Bookburners

by Max Gladstone

  And if she could come back, wouldn’t she have just done so in the first place?

  “She’s okay,” Perry mumbled.

  “What? Sal? How do you know?”

  Perry shrugged. “I just know. She’s fine, even if she’s alone.”

  “Is this special angel knowledge?” The words came out of Menchú’s mouth with more bitterness than he meant them to bear.

  “Special brother knowledge.” Perry ducked his head and changed the subject. “This is one of the places where the Society couldn’t finish the job, isn’t it?” he asked. He examined the moss on a tree carefully, sniffed it, then scraped it with a fingernail.

  Hmm. Sal had said he wasn’t a mind reader, nor even halfway to omniscient. Menchú wondered what else he knew about angels that was wrong. Everything, probably. “How would you know that?”

  Perry flashed him a smile that would probably have been endearing, if Menchú were the target audience for a certain brand of learned helplessness. “We share some interests. I pay attention.” That again, with the interests.

  Menchú stopped in front of Perry to keep the young man—the angelic being, never forget that—from moving ahead. “What kind of interests are you getting at?” he asked.

  Perry looked down at his shoes, as if screwing up his courage. “The thing is,” he began slowly, “I wanted to talk to you about some more things. The big picture.”

  “You have terrible timing,” Menchú said. “What’s important right now is Sal, and those missing children. You know about the thing that lives here, don’t you?”

  Perry waved his hands vaguely. “Kind of. Something about women leading people into temptation, or hungry children, or some other typical Church nattering like that.”

  Menchú stepped toward him, sharply. That was … terribly familiar. “Where did you hear that?” he said. “Have you been speaking to Asanti?”

  Perry drooped. “Yeah,” he said. “Um. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

  • • •

  Sal knew before she arrived that there would be a cottage at the end of the trail. She had half expected gingerbread, given the setup. But when she finally found it, the little house was an ordinary squat thing with a thatched roof, its shutters hanging askew. Light flickered from within, throwing shadows on shadows.

  It was completely silent, as if it had slept for a hundred years while the dark wood grew around it. Like it was still sleeping.

  She hung back for a moment, thinking through her options. She could continue to linger here in the creepy forest, with its catching branches and dark whispers, hoping the others would somehow come to the same place. On the other hand, there were children on the line. How could she wait around when kids were in danger?

  But back on the first hand, how much help could she be to those kids if she stormed the cottage alone and got into trouble herself?

  She thought through the same few terrible options over and over. There was one more choice: She should at least try to get a better idea of what was going on, without mounting a full-on assault. She would make better decisions with better information. Sal approached a window as slowly as she could, so as not to wake the house. Or anything else. She peered in through a crack where the shutter was loose. It was enough for a clear view of what waited inside the dwelling.

  A pair of cages hung suspended over a roaring hearth. And inside them, a pair of children shoveling fists full of grubs and straw into their mouths. The little girl was alert, the boy less so. The shadows inside were constantly shifting.

  A touch fell on her shoulder. Sal whirled, startled, and found herself facing a—what? A woman, full of breast and full of belly, round as if she’d been made from balls pressed together. Her face was blank, just as smooth and curved as the rest of her.

  Well. This must be Mother Goose, then.

  Mother Goose raised her hand, and the world changed.

  Sal stood in a sunny glade before a charming little house; perhaps it could have been that same stone cottage if only it had been kept up, with flowers planted all around and brightly painted doors and shutters. The sky was blue. Birds sang. A pair of butterflies meandered by. The air smelled like something sweet baking.

  And the faceless woman before Sal had changed, too. She was a full person now, with rosy cheeks and a head full of curly white hair. Her back was stooped a little, and her eyes had a kindly twinkle that reminded Sal of the librarian at her elementary school. She even wore the same kind of loose denim skirt and paisley blouse. When the woman spoke, it was without a hint of a German accent: “Well! Dear heart, you look famished. Won’t you come inside and have a bite to eat?”

  She took Sal’s wrist to lead her into the little house, and Sal realized suddenly that she was hungry. Excruciatingly hungry. The delicious smell intensified. “Thank you,” Sal said. “That’s very thoughtful.”

  How long had it been since she had entered the forest, anyway? The light had never changed, and of course her phone didn’t work here. Because it was—

  She pulled her hand away. “Stop it,” she said. “Stop. Let those kids go.”

  Mother Goose turned and put a hand to her own chest. “My dear, what are you saying? Aren’t you hungry? Don’t you want something to—”

  And God help her, it was true; Sal was practically starving. But it was magic. This was magic. “I’m from the Society that put you in this prison. And we’ve learned a lot since then. So if you don’t let those kids go, I’m going to do a lot worse to you than this.”

  The beautiful day, the charming cottage, the sweet old lady all rippled, like the reflection on a pond when someone has skipped a stone across it. The woman’s mouth grew vast and full of teeth. “Just a bite,” she wheedled.

  Sal’s hand went for her service pistol. She fired at the monster once, then heard the distinctive whine of a ricochet, as if she’d fired at a stone wall. She clicked the safety on and used the pistol as a bludgeon, striking at the monster’s head.

  “That won’t do at all,” said Mother Goose in her sweet old lady voice. “Come inside. You must be so hungry.”

  The ground rumbled, as if something enormous were moving nearby. Sal spun to see the house rising up from its place, dirt showering from its underside. It wasn’t mere levitation. The house stood up on two legs, powerful and clawed like an enormous ostrich’s. It must have been thirty feet tall, in all, and loomed over the two of them like some ridiculous headless dinosaur.

  The house tilted as if it were looking at Sal. Slowly it moved until the doorway hovered directly over her. She held her breath, forgetting about the witch, about the children, about anything but what it felt like in the moment before a house falls on you.

  And then the house swooped down and gobbled her up.

  4.

  Perry and Menchú traveled together in silence, punctuated by occasional outbursts from the angel: “So what happened was …” or “I want to be completely honest with you,” or, most mysteriously, “You can’t think Asanti is bad.” He trailed off every time, unable to conjure the words he needed.

  For his part, the priest spoke little, but in his head the same few thoughts and feelings whirled around and around, a merry-go-round he wished he could stop. Perry and Asanti had been talking to one another. Which meant what, exactly? A terrible suspicion burned in Menchú’s heart, growing hotter with each minute Perry stalled.

  “Just get it out,” he said at last. “If it’s taking you this long to find the right words, there probably isn’t a better way to say it.”

  Perry sighed a showy sigh. “You’re right. Of course you’re right. The thing is,” and here he paused again, so long that Menchú thought it was another false start, “I’m on Team Four. With Asanti.”

  Menchú stopped short. “Team Four? Did the Cardinal authorize you to—”

  “No,” Perry said. At first he kept shuffling ahead, but slowed and stopped when it became clear Menchú was not following him. “We took it into our own hands.” He he
ld out his empty hands by way of demonstration.

  Menchú felt he was suffocating under an avalanche of the terrible implications of this knowledge. “So you and Asanti have been, what, doing magic together? Who else is involved?” Then he growled the answer to his own question: “Frances.”

  Perry was the picture of misery. “Yes. It was important, we—”

  “For how long?” Menchú asked. What he meant was: How long have you been keeping this from me? How long had Asanti been lying to his face? And after he had been so plagued with guilt for keeping Hannah’s existence from her, from his whole team.

  “A long time. Since a little after Dublin.”

  Menchú leaned against a tree for strength. “Does Sal know?”

  Perry brightened, as if the worst was past. “No, nobody else has any idea.”

  “Why?” Menchú asked. He meant why would Asanti do this, but that was not the question Perry chose to answer.

  “Asanti’s heading to London to look for Hannah,” Perry said. “She doesn’t know I’m here. She’ll probably be mad when she finds out. I’ve helped them to get ready for this fight as much as I can, but I don’t think the three of us can handle Hannah alone. Before Guatemala, I thought that, if we lost, there would be time to call for help, you and Sal might swing in to the rescue. But Hannah’s moving the timetable up. I don’t know what she’s trying yet, but it’ll be big. And if we fail, there won’t be a second chance.”

  Menchú held his temper in check, though there was no speaking for his blood pressure. “What is she planning?”

  “Um. Hannah or Asanti?”

  “Anyone.” Menchú’s voice was low and dangerous. He had never understood why Jacob might want to wrestle an angel, but he was getting a pretty good idea.

  “Uh, Asanti wants to—stop her? I guess? As for Hannah, we don’t … run with the same crowd. But it’s like I said. She wants to balance the project. Keep you from sinking. Only—” He squirmed under Menchú’s assessing gaze. But before Menchú could continue his interrogation, a sound came from the distance, through the trees. Rumble, creak. Shriek.

  “Sal!” Perry took off like a shot, hardly even dodging the grasping branches and biting twigs as he went. Menchú followed him as best he could, though it was slower and more effortful than it would have been in years past.

  They followed the crashing noise they’d heard, arriving at a clearing in time to see a strange, enormous two-legged beast loping away from them.

  They gaped at the lumbering, impossible thing, Asanti and Team Four forgotten for the moment. “Is that a … walking house?” Menchú asked at last.

  “I think so,” Perry answered. “I think we’ve found what we’re looking for.”

  They watched it crashing through the trees.

  “We can’t lose sight of it,” Menchú said. “Or we’ll lose track of it entirely, like we lost Sal before.”

  Perry nodded. “Good point. Let’s keep moving.”

  • • •

  Sal woke slowly, brought back from sleep by a chorus of screaming discomforts. She was hot. Her muscles were knotted tight. There was something thin like ribs pressing into her spine. And she was hungry. Oh so very, very, very hungry.

  She opened her eyes and discovered that she had joined the children, swinging now in a cage of her own. It was hardly larger than a birdcage, just big enough for her to sit with her knees pushed into her chest and her elbows pinned to her sides.

  The whole place was swaying, like a sailboat on the ocean. The cages swung gently from side to side.

  The faceless figure of Mother Goose, no longer disguised as a kind old woman, shambled toward her, then poked her with a single bony finger. Hunger rolled through Sal at the touch.

  Sal had been hungry before, of course. She was familiar with many of its flavors: the hangry of a missed lunch on a busy day, the twitching pang of going running before breakfast, the siren lust for a 2 a.m. slice of pizza after a late night out with her old friends.

  The thing that consumed her now was another whole genus of hunger. She was dizzy, her stomach roiled and groaned, her limbs felt weak and heavy. Her fingers and toes tingled, sharp. Her tongue was dry and her head pounded. “What the hell,” she gasped.

  The feeling receded, slowly, but did not go away.

  Mother Goose poked her again and a new wave of hunger filled her. The witch offered Sal a bowl full of somethings that were almost like food: leaves, scraps of leather, clods of sod with worms still writhing inside.

  “Am I supposed to eat this?” Sal asked. Her vision shimmered, and she saw the kindly old woman offering her a slice of New York pizza, dripping orange grease. “Take it, you’ll feel better,” said Mother Goose.

  Sal looked toward the children. The little girl was watching her. She imperceptibly shook her head.

  Sal took the pizza and let it fall. The illusion broke as it did, and by the time it hit the flames below it had turned back into leaves, leather, sod.

  “Tsk!” Mother Goose shook her sweet head, already shimmering back to facelessness. “Well, enough time alone and you’ll be begging me for such things.” The final scraps of the illusion rippled and broke apart. Sal faced the pale, round creature again.

  Sal began to understand. The monster must be a wraith made of hunger, or perhaps it had learned to feed off of hunger in long-ago centuries. It brought its victims here to starve them, slowly. In the fullness of its power it had been able to lull its victims into a happy death by making them think they were eating an endless amount of treats, but now, confined by the Society for so long, the creature had grown weak; it could only fool its victims long enough to lure them in, not to keep them fooled into thinking they were fat and happy.

  Probably it preferred the sharper, quicker hunger of children. But beggars can’t be choosers.

  She wondered how old this thing was, anyway. As old as fairy tales? Older? Had this thing existed side by side with man and magic for as long as they had known of one another?

  The cottage lurched once, hard. It dropped, and then it was still. The witch turned and left the cottage. For the first time since she had woken up, Sal felt like she could breathe.

  “Hey,” Sal pitched her voice to be as quiet and as friendly as she knew how. “Hey, are you Gudrun?”

  The little girl stared at her. Her teary eyes were almost empty. Almost. A flicker of fight stayed in them. But she didn’t speak to Sal.

  Right, right. German. “Do you speak English?” Sal asked, though not with much hope.

  The girl stared and then shook her head no.

  Sal bunched her fists around the bars of her cage. Talking wasn’t going to work, that much was clear. Instead, she began an elaborate pantomime: pointing to where Mother Goose had left. Pointing to her mouth. Elaborate shrug, to show a question.

  The girl bit her lip. Then she pointed to her brother, and to herself. And then up.

  Above them hung a stone figure, very like the witch: round, smooth, faceless. It was tied to the rafters with straw and leather thongs. Gudrun pantomimed herself digging, pulling something up from the ground. She pointed at the figure again.

  Well that was cryptic.

  • • •

  Gerald met Asanti and Frances at the main entrance to the British Museum, where there was a lift that could take Frances’s wheelchair up the steps. The cool breath of London at night followed them in.

  The caretaker hurried them inside with a limp. That was new since the last time Asanti had seen him in person, not that that had been recent. And so were those glasses, the kind that turned into sunglasses when it was bright, but never really became clear when it wasn’t. Asanti gave a moment to a short meditation on age and the frailness of the flesh.

  “Thank you for making the time to meet me, old friend,” she said. “I’m sorry to only ever come to you for favors.”

  “Oh, it’s my pleasure,” he said. He finished locking the door, then turned a courtly bow on Frances. “And it’s a delight to
see that the youth of today are still interested in these dusty topics of ours.”

  Frances nodded back. “Solving the mysteries of the past is its own reward,” she replied.

  Asanti brushed her skirts straight. “If it’s all the same to you, I’d like to begin looking around?”

  “Of course, of course.” Gerald waved them farther inside. “Please, make yourselves at home. There aren’t any visitors left at this hour, and the guards know not to bother us.”

  The halls of the museum were cold and echoed with Asanti’s footsteps as she swept through the Great Court and toward the galleries full of antiquities. Frances wheeled behind her, only a hair more slowly.

  “You know what you’re looking for?” Gerald asked.

  “After a fashion,” Asanti replied. She sighed. This task would have been infinitely easier with the spectacles she’d given to Menchú. But she still had other, less elegant ways of finding out what they needed to know. “Frances?”

  Frances took a device from the knapsack on her lap. It was an inelegant thing; a cowbell streaked with rust. Frances pricked her finger, then tapped the bell with the smeared blood. No sound emerged. “Not here,” Frances said. She pushed her glasses up with a knuckle. “Let’s try again from somewhere else.”

  Asanti pushed Frances’s wheelchair this time. They walked to the next room down. Frances tapped the bell with a bloody finger again. Nothing happened, again.

  Gerald coughed. “Is this meant to …?” His British reserve didn’t allow him to outright call them insane or ask what the hell they thought they were doing. He’d only let them in, so Asanti had led him to believe, so they could examine a particular artifact for nebulous research purposes.

  Asanti smiled thinly. The British Museum all but throbbed with power taken from other lands and other peoples. Much of that power was symbolic, some of it represented by wealth; but no small amount of it was long-dormant magic, as well, a fact the curators did their best to euphemize and diminish. “I’m afraid I can’t tell you much, Gerald. Just that this is … not theory. Not the way that you know it.”