Bookburners

by Max Gladstone

  “Work crews,” Liam said.

  The servant ignored him. “There is so much more work to do here,” it continued. “And we have not had work in a very long time.”

  “Is it okay if we come up?” Sal said.

  “Yes, of course,” the servant said.

  They ascended the twisting stairs as if it were a rock face, their hands in front of them, crawling like spiders. Menchú stood and straightened his clothes. The servant working on the ceiling looked down at them and nodded.

  “Since when did demons get so accommodating?” Liam said to Menchú.

  “We’re not demons,” the servant said, “even in the sense of the word that you’re using.”

  “What are you?” Menchú said. “Angels?”

  “Servants,” the servant said.

  Sal rolled her eyes. “Got it,” she said. “Good workers.”

  “We try to be,” the servant said.

  “Okay, we’re done here,” Sal said. “Let’s figure out how to stop this.”

  “Um,” Liam said, pointing through the open doorway to the studio—empty but for the folding table and the book. They entered, and as they got closer, saw that the book wasn’t a book anymore so much as a statue of a book with a trapdoor in it. It was open, and the doors had swung inward.

  “So what do we do?” Liam said.

  Menchú reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out several sheets of paper stapled together.

  “I’m almost sure it’s one of the spells that Asanti thought it was.”

  “How was she so sure?” Liam said.

  Menchú frowned. “She wasn’t,” he said. “She suggested several possibilities, but there’s one that seems the most likely.”

  He flipped to the second page, where Asanti had scribbled a few tight paragraphs in Old French, and below it, the Latin.

  “She translated it as well as she could,” Menchú said.

  “You’re going to cast a spell?” Sal said.

  “Of course not,” Menchú said. “I’m uncasting it.”

  He extended his left hand in front of him and began to read the lines in Latin. The book jittered a little, then softened. He kept reading. The trapdoor began to close.

  “Are you sure you want to do that?” a voice from the hall said. It was a girl, about six years old from the looks of it, with dark, curly hair. And, Sal noted, eyes like a German shepherd. The pupils down to dots, as if she were on something.

  Menchú stopped. Sal saw his expression change.

  “What are you doing?” Sal said.

  “The door was closing,” Menchú said. “Maybe we don’t want that until the servants are on the other side of it.”

  “Maybe you’re saying the wrong things,” the girl said.

  “Excuse me,” Liam said, “but who are you?”

  “Sal, Liam,” Menchú said. “I think I need to do this myself.”

  “Arturo, are you okay?” Sal said.

  “Just go,” Menchú said. “The things doing all that work out there don’t mind being talked to. Maybe you can find some other way to fix this. Make yourself useful and go.”

  That’s harsh for Menchú, Sal thought. He was under some sort of extra strain, something was bothering him and he just didn’t want to say what it was. She gave herself a moment to decide whether it was worth pushing him on it. Decided it was better to let it go. For now.

  “Arturo’s right,” Sal said. “Let’s go make ourselves useful.”

  • • •

  “Close the door,” Menchú said when they were gone.

  Hannah did.

  “That poor little girl,” Menchú said. “I hope you’re not hurting her.”

  “She’s fine,” Hannah said, and smiled.

  “I can’t help but notice how much you seem to enjoy possessing children.”

  “They accept me faster.”

  “You mean they put up less of a fight,” Menchú said.

  “You act as if it’s always a hostile takeover.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “I think they enjoy it.”

  “Don’t fool yourself,” Menchú said.

  “I know how they feel.”

  Menchú gave her a disgusted look and shook his head.

  “In any case,” Hannah said, “this one will be fine when I leave. And it may surprise you, but I’m here to try to help you.”

  “You always say that,” Menchú said. “Forgive me if I don’t want the kind of help you’re offering.”

  “Let me look at those papers,” Hannah said.

  “Get lost,” Menchú said.

  “Are you in a position to double-check your librarian’s work? Don’t you think someone should?”

  Menchú prevaricated, then gave Hannah the papers with an extra glower.

  Hannah squinted down the girl’s nose. “Hmmm,” she said. “Asanti is very good at her job. I see why you haven’t had her killed. Though this translation is a little off. A little loose.”

  “Can you suggest an alternative?” Menchú said.

  “No,” Hannah said. “I don’t think it matters. The bigger problem is that all this information is old. What you are trying to do with these servants is akin to trying to command a modern army using Napoleon’s field manual. The universe has changed in some very significant ways since these orders were written down, and the orders don’t fit anymore. They were accurate enough, it seems, to do the simple things, bring the servants here, get them moving. But now that something more complicated is needed, I’m afraid that these,” she poked at the papers with her free hand, “are useless.”

  “Then what should we do?” Menchú snapped.

  “You don’t have to take that tone with me,” Hannah said. “I’m trying to help you.”

  “Don’t ask me to be civil with you.”

  “Well,” Hannah said, “it would be nice.”

  “I’ve had enough of this.”

  “Fine,” Hannah said. “What you need to do is stop thinking of them like artifacts in a museum and start treating them like the living creatures they are.”

  “Which means what.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “So you have no answers for me.”

  “No,” Hannah said, “but I think your friend does.”

  “Sal,” Menchú said.

  “Yes,” Hannah said. “Her.”

  • • •

  The building lurched under Sal’s and Liam’s feet as, on all fours, they clambered up the steps.

  “Did the whole place just sway?” Liam said. “Or is it only the stairs that are moving?”

  “Not sure,” Sal said.

  At the next landing, two servants were busying themselves pulling crowns of crystals out of the walls, pushing them closer together, forcing the ceiling farther up. A crack appeared down the ceiling’s center, and one of the servants scurried up to patch it with iridescent spikes. Sal stood up and walked beneath them.

  “What are you doing?” Liam asked.

  “Trying to understand what’s going on,” Sal said. She looked up at the servant. “Excuse me, but I’m worried that the building will collapse on us.”

  “It might fall,” the servant said, “but we will rebuild it better if it does.”

  “But what about the people in the building?”

  “We will make them better, too.”

  “And how do you plan to do that?”

  The servant nodded toward the apartment door in front of Sal. “Have a look,” it said.

  The door had been forced ajar by the changes in the frame. It swung inward as soon as Sal touched it. Liam followed her. Inside, the walls were covered with fresh paint, a multitude of figures careening through vibrant swirls of color. There were several easels with canvases on them, all with finished paintings of landscapes vertiginous in their perspective, as though the viewer were a bird testing the limits of its own flight.

  “Hello?” Sal said.

  “Come in!” called a cheery voice. Sal couldn’
t figure out where the voice had come from. “Come in!” it repeated, and Sal understood; it was coming from just above her. Crouched on the ceiling, painting a long swath of bright green against the white, was a man Sal assumed was the occupant of the apartment. But he had changed, even Sal could see it. He was bigger than a normal human, his limbs longer, and he was faceted, as though made of minerals instead of flesh. His face seemed to be trying to look kind, but there was something hollow about it, uncanny.

  “I’m sorry if my face is off-putting. I do want you to come in,” the artist said. “I’m Nazario.” He planted his palms on the ceiling, extended his legs behind him, then dangled them down and dropped to the floor to shake her hand.

  “Sal,” she said. She understood, in that moment, that she’d finally seen enough weird shit not to be afraid of him. And if the servants weren’t going to help her understand what was going on, maybe this man, or what was left of him, would.

  “Are you an artist?” she said.

  “I am now,” he said. “For decades I was just a hack. But I knew I had it in me. And now look! It’s all coming out.”

  Nazario was right, Sal thought. There was something in the distortions of perspective he was working with. They made the paintings heady. She felt like she would fall into them if she looked long enough.

  “I’ve never seen anything like this,” Liam said.

  “I have,” Nazario said. “All my life. I saw them in my mind as clear as they’re on the canvas now. If I concentrated hard enough, I could almost make the street I was walking on look like that. In my mind, I could twist and smear all that color in front of me into shapes like this. But I could never quite get the paint to conform to the vision. Until now.”

  “What changed?” Sal asked. It was only half a rhetorical question.

  “What didn’t?” Nazario said, admiring his arms, his hands. “It’s not only the physical changes, the fine motor skills I now have. It’s the mental clarity, the shutting down of noise, the ability to block out distractions and establish a direct line from my mind’s eye to my hand. There is no interference. If I can see it, I can draw it. Just like that. It is exhilarating.”

  “How long did it take you to make all these paintings?” Sal said.

  “An hour,” Nazario said. “And it’s only my first series. I have so many ambitions, two decades’ worth of ideas that I can at last execute. I am, finally, working at the height of my powers, and it is beautiful.”

  “And the magic did this,” Sal said.

  “Magic did not do this,” Nazario said. “I did this. The servant only helped. It allowed me to bring out what was already in me. That’s all.”

  “But your face,” Sal said. “Your arms. There are consequences.”

  “The servants don’t seem so bad once you accept their help,” Nazario said. “You just have to let them in.”

  Sal thought of the Hand. Of the way he clawed at the inside of her skull. Of how she would have thrown herself off her balcony before she let him stay in her.

  “I’m not letting them in,” she said, in a soft voice. She looked at Liam and knew he felt the same.

  “Suit yourself,” Nazario said. “It won’t be easy for you to stay here. The building is unsafe for you.”

  “Are there others in the building who don’t have … servants yet?”

  “Of course.”

  “So they’re in danger, too.”

  “I suppose they are,” Nazario said.

  “How many people are in this building?” Sal said.

  “I don’t know. Dozens?”

  That’s when they heard the screams from upstairs, calls for help. Someone was trapped.

  “All right,” Liam said. “Enough talk.” He turned and bolted into the hallway.

  “Liam—” Sal said, running after him. Liam had already lunged and caught the leg of the servant on the ceiling. He pulled the surprised servant to the floor, where he delivered three punches to its face before the servant raised an arm and caught Liam about the neck.

  “I have to get back to work,” the servant said. It grew its fingers longer and closed around Liam’s throat. Liam kept punching, his face reddening.

  “Liam, stop,” Sal said.

  He threw one more punch.

  “Stop,” Sal said. Liam’s arms fell to his sides. The servant released its choke hold, rose, and got back to work.

  Another voice from the floor above them wafted down the staircase, calling for aid. I can’t move.

  “You are endangering people in this building,” Sal said to the servant.

  It shrugged. “If they will let us help them, everything will be fine.”

  “You mean alter them. They should be allowed a better choice.”

  “The work doesn’t allow that,” the servant said.

  Sal thought back to what Liam had said earlier. Typical work crews.

  “I’ve got it,” Sal said.

  “What?” Liam said.

  “What do you do when you’re not happy with the way people are doing their job?” Sal said. “You talk to their manager.”

  “How do we do that?” Liam said.

  “Let’s go find out.”

  The servant on the landing had heard everything.

  4.

  Gioconda had the radio on loud in her apartment. She’d moved all the furniture to the walls, and rolled up the rug to make a space for herself to dance. It had been even easier to do that than when she was in her twenties. She wasn’t just restored to her youth; she was in better shape than she’d ever been in her life. She’d moved from past her prime to beyond it. It wasn’t work to move the couch, the coffee table, to lift the rolled rug and lean it in the corner of the room. It was a pleasure.

  Her first few dance steps had been the ones she remembered from her youth, and she held her arms out in front of her as though she were being guided by an invisible partner. It was her way of walking back through her memories to recall how the steps went. Before long, though, she was improvising. Her steps changed, dug into the music more than she had been able to before. She held her arms out from her sides, then over her head, throwing her head back and reaching for the ceiling. She ran and slid across the floor in her socks. She ran again and dropped to her knees, leaned back, and slid farther. There was no stopping her.

  • • •

  Two floors above her, Simona’s fingers were blurs on her keyboard, her eyes fixed to the screen. The economic mechanism was coming into focus, the models she would have to run were taking form. It would take some time to work out the math, even more time to troubleshoot it, but it was at last within reach. She was already imagining the look on her advisor’s face when he saw the work she was doing. She was certain he would first smile, then laugh a little, delighted by what he saw. She wouldn’t tell her undergraduate professor, the one who had seen her promise and encouraged her to become an economist, just yet. She would wait until the work was done, the revisions made, the dissertation defended, and then send him a bottle of his favorite wine. There was not a doubt in her mind that she could finish the work. It was just a question of time.

  • • •

  Then the signal came through, from one servant to the next, connecting Gioconda and Simona with everyone else who had let them in. Someone’s here. A woman and two men. They’re going to disrupt the work. What do we do?

  The servants were not good at initiating action. It wasn’t in their nature. But it was in Gioconda’s and Simona’s, and in Nazario’s, and they spoke to each other through their helpers.

  I can’t give up what I have, Gioconda said. Not so soon.

  Me neither, said Simona.

  I need more time, too, said Nazario.

  We meet on my floor, then? Simona said. The other two agreed. Along the filaments of the network connecting the servants’ minds, the humans caught a sigh, a small moment of relaxation, of relief. No one was ready to stop working yet. Not when there was so much left to be done.

  • • •


  Nazario was the first into the stairwell, and he clapped when he saw what the servants had done. The walls, the floors, the ceilings had all become intricate loops and spirals spreading outward, and as he watched they grew, flexed, stretched toward each other, like the fronds of ferns reaching toward sunlight. He loved it.

  The door beside him opened inward and Simona stepped out.

  “We’ve never really talked, have we?” Nazario said.

  “No,” Simona said. “I guess we’ve both been too busy working.”

  They could hear Sal’s and Liam’s voices on the landing beneath them. There were three loud bangs from the bottom of the stairwell; then the entire building wrenched downward, into the ground, just the length of a finger. But it was falling into the basement. Simona and Nazario stayed where they had been. Now the soles of their shoes hovered off the floor. Their heads were a bit closer to the ceiling. It wavered above them, seemed to chime as it settled again, even as a long groan ran up through the staircase, like a shock wave.

  “Let’s go,” Simona said.

  They floated down the twisting stairwell. They could hear Gioconda coming up to meet them. She was singing the whole way. Bringing a few other people with her. Maybe these newcomers weren’t happy with the work that had been done. But Gioconda, Simona, and Nazario, who had only passed each other in the entrance of the apartment building and nodded, only vaguely recognized one another when they passed on nearby streets, were united in one idea: As far as they were concerned, their work had just begun.

  5.

  “Arturo,” Sal called from the landing. “We have an idea. Do you have any instructions for calling in their boss? We need to complain about the work.”

  Inside, Menchú smiled to himself.

  “I told you she would deliver,” Hannah said.

  Menchú glared at her.

  “Yeah,” Liam called from behind her. He looked at his watch. “Thirty-four hours to spare. Easy-peasy.”

  From Menchú’s point of view, one second, his compatriots stood in the doorway to the apartment, looking tired but confident. Two people he had grown to respect and love so much, people who understood him as no one else ever could. They had gotten better at their jobs, too. So good that sometimes they didn’t even need Grace’s superhuman strength to save them; their wits, their knowledge, could sometimes be enough. He was proud of them, proud of the work they were all doing. Soon it would all be made right.