Bookburners

by Max Gladstone

  “You have,” she said, as kindly as she could manage. “Go ahead, Arturo. I wish I could go with you.” She wasn’t lying, was the damnedest thing.

  He looked at her with that sad, perfect, hangdog expression, then turned and left, with everything unsaid between them.

  Asanti waited until he was gone, then climbed the stairs to offer her report. It had taken her some experimentation to find a point where she could receive cell service without anyone in the Archives nor the stairwell cameras observing what she used it for. She drew her phone and typed a few innocuous words about shopping for that night’s dinner, which her intended recipient would, if he remembered their code, read as: Time’s up. The Bookburners are in play.

  Then she locked her phone, and decided what she would tell the Cardinal.

  • • •

  “You have to help me!” the woman sobbed. “My sister, she is missing!”

  Sal rounded the corner first. The fight, such as it was, had broken out in a long black hallway lined with cave painting reproductions, and concerned three individuals. One woman, dark hair, five eight or so, pale, round face, considerably upset, was being held off by another woman wearing a sweater-vest, who seemed even less comfortable holding someone off than folk who wore sweater-vests tended to be on average. Sal pegged the second woman as a research assistant, especially since the gray-haired man drawing back from them both wore a bow tie and khakis, and had the harried, uncomfortable expression of a certain sort of university professor unexpectedly confronted with strong emotion. “I am terribly sorry,” the professor said, adjusting his shirt, “but I do not understand what you think I can do to help! If your sister is missing, surely you should contact the, ah, police.”

  Sal extended her arm without looking, and Liam ran into it from behind.

  “You run the dig site. I know she is in there. Her name is Sylwia, she ran away from hotel, she must be down in your caves—”

  “Madam.”

  “My name is Agniezska, my sister Sylwia—”

  “I assure you, your sister, whatever her name, is nowhere near our excavation. The site is closed. Had she entered, there would have been alarms. And there are no alarms.”

  “She is in there. You do not understand. I saw her!”

  “One for the security guards, then?” Liam said, sounding almost disappointed. Guards were, in fact, rounding the corner. Shadows clustered and bubbled on the walls.

  Lost her sister. Sal felt a pang of guilt, and wished she could help. Then again, someone whose brother had half-merged with an angel, then disappeared, probably wasn’t the kind of help this young woman needed.

  She was about to nod when the Megaloceros painting on the wall exploded.

  The hall went weird in a way Sal knew all too well, and a beast of shadow, twenty hands tall at the shoulder, towered in the center of the room. Enormous antlers drew sparks where they struck the ceiling. It shook its whole shaggy length, more or less like Sal would expect a creature imprisoned for twenty thousand years without physical form to do. Then it charged.

  Of the two of them, Sal might have had more practice in the hundred-meter dash toward trouble, but Liam won hands down when it came to reacting to weird shit. By the time the beast charged, he had already tackled Agniezska out of the way. The research associate, too, fell clear. Sal tried to grab the man, but extinct Pleistocene beasts worked up speed quickly; before she could close the distance, the Megaloceros slammed into the professor.

  And they both vanished.

  The professor was gone, completely. Not even his clipboard remained. Sal ran to Liam, head up, ready for the walls to bubble again. “Save the pretty girl first, huh?”

  “He was being a jerk. Jerks are save-the-world priority two. What the hell was that thing?”

  “Extinct,” Sal said.

  There weren’t many people shadow monsters set at ease, and Agniezska didn’t qualify. The research associate, though, recovered fast enough to ask the obvious question. “Where is Professor Gerondain?”

  Sal had never been good at this part of the job. She still didn’t like that this was part of the job at all.

  On the wall, where the painting of the Megaloceros had been, stood a crude, vivid drawing of a man with a clipboard and a bow tie.

  “I don’t know,” she said, “but I don’t think he’s gone far.”

  2.

  The museum, like most, lacked a contingency plan for magical outbreaks. Flustered security guards ran over from whatever they hadn’t been doing before, cordoned off the hallway, then shifted, unsure how to respond to the absence of a visible problem. If their training manuals included a procedure for “museum guest transformed into cave wall cartoon,” they must not have covered that page in the seminar.

  The grad student shouted at them in rapid French, gesturing toward Agniezska and, collaterally, to Liam and Sal. Liam rolled his eyes. “I’ll deal with this. Just a tick.”

  Sal doubted her face could express the depth of her disbelief. “Deal with this? How?”

  “I’ll improvise.” He shot her a winning smile, rose, and walked over to the grad student, arms spread, composing his body into an apology.

  Sal sat beside Agniezska and extended her hand. “Are you okay?”

  The woman pulled the pieces of herself together, and reached out. Her hand shook. Sal had seen that spooked, unsteady expression on too many faces in the years since she joined the Society. She must have looked like that herself back when it all began, in those stunned few days after she learned magic was real, that the human world was an island on a sea of storms. But Agniezska’s grip was strong.

  “I’m Sal.” She touched her own chest. “You’re Agnieszka. Am I saying that right?”

  “I am sorry,” she said. “English not so good.”

  “Better than my … Polish?”

  “Yes.” She nodded. “What happened?”

  Well, you were arguing with a puffed-up professor about your sister’s disappearance, and then magic popped out of the wall and almost pulled you into a fake cave painting. “You saw.”

  “None of this makes sense.”

  “I’m from the Vatican,” Sal said. She showed the Vatican Police card from her wallet, and wished, not for the first time, that a Team Three badge wouldn’t violate the Society’s secrecy rules. Badges helped, sometimes. She wasn’t asking for much in a badge, just a shield, the papal keys, and Vatican Magic Police. In Latin, because “magic police” sounded pretty dumb in English.

  Behind her, Liam had—somehow—managed to mollify the guards. The grad student had her arms crossed over her sweater-vest, and glared at him over the rims of her glasses. Agnieszka read the card, and looked up at Sal, questioning. “We solve problems like this,” Sal said. “Stuff that can’t be explained, um, normally.” This was usually where people got all flustered and started protesting—ghosts don’t exist, demons aren’t real, that kind of thing.

  “Thank God,” Agniezska said. She fished a crucifix from her shirt by the chain, and clutched it like a line thrown to a drowning woman. “My sister needs your help.”

  Sal had not expected that reaction. She glanced around for backup, wishing Menchú were here. Hell, even Liam would have cut a more convincing Catholic authority figure, but he was still talking to the security guards and the grad student—all of whom were, for some reason, nodding? The grad student watched him with a wary, intrigued expression that occasionally slipped down to his shoulders, then back up again. Dammit. Sal scanned the hall for further aid, if only of a moral variety. The audience behind the security cordon was already drifting away, deprived of either an obvious victim or a hysterical woman to fixate on. Two tense conversations in a hall made for poor rubbernecking.

  But, there, behind a woman in a yellow rain slicker leading two children on leashes, stood someone Sal hadn’t seen in more than a year, someone she’d half hoped, half feared, she would never see again.

  “Come on,” she told Agniezska, and helped pull the ot
her woman to her feet. “Let’s get cleaned up. Liam—restroom?” He shot her a thumbs-up.

  Agniezska shook her head, not understanding. “Where are we going?”

  “The bathroom.”

  “But I don’t need—”

  “Sorry. I know. But I just saw someone who shouldn’t be here.”

  She shoved through the crowd, and saw him again.

  Perry had changed his hair. He had found a better barber, for one, not that his haircuts could exactly have gotten worse, and his hair had thinned a bit, though his body hadn’t thickened to compensate. He still bounced when he moved, like rubber bands held his bones together. He wore a hoodie with a cartoon wizard on it, and kept his head bent over his cell phone as he walked away.

  Her brother. More or less.

  She had last seen him a year and a half ago, seated on her couch, eating pizza and fading away before her eyes, her brother whom she’d rescued from hell, literally, only to lose him again to the angel who shared his body. Her brother, whose experiments with magic got her into this wonderful, screwed up life in the first place: working for the Vatican, meddling in forces woman was not meant to touch. Her brother, who she never could save.

  Sal guided Agniezska through the crowd, down the hall. He quickened his step. “Perry!”

  He reached a corner, turned, and saw them coming. His eyebrows rose and he smiled, waved with his fingertips, turned away.

  She turned to Agniezska. “Run.”

  She’d meant run away, but Agniezska must have misinterpreted—she matched Sal’s pace toward Perry. “What’s going on? Who is that man?”

  When they reached the corner, he was gone. A teenage couple kissing near a model saber-toothed tiger recoiled from each another and bent back to their schoolbooks. Sal allowed herself a distinctly un-Vatican-like curse.

  Agniezska tore herself away from Sal and drew back, her hands clenched to fists. “I am done with being confused. I want answers. There is disappearing moose. Also disappearing idiot in bow tie. You say there is, what, magic? And you are from the Vatican. Please. Make sense. My sister has gone, and I must find her.”

  Sal stared into the empty hallway. “I know how you feel.”

  • • •

  The abandoned back alley clock shop that served as headquarters of the Societas Librorium Occultorum’s Team Four, real-time division, lacked insignia, blazon, motto, or even a sign beyond the one hanging in the window that read Closed. This was entirely appropriate so far as the members of Team Four, real-time division, were concerned, since they were a secret organization operating beyond the authority of the already-secret Society, and secret organizations, and especially double-secret organizations, did not, as a rule, advertise. This point, on which the team’s few members agreed, allowed them to avoid argument over several other, less practical questions, including but not limited to: Since they were working without the Society’s endorsement, and would in fact be killed or shoved in an oubliette forever were their work to be discovered, should they still refer to themselves as a Society Team? Were they in fact Team Four, considering that Team Four, the Vatican’s old magical research and development unit, still existed, albeit as a bunch of basically useless cryptic sages operating from a hermitage built in an adjacent dimension which experienced all time simultaneously? Was real-time accurate, given the existence of a dimension of complete simultaneity, which implied that time itself was a less fundamental category than Kant would argue? And: What was a sufficiently impressive motto for a guild of secret wizards?

  All these precautions did, however, mean Asanti still got lost looking for the place. She sometimes wondered if this was an intentional line of defense, an unmentioned gift of their more mystical partners—but she had lived in Rome long enough to own her failure at street navigation. Her archive was a labyrinth of tangled passages, many alike, none identical. Texts doubled back on their own meanings, only to connect with other texts in strange, geometry-defying twists. Those were the paths her mind charted, those were the turns she memorized. For the rest, she trusted GPS. Her children hadn’t let her navigate on vacations since they were old enough to read a map.

  But she found the clock shop, locked the door behind her, and marched into the future.

  The front room was, of course, empty save a table and an unlit candle. She passed through without examining the dust or the chairs. More candlelight flickered beneath the door to the stockroom. She closed that door behind her, too, and let her eyes adjust. “Are we ready?”

  “No.”

  “Reading by candlelight will hurt your eyes.”

  “I see better in shadow, these days.” Frances Haddad sat pooled on the rug amid a nest of snakes. Her wheelchair stood empty by the wall. A circle of candles on the floor illuminated the bookcases and improvised mystic apparatus that filled the stockroom. Frances reclined on her elbows, turning the pages of a crackling leather-bound codex with the scaled tentacles that sprouted from her hips. “I don’t know if it’s part of my transformation, or some sort of psychological coping mechanism. My night vision seems to have improved, though—again—I might be imagining it.”

  “I brought more books.”

  Frances frowned at her own book, turned several more pages, then raised another with another set of tentacles, and consulted it. “Oh. Excellent.” She adjusted her glasses with a snake. “More contradictions?”

  “And a few pieces of hard evidence. It seems Team Three judged the cave paintings in Lascaux harmless in nineteen fifty, soon after their discovery. Believe it or not, the caves’ closure in the early years of this century did in fact stem from fungal blooms degrading the paint, no mystical interference whatsoever. Sometimes a cigar, as the good doctor says, is merely a cigar.” She opened the book bag, and set the volumes within on the floor. “I’ve skimmed most of these except for the Shang, which looks like a piece of theoretical fluff—I’ve nothing against theoretical fluff, but we’re under time pressure. Team Three deployed two hours ago—or Menchú did. Sal and Liam are already on site, more’s the pity.” She made a face, and tried to look as if she hadn’t. “Just bad luck this notion of Sal’s paid off. Bad luck for us, I mean. I’m sure the people of Lascaux will be happy to have an authority to hand.”

  “It still bothers you, doesn’t it? To keep them away from our work?”

  “Of course. I wish—I wish last year had turned out differently.”

  “You’re not the only one.” Her snakes rippled like a pond surface brushed by wind.

  Asanti sank into a chair. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking. I have been so tired.”

  “It’s fine,” Frances said. “That is, to be honest, I don’t know what fine looks like any more. The tide of magic is rising, the world’s due to burn any year now, and I have snakes for legs. But we’re all managing, for the moment.” She slammed her book shut. A cloud of dust rose from the pages. “I’m just so frustrated. Lascaux went from threatening to a full outbreak too fast. Our models—”

  “None of us expected learning magic to be easy.”

  “As far as we can tell, there’s not even a book at Lascaux. That’s the one thing we thought we knew for sure about magic.”

  “No books,” Asanti said. “But what’s a book, to a caveman? And the ground under Lascaux is full of artistic representations. Perhaps there’s something deeper at work—perhaps books are merely a special case. The boundaries between our world and representations of our world blur. Observation matters: Shadows need light for contrast, or else they’re only darkness. So we use tricks to reinforce darkness, and we use language and music to separate apparent from actual reality. Knowing that, we should be able to stem the tide.”

  “Risky.”

  “We are children learning surgery. But the world is dying, and needs a surgeon, and there’s no one else.”

  “No pressure.”

  Asanti selected a book from her pile, and opened it to read. “Certainly not. Fortunately for the world,” she said, “we are very smart.
What do you have so far?”

  “A few incantations. A protective circle. A rhythm.” One of Frances’s snakes passed up a few sheets of notebook paper.

  “I hope it’ll be enough.” Asanti took out her camera phone. “He should start the ritual soon. Arturo’s already on his way.”

  3.

  Sal met Father Menchú’s taxi in front of the bed-and-breakfast near sunset. The priest looked rumpled and determined, and had brought no luggage save a duffel bag and crash kit: crosses, silver, a few weapons in case of emergency. All regulation, now that they had regulation. Sal hugged him in the driveway. “I’m sorry I’m late,” he said. “I caught the first flight into Bordeaux and drove.”

  She took his bag. “I never thought I’d be upset at pistols being standard issue on a Society mission.”

  “God bless and guide Cardinal Fox,” Menchú said, with a tone of voice that suggested he might be thinking of verbs other than bless and guide. “He sees himself as a changemaker, and he has made changes.”

  “Speaking of which—where’s our countdown?”

  When he showed her the timer on his phone, she cursed. “That’s not fair.”

  “I’m inclined to agree. But fair or not, we must accept our limits.” The priest ran his thumb and forefinger over his mustache, then curved them back around to clutch his chin. “What’s happened?”

  Liam saluted them when they reached the balcony outside the second-floor bedroom. “The professor in the painting disappeared soon after he was sucked in, but nobody saw him go. Monique was pretty messed up about it. I tried to convince her to close the new excavation, in case that had something to do with our phantom reindeer monster, but she didn’t listen.”

  “Monique?” Sal raised an eyebrow, but Liam refused the bait.

  “Team Two managed to close down the museum for now—score one for Fox’s intramural cooperation initiative. Carbon monoxide leak, they said. I don’t think hallucinations have much to do with carbon monoxide, but I’m not the professional liar. Didn’t close the fake cave in time, though: They lost a roomful of tourists. Sent ’em in, and no one came out again.”