“It’s going to be fine, Grace. And I’m not going to let you go.”
• • •
Menchú kept a small box in the back of a drawer in his desk. It was placed so that he never needed to see it, and so that he never needed to think about it. He dug for it now.
Inside the box were a few scraps of fabric crusted in long-dried blood. It was his own, mingled with that of his congregants from Guatemala, so long ago. This relic was all he had left of that past, and he rarely brought it out into the light. Indeed, he rarely thought of it these days.
He caressed the remnant. That terrible day would always be with him, but he was no longer that young and naive priest. Everything had changed since then. He had changed. And if he had to cross swords with an angel again, this time he would do better.
Asanti darkened his doorway. “Arturo.”
“Asanti. Do you need something?” His voice was too curt.
She grimaced at his tone. “I don’t, but I thought maybe you do. I’ve noticed that lately you seem a bit—uneasy. Is there something you need to talk to me about?”
This was his chance. He should tell her about Hannah, about the dreams, about how his time in the Society suddenly seemed to be a threadbare illusion. Perhaps he was still in Guatemala, digging graves. Perhaps this was part of the angel’s torment of him. Hannah’s laughter echoed in his skull.
He pressed his knuckles into his eye sockets to silence her. “It’s nothing I can’t handle on my own,” he said out loud.
5.
Sunset on the third day of the Market was a long time coming. Grace and Sal holed up in their room together.
Grace bent her head over her book, a secondhand copy of Twilight. She’d left Fifty Shades of Gray on the train.
Sal prowled the length of the room, measuring out the twelve steps from the mirror to the window again and again.
“There has to be something else we can do.”
“We wait. If it’s not about the chess pieces, then someone is trying to stop the deal. Now we just need to wait and find out who.”
“You’re not even reading.” Sal loomed over Grace, hands on her hips.
Grace turned her head, her bobbed hair swinging and brushing her chin. “No, I’m not.”
“Why did you do it, anyway?”
Grace looked up, met Sal’s eyes. “Do what?” But she knew. Sal was finally asking the question she’d been diligently avoiding for weeks. Why had Grace asked to be transferred to Team One? “I thought I’d do better there.”
“Better than what?”
“Better at fighting. More chance to turn every last second into a kick in the teeth to this thing that happened to me. All I want is one exquisite blaze of glory. To burn myself out when it counts the most.”
“Is that all? You thought you’d be a better weapon?”
“Isn’t that enough? I have all this strength and speed, I should use it the best I can.”
Sal took one of Grace’s hands and pressed it between both of her own. “Grace, you don’t have to be strong all the time. Sometimes we can be strong for you.”
Grace let her hand rest there for ten heartbeats. “None of it matters,” she said carefully, “if we don’t find the thief.” She felt the collar pulse around her throat.
The world disappeared: light gone, sound distant. It was a familiar darkness to be swaddled in.
Grace felt something sharp pierce her ribs and up into her heart, a sliver of ice and pain. If she were someone else—even her old self, before the candle—she would’ve died instantly.
She burned through the pain, giving herself a supernatural burst of speed. She grabbed for the hand that had wielded the knife, but found nothing.
Grace removed the knife from her chest. It hurt just as much going out as it had going in, and she felt a gush of blood cascade down her ribs. She coughed, choking a little on something wet gurgling up from her lungs.
A thousand miles away, a candle in a small, dark room flared bright and dripped wax onto the floor. Grace breathed in deep and willed her lungs to clear and her arteries to knit together.
But she had to stop the would-be killer, too.
She swung her foot out in a wide, sweeping roundhouse, hoping to catch the attacker in the stomach or groin. She clung to Sal’s hand for balance, and to keep careful track of where Sal was in space so she wouldn’t hurt her by mistake. Grace’s foot connected with something soft, though she heard nothing.
Grace pulled away from Sal, pouncing toward her unknown attacker. She shot forward like an artillery shell and tumbled to the ground with a body. She felt teeth on her, or more knives, cutting her arms. Feet kicked under her, but only met the air.
Grace struck with her fists and with the knife, making up for her inability to see the target with pure ferocity.
The light came back. Grace sat astride a woman: Povel’s minder, the lady in gray. She was dead.
• • •
The Maitresse had a search conducted of the woman’s room, and retrieved the chess pieces that had been stolen. “Povel’s family must not have wanted him to sell the book,” she murmured. “How fortunate that you were able to resolve this matter.”
“They couldn’t have just asked him?”
“Perhaps they know him very well, and know how ineffective that would have been.” Her eyes narrowed. “I will have words with them over violating the sanctity of the Market. They won’t be back here for a generation.”
They found Povel yet again in an enthusiastic crowd, each peering in turn into something like a kaleidoscope, by turns gasping and laughing at what they saw there. He smirked at Grace as she approached. “Are you ready to complete the deal?”
“Bad news,” said Sal. “Your babysitter is dead, and we have the chess pieces she stole.”
He turned pale. “Ström is dead?”
“She tried to kill me,” Grace said.
“Grandfather is going to be so upset,” Povel said. He removed his mirrored sunglasses and stared at them in obvious despair.
Sal put a quelling hand up. “Give us the book,” she said, “and we won’t hold a grudge. Maybe the Maitresse will go easier on you, too.”
The Swede wilted. “Fine,” he said. He turned and removed one of the knives pinning his pet homuncubear together, then reached into the gap in its belly. The book he pulled out was unremarkable. It was wrapped in a plain vellum binding, yellow and marked by water stains. Sal thought it resembled a stack of legal papers in an accordion folder more than a legendary demon habitat.
“Are you sure this is it?” she asked. “It doesn’t seem very …”
The Swede smiled. His teeth were pearly and impeccably clean. “Asanti would know it on sight, but I suppose I shouldn’t expect any better of an amateur like yourself. Would you like me to read a bit to you for proof?” he asked.
“That won’t be necessary,” Grace said. She bagged the book carefully, making sure not to touch it with her hands.
The Swede watched this procedure with distaste. “Barbaric,” he said. “To think an heirloom of my own illustrious ancestors is being treated in this disrespectful fashion …”
“Don’t worry,” Sal told him, “we’ll take very good care of it back at the Archives. No Cheeto dust, no coffee rings, nothing. Now take the collar off of Grace.”
He did so in silence, then hung it around the bear’s neck again.
Sal held the box out to him when he was done. “And after all that, I sure hope these are worth the trouble.”
The Swede took the box of chess pieces from her, running his long fingers across the inlay of the box. “Exquisite,” he declared. He inserted them into his bear, then pinned the flap of its belly closed again. Finally he turned and bowed. “Safe travels, Bookburners,” he said. “This certainly has been interesting, has it not?”
“Sure, interesting is a good word for it,” Sal said.
“Maybe we’ll cross paths again one day.” Grace gave him a toothy grin. “I’d enjo
y that.”
The Swede sniffed. “You’re very wasteful,” he told Grace. “On second thought, I wouldn’t have wanted you anyway. Much too used-up. I’d rather have a tool that isn’t likely to burn itself out in a passing impulse.”
“Stop,” Grace said.
“No, it would have been a terrible deal,” the Swede continued. He squinted at her. “How much time do you have left, anyway? Surely you know. It would be a trivial calculation.”
Grace said nothing.
“You do know!” The Swede laughed in triumph. “How much time is it? How little?”
“Pleasure doing business,” Sal said, leading Grace away.
• • •
Sal watched the countryside of northern Europe pass them by. They’d opted to take the earliest train possible, leaving the Market at dawn, so that Grace could get back to her bed and her candle as soon as possible and not waste a moment more than was necessary.
“Is it true?” Sal asked her at last. “Do you know how much time you have left?”
Grace’s face showed no reaction at all. She paused in the middle of scribbling marks in her little notebook. “More or less.”
Sal turned this over and over in her mind. Not the same as knowing the exact date and circumstance of your death, no, but looming mortality did have a way of shaping a person. She thought of a cop she’d worked with—competent, brusque—who’d been given a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer and maybe six months to live. She’d quit her job and raided her retirement to fund a wild trip around the world. The rumor mill said she’d died on a cruise ship.
Grace didn’t seem the type. Then again, Grace had been trying to make every moment count from the second Sal had met her.
“How long, Grace?”
Grace stiffened, then lowered her pen. “Sal,” she said. Her voice was quiet. “Please.”
“How long do you have left? Is it decades or days? And were you ever going to tell us?”
Grace leaned forward to take Sal’s hand in her own, squeezing tightly. “I have the same amount of time as everyone else,” she said. “Too much, and not enough.”
• • •
Menchú worked late, his eyes burning and head aching even though he could have gone home hours before. The work was not pressing; it would still be there for him tomorrow, and the next day. But leaving it in favor of sleep held no allure; there could be no respite in dreams. Better to work, and let tedium chase away the horrors of the past like it had so many times before.
He turned the page on a report. It was a courtesy document from Team One, compiling their account of what had taken place on the ocean outside of New Zealand. He’d received it thanks to Sal’s presence on the mission.
He reflected on the young priest he had been once, and how back then, this poorly stapled account of battling a hydra would have seemed like much more exciting reading. But now he knew too well what these reports were like. There was a spreadsheet on his current page. Cost of travel. Cost of meals. Cost of accommodations. Cost of sundries.
Flip. Another spreadsheet, breaking down duty rosters and average hours of sleep per deployed Team One member. Grace’s line was blank, except for an asterisk.
Flip. A dry-as-dust analysis of situational readiness and how it was affected by new efforts toward interdepartmental cooperation. Menchú wondered who it was that Cardinal Fox had employed that could make battling monsters and saving the world sound as dull as calculating how much a freight company might spend on new tires in the next fiscal year.
Flip. Now the appendices. These were where the important details tended to be hiding, because here were the debriefing interviews. These were the raw transcripts of everyone’s accounts of a mission, meant to capture their recollections and impressions as soon and as thoroughly as possible.
He riffled the pages looking for Grace’s transcript. He missed getting reports from her; they had always made her seem closer, as if she were still awake, just traveling and sending him letters. And being swallowed up by a sea monster had to be interesting to read about, at the very least.
And then: the part about the woman with pale eyes, already in the belly of the beast. Hannah? Could it be the same Hannah? Impossible, and yet the description Grace gave was unerringly identical. If anything, Menchú could hear Hannah’s voice in his head, her intonation in every syllable she’d spoken to Grace. But—how could she have been in two places at once?
Then Menchú remembered that New Zealand and Spain were exactly opposite each other on the globe. He’d said as much to Liam in Spain, considered that the two events might somehow be connected. Here was the proof. It wasn’t possible for the parts of his team to be farther apart, and less able to help one another. Hannah had been in both places. Hannah had caused both problems. That couldn’t have been a coincidence.
Hannah wasn’t toying with only him. She was planning something for his whole team—for the whole Society, perhaps. Dread ran cold and heavy in his limbs. She wasn’t going to stop until she’d finished whatever exquisite torture she had in mind.
Whatever that was.
Bookburners
Season 3, Episode 4
All in a Day’s Work
Brian Francis Slattery
1.
Asanti lowered the shades on the window of the studio apartment, then walked across the room and locked the door.
“Are we ready?” she said.
Frances and Perry nodded. They stood on either side of a small folding table, the only furniture in the apartment. On the table was a book, a leather cover cracking around the wrinkles, the binding on the spine beginning to divorce itself from the stitching holding the pages.
“So,” Asanti said, “the important aspect of this particular spell is that it’s intrinsically harmless. The servants we conjure will do our bidding. It is, in fact, the only thing they’ll be here to do.”
She eyed Frances and Perry, one after the other.
“Right?” she said.
“That’s what my research suggests,” Frances said.
“It’s what I understand as well,” Perry said.
“And we don’t have to act like every question is a trick question?” Asanti said. “We don’t have to assume that the servants we summon actually have some sort of ulterior motive, and they’re looking to exploit loopholes in whatever we say?”
“That sort of thing shows up more in human stories about magic,” Perry said, “than in the actual use of magic.”
“Though it happens,” Frances said.
“Not as often as you might think,” Perry said.
“You don’t have to be defensive about it,” Frances said.
“I’m not,” Perry said. “I’m just trying to clarify—”
“Okay,” Asanti said. “All you’re trying to say is that we should be able to conjure the servants up out of the book, have them perform a simple task, and then order them back into the book again.”
“Yes,” Perry said.
“And we’ve agreed that we’re just going to ask the servants to paint the walls.” She motioned to the paint cans in the corner, a drop cloth folded on top of them, a paintbrush resting on top of that.
“Yes,” Frances said.
Asanti put a hand on the cover of the book and smiled.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m just excited.”
It had taken Asanti and Frances weeks to identify the right book from the Archives with which to conduct their test, first by deciphering the books themselves, then by cross-referencing them with other books and the Society’s official records. There were a few candidates—a spell to walk through walls, a spell to transport people and things from one place to another—but they were ruled out as being too dangerous. It was all a question of containment, of control. Asanti and Frances needed to be able to let some magic into the world and have some say about containing it again. That was all. As Asanti had told Frances and Perry from the beginning, their little side project was never going to be about stopping m
agic altogether, or fighting against it; it was about learning how to accept it and live with it. Asanti didn’t have to push the point, either. Frances, her body transformed with no real chance of reversal, was already living it.
Frances smiled back at Asanti. “Let’s do it,” she said, and Asanti cherished her all over again. How many people would go through what she’d been through and still go on?
Asanti opened the book, felt the pages beneath her fingers get a little warmer. The characters on the page were a Rosetta stone of languages, a couple of which she’d had to learn to read on the job. She turned the pages until she found the French directions, the language in the book in which she was most fluent. The book was ancient enough that the French was Old French, tilting into Middle French. It would be problematic for a modern reader to use the book, but not for Asanti. From a linguistic perspective, she noted, it was an interesting historical artifact that made the book tough to date and had her wondering about who the author had been, how it had come to be written. Neither the book itself nor the records about the book had any information about that; only what it could do.
Frances and Perry stayed silent. Once the book was open, Asanti knew, every word uttered in the room mattered. There was a bump from the ceiling, someone moving something around in the apartment above them, and Asanti had a moment to wish they’d rented a studio in a better-constructed building. She’d thought at first that its shabbiness—the dim stairwell, the creaking stairs, the cracked windows—was an asset. Maybe it was the kind of place where nobody asked what you were doing in your apartment as long as you didn’t make too much noise. She now wished that the walls weren’t so thin. But it was too late for that.
She began to read a series of incantations aloud. They were notes of welcome, of benediction, a little bit of flattery. The wrinkles on the book’s pages flattened out. A sheen grew on the paper until it looked almost like glass. Then seams appeared in the glittering surface, and the book opened outward from the spine, as though it were a gate and the edges of the pages had been made into hinges. A slender, angular being rose from the gate. Asanti stepped back, and the being moved forward, hovering in the air. Then it extended its legs downward to stand before her.
Bookburners Page 12
