Bookburners The Complete Season Two

by Max Gladstone

  The gargoyle was not a direct threat anymore, but it was a chaotic, dangerous mess, flailing around and knocking into things. Sal threw a belt at it, wishing for a lasso. She had never lassoed anything ever before, but she did know that rope was more flexible than belts.

  Grace was at her side, then. “What about the mage—” Sal began, then heard a loud thump on the other side of the kiosk. “Oh.”

  She handed Grace the belts, and watched as Grace began to burn for speed. At least her curse has some benefits, Sal thought as her friend dashed around the stone beast and captured its limbs in the finely crafted and very strong leather. She pulled them tight and then they had one trussed gargoyle that still bellowed with pain from its eyes.

  The mage lay unmoving and broken on the mall floor, the knife jutting from her throat. Sal winced. Merry Christmas.

  She was definitely dead, but Asanti’s cage hadn’t melted yet. The magic was still active. Asanti struggled—she was running out of time, and she yelled for help.

  “We need to break that cage,” Sal said. “Liam, the authorities will be here soon—get to work finding the phone that belongs to the Maitresse. Grace, you’ve got a wrecking ball right there. Bust open the cage, just don’t hurt Asanti.”

  “I’m a professional,” Grace said, then lifted the gargoyle by two of the belts. Like a champion hammer-thrower, she spun around twice and heaved the thing at the ice cage. It didn’t shatter like Sal had hoped it would, but it did leave some large cracks. Grace went back to pick up her new weapon and have another go, and Sal returned to the juice store to get something to chip the rest away.

  It was short work with kitchen utensils and hot water to melt the rest of the ice imprisoning Asanti, and Grace and Sal helped the shivering archivist out of her soggy prison.

  “Are you all right?” Sal asked.

  Asanti nodded, teeth chattering. A few white patches stood out on her dark skin, but she was otherwise unharmed.

  Grace appeared behind her, draping a heavy, fur-lined men’s trench coat over her shoulders. Sal raised an eyebrow, and Grace made a face. “I don’t think they will miss this one coat when they’re trying to deal with their shredded inventory and broken store window.”

  Sal shrugged. Fair enough.

  Grace looked at the strange kiosk. “What do we do now?” she asked.

  “Found it,” Liam shouted. “The Maitresse, acquired June twenty-third, value sixty-five million one hundred and fifty thousand kronor. Which makes it,” he paused and punched in a few numbers on Sal’s phone (he’d borrowed it again, to her annoyance), “a little less than five hundred thousand euros.”

  “That’s hers,” Asanti said.

  Liam picked up a rather gaudy black case with rhinestones covering it. “It’s this one. How does this tacky thing carry a secret?”

  Asanti was warming up, but wrapped the coat more tightly around her. “The phone these were made for was a failure. The magical community has taken advantage of that and purchased them to serve as their own tools. If someone has this phone, you can guess they’re not using it for calls. I expect the phone can read whatever secrets the cases are holding.”

  “So their phones can work near magic while ours can’t?” he asked, his eyes gleaming. “I need one of these.”

  “It’s magic that makes them work,” Asanti said. “If you take that into the Vatican you will be relieved of it in about two seconds.”

  “Should we gather all of this?” Grace asked, looking at the extensive inventory.

  “Haven’t you stolen enough?” Sal asked.

  Grace bristled, but Asanti said, “No, she’s right. We need to treat these as though they’re as dangerous as any of the books we find. If not because they can cause damage, then because of who might come looking for them.”

  Sirens wailed in the distance. Asanti began grabbing cases and putting them in the bags stocked by the kiosk, taking care to set the Maitresse’s in the trench coat pocket by itself. “Get as many as you can,” she said, and they got to work.

  The last thing they packed up was the book still clutched in the mage’s dead hands. Once it was closed and shrouded, the gargoyle stopped struggling and began shrinking. Before long, it looked like a pile of belts with one small toy in the middle of it.

  “That’s a relief,” Sal said. “I was trying to figure how we were going to strap that to the top of the car.”

  4.

  A few hours later, they met the Maitresse in her garden. Well, Asanti, Liam, and Sal did. The Maitresse didn’t look at the injuries the team had, not even at the patches of frostbite on Asanti’s skin, or ask why she was wearing a leather-and-fur trench coat over her billowy dress. She merely took the cell phone case that Asanti offered and, smiling, crushed it in her hand. It disintegrated to dust, which she blew into her garden. Her flowers stirred in response.

  “Paid in full,” she said, smiling. “Now you must take care of this.” She passed a small shoebox to Asanti, who took it carefully.

  “And the information we needed?” Sal said.

  “You stole it with the rest of the phone cases. It’s in the inventory list as being stolen from an M. Smoth,” the Maitresse said, still smiling at her garden.

  “Smoth?” Liam asked, pulling up the information he had stolen from the kiosk computer.

  “Yes. Demons aren’t terribly smart or good spellers, you know.”

  “Found it. It’s an off-brand Hello Kitty clone case. Yellow.”

  They sifted through the plastic bags of cases, and Grace snagged it from hers. “That’s adorable.”

  “It’s also information.” The Maitresse produced an oddly shaped, slanted phone. “Use my phone to read it. Then we are done here. You can leave by the back gate.”

  Asanti took the phone and the case, slid one onto the other, and then read. She nodded, relaxing for the first time since she had come out of the ice. “Perfect. Shanghai.”

  Grace blinked. “What?”

  “It looks like the object we need is in Shanghai. In your previous life, did you ever visit—” Asanti's eyes narrowed. “I think these characters are… the ?”

  Grace frowned. “I know the place. I haven’t been there in a long time. I don’t even know where it would be, these days.”

  “Right where you left it,” the Maitresse said. “Only on the flip side. Now, if you’ll excuse me. You can see yourselves out, through the back gate.” When Asanti looked up, the Maitresse had returned to the house.

  Asanti shrugged and handed the phone to Liam. He took it eagerly. He might have to surrender it when they got to the Vatican, but until then he had something to occupy him.

  “I wish I could keep this phone,” he said on the way to the airport. “Think of how much info we could get out of all of these cases.”

  “Now you know what to ask Santa for next year,” Sal said. “Providing Santa shops at the Black Market.”

  • • •

  With the book and all the cell phone cases safely secured inside the library, the team met with Menchú for debriefing. He listened without comment until they were done.

  He looked at Grace curiously. “That gargoyle must have attacked you because it sensed you had a rather large, magical secret. You were a flame to its moth.”

  Grace rubbed her right hand, which she still held as if it bugged her even though she’d had plenty of time to heal. “It certainly didn’t feel like a moth.”

  “We got the info we needed,” Sal said. “Next stop is China. But I could really go for a nap first.”

  Grace shook her head. “You promised.”

  “Come on, Grace, I’m exhausted!” Sal protested. “It was a long flight.”

  “I was on the same flight; it was five hours,” Grace said. “You shouldn’t have any jet lag, and we still have several hours of daylight.”

  Sal groaned and then closed her eyes. “All right. Fine. We’ll go to Euroma Two. That should have a Hot Topic. Or something like.”

  “What are you…
Hot Topic?” Menchú asked, looking between them.

  “It’s a long story,” Sal said. “Let Grace tell you sometime. Like on the way to China.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Liam said. “I’m off to bed. Let’s plan China tomorrow.”

  Asanti kept her eyes on Menchú. He didn’t look at her. The others made their ways out of the library, and they sat alone.

  “Was it worth it?” he asked.

  Asanti still had some patches of frostbite where the ice had touched exposed skin. “It’s nice not to be in debt to the Maitresse anymore,” she said. “None of the team has any lasting injuries, and we did get the information we needed about the Orb.”

  “That’s not an answer,” he said.

  “Of course it was worth it, Arturo. It had to be worth it: We did everything we set out to do, and no civilians died. I actually think it was one of our more successful missions.”

  “You do know there’ll be questions from Team Two. They’re going to ask why we required their resources for an unsanctioned mission they knew nothing about. This isn’t over.”

  Asanti nodded. “I know. I’ll take responsibility if I need to.”

  “You’ll need to,” he said. “If not now, then someday. This won’t go away.”

  Asanti thought of the small shoebox wrapped in brown paper that sat in the back of her closet. It wasn’t a secure hiding place, but it fit in with the other boxes back there. The whole trip had been worth it.

  “I’ll be ready when they have questions,” she said. She sighed and leaned back in the chair. “Now, what happened while we were gone?”

  He rubbed his hollow eyes. “I think I would have rather been verbally sparring with the Maitresse with you, all told. She and her kind offer a fight I can at least enjoy.”

  And her kind resonated in Asanti’s head, but she didn’t react. She felt an ache of loneliness and a brief desire to return to Iceland. But the Maitresse wouldn’t accept her any more than the Church would; she would just accept the other side of her. She was caught between two worlds, and would remain that way until she made a full choice as to what side she fell on. She’d thought she had chosen, decades ago, but this trip had made her wonder.

  “A hard day of meetings?”

  He looked tired. He looked like a man whose heart was full, and who could not find words in which to wrap its fullness. He sat, at last, and settled for: “A hard day.”

  Bookburners

  Season 2, Episode 6

  Incognita

  Max Gladstone

  1.

  Hell, Liam thought, is a customs and immigration line: no escape, no recourse, no logic. But why complain? Prayers and groans yield only a side-eye from the poor damn listless souls suffering alongside you. Your own choices left you here, thrown upon the tender mercy of petty bureaucrats, abandoned to the death of a thousand grinding ticks of a slowing clock. The judge waits. She’s had a long day, there are men with guns behind her, and she doesn’t give a shit about you.

  Even Liam had to admit he was being unusually grim, but after an eleven-hour flight with a three-hour connection through Dubai, no one had the right to expect him to feel chipper. Bureaucrats and their lines and maps, getting in the job’s way, keeping people from living the lives they— No, calm down. Behave. Act how you had to act in lines. Or else. Think positive thoughts, Sal would have told him, if she were here.

  Typical American.

  Fine. Positive: The Shanghai Pudong Airport customs line was far from the worst he’d seen. They’d swept the place recently. He could appreciate quality in this sort of thing. There were better and worse ways of having one’s fingernails pulled out.

  Grace, beside him, hadn’t stopped fidgeting since they had joined the line. She rolled her ankles, her shoulders. Hands in pockets, then out. Arms crossed, uncrossed. Stretching. Casing the corners of the room, as if a demon would jump them in the middle of a goddamn airport. Liam frowned. “Could you stay still, please?” Meaning: You’re attracting attention. “I'm just as eager to get this over with as you.”

  “I doubt that.” But she stilled. Too much, in fact. He stood beside an iceberg.

  And now he’d pissed her off, of course, sent her into that icy withdrawal where she spent… well, a lot of her time when he was around. He was just tired. Christ Jesus. “Look. I’m sorry. I know you hate travel. Me too.” She turned to him, at least, and raised one eyebrow. “Not the waiting—good chance to catch up on airport news. It’s this guy that bothers me.” He thumbed open his passport and showed her the picture.

  “Looks like you with a better haircut.”

  “And I don’t have any idea what he was up to for two years.”

  Grace blinked. “Oh. The demon thing.”

  Which was an abrupt, if accurate, way to sum up the two years of possession and stolen memories from which the Bookburners had rescued him. “The ‘demon thing.’ Sansone’s diplomats claim I’m not on any watch lists, that they’ve scrubbed the few crimes I committed that made it onto records, but you never know. Especially in a place like this.” He pointed to the stars-and-blood flag with his chin. “Sansone doesn’t have official ties here. No Bookburners in China since the Matteo Ricci business. If it turns out dear old demon-possessed Liam has history with the local constabulary, well, you know what they say about interesting times.” He glared at the face in the passport. Beautiful old mug. Shame it kept getting him into trouble.

  “Nobody actually says that,” Grace said. “It’s an urban legend. Sort of racist, too. If you think about it. Inscrutable wisdom.”

  The line shuffled forward in silence.

  “Anyway,” she continued, “it could be worse.”

  “Oh?”

  “You could have fought wizards and demons for the Nationalist government in 1928, until your friends betrayed you and smuggled you out of the country in a curse that stuck you beyond time. You could have slept away most of the century, not knowing what happened to the people you fought beside, while the country and the world changed. You could worry that whatever name your passport says, whatever flag’s on the front, your face will trip some trigger in a ninety-year-old file that says wait for her. For example.”

  “Oh,” Liam repeated, in a different tone.

  “Exactly.”

  Grace didn’t go in for gallows humor, or graveyard whistling, but Liam tried anyway. “Remind me why they sent the two of us, in particular, on this job.”

  “Bringing the whole team would attract attention. The information Asanti got from the Maitresse said that we need an artifact Team Four sent east a few centuries back, with a Jesuit named Matteo Ricci. And the Ricci Circlet should be on sale at the Bizarre.”

  “You keep calling it that. Don’t tell me the homophone works the same in Chinese.”

  Grace rolled her eyes. “The Chinese name for the place we’re going,” she said, “is two characters, one of which means death, and the other one of which is half of the word for market, sort of, and it’s a horrible pun, because if you pronounce market with a thick southern accent, the first half sounds kind of like the word for death, or dead.”

  “And you thought it was important to translate the bad pun.”

  Grace didn’t answer that. “Your ex-whatever said she and her gang of techno-cultists were headed to Shanghai, so you’re here in case she is, and you don’t speak Chinese, which is why I’m here. Entering a country where we have very limited resources, looking for magic that might kill us, under the eye of an unfriendly government. That might recognize me.”

  “It’s been a long time, Grace.”

  “I used to work with people who served under the emperors. Bureaucracies conserve people and knowledge—that’s what they’re for.”

  Liam sought through shreds of history he remembered from school: wars and revolutions and caves and there had been a march or something, probably. Red armbands? Books on fire? Or was that Indiana Jones? “A lot of things changed while you were sleeping in tha
t crate.”

  “I know,” she said. Four people left between them and the front of the line.

  “We’ll be fine.” He was reassuring himself as much as her, but it helped to say the words. “Team Two have been wankers in the past, but their tradecraft is good. Our umbrellas here will hold, we’ll slide into the Bizarre, find the dingus, and be on our way before you can adjust to the time change.”

  “Maybe.” She flicked her passport cover.

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “Maybe I don’t want to. This was my country, once. My friends and I fought to save it. They might still be around. Or their children.”

  Liam heard the note of hope in her voice, and did not know how to answer. He handed his documents to the woman behind the desk, who frowned at the visa, frowned at the picture, frowned at Liam, then stamped his entry and waved him through. Grace approached the desk, submitted her passport with both hands, and received the same three frowns and a stamp.

  “Just goes to show,” Liam said. “You can’t go home again.”

  • • •

  Several hours later, Grace still hadn’t choked Liam out, though not for lack of prompting.

  “Looks like a Shaw Brothers set,” Liam said, wondering at the scalloped tile roofs of the market north of the City God Temple. “I mean, except for the skyscrapers. I didn’t expect buildings this… old-fashioned.”

  “That’s because we’re in a tourist trap.” Grace grabbed Liam’s wrist and pulled him away from a young man touting overpriced steamed buns. “They want it to look like you think it should. Now come on. Our tail’s catching up.”

  Liam stumbled into step. “I was going to eat those.”

  “Stuff your face later.” She frowned at the stone courtyard and the gaggle of tourists and the slate-colored sky. Liam was right, though she’d never admit it: the place did look old-fashioned, not quite like she remembered, but close enough. Traditional. The people, though, those had changed. Fewer suits, no hats, sneakers everywhere. She liked modern fashion, in general: more supportive and less constraining than the older styles. A night’s makeup no longer took an afternoon to apply. But she’d grown used to those changes in the West, in her decades of Vatican service after Menchú woke her in Guatemala. Here, on streets she almost knew, the modern look seemed harsher, more artificial. She knew how people dressed in her Shanghai, and they didn’t dress like this. But once in a while she saw a look in some businessman’s eye, a smile shared between two young women walking hand in hand, that dragged her ninety years back home. She remembered the smell of sea and fish and sweat and smoke and perfume; she remembered the sharp sibilants of the city.