Bookburners

by Max Gladstone

  As she left the wheelhouse, Sal felt the ship lurch beneath her. That sudden roll of the deck could only mean one thing.

  • • •

  Sal came to a skidding stop at the stern of the boat. On the deck, the severed sea monster head still lay under its tarp. Above, two others now seethed and writhed, still very much attached to their necks. Team One was already engaged with the head on the left. Ellsdale swung a large chain in lazy circles in the air, golden links shimmering in the sun with a dazzling intensity that the creature seemed hesitant to approach. Soo had donned the brass backpack Sal had seen her inspecting on the plane. She leapt into the air and Sal saw that she had been wrong. The brass and steel construction wasn’t a jetpack. It was a pair of shining wings.

  Once in the sky, Soo caught the loose end of Ellsdale’s chain as it flicked by, then dove, nearly crashing into the deck, only to pivot up at the last moment, looping the chain around the left creature’s neck. Ellsdale braced himself against the rail. Soo soared back, wings beating fast and strong against the air, pulling hard with all of their might. The chain smoked against the monster’s skin, and both heads let out throaty cries.

  Both heads? Sal thought, but that was as far as she had time to get before she was leaping out of the way of the freshly severed sea monster head crashing onto the boat.

  “Excellent!” Shah was shouting. “Now the other one.”

  Ellsdale and Soo moved to get into position, but Grace was already at the edge of the deck, sword out, daring the second creature to come down into range. The sea monster snapped at her, but whipped back whenever any of the team got too close.

  “Be patient,” Shah called. “We can wait it out. Stay ready, and when you see your chance, take it.”

  Sal tried to come up with something useful she could do. Would throwing one of the severed heads back overboard distract the monster at all? Probably not, and she doubted that anyone at the Society would approve of her leaving sea monster heads floating around for random fishermen to drag up in their nets. The pitching of the deck had caused the tarp covering the original creature’s head to slide off, leaving it lying in the open beside the one Soo and Ellsdale had just severed. The two heads were absolutely identical. Like a clone, Sal thought.

  The last monster lunged forward, and Grace caught it under the jaw with her sword. The blow wasn’t enough to decapitate it, but it held it still long enough for Soo and Ellsdale to make their move, neatly trapping the neck and garroting it just as they had the last one. The severed neck sent a splash of viscous brown fluid across the deck and everyone on it. Sal caught the spray across her shins, but she barely noticed. The third head perfectly matched the other two.

  First one head alone, then two together … all exactly the same. What if this wasn’t a case of multiple monsters, but a single monster with multiple heads? Cut one off … The water where one of the paired necks had gone down churned. “Guys—” Sal called. But everyone’s attention was fixed on the water.

  Two more heads rose from the deep. Even as they watched, the water began to boil where the last neck stump had gone down.

  Shah cursed. “A hydra.”

  “How are we going to burn the neck stumps in the middle of the ocean?” asked Soo.

  “Doesn’t matter,” said Ellsdale. “Fire just slows it down. The only way to stop a hydra from re-growing is to find the one immortal head and destroy it.”

  Sal was so distracted by the dipping and weaving monster heads that she didn’t notice Grace until she was standing on the deck rail. Silver sword in one hand, and an unlit torch in the other.

  “Grace!” she screamed. “What are you doing?”

  For a moment, Grace turned to meet Sal’s eyes. She opened her mouth to speak.

  In that moment of distraction, the sea monster reared up, swooped down, and swallowed Grace whole.

  4.

  Menchú did not sleep that night. About an hour before sunrise he heard something rattle the kitchen door. The table was still pressed against it, and the door did not budge. A few minutes later, he heard the front door open, followed by footsteps and the sound of Father Lopez indulging in a low litany of muttered complaints.

  Menchú did not move from his place until he heard Lopez shower and emerge again, and the smell of fresh coffee had begun to waft down from the kitchen. He collected Liam from his room and together both men made their way to the kitchen. They found Lopez seated at the table, which had been moved back to its usual spot, sipping his coffee. He held the cup awkwardly in his left hand, letting the right lie uselessly in his lap.

  He forced a smile to his lips. “Good morning. If you want coffee, feel free to help yourselves. Or if you’d like to return to your car immediately, I can call one of the neighbors to help you. I would take you myself, but I have some parishioners coming this morning. Premarital counseling.”

  Liam scoffed. “Oh come off it. Did you really think that we were just going to show up to breakfast like nothing happened?”

  “And what do you think happened?” asked Father Lopez.

  Menchú shrugged. “I, for one, think that the town is full of werewolves.” As he made this pronouncement, Menchú walked over to the counter and helped himself to the coffee. Normally, he was a tea drinker, but given how little sleep he had gotten, he wasn’t going to be picky about the source of his caffeine. “What confuses me,” he continued, as though this was a perfectly normal sort of thing to say, “is that your security door isn’t new. This is a small village. Surely you don’t need it to deter criminals, which implies that your condition and that of your neighbors is not a new one. But in that case, what has recently changed to bring this place to our attention?”

  Father Lopez sagged. “Are you with the Inquisition?” he asked.

  “There is no Inquisition anymore,” said Liam. “I think it’s called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith now.”

  Lopez shot him a glare. “Doesn’t matter what they call it. It’s still the Inquisition.”

  Menchú stepped in. “In any event, we are not a part of it.”

  “Then who?”

  “We are with the Societas Librorum Occultorum.”

  Lopez’s eyes narrowed. “I’ve never heard of it.”

  Menchú shrugged. “Most people haven’t.”

  “What is your charge?”

  “In brief, investigating things like werewolves. Which brings us back to my question. From what we saw and heard last night, it’s my guess that the entire town has been turned.”

  Father Lopez looked down at the table, shaking his head. “None of the villagers have been turned,” he said. “We were born this way. Have been for the last five hundred years.”

  Menchú looked to Liam, and saw his own confusion echoed on the other man’s face. “What?”

  Father Lopez let out a long, slow sigh. “We have had investigators from the Church here before. In the fifteenth century, this place came to the attention of the Inquisition. I don’t know why they came. Maybe for the same reason you have.”

  Menchú heard Liam mutter, “Doubt that,” but ignored it and motioned for Father Lopez to continue.

  “At first, they were welcomed by the people. After all, they were good Catholics, why wouldn’t they want to find and expel any heretics in their midst? But the Inquisitors were more interested in lining their pockets than defending the faith. The people here have never had much. That didn’t stop the Inquisitors from extorting the people. And so the villagers went to their local priest for help.

  “At the time, there was a small Franciscan monastery attached to the church; the abbot and his brothers gathered everyone inside, and they prayed for God to deliver them. They even brought out their most holy relic, a tooth of the Wolf of Gubbio, which had been tamed by Saint Francis himself.

  “The Inquisitors gathered around the church, threatening to burn everyone inside if they did not emerge and submit to them.”

  Father Lopez paused. Menchú realized that he and
Liam were leaning in. He made a conscious effort to relax his posture, to be as nonthreatening as possible as he asked, “And then what happened?”

  “Who can be sure? It was five centuries ago. No one who was there is still alive today. But we are told that at midnight, the church bell—all on its own—began to toll. A strange light filled the chapel, and the Inquisition decided our little village was not such a hotbed of heresy after all.”

  “Because the Inquisitors were eaten by wolves?” asked Liam.

  “As I said, I was not there.”

  Menchú frowned. “Does this happen every night?”

  Lopez shook his head again. “No, usually only a few times a year. And no, it isn’t tied to the full moon. There are certain feast days, anniversaries of the original miracle. Or times when the village is in danger and we are called to defend it. This was one of the few places relatively untouched by the Civil War.”

  “You call this a miracle?” asked Menchú.

  Lopez frowned at him. “Of course. It was brought about by the prayers of the faithful and a holy relic of Saint Francis. What else could it be?”

  Menchú’s turn to furrow his brow. “You say that the residents transform when they need to defend the village. Why last night, then? Surely two strangers walking into town after their car broke down isn’t a significant threat.”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Then what?”

  Lopez sighed. “The expats. They cause every other problem around here. I’m sure they’re somehow responsible for bringing you down on our heads as well.”

  • • •

  Sal stared into the water as though the sheer force of her will could cause Grace to rise to the surface. But there was nothing to see but sunlight glittering on undulating waves.

  Soo and Ellsdale had tried to snare the head that had swallowed Grace, attempting to slice the neck before Grace was too far down its gullet, but the hydra had withdrawn, diving so that it could—presumably—digest its morsel unmolested. Only a quick grab from Soo had prevented Sal from jumping over the side to follow it. Shah commended Soo for her quick thinking, condemned Sal as an idiot, and then she and Ellsdale had immediately donned their scuba gear to go after the hydra in a less suicidal manner.

  They had yet to return. Although Sal acknowledged that free diving after a sea monster was a stupid idea, especially when her only experience at depth was trying to touch the bottom of the diving pool at the Y, it didn’t stop her from wishing that she was down there with them. At least then she would be doing something.

  A call from Soo pulled Sal out of her own frustration. “I’ve got something!”

  Sal readied a flare gun she’d commandeered and ran to her. The water a few meters off the port side was roiling from beneath, a stream of bubbles that grew larger and stronger as a dark form reached the surface.

  “Hold fire,” called Soo. “Friendly!”

  Sal resisted the urge to point out that she was neither in Soo’s chain of command nor a total idiot, and instead lowered the muzzle of the flare. Divers surfaced much more slowly than the hydra had, and she hadn’t felt the roll of the ship that presaged the last two encounters. But Sal still held her breath, waiting to see how many, and which heads would break out of the water.

  The first face emerged: Ellsdale.

  A moment later, Shah.

  Sal watched, waiting. Hoping. But there was no one else.

  “We followed it down to two hundred meters,” said Shah, once she was on deck. “But then we lost the light and had to turn back.”

  “Can you get better lights and try again?” Sal asked. “Go deeper?”

  Shah shook her head. “The problem isn’t the light,” she said. “It’s the pressure. One hundred fifty meters is the deepest that anyone has claimed to have dived on compressed air, and that was never officially verified. We can go deeper because we brought hypoxic breathing gas.” Shah tapped her tank. “But I didn’t see the hydra swallow any of our tanks when it grabbed Grace. Even if we assume Grace survived being swallowed, if the hydra took her deeper than we can see, she’s dead.”

  “But it’s Grace,” said Sal. “You’re trying to apply logic to a sea monster swallowing a woman who is—” She cut herself off. She didn’t know if Team One knew all of Grace’s secrets or not. Even if they did, they weren’t hers to tell.

  Shah nodded. “I know. But just because Grace is durable doesn’t mean that she’s indestructible.”

  “We can’t just abandon her. What happened to ‘no man left behind?’”

  Shah didn’t blink. “I will not leave her if I have a choice. But I also have a job to do. Grace knows that.” Shah finished stripping off her equipment and made her way toward the ship’s wheelhouse.

  “Where are you going?” asked Sal.

  “To contact Asanti and find out if Grace completed the mission.”

  • • •

  Hundreds of meters below the surface, Grace managed to worm her hand down from where it was pinned against her chest into one of her many pockets. She had to give Shah one thing: While cargo pants might not be very fashion-forward, they did make it easier to carry things that might come in handy, even in the most unlikely of circumstances.

  Being swallowed whole by a sea monster, for example.

  Her fingers closed around a nylon strap connected to a rectangular piece of plastic, and Grace began the slow process of pulling it out of her pocket and back up to her head. She had sworn, when Shah first laid out her gear, that there was no circumstance so dire that she would resort to strapping a flashlight to her head. Shah had shrugged and insisted she carry the headlamp anyway.

  It would seem that she owed Shah an apology.

  On the other hand, if she never got out of the belly of this thing, it was all going to be rather moot.

  Light in place, Grace clicked it on, rendering her immediate surroundings visible, if no more pleasant. At least her eyes confirmed what her sense of touch and smell had already told her. She was in a small, wet, muscular space, like being squeezed by a giant slimy fist that smelled of dead fish, salt, and bile. If she pressed her arms out in front of her to their full extension, she could create enough space to tilt her head and look toward her feet. As she did so, she felt the walls around her ripple from her feet upward, followed by a gush of cold seawater that swept by her face before vanishing into the dark again. As it did so, Grace slid forward and caught a glimpse of a thick sphincter up ahead.

  Not in the belly yet, then.

  Not that being slowly swallowed down the esophagus of a sea monster was much of an improvement.

  The salty water stung her exposed skin, and Grace wriggled around to shine her light on her hand. Her palm was red and sore, coated in a yellowish fluid, secreted by the creature around her. But even as she watched, she could see she was healing faster than the acid ate at her flesh. Which was definitely what Sal would call a “good news, bad news” scenario.

  Good news: She wasn’t going to be eaten alive by the gastric juices of a magical sea monster. Bad news: If the creature’s digestion wasn’t going to finish her off, how long could she survive in here?

  She tried to stop herself, but her brain was already doing the math. Standard burn rate, slightly accelerated because of lack of food, slightly slower because she wasn’t moving, couldn’t move …

  The number was only a rough estimate, but it was enough to make her shudder.

  Twenty years.

  Unless someone in Rome put out her candle, of course. Then she could be here forever.

  The monster swallowed again, and this time Grace wiggled with the contraction, forcing herself farther down the winding throat. She had lost her torch and sword when she was swallowed. The trauma of the mouth coupled with the distraction of Sal’s shout. But logically, everything had to end up in the same place eventually.

  The hydra had one immortal head. Heracles had defeated the creature by putting it under a rock. Apparently, someone had let it go again. Grace
gritted her teeth and slid forward another half meter.

  She would have to find a bigger rock this time.

  • • •

  Menchú and Liam left Father Lopez in the rectory kitchen staring into his cup of coffee, and returned to their rooms.

  “Contact Asanti,” Menchú told Liam. “See if she can find any documentation to support the story that Father Lopez told us.”

  “You really think the Vatican is going to have a record of the miracle of the small Spanish village where everyone turned into a werewolf and then ate the Inquisition?” he asked.

  “Perhaps not, but they may well have a record of the tiny Spanish town where the Inquisition came and then was never heard from again.”

  “Do you buy his theory for what’s changed? Why the Orb is only pinging this place now?”

  “The new people coming to town? It’s possible. For all we know, one of the newcomers is a wizard, and the werewolves have nothing to do with anything.”

  Liam snorted. “Or rich expats started running over wolves and the wolves started biting back. Turning a bunch of people could set off the Orb.”

  “If Father Lopez was telling the truth, the villagers weren’t turned by being bitten,” Menchú pointed out.

  “Doesn’t mean they couldn’t do it to other people if they wanted to. I’ve watched a lot of old horror movies. Werewolves always bite.”

  Menchú didn’t bother to hide his smile. Liam had worked so hard to earn it, after all.

  “But seriously,” Liam continued, “if this town is full of werewolves, should we really be hanging around?”

  So Menchú hadn’t been the only one pondering that question. “If we leave now, we’ll have to tell Cardinal Fox why, and he’ll send in Team One.” He let the implications of what would then follow go unsaid, trusting Liam to connect the dots himself.

  “Might be the only way to solve the problem.”

  “I’d rather we explore our other options first. And at least we know that here the doors lock.”