Bookburners

by Max Gladstone

  She heard a groan at her feet, and a sharp, brief exclamation in Polish. Agnieszka and Perry lay nearby, shuddering and trying to rise. They lacked color, hue, shade in this place. Vivid dark lines sketched them against the rock. When they moved, she felt sick to her stomach. She wondered whether she actually had a stomach here, and decided against thinking about that question any more. She reached for Agnieszka, and saw her own hand—also an outline, proportions perfect, fleshless. She was a shape on a wall.

  She ignored that, too, and helped Agnieszka up. “Are you okay?”

  “I think so.” Agnieszka dusted herself off. “Where are we?”

  “Ask him.”

  Perry grinned, and helped himself to his feet. “Hi, Sal. Long time no see.”

  “What the hell,” said Sal, “were you doing?”

  “Oh, you know.” He brushed invisible dust off his clothes. “Helping.”

  “Is this what helping looks like? Because being turned into a cave painting is not what I have in mind when I think helping.”

  “I had everything under control!”

  “Give and take a few aurochs storming through the dig site.”

  “Can’t make an omelet without breaking a few aurochs.”

  “This isn’t a joke!”

  “I figured out a ritual to hold the animals in the wall. I would have fought through the shadows to the main gallery in another hour or so, if your meathead friend hadn’t messed everything up.” He cracked his neck, then his knuckles. Sal winced. “So yeah, I was helping. Meanwhile, what exactly was your plan, outside of getting us stuck in a caveman remake of the ‘Take On Me’ music video?”

  “We are,” Agnieszka said, “on the rock?”

  “Yes,” Perry said, followed by a few words of Polish. Agnieszka laughed for the first time that day, and Sal felt briefly jealous.

  “What?”

  “Cannot translate,” she said, with a shrug. “Good joke, though.”

  Sal, to Perry: “You speak Polish now?”

  He kicked at the ground, producing a few lines of pebble movement that soon settled back into stability. “Aaron did. His languages ended up muddled in my head with the rest.”

  Agnieszka looked from Perry’s face, to Sal’s, judging. “This is your brother?”

  “Good question,” Sal said.

  “Come on, Sal. It doesn’t have to be like that.”

  “I don’t know the answer, Perry. Aaron. Perrin. Whoever you are. It’s not as if you’ve been straight with me so far.”

  He raised his hands, opened his mouth, then thought better of whatever he had planned to say. His hands returned to his pockets, and his lines all curved. “I’m Perry,” he said, and to Agnieszka, “her brother. Mostly. With some extra parts.”

  “How do I know you’re not lying?”

  “I told you the truth when I left. I didn’t know what was going on in Aaron’s head, and I still don’t. I thought I could sort the whole thing out, then come back to help you—with the Church, or whatever. But it’s not that simple.”

  “So that’s why you’ve been playing keep-away-from-Sal for the last year and a half? After everything I did to bring you home safe? You just had to go walkabout?”

  “You don’t need to sound so dismissive.”

  “What were you up to back in the museum? That whole wave-and-disappear shtick?”

  “I panicked! I thought it would look cool!”

  “You thought.” She paced away, and realized her fingers were hooking into strangling position. “Okay. Fine. Can you disappear us out of here? Back into the real world?”

  “It doesn’t work that way.”

  “Of course it wouldn’t.”

  “I can send shadows of myself on errands—like I’m dreaming, only it’s real. I can’t just teleport.”

  “Good for you.”

  “Fine.”

  “Fine!”

  “Will you both please shut up?”

  Sal turned. Agnieszka stood between them, hands out, looking from one to the other.

  “My sister is lost in here,” she said. “I must find her. Can you help?”

  Sal stared at Perry, and Perry stared at Sal, until they both said, “Yes” at once.

  • • •

  They worked through the stone land.

  Perry guided them toward the cyclone. “It looks like a whirlwind,” he said, “but it’s not, really. Agnieszka’s sister has been breaking things out of the rock, pulling them into the human world. That’s where we’ll find her.”

  “But the animals were breaking out everywhere.”

  “Not all the way. They were shadows, remember? Only half there. If we want our bodies back, we can’t just try to bubble out of the painted world. We need to go to the magic’s heart.”

  “And there we will find Sylwia?”

  Sal looked to Perry, who nodded. “I mean, I hope. This isn’t exactly a science.”

  Agnieszka marched on, and they marched with her.

  Sal took point, pistol drawn. She listened with her ears, and with her feet. When the stone shook she guided them to shelter as a herd of bison shambled past. Once, she heard a loud, sharp cough from a nearby copse of sketchy trees, like a tiger’s chuff, but deeper. She motioned them along, and kept her eyes on the copse until they crested a nearby hill.

  She checked her watch, and swore.

  “What?”

  She showed Perry. The watch hands moved in jumps, five minutes at a time. “If this is telling the truth, we’ve been here twelve hours.”

  “I don’t feel hungry,” he said.

  “You still need to eat?” He answered with a long-suffering look she ignored. “Twenty hours left. If my watch is right.”

  Agnieszka trotted up next to her. “What happens after twenty hours?”

  She sucked air through her teeth. It tasted of dust and stone, and she realized that was the first breath she’d taken in, hell, several hours. “The people we work for,” she said. “When something like this happens, they want us to deal with it quickly and peacefully. If that doesn’t work, they call in backup.” That was one word for it. She remembered a burning hotel, and a young woman, killed by a bureaucrat’s need to check a box.

  “Backup is good, no?”

  “No,” she said, and pressed on.

  Hours passed, or minutes. Unmoored from flesh, she found she lacked any instinct for telling time. She missed her heartbeat. She missed her skin. She still felt—felt her clothes, felt the ground beneath her shoes, felt her skin when she touched it—but when she wasn’t paying attention, it slipped away.

  They passed over a ridge and descended into a shattered land of deep craters and ravines, a desert moonscape. Across the sharp rock labyrinth rose the whirlwind they had seen from a distance, raw movement against the unbroken stone sky, spinning in some direction that was not precisely up, carrying bison and deer and horses and men along with it, toward those burning suns Sal could already tell were eyes.

  Below them, painted suggestions of men and women fought a great lizard-like smudge beside a cliff. The smudge reared back from their blades and the sling-stones, hissing. Its tail caught one man across the stomach, and he crumpled. A kid jumped on the smudge’s back and tried to pierce its hide with a stone knife, but didn’t seem to make much progress.

  “Okay,” Perry said. “We can do this. We’ll skirt around the battle, work through the maze, and get to the whirlwind.”

  Sal glanced at her watch again. Ten hours. How the hell—no. Don’t worry about it. You’re stuck in a cave painting, no sense getting pissy at your wristwatch. “No time. I have a better idea.”

  “What?”

  “Ask for directions,” she said, and sprinted toward the battle.

  She whooped as she ran and hollered and otherwise raised a ruckus, partly to attract attention, and partly to drown out Perry’s terrified squawk behind her. “Hey, you ugly sonofagun! Over here.”

  The smudge whirled on her, snarling. It was a lot big
ger up close, and she’d closed the distance faster than she expected.

  It roared stone and rotting meat.

  Sal drew her gun, and shot it three times in the head.

  The bullets didn’t simply bounce off. They left bloody furrows in its hide—she could tell by the rust-red trails, and white where the bone showed through—but didn’t pierce the skull. The smudge coiled along its length, baring long sharp teeth. She jumped back; its jaws snapped shut where she had been. Okay. Steady your breath. Think about the eyes, or the open mouth. Smooth pressure on the trigger.

  The smudge launched itself at her again. She rolled out of the way, came up, drew a bead on its eye as it reared, long tongue snaking out between its teeth. This time, she had it.

  Then the kid hanging from the smudge’s neck jammed his knife through its eye into the brain.

  That worked, too.

  The smudge fell hard.

  The hunters turned to Sal in the sudden silence. She raised her hands, and hoped that body language carried across, what, twenty thousand years?

  They looked—human. Ish. Shaggy, dressed in kilts of some sort of fur? Or maybe just pelts? They moved slowly, which surprised her after the ferocity they showed while hunting. The kid on the smudge’s back stood. Her hand dripped blood. The dead beast’s rear leg twitched.

  A bearded man asked sharp questions in a language like gravel rolling in a metal pan. She shook her head. “Friend?”

  He frowned.

  Fine. Couldn’t expect cave people to speak English. But at least this wasn’t one of those moments where the rest of the team rolled their eyes at the American’s inability to speak furrin. Perry skidded down the hill toward them, Agnieszka following. Sal tried to wave them back, without looking like she was waving someone back. She could figure this out. She just needed a little more time.

  Then Perry opened his mouth.

  The sounds that came out sounded harsh and guttural, and he hunched forward as he spoke them, like the hunters. The bearded man turned back and responded in kind.

  “Let me guess,” Sal said. “Aaron speaks caveman?”

  “He’s been around a long time,” Perry said, and returned to the hunter. “Okay. Good. They can take us the rest of the way. He asked if he could have your gun.”

  “Tell him it’s big magic. Only works for me.”

  Perry relayed this message. The hunter shrugged, and made a noise even Sal could tell was noncommittal.

  “He says, can’t blame him for trying.”

  “Cute.” The kid scampered off the beast, and waved them after her with her red right hand.

  “She says—”

  “Follow. I got that part, thanks.”

  • • •

  The kid with the bloody hand led them through jagged canyons and over sharp stone to the foot of the whirlwind. Overhead—or whatever direction that was—twin eye-suns burned. The wind chipped and tore at the rock, tearing ground away to reveal an enormous familiar shape, like the smudge-lizard but so large she mistook it at first for a mistake: twenty-thousand-year-old spilled paint, perhaps. But no, that darkness had scales, and claws, and moved.

  The kid pointed into the maelstrom. Sal gave her a thumbs-up, and she sprinted back through the canyons.

  “So,” she said to Perry, “we jump into that thing, and we pop back into the real world.”

  “Or get smashed into pulp.” He grinned. “But I think it’s the real world one.”

  “You think.”

  “I have a really good feeling about this.”

  “Great.” She started for the whirlwind, only to realize Agnieszka wasn’t with them. After a moment’s frantic search she found her, crouched behind a boulder. “Agnieszka. We have to go.”

  She shook her head. Her wide eyes reflected the paired suns’ light.

  “This is our shot. Your sister’s on the other side of that thing.”

  “That,” Agnieszka said, “is what scares me.”

  “She wants to see you. Whatever you were fighting about. Whatever you said.”

  “You don’t know that!”

  There were right words to say here. There had to be. She just couldn’t find them.

  “She does,” Perry said.

  Behind them, a huge slab of rock tore free of the ground and shattered as it rose. The beast beneath twitched and surged, almost free.

  Agnieszka took Sal’s hand. “Good,” she said. “Okay. Let’s go.”

  They ran together into the whirlwind.

  5.

  This time Sal stayed conscious the whole way through the grotesque inversion as the twin suns pierced her with their gaze. Her body folded inside out and outside in again, known completely—rendered as a line drawing, rendered as fat cooked from bone. Winds took her to pieces. Flesh hung itself around her like a cloak. Tyrant lungs demanded she breathe, the autarch heart drove blood through resisting veins. Gravity, real gravity, not an artist’s disposition to place these forms against those others, tugged her down.

  She landed on her feet in a cavern warm with the breath of beasts. They circled near the walls or nested among stalagmites, horned and furred and long-toothed, paws padding stone, claws tearing chalk-white trails in gray. Eyes glittered in the dark, reflecting the cavern’s sole source of light.

  Sylwia’s gaze carved the shadows like a searchlight, and reflected back off the walls onto her. She was a kid, really—Sal was always surprised how young eighteen looked to her these days—a kid with narrow shoulders, a blonde ponytail, a baggy jacket, straight-leg jeans, big stomping boots. Huge pages littered the ground at her feet. She propped the sketch pad on her hip as she swept her hand across its surface, leaving charcoal trails.

  Her searchlight gaze flickered back to the painting she was copying off the wall: an enormous nightmare smudge of lizard, too huge to ever live, a scared and long-dead artist’s fever dream. And as Sylwia scratched charcoal onto her page, the lizard on the wall swelled and sharpened. It took shape, grew definition. When it breathed, the other creatures shuddered.

  “Talk to her,” Sal said. “She’ll listen.”

  “Or you could tackle her in the middle of an incantation. Sal’s friends seem to like that approach.”

  “Sylwia!” Agnieszka lifted herself from the rock, and stepped toward her sister. Sylwia drew faster. The lizard’s eyes opened, and rolled red. “Sylwia, listen to me. You have to stop.” Agnieszka ground her toe into the rock. She raised her chin, thrust her shoulders back, and marched toward her sister. She spoke through the chisel-whirl of magic. Shouted.

  Perry stepped up behind her. “She says she didn’t mean it. She says—she’s sorry.”

  Sal almost grabbed his hand. “Okay.”

  Sylwia kept drawing. Agnieszka neared, step by step, braced against a wind only she could feel. Maybe it was magic. Maybe not. She reached for Sylwia’s shoulder.

  The girl turned, and fixed her with that lantern gaze. Shadows vanished from Agnieszka’s face, and she rose off the ground as if caught in a giant’s invisible fist. Sal started forward, but Perry held her back.

  “Of course you want me to stop,” Perry translated. “You always wanted me to stop. You all did. Mom and Dad and you, all together. Why waste your time? Do something, um, something serious. The world doesn’t need more pictures.”

  “Oh,” Sal said, remembering dinner tables past. “Huh.”

  “Some things are the same all over the world,” Perry said. “I guess.”

  “For the record, I never said history was useless.”

  “No, you just had to go into the family business and crow about how you liked making a real difference in the world.” Agnieszka fought to breathe, fought to speak. “We, uh. Sorry, okay. That’s what she says. I didn’t mean to. Um.” Sylwia snarled. Tears burned on her face. Agnieszka tried again. “I missed you. That’s all. I haven’t seen you since I left home. I do this job because I like it, and because it makes money, and because we can send you to school. But I was so happy to see yo
u, and you wanted to spend all your time drawing. I couldn’t talk to you. I didn’t know how.” He nodded, satisfied with the translation. He was not looking at Sal. “But this is wrong. You’re stealing people’s reality to make your own world. The power of this place, it’s using you. I just want my sister back.”

  The lizard strained against the rock wall. Two of its claws burst free, and its great head reared. Dust rained and stone creaked.

  Sal took Perry’s hand.

  Sylwia lifted her hand from the page, and closed her eyes.

  Darkness closed around them. A blast of wind shook the cavern. Sal fell to her knees. Cows lowed and horses whinnied and lions roared, but the sounds twisted, and then, suddenly, became human voices. Lights split the darkness: cell phones, flashlights. Torches.

  “Liam! Father Menchú!”

  They crouched for battle not ten feet from Sal herself. Liam’s shirt seemed to have been cannibalized for bandages; he was sweat-slick and daubed in paintings that reminded Sal of the pelt-clad people in the rock. Father Menchú’s jacket and shirt were torn, and his pants; one of Liam’s shirtsleeves was wadded around a wound on his bare leg. Monique still wore her sweater-vest, bloodstained now, but her sleeves were rolled up, her knuckles swollen as if she’d punched someone recently. Liam’s face, for that matter, looked a little discolored.

  But at least they had light.

  “Sal!” Father Menchú ran to her. “We looked for you in—wherever that was—but we couldn’t find you. What happened?”

  Agnieszka and Sylwia lay, still but breathing, in the center of the cavern, while scared tourists snapped flash photos and Professor Gerondain, who seemed utterly unaffected by his stay on the cave wall, scrambled to stop them. Monique called the professor’s name, and he stopped, confused, to adjust his glasses.

  “Um,” Perry said. “Sal?” When she turned to look, he cast his phone light to the wall across the cavern.

  It was empty.

  Sal heard a hiss from overhead. The air stank of cave carrion.

  “Everybody get down!”

  Of course the civilians didn’t listen. Camera lights darted up to the blackness on the ceiling: The enormous scaled bulk of the creature splayed there. Its hiss turned to a roar, and it sprang—toward the passage leading, near as Sal could tell, up. The lizard compressed itself, illogical, octopus-like, through the opening, and wriggled away, leaving screams in its wake.