Bookburners

by Max Gladstone

  “It’s afraid of us?” Liam asked. “Something that size?”

  “Hell if I know,” Sal said. “But we can’t let it get away.”

  She ran, and the others followed: Liam, Menchú, even Perry and, to her surprise, Monique. Running was fine. Running was good, even, following the trail of broken rocks and smeared paintings the wriggling lizard left. Running gave you time to think. This lizard, the smaller version, had been almost bulletproof, and Sal had, God, was it five or six rounds left? Four? She should know this, dammit. Lost track in the sprint and the magic. Anyway. Eyes were vulnerable. Since this one was bigger, maybe that left her a bigger target. Or something.

  Christ. What was the cover story if this one got out? It didn’t exactly fit the local landscape. Maybe they could pass it off as a tourist attraction. Come to the south of France, see the scenic local giant prehistoric lizards that probably didn’t exist anyway.

  She ran faster, through the gallery where they’d found Perry, up the tunnel, through two more galleries, then, crouching, out into the sunlight.

  The lizard looked even larger by day. It swelled in the clearing. One sweep of its tail toppled a tent. It gnawed experimentally at a floodlight. Sparks fountained from its mouth, but the shock didn’t seem to bother it. Grad students scattered, screaming. Monique ran out, waving her hands, directing them in French to do—something. Liam followed her, torch brandished like a sword, the flame barely visible by daylight. Menchú circled the other way, wary; he grabbed a shovel and jabbed at the lizard, which did not seem to notice.

  Sal swallowed hard, and drew her pistol.

  Then a knight fell from the sky and cut the lizard’s head off.

  The head, the body, and the knight hit the ground in triple time. Blood gushed from the lizard’s neck.

  The knight stood. Team One’s cross-sword logo stencil glittered on her armor. Her wings folded back against their harness.

  Sal glanced down at her watch. Time’s up.

  Jeeps growled up the gravel road, and boots hit earth. The Team One cleaning crew arrived, and ran for the lizard’s body, bearing chainsaws and gasoline.

  The knight removed her helmet.

  “Hi, Grace,” Sal said.

  It had been weeks since Sal had last seen her. She’d almost grown used to the absence—almost didn’t feel it anymore on assignment, almost didn’t miss the way they were before Grace left. Before she joined Team One.

  The corners of her mouth twitched, too fast for Sal to say if they moved up or down. “Sal.” Sometimes she didn’t say that much.

  “There are civilians down in the cave,” Sal said. “There’s nothing wrong with them. No books. No possession.”

  Grace brushed hair from her eyes with a gauntleted hand. She left a trail of gore. She did not seem triumphant, though she stood on the body of her enemy.

  There was too much to say, so Sal said nothing.

  Grace turned, and stalked away. Team One set fire to the lizard.

  Across the clearing, Monique and Liam kissed.

  Sal turned back to Perry, but he was gone.

  6.

  Days later, Father Arturo Menchú stood before the Orb once more, and before Asanti, and once more she refused to look at him. “The timer must have run out while we were stuck in the cave wall,” he said. “Team One deployed. We’re lucky no one was hurt.”

  “Yes,” Asanti said.

  She’d been like this since the trial: quiet and careful, choosing her moments. Or at least, he believed she was choosing her moments. None of those moments happened to involve him.

  They had been many things to one another down many years, but it had never been this bad before.

  “Sal’s brother disappeared.”

  “I see.”

  “She claims he seemed … himself. He has been using the memories of his, ah, angel half”—he removed his glasses, and tried to clean them on the lining of his coat—“to guide him. Even tried to help us, though it would have worked better if he had bothered to keep us informed.”

  She said nothing.

  “But his ritual didn’t work. I mean, Liam obviously interrupted him, so there’s no way of knowing what might have happened, but he had been down there for hours and only barely contained the shadows. Even then, some slipped out.” He tried the glasses again, but the world looked as cloudy as before.

  “I see.” She stroked her chin, then raised a lever on the machine.

  “I only mean to say, it seems even angels don’t understand what they’re doing. With magic.”

  “I thought you didn’t believe in angels.”

  Yes. Good. That was it: a sign of life, of disagreement, a sign she cared about—about them, about their work together, enough to fight. “Whatever he is, then. Maybe he is a demon, after all. But he’s as in the dark as we are.”

  She turned, and looked at him. He waited. If he’d had a hat, and poor self-control, he would have twisted it in his hands. What did people do with their hands, anyway? He let his hang wooden by his sides. He felt made of wood all through. Take the bait. It’s an argument so full of holes even I can see them. Show me. Tear me to pieces.

  “That’s a good point, Arturo,” she said, and smiled, and turned away.

  For the first time, Father Arturo Menchú feared his friend.

  • • •

  There was an empty cavern beneath the earth, and then it held a woman with sharp, silver eyes.

  There were no lights in this dark place, the tourists having been evacuated, the scholars having retreated to safety, but if you had eyes like hers, you could have seen her as if in a field at noon. She walked a slow circle, touching paintings, and where she touched, they moved, and the world changed, as if great machines worked out of sight.

  She passed without looking the bare wall once occupied by a painting of a lizard, and moved to another patch, far smaller, once occupied by a painting of a priest.

  With her thumbnail, she carved a sliver of stone free from the wall, placed it in her mouth, and chewed. Rock shards cut her gums. Her teeth were not sharp, but an observer might be forgiven for thinking they were. She grinned.

  “Arturo, you have been busy.”

  Then she vanished, leaving only footprints and a trace of laughter.

  Bookburners

  Season 3, Episode 2

  Faces of the Beast

  Margaret Dunlap

  1.

  Grace snapped awake. The candle was lit. Her life was burning away.

  Shah stood by the table. It was still strange to see her there and not Menchú. Like trying to walk with a fold in her sock.

  Shah turned to replace the glass chimney over her candle. Drafts caused drips, and lost wax was life unused. Shah was meticulous about Grace’s candle, which Grace should have found reassuring, but her new superior’s fetishistic care to avoid any waste of wax merely felt like another fold in her sock.

  In keeping with her devotion to efficiency, Shah had set out a pair of black cargo pants, shirt, and tac vest before waking Grace. Not what she would have chosen for herself, but also not an argument Grace felt like having. Not again. And so she contained her inward sigh and reached for the pile. “No plate armor this time?” she asked.

  “We’re headed to a point off the coast of New Zealand,” said Shah. “I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be wearing plate on a boat.”

  Grace shrugged as she pulled the shirt over her head. “There’s no evidence I can drown.”

  “No evidence you can’t, either,” said Shah. Grace bent down to tighten her shoelaces, sensing Shah’s impatience as she did so. On their first mission, Shah had suggested that—to save time—Grace could sleep in her shoes. Grace, still Chinese in spite of everything, had declined.

  Grace distracted herself from her thoughts and Shah from her waiting with another question. “What’s the report from Team Three?”

  “They’re on another call. This is our mission.”

  Grace looked up, startled
. “What happened?”

  “You’ll get the brief with everyone else on the plane. We’re wheels up as soon as Brooks gets to the airfield.”

  • • •

  Sal and the rest of Team Three—which, since Asanti had been banished from the field, these days meant Father Menchú and Liam—had been heading for the airport and the next flight that could take them to Auckland when a call came in from the Archives. The Orb had another ping, this time with a location in central Spain.

  As soon as Menchú hung up with Asanti, his phone buzzed again. This time, it was Cardinal Fox on the line. When Menchú ended that call, he turned to Sal, frowning.

  “From what we can tell, the first coordinates are off the coast of New Zealand, not on land. The cardinal”—Sal thought Menchú did an excellent job of not flinching when he said Fox’s new title—“believes that this means it is less likely to be artifact-related. He wants us in Spain instead. Team One will go to New Zealand.”

  “Did you tell him that ‘less likely’ is not the same as ‘impossible?’” said Sal.

  “And that he can’t give our job to his old team just because he’s in charge now?” added Liam.

  “I made that suggestion. But since we don’t have Grace and Asanti is barred from field work, if our team splits up to cover both sites, it would mean putting one of us on our own.”

  “So Team One is going to New Zealand,” said Sal.

  Menchú nodded. “Yes. And you’re going with them.”

  Less than an hour later, Sal was strapped into the hold of a military transport that Shah had somehow commandeered to take them all to a location on the other side of the planet. In addition to Grace, two others from the Team One roster had been tapped for the job, neither of them conversationalists. Soo, a Korean woman, was busy inspecting what looked like a steampunk jetpack. Given Team One’s gear, it might be exactly that. The man, Ellsdale, who could give Liam a run for his money in a “member of the Society least-suited to survive a sun demon” contest, was asleep. Sal knew them both by sight from other missions, but apparently this wasn’t the trip where they were all going to bond and become friends. The one person on the team she had thought was a friend, Grace, hadn’t even looked up when Sal said hello.

  Yeah. This inter-team collaboration was off to a great start.

  “Okay!” It took some work for Shah to be heard over the roar of the engines and the rattle of the plane, but she made her voice carry. “We’re looking at a major disturbance off the west coast of the South Island. Local authorities are calling it an earthquake, but the Orb says otherwise, so we’re on the job. Lucky for us, earthquakes aren’t unusual for that part of the world, so we shouldn’t be up to our asses in civilian scientists and looky-loos getting in the way—”

  Sal glanced over at Grace, who had her nose buried in … The Da Vinci Code? Since when did Grace read airport thrillers?

  Sal tried to turn her attention back to the briefing. She managed, at least, to catch her cue when Shah asked her to present the information that Team Three had gleaned from the Orb. (Admittedly, not very much beyond: It’s in the ocean; it’s magic; it’s big.) But she kept stealing glances in Grace’s direction.

  Grace didn’t look up from her book once.

  • • •

  The flight to New Zealand was long, and eventually, all the others fell asleep. Grace put down her book that she no longer had to pretend to read and found herself alone with her thoughts.

  “Did Team Three do something to piss you off?” Fox asked when Grace came to him in the aftermath of Belfast and Asanti’s trial.

  Grace returned Fox’s penetrating look with one of her own. She had known three cardinals before he had taken over this office. Odds were she would know more. He didn’t scare her.

  “No,” Grace said.

  Fox leaned back in his chair. “Then why are you asking for a transfer?” he asked.

  Grace didn’t want to be wasting wax on this conversation. “Shah has made several overtures since she assumed leadership of Team One. I’ve come to agree that it would be a better match for my primary skill set.”

  Fox considered this. “You always said no before. What changed?”

  Grace knew that Shah’s offers to bring her to Team One had certainly been supported, if not instigated, by Fox when he was still a monsignor. Why was he so hard to convince? She was giving him what he wanted.

  Instead of voicing that thought aloud, Grace asked, “Does it matter?”

  “It matters if it affects the readiness and function of the Society,” said Fox.

  “It doesn’t.”

  Despite the fact that Grace had then walked out of Fox’s office, or perhaps because of it, the requested transfer had been granted. The next time Grace woke, it had been to Shah looking down at her.

  She sometimes regretted not formally saying goodbye to Arturo. Then chided herself. Even when life was long, it was too short for regrets.

  • • •

  Despite a population of more than forty-six million, outside of the capital and the major cities on the coasts, most of the Spanish countryside was still just that: countryside. For stretches in the central plains where you could go for miles between isolated villages, the illusion of aloneness broken only by the occasional car or train rushing by.

  Naturally, it was in one of these areas that Father Menchú and Liam’s car—a loaner from the Society’s tiny motor pool—came to a coughing stop, and despite Liam’s best efforts at mechanical and spiritual persuasion, refused to roll another inch. Menchú helped push the car to the side of the road, then leaned back against the hood, and sighed.

  “I wish Sal and Grace were here.”

  “Why? Does one of them know how to fix a busted head gasket?” asked Liam.

  Menchú’s chuckle carried in the quiet night. “Not to my knowledge, but I don’t like being away from the rest of the team.”

  “Grace isn’t on the team anymore,” Liam pointed out.

  Menchú allowed this without comment. “More than that,” he continued, “the two sets of coordinates we’ve gotten from the Orb just so happen to be exactly antipodal to each other.”

  “What now?”

  “If we drilled a hole from one straight through the center of the Earth, we’d reach the other.”

  “Well, that’s a little too perfect to be coincidence.”

  Menchú nodded. “As I said, I wish Sal and Grace were here.”

  In the distance, a set of headlights appeared. They were low to the ground, and soon joined by the roar of a well-tuned engine speeding toward them.

  “You want to stick a thumb out, Father?”

  Menchú pushed himself off the fender of the car and joined Liam at the side of the road. “Italian and Spanish are very close, you know,” he said. “I’m sure you could handle asking for a ride.”

  “Probably,” said Liam. “But there’s no talking if the car doesn’t stop, and that’s more likely to happen for the guy with a collar than the one covered in tattoos.”

  Menchú couldn’t argue with that logic. Making sure that he was clearly visible in the spill from the headlights and blinking hazards, Menchú put out a thumb and Liam stepped a little farther into the verge at the side of the road.

  According to Liam’s calculations, they were only about fifteen kilometers from whatever had set off the Orb. Not much of a detour, even for someone in a hurry to get home at this late hour.

  The throaty roar of the sports car was nearly on them, and the driver flashed his brights. Menchú held up his free hand to shade his eyes. Oh good, he thought, they see us. He allowed himself a moment of relief as he imagined a warm bed at the end of a long drive.

  Except the car wasn’t slowing down. An instant later, Menchú was jolted nearly off his feet as Liam yanked him back from the edge of the road. The car zoomed past without even slowing down.

  “Bloody hell!” said Liam. He threw an obscene gesture in the direction of the car’s taillights, but it was alread
y disappearing around the bend. “What’s got them in a such a hurry?”

  Menchú brushed himself off with shaking hands, ridding himself of the dust kicked up by the car’s passage and the bits of vegetation he’d acquired from his unexpected step into the hedge.

  “So much for Spanish hospitality, hey?” said Liam.

  Menchú shook his head, looking up and down the road. No sign of another vehicle. The stars glittered overhead, but in the distance, in the direction the car had gone, the horizon glowed. Menchú turned to Liam.

  “Fifteen kilometers, you said?”

  “More or less.”

  Menchú sighed. “May as well start walking.”

  • • •

  The plane landed in Wellington. Shah hailed a cab, which brought Team One—plus Sal—to the tattered end of the city’s port, where the private charters and scientific vessels docked away from the cargo ships and their towering stacks of containers. From the cab they boarded a modest vessel and headed out to sea. Hours passed.

  On the port side of the boat, out of sight of the wheelhouse and the aft deck, Grace stood alone at the rail. The rest of Team One was busy laying out a combination of magical weaponry they carefully kept out of view from the captain and mundane scuba equipment that they didn’t. She removed a small notebook from her pocket, checked her watch, paused for a moment, staring into space as though performing some kind of mental calculation, and made a series of hash marks before returning the notebook to her pocket.

  The boat rocked under her feet. Not the steady passing of the swells on the choppy waters, but a gout of water erupting from the deep. Grace stared, transfixed, as the water fell away and revealed a serpentine neck covered in glittering scales that rose … and rose … and rose …

  2.

  Before Shah had come to the Society, her training had not included “what to do when a giant sea monster rises from the Pacific and tries to eat your boat.” But the truth was that the lessons she had learned in the military were highly transferable.