Bookburners

by Max Gladstone

“Let’s make some noise,” said Liam. Without another word, he rushed toward the creature, hollering like he was on fire. Sal and the two police officers followed. So much the better, Sal thought. Just that much more commotion. She screamed as loud as she could. The creature turned its head to watch them come.

  From there, it was hard for Sal to see quite what happened. She watched as the City Eater tottered, letting out a howl of pain that she felt as much as she heard. The beast listed to one side, then fell over, its remaining legs in the air, almost like a turtle, black ooze gouting in the air. Now Sal could see them, the two legs Grace had managed to sever. They were hopping under their own power toward the river. They looked like they were trying to escape. Sal knew Grace would never let them, and she was right. Within a few seconds, Grace had sliced them in two again with her makeshift meat cleaver. She halved those halves, too. Kept doing it, using the pavement as her butcher block, until she was ringing the blade against the asphalt. She was spattered now in the creature’s gore from head to toe. She caught Sal’s eye and smiled. But Sal could see she was getting tired.

  “I can do this, Arturo,” she called. “I can kill the rest of it.” She took a step and faltered. Righted herself. She’s pushing herself too hard, Sal thought.

  Grace raised the metal in her hand and pointed to the creature, struggling to right itself. Sal realized Grace wasn’t just pointing at the creature; she was pointing at the biggest wound in it, from having lost its legs. That was a ragged gap flowing with black liquid, a hole with skin hanging around the edges like a curtain. A portal straight into the creature’s body.

  “No,” Sal said.

  Menchú saw it too. “Don’t,” he said.

  “It worked on the hydra, didn’t it?” Grace said.

  “It almost killed you,” Sal said.

  “Almost,” Grace said.

  “We don’t have to sacrifice ourselves to this,” Menchú said.

  “Really?” Grace said. “Then what did we come here for?”

  She ran, dove into the wound, and disappeared. The beast lurched. Its body buckled. Grace’s metal cleaver erupted from its back, and Sal watched the blade turn like a corkscrew, drilling a hole, making a tunnel that Grace’s free hand, then arm, emerged from. The City Eater thrashed, fell on its side, made the piece of the car sticking out of it strike the sidewalk, but it was too late for it to stop what Grace had started as she dug her way out the other side. She’d made a hole clean through it. She spilled out like a newborn, stood up, and spat. She wavered on her feet. The creature wasn’t dead yet.

  “Good God,” Menchú said.

  Sal ran over to Harris, who was watching, agape.

  “Harris,” Sal said. “Please tell me the reserve is almost here with something that can run this thing over.”

  “Where did you say you were from again?” Harris said. “I have a lot of questions about what I’m seeing.”

  It occurred to Sal that she had no idea how she or anyone from the Vatican was going to explain any of this. Not the magic. Not Grace. Not anything. She thought herself lucky in that moment that it wasn’t her job.

  Liam was rushing over to help Grace. She was still bobbing, but it seemed as though she was regaining her feet.

  Then there was only one more to go, Sal thought. The third couldn’t have gotten much bigger than this one. If they found it fast, the fight wouldn’t be much worse, especially if she could convince the police they were on the same side, that together they could put an end to this and all the officers really had to do was trust that she and her team weren’t here to do harm. Maybe they could beat this thing after all.

  That was when Sal heard sirens again, another chorus of them. The sound of machine-gun fire.

  “The reserves,” Harris said. “They’re here.”

  Then there was a long, croaking wail from a block away. What was left of the wounded creature in front of them began lurching toward the sound, gargling and hacking. What rounded the far corner in response was bigger than the second City Eater had been. A lot bigger. A unit of soldiers ran in its wake, training gunfire on it that seemed to do nothing. It had one enormous foot like a snail; Sal wished it moved as slowly. Its behemoth of a body was four stories high. When it caught sight of the second creature, it grew a long tentacle of a neck that ended in an enormous oblong eye, topped with a clump of waving feelers. As the hulk of its body slithered forward, filling the street, the eye swooped forward and down on its stalk and examined its sibling. The wail gave way to something that sounded to Sal like dismay. With a speed and agility that the creature seemed incapable of—and before the horrified faces of the multiple law enforcement units attempting to contain what was happening in their city—the bigger City Eater leapt forward into the air and landed on top of the smaller one. Its wide, slimy foot smothered its sibling, engulfed it. The eye rose on its stalk, shivered, and melted back into the bulk of the body. For a second, it was all just a big throbbing blob in the middle of the block, taking up the entire street.

  It exploded with a roar. Limbs shot out in five different directions, four of them bursting through the walls of the buildings around them, ending somewhere inside. The fifth shot straight down the street and ended in a sloppy, three-toed foot. Sal saw Grace tense, tighten her grip on her new favorite weapon, then relax a little again.

  “It’s too big,” Grace said. “I can’t get through it. Not with this. Maybe if I had something better.”

  Something like what she used to have on Team One, Sal thought. When were they going to get here?

  Having planted its feet, the beast hoisted itself into the air and began to walk, its legs leaving long, striped gouges in the buildings around it, a trail of broken bricks and glass behind. It was paying no attention to the soldiers shooting into it. It was coming toward the river, toward Team Three. Toward Grace. The one human around here, Sal realized, who had been able to hurt it.

  “Run,” she said to Grace.

  “Are you kidding me?” Grace said. She was keyed up, but her breath was still ragged.

  “There’s nothing we can do with this,” Menchú said. “Not even you. You’re too weak. Fall back.”

  “You heard the man,” Liam said. “Fall back.”

  The creature grew three stalks from the center of its body, each with one furry eye on it. They fixed on Grace; there was no mistaking its intention.

  “If it wants to come and get me, it can try,” Grace said.

  “Don’t, Grace,” Menchú said.

  “Didn’t you say every life we save counts?”

  “That includes yours,” Sal said. It matters to us, she almost added. To me. But kept it to herself.

  Grace was plotting a retort; Sal could see it. Then Grace’s expression changed, faded. The flicker in her eyes went out. Her eyelids slid shut, and she fell to the pavement.

  Menchú dropped with her, held her head in his hands. No, no, no, he muttered to himself.

  Sal wanted to lose it, but her police training kicked in. “We need something bigger,” Sal said to Harris. “Bigger than guns.”

  “I hope to God we just found it, and that it’s on our side,” Harris said.

  She was looking not at the creature, but at the river. Which now gave off light almost as if it were molten, and was rising. Well, at least parts of it were. Something was emerging from it, even larger than the City Eater. The surface of the water stretched, almost like the skin of a balloon, then opened to let out a long column of light that curled overhead and glided back to earth. Something like an eel, Sal thought. A body that started slender at the tail and grew fatter in the middle, ended in a head with a short snout, big eyes, a wide mouth. Those eyes, even at the speed the new creature was going, conveyed intelligence, discernment. It was looking for something. It knew what it wanted. And it was hungry.

  • • •

  With a surprised cry, Perry fell backward into the bottom of the boat. Asanti and Frances shifted their weight to keep the dinghy from capsizing. They
rose and fell on the waves.

  “Are you all right?” Asanti asked, helping him into his seat.

  “I’m okay,” Perry said. “I’m still young.”

  “I was worried,” Asanti said. “About everything.”

  She motioned to the shore and caught Perry’s gaze as his eyes took it in: the monster on the shore, terrifying enough even from the middle of the river. She wondered what it must be like for the people on the street in front of it.

  “I had no idea it would be so beautiful,” Frances said. She was looking upward at the river, which cast light as it circled overhead.

  “I’m sorry that took so long,” Perry said. “It’s old and cranky and didn’t like being woken up. Conveniently, the sacrifice it demanded is just the sort of thing I had to offer: a big meal.”

  “Was that all you said, though?” Asanti asked.

  “Most of it was flattery,” Perry admitted.

  The waves from the river being’s emergence from the water were beginning to subside. The City Eater on the shore began to change shape just as the river shot down from the sky to engage it. Asanti had read reports from witnesses to natural disasters and terrorist attacks. So many of them said how it was like watching a movie. She’d never managed to believe that; it seemed to her that reality would get in the way, that something would remind her that she wasn’t safe where she was, that she was a part of it, that there would be consequences to deal with after the mayhem ended. The two beasts collided, crashed into a large building behind them that then collapsed beneath their weight. Another small explosion shrouded the fighters in smoke while the humans around them scattered. The fighters wrestled their way out of it. The beast was bigger than it had been a minute ago. The river had a gash in its side. She was right about herself, at least, Asanti thought. It mattered that there was no screen between her and what she was seeing, that the water under her feet stretched to the shore where the monsters were fighting. Sometimes she could feel the reverberations of their collisions in the water, even as the distance between them made it seem oddly ordinary, as if there were a giant monster fight every day. It was too disorienting, too terrifying, to dismiss as fiction.

  “Huh,” Perry said. “It really is just like watching a movie.”

  Frances was transfixed. “Amazing,” she said softly.

  Maybe it’s just me, Asanti thought.

  Then she noticed the river wasn’t calm yet. Strike that: It wasn’t getting calmer at all. What Asanti had first thought was the disruption from the emergence of the river spirit wasn’t that, after all. The current was no longer moving in one direction. It was squirrelly, curving around, spinning, eddying. She watched a buoy let loose during the river’s emergence travel downstream from them, then turn and start to travel upstream, like it was tracing a circle. Or a spiral. Like there were holes at the bottom of the Thames, and the water was draining out. It was an insane idea, but the alternative ideas she came up with to explain what she saw on the water seemed worse.

  Asanti pointed to the buoy. “We need to get off this river,” she said to Frances. Saw her assistant’s face fall. Frances leaned into the oars and pointed the boat toward shore. Toward the monsters, yes, and the armed forces, but toward their friends, too. There was no other direction to choose. As Frances got the boat moving, Asanti risked a quick look into the water. It was alive with light. But down at the bottom, unmistakably, it was lighter still. There was a line right down the middle of the river. It looked for all the world like a crack in the riverbed, and it ran as far as Asanti could see.

  She called Menchú. His phone wasn’t working. On the shore, the monsters were still fighting.

  “Head right toward them,” Asanti said. “We have to find the rest of the team.”

  Frances looked concerned. “You really think Team Three is there?”

  “Where else would they be?” Asanti said, keeping her voice steady. Come on, everybody, she thought. Let’s get through this.

  • • •

  Sal was covered in dust. They all were—Liam, Menchú, the policeman who had helped carry Grace to a defensive position with them behind a small wall. She hadn’t even caught the officer’s name yet. The river was to their backs. Before them was a sight that they all had difficulty processing, as two monsters wrestled and thrashed their way across two city blocks.

  “We had all those buildings evacuated, yeah?” she heard an officer say.

  “I think so,” another answered. “I hope so.”

  They were helpless now. But the river wasn’t. The City Eater grew arms to hold it back, but in time the river’s coils fought through its grip and wrapped around it. The coil closed tight enough to cut through the monster, taking an enormous piece off. It seemed the fight might be over fast. But the gargantuan creature regrouped, put itself back together, reformed. Got bigger again.

  A captain gave the order to fall back as a couple new office buildings were dismantled. And Liam looked toward the river again.

  “It’s them,” he said.

  He ran closer to the banks, waving. Frances was rowing the dinghy toward a dock nearby. Team Three congregated there to help their friends off the water. Nobody smiled. But for Sal, it was still good to see them, good to be together.

  “Do you think it will work?” Menchú said.

  “Not unless our monster wins,” Asanti said.

  A throaty, coughing howl echoed across the London sky. It seemed the behemoth had gotten twice as big as it had been just a moment ago. At its feet, shop lights and windows went dark.

  Liam whistled. “It must have figured out a way to siphon power off the city’s grid.”

  “Then there’s no end to how big it could get,” Sal said.

  “Unless the river finds a way to disconnect it from the grid.”

  With a singsong warble that ended in a squawk, the river wrapped itself around the giant and began pulling it into the air.

  “Huh,” Liam said. “Well, that’s one way.”

  The City Eater tried to resist. It extended its legs down to the ground, tried to embed claws into the pavement that would hold it fast to the earth. The river gave a sharp tug, another sharp tug, and with a roar of anguish from the creature, wrenched those new legs hard enough that they broke off at the ankles.

  “Should we order in the air force?” Harris said.

  “Wait,” Sal said.

  “Let the river do what it came here to do,” Asanti said.

  The two creatures were above the city now, chased by helicopters. The monster in the coils kept trying to wrench itself free. The river wouldn’t let it. In the light cast from the water below, everyone in Team Three could see; they gasped when the monster sprouted wings and began to overpower the river. The river keened like an enormous hawk, dove with its prey into the water with a splash as if a depth charge had gone off. The creatures emerged again, skyrocketing upward, then executing a sharp angle to crash, both headfirst, onto the opposite bank.

  Now the first monster had grown arms again, four of them, and was trying to punch its way out. The river uncoiled just a little. Both creatures were getting weaker, it was clear. They were maybe too evenly matched, too driven by primal urges to surrender. One wanted freedom. The other wanted a meal. At last the river caught one of the monster’s hands in its mouth and, with a coughing sound, drew that hand further down its throat and bit it off at the wrist. The monster roared, as much in anger as in pain. The river reared back its head to strike again. Two arms shot forward and got the river around the throat. They jerked the river back and forth, as if the monster were trying to twist its head off. For a second it seemed it might succeed. Then the river wriggled out of the monster’s grip, drew back its head, and snapped it forward. Its jaws closed on either side of the monster’s head. Its teeth sunk in. With a quizzical grunt, the river whipped its head to the side. The creature let out a scream, and as it turned, Sal understood why. The river had ripped its face off. There was only pudding-like infrastructure beneath it,
a mass of seeping matter.

  As the monster stumbled backward, the river struck again, and this time got the whole head into its mouth. It was fidgeting with its jaw position a bit—it seemed to Sal that it was trying to get the best angle to eat the entire head at once—when Sal heard a familiar flutter, a familiar whine, and people in suits she recognized by the river’s light streaked through the air toward the fight.

  “It’s Team One,” Menchú said. “They’ve arrived.”

  “Oh, great,” Perry said. His voice all human again, not even trying to hide his sarcasm.

  Asanti shook her head. “Just when it might have worked,” she said.

  3.

  Team One had deployed straight from the airport. It was too late, Shah figured, to worry about their cover anymore. She tried to call Asanti and Menchú. The calls couldn’t get through. And even when they landed, the talk in the terminal was beyond terrorism. The damage in London didn’t look quite like the work of human hands. In the news reports, mixed in with the language about bombings and attacks, was language about disasters. About infrastructure collapsing, gas lines breaking. Maybe it was a strange kind of storm, people were saying, or an earthquake, even if London almost never got earthquakes. And then there was the phenomenon that nobody could really explain: that cell phones and cameras, anything electronic, stopped working as soon as someone got close enough. That the radius for things not working seemed to be spreading. Shah could swear she even heard the word once: magic. Maybe it’s magic.

  There were gasps around them when they deployed. Team One had been drilling well lately, Shah thought, and she noted with satisfaction how fast they suited up. People around them whipped out phones and cameras Shah knew would be unable to capture what they were doing; they would just be one more part of the foggy information flooding social media about what was happening in London. Maybe enough to have the police sweep the airport—something, Shah thought to herself, they should be doing anyway right now. The members of Team One whose suits could fly picked up the ones who couldn’t, and they were off.