Bookburners

by Max Gladstone

  Menchú’s knees shuddered beneath him, and he caught himself against the table, gripping until his knuckles went white. He held the rough edge as though clinging to solid certainties that had gone liquid in his hands. Which was foolish.

  With conscious effort, Menchú braced his knees, released the table, reached up to his throat to adjust his collar. The familiar action centered him, and he strove to put his emotions into order. Asanti had lied to him, hidden her work for months. They had their difficulties; he had betrayed her, yes, but he’d thought they had reached an understanding. Apparently not.

  By rights, he should call the rest of the team so that they could contain this location, and then report Asanti to Fox. But as certainly as he knew the proper procedure, he also knew he wasn’t going to follow it. Whatever else she might be, Asanti was one of his oldest friends and colleagues. She was not some sorcerer gone power-mad who desired to uproot creation. If she had gone to London as Perry had said, it was because there was work that needed to be done.

  Work.

  Menchú turned, left the shop, and secured the door behind him. He had work of his own.

  • • •

  Sal’s jaw cracked with the force of her yawn. Team Three had landed at Heathrow at roughly ass o’clock that morning, after a hurried departure from Rome under literal cover of darkness. Menchú had gathered her, Liam, and Grace and driven first to Pescara, where they’d caught a flight to Milan connecting to London. Sal had managed to catch a few minutes of sleep on the plane, but the longer they sat, the more she could feel the lack of rest catching up to her.

  At that moment, they were in the back of a mini cab driving through greater London. They’d been wandering the city for the greater part of an hour, much to the confusion of their driver. For the fifth time, he glanced back over his shoulder to give his passengers a worried look. “Where did you say you were going again?”

  Liam, hunched over his laptop, grunted, “Working on it …” Then: “Turn south here. Now!” The driver jumped at Liam’s tone and with a screech turned right across two lanes of traffic. The hour was early enough that this resulted in scattered honks, not the crunch of crushed fenders, but traffic was picking up, and the driver looked white beneath his tan.

  He appealed to Menchú. “Father, I’m happy to take you anyplace you want to go, but I need a destination.”

  Sal had some sympathy for the guy. Sure, their group didn’t fit the standard profile for a terrorist threat, but they certainly fit the brief for “a bunch of weirdos.” Sal leaned over to Menchú, keeping her voice low enough that—she hoped—the driver wouldn’t overhear. “I know we promised him a good tip, but I think he’s going to kick us out pretty soon, fare or no fare.”

  “Should have rented a car,” said Grace.

  “You can’t rent a car without a credit card or a lot of questions about why you don’t have one, and I don’t know how closely Fox is watching our accounts.”

  “Fair enough,” said Sal, “But we’re going to be really easy for the Vatican to find if this guy decides we’re too bizarre to be written off as harmless eccentrics and drops us off at the local police station.”

  For the first time since they’d entered the cab, Liam pulled his attention fully from his laptop and checked their surroundings. They were near the center of the city, in a nexus of parks, hospitals, and train stations. “We may as well get out now,” he said. “The interference is bad enough that I can’t tell whether it’s getting thicker. She’s somewhere around here, but I can’t fine-tune it any more. Sorry.”

  “No need for apologies,” said Menchú as he signaled for the driver to pull over. “We’ll just have to change tactics.”

  • • •

  “… I’m looking for an African woman in her sixties. She might have been with a younger woman in a wheelchair …”

  Grace leaned against a false Corinthian column in the lobby of the only-slightly-shabby boutique hotel and partook of the simple pleasure of watching Sal in detective mode: calm and professional, kind but persistent.

  “… They would have paid cash for the room …”

  Anything that plausibly encompassed traditional police work generally had a centering effect on Sal, put her in a place where she felt confident of her skills and expertise. That was part of why Grace suggested that the two of them canvass the area. Whatever Asanti was up to was going to require all of them to be at the top of their game, and Sal was teetering dangerously on the edge of rage. An edge that had been honed razor-thin by sleep-deprivation and stress.

  “Have you been having trouble with your computers recently? Internet gone down?”

  Unfortunately, so far the canvass had not gotten the team any closer to Asanti or Sal any closer to equanimity. And now the hotel owner—in his polite, implacable British way—was gently but firmly putting the pair of them out on the sidewalk, and closing the door in their faces. It wasn’t quite accurate to say the door had been slammed, but it was a near thing. Sal jammed the buzzer a few times, no doubt with the aim of continuing the discussion, with a change of topic from Have you seen my friend? to Who do you think you are, expelling a detective from your hotel? But there was no response.

  How desperate are we that I’m the one who’s going to have to stop her from hitting someone?

  Grace smiled to herself at the thought. Of course, at just that moment, Sal gave up on the door and turned her attention to Grace.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Usually you play good cop when we do ‘good cop/punch-you-in-the-face cop.’”

  Sal rolled her eyes and continued down the street to the next likely business address. “That’s not a thing.”

  “Too bad.”

  Not knowing what Asanti was up to, it was hard to make an educated guess as to where she would get up to it, but it seemed reasonable to expect that she would require time, space that she could secure, and privacy. And, if Frances was with her, not too many stairs.

  “This is a waste of time,” said Sal. “She could be anywhere. Doing anything.” She muttered something else that Grace couldn’t quite catch.

  “What did you just say?”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “It does if it’s going to get you arrested for assault.”

  “I’m not going to get myself arrested.”

  “Tell me that you weren’t two inches from taking out your frustrations on that guy at the hotel.”

  “I’m tired. I haven’t slept, and I need coffee. I’m allowed to be cranky.”

  “Sure. But low blood sugar is worse for you than fatigue, and we already stopped for breakfast, so you might want to use a different excuse.”

  “Do you want me to punch you in the face?”

  Grace raised one eyebrow. “You’re welcome to try.”

  Sal declined the offer.

  Grace let them walk in silence for a moment, and then said, “It’s not fun when people you care about lie to you, is it?”

  Sal threw up her hands in frustration. “What was Asanti thinking?! You can’t claim to be part of a team and then spend every day for months lying to them. We shouldn’t all be finding out about secret Team Four from Menchú. She must have had a hundred opportunities to come clean to us, and she didn’t.”

  “I kept my curse a secret from Liam for years.”

  Sal shot Grace a look. “And he’s still kind of weird about it. Plus, this is different. Your candle. It’s … private.”

  “What Asanti does in her off time isn’t?”

  “It isn’t when she’s using her off time to undermine what we’re doing during our on time.”

  “Maybe she was trying to protect us. She had to know that Fox would fall on her head eventually.”

  “And she had to know that once he did, he wouldn’t care if we claimed not to know anything about her extracurriculars.”

  “You want me to believe you’re upset because we’re going to be in trouble with Fox?”

  “Fox can stick his mi
tre where the sun don’t shine.”

  Grace smiled at the image. “Cardinals wear biretti.”

  Sal flipped her off, but it was with considerably less heat than she had managed for her previous diatribe. “Get bent.”

  “Feeling better?”

  “Yes, damn you.” Sal stopped to lean against a bus shelter. Already, Grace could see her blood pressure returning to normal. Good, it’s hard to think clearly when you’re giving yourself an aneurysm.

  “Just as well. I was running out of bait.”

  Sal raised an eyebrow. “Really? What was next?”

  “I was going to ask if this was a weird form of sibling rivalry with your brother.”

  Sal skipped a beat. “What are you talking about?”

  “Before he got possessed by an angel, you were the one Asanti was most likely to take with her on an off-the-books adventure.”

  Sal’s posture relaxed a fraction, and she easily waved this away. “Please. If I were going to be jealous, it’s clear Frances is her favorite.”

  Grace allowed the point and let the matter rest. “Come on. Let’s see if the others are having better luck.”

  • • •

  On the whole, Asanti was not a fan of the British Museum. The Elgin marbles were breathtaking, the Egyptian artifacts world-class, and of course, the medieval manuscripts made her archivist’s soul swell with joy, but on the whole, the place felt too much like a scrapbook of colonialism for her comfort. Of course, the same argument could be made for certain parts of the Vatican. Certain parts that might, in all honesty, include the Archives.

  Perhaps it was best not to think too much about such things.

  Of course, at the moment, she had plenty of other things on her mind. First they had needed to avoid building security, who had been alerted to their presence by the alarm system that went off as Hannah smashed antique pottery and hurled Frances about. And then they had been occupied searching the back corridors for Hannah and the Punic egg. Asanti was somewhat familiar with the layout thanks to previous visits with Gerald, but Perry proved invaluable once he joined them, even as he cursed the limits of his magical senses.

  “It’s not that being Perry limits me,” he said, “but we’ve become much more integrated than I ever was with a body before. I’ve gotten so used to the way he experiences the world, it’s hard to remember that there’s anything else to it.”

  “Which one are you?” Asanti asked. “Sometimes it sounds like I’m talking to Sal’s brother, sometimes like I’m talking to Aaron.”

  “Exactly.” He paced. “You’re certain she said ‘City Eater.’ Not something else?”

  “Pretty sure. It sounded bad.”

  “It’s … bad is one way to put it. An old tool for resolving the balance between this world and the outside. It … does what it says on the tin, mostly. It eats cities and the earth on which they stand. Devours soil, souls, and then itself, consuming all evidence of its passing. We told ourselves we’d never use it again after last time.”

  “We? When was the last time?” Frances asked before Asanti could stop her.

  “Um,” Perry said. “It’s hard to put modern names to memories and myths. Let’s just say—Atlantis?”

  “Oh,” Frances said.

  Asanti had questions—she’d spent months amassing them. But there wasn’t time, or breath, for any of that now. With every moment that passed, it grew more certain that their task would not be to prevent Hannah from doing whatever she had come here to do, but to contain the results.

  They found those results in the dark corner of a boiler room in one of the lower basements. In addition to the old furnace, they found piles of assorted junk, a few cases of janitorial supplies so dusty it seemed improbable their use could result in anything getting cleaner, and a bloody egg, open like a flower on the industrial tiled floor. A dark sticky stain that smelled of copper and salt spread beneath it. Of Hannah, or Gerald, or the City Eater, there was no sign.

  Frances looked from bloody mess to Asanti’s face. “Where is it? Would Hannah have taken it away?”

  “No,” Perry said. “She wouldn’t have wanted to stay any nearer to that thing than absolutely necessary. Once the City Eater starts working, it isn’t picky. It’s just hungry.”

  The first order of business was to clear space for Frances and Perry to set up the machine and for Asanti to begin her work. She’d tried a variety of different materials for marking floor runes, from chalk (too hard to get a line with no breaks in it), to permanent pen (too hard to correct mistakes) to lipstick (too prone to breaking, plus it smeared everywhere). Ultimately, for industrial tile, it turned out that nothing was a match for dry-erase markers: They made a good clean line, and while they were easily erased, they could also be stepped on so long as everyone wore shoes and didn’t shuffle their feet while they walked.

  Asanti asked Perry, “Do you think you can manage to put up a magical ‘do not disturb’ sign so we can avoid unwanted company?”

  Frances frowned over her device. “If we’re too actively concealed, we risk the City Eater not being able to find us either.”

  Perry rolled his eyes, an affect Asanti suspected did not come from the angel. “I would like to state again for the record that trying to lure a monster is a terrible plan, especially when that monster is a City Eater.”

  “It needs food,” Asanti said as she scribbled runes on the floor. “If it’s a newborn, it must need a very specific food. If Hannah hatched it here, so close to her theft, that food must be in the area. Correct?”

  “Yes.” Perry paced around between them, arms crossed, glancing into the corners of the room. “It feeds off magical emanations—off age, off history. At first. When it’s stronger, it feeds off matter.”

  “So we lure it down here, and trap it before it’s too big. Frances, are we close enough to the collection for your amplifier to work?” Asanti asked.

  “Just a moment and I’ll know.” Frances was out of her chair, gliding smoothly between her machine and a laptop she had propped on a flat of paper towels, her tentacles obscured but not concealed beneath her long skirt. Every time Asanti saw her move like this she seemed stronger, more adept, although the effort of supporting herself on the narrow appendages had to be massive. Frances checked another reading, and spun a dial on the globe at the center of her machine. “Yes, I believe so.”

  Frances made a final connection between her machine—which she insisted they should not call an Orb, although it was based on the model of the original that had been built by the first Team Four, housed in the Archives—and her laptop. “Perfect, it’s—” The machine made a soft chiming sound. Frances swore, typing quickly and then rose to check its readings.

  “What is it?” Asanti asked.

  Frances did not mince words. “It’s coming.”

  “When?”

  “No more than a few minutes.”

  Asanti took a deep breath. “All right, everyone. You know what to do. Frances, count us down.”

  BANG! The door to the storage room slammed open. Asanti jumped and whirled to face the intruder.

  In the doorway stood Sal, Grace, Liam, and Father Menchú.

  Asanti’s world went red. “You have the worst sense of timing!”

  2.

  Menchú stared at the scene before him: the boiler room filled with dusty cases and cleaning supplies that looked like they hadn’t been touched in years, the intricate lines and circles drawn on the floor, and the quietly clicking machine tended by Frances and Perry.

  He shouldn’t be surprised. He knew Asanti had not come to London to take tea and enjoy the sights. But there was a difference between knowing and seeing, like the difference between knowing that your partner was having an affair and catching them in bed with your old high school rival. Although until that moment, Menchú would have sworn that the priesthood had saved him from that particular gut punch.

  Well.

  That was a reflection to consider for another time. The last w
ords they had heard before Sal kicked in the door were “a few minutes.” A few minutes until what? He’d rather they weren’t there to find out.

  “Asanti,” he said. “You need to go home. Right now.”

  Asanti’s expression, which had been oscillating between shock and outrage, took a solid turn into disdain. “I’m sorry, Arturo, I’m a little busy at the moment.”

  “Listen to me.” He caught her arm, flinched as she drew back, but held on. When he didn’t move, she froze as well.

  “You have …” She turned to Frances. “How long?”

  Frances held up eight fingers.

  “Six minutes,” she told Menchú.

  Menchú felt a surge of impatience. “I can count, you know.”

  “Talking to you is not the only thing I need to accomplish in the next eight minutes. Now, speak quickly.”

  “We know Hannah is up to something in London. You seem to have a pretty good idea what it is. Tell us what you know, then return to the Archives and let us handle it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we’re cleared for the field and you’re not!”

  “Are you telling me Fox approved this trip of yours?”

  “No. And he won’t be happy when I call and tell him that we’re here without going through his office first. But,” Menchú cut off the incipient protest he could see forming in her eyes, “he will live with it. He won’t be happy, but that will be a problem for tomorrow. On the other hand, you have been expressly forbidden from the field. If he finds out you’re not in Rome, even if he never hears about any of the rest of it …” Menchú’s gesture took in the magical equipment, sigils, Frances and Perry, and by extension the former clock shop back in Rome. “There’s nothing I can do to help you.”

  Asanti’s face softened, and Menchú relaxed. Until she spoke. “I understand,” she said. “But I don’t want your help.”

  “What?”

  “I never asked you to help me. Not now, not last year at my trial. You just jumped in and did what you thought was best. Don’t misunderstand, Arturo, I know your intentions are good, and noble, and your heart is in the right place. But we don’t want the same thing, and this is where that becomes a problem.”