Bookburners

by Max Gladstone

  Christ. “How are we supposed to fight that thing?”

  Soo was still grinning. Liam wished he could share the sentiment. “Oh, you know. The usual way.” Her wings spread. “You’ve done this before, haven’t you?”

  “We tend to stop them before they’re that big.”

  “So what you’re saying is you miss the fun part.”

  “We also tend to miss the dying part.”

  “What’s the point of living if you can’t have a good time?” And, with a laugh, Soo took flight.

  Liam watched her rise: a streak of feathers and steel, her moving spear an arc, pure and beautiful as math.

  She was right. They’d passed the point of caring about survival, or even containment. People needed help. He had his knuckles, and some tattoos with holy water, and he’d bet he could out-think a mutant rocktopus. This would be fine. Or not. And if not, then he wouldn’t have anything to worry about.

  Soo swept down again, and dropped a vector of metal that spun slightly and thudded into the ground at Liam’s feet, sang there, its vibration a deep and joyful song. A sword, broad-bladed, silver, with cross guard, hilt up.

  “Go on,” Soo called from overhead. “Save lives! Fight well! Have fun!”

  Liam grinned, grabbed the sword, and ran into the fray.

  • • •

  Up the bank, the Team One line called: “We can’t hold out much longer! Fall back along the river!”

  “Hold!” Shah shouted back. “Retreat on my order!”

  “Yes, sir!”

  She turned to Frances. “What do you have?”

  Frances spun her wheelchair around. Asanti had grown so used to Frances after her accident, to Frances in her chair, to Frances in mild persistent pain, that at first she wondered at the flush in the other woman’s cheeks, at the straightness of her spine and the way she seemed to swell—wondered if she were undergoing a further transformation in the flood of magic. But no. The magic from the rift had not transformed her—she had been transformed to fit precisely this environment. The ground on which they stood might be unsteady, but Frances knew it in her bones. Study and knowledge melded with instinct. Pain receded.

  Asanti felt—not jealous, no—but she wished she had that certainty.

  “The rift,” Frances said, “wants to close. But the spirit’s corpse is wedged in there, holding it open. So we need to widen the rift again, and push the corpse through. Once it’s on the other side, it should act like a plug. The worst of this will stop.” Behind her, Big Ben finally tore free of Parliament, and rang bells of triumph. “I don’t think everything will go back to normal. But we’ll save the city.”

  Shah glanced back over her shoulder: the line, starting to give. “Jacobs! Your left!”

  She hissed through her teeth, drew her pistol, aimed, shot something with two heads, then spun back to Frances. “You want to widen the rift.”

  Frances raised her hands, innocent. “Only for a second!” The snakes that had been her legs twitched in fear.

  “The city’s already coming apart! You might kill us all.”

  Puzzle pieces fell into place in Asanti’s mind. She wondered, then, if she had been planning this along—or if Frances had, or Perry. If needs could travel back through time. “I can help.” She was ready for the pressure of Shah’s gaze. “I know how to summon—you would think of them as contractors. They can shore London up against the flood, until the rift closes. Arturo has seen them. He knows they work.”

  Arturo stiffened. If they had been alone here together, she thought he would have answered, I have, at once. But Shah stood by her side; Team One used their share of magic and more, but that magic was rigidly monitored, controlled, screened. Arturo had condoned Asanti’s experiments, back before he sold her out to save her, but always in extremis, always deniably; she asked him now to stand up for her, against the Society, in public. It was hardly fair.

  He had, of course, a great deal to make up for.

  Still, she felt a stab of relief when he said, “Yes.”

  Shah closed her eyes, and drew a deep breath. Her hand twitched in a way Asanti recognized: She wanted a cigarette. Asanti did not smoke herself, but she could empathize. From the line, a Team One soldier called Shah’s name. She didn’t answer. Asanti did not envy the commander this decision, under pressure, as London tore itself apart. She herself made all her decisions at leisure: spent endless hours in solitude, or in argument with friends and lovers and children and grandchildren, deciding on core principles with which to address any decision that might arise. But then, she had never spent much time on the battlefield. Though that seemed likely to change, in the near future.

  Shah’s eyes glittered black when she opened them, like jewels dipped in water. “How do you push the corpse through the rift? Against the tide of magic?”

  Frances shrugged. “Explosives? Hit it hard?”

  “There’s no way this plan will work.”

  “Your other option,” Menchú said, “is to blow up London.”

  Shah looked back at her soldiers, and up at the tall white buildings on the quay, and across the water at the blinking enormous eye, at the fine old span of the Tower Bridge, at the swollen dome of Saint Paul’s, just barely visible from this vantage. Asanti wondered what Thavanai Shah thought of London—if she had come here before, and under what circumstances. Did she have relatives here? Had she made love in some hotel? Walked hand in hand with a partner through Hyde Park? Had she served here, ever? Gone to a show, or had a pint in some back-alley pub, or sat in the National Gallery for hours before Impressionists, or wandered the British Museum past the stolen relics of an empire? Or was this only a stranger’s city to her? A few million people, and blocks of stone, an airport with a shopping mall inside that connected somewhere to somewhere else?

  Up the bank, the soldiers fell back—an orderly retreat before a wave of walking fire. One broke and ran toward them. “Sir!”

  Shah’s mouth twitched down. She was not yet done thinking.

  If Shah were anyone else, Asanti would have spoken. But she knew the commander just well enough to know she would brook no counsel now.

  There is seldom a first time for anything, in history, and that’s doubly true when the history in question belongs to a city old as London; surely its survival had depended on the single decision of a single person before. She imagined Thavani Shah in the company of her predecessors, and, despite the gravity of the situation, allowed herself a brief thrill of pleasure at the contrast.

  “Let’s do it,” Shah said, and turned to give the order. “We’ll retreat along the waterfront!” Her expression sharpened into a guillotine blade when she saw the soldier who’d run down the beach to join her. “What are you doing out of position, Jacobs?”

  “Sir,” she said, and held out her radio. “We have Sal Brooks on the line.”

  • • •

  Liam could grow to like this kind of fight.

  Now, he had always been one for the odd dustup, and he sure didn’t shrink from throwing himself into danger with Team Three, but he never really enjoyed the kind of fighting they did together, what with the potential for immediate grim death in case of failure, and their general lack of force multipliers. Crosses worked against magic, but they wouldn’t stop claws or blunt force trauma, and his blessed tattoos only helped some of the time. Bullets rarely made a difference, so he spent most of his fights on Team Three’s behalf desperately hoping he’d be able to get a few licks in, and stay alive long enough to have a chance at closing the book.

  Grace, now, she really liked the experience, a difference between them about which he’d felt properly embarrassed until he discovered she was just magically more durable than he was.

  But this Team One kind of fighting, now, with magic on your side, this, he could learn to love. Start with the sword, for one thing: perfectly balanced, and somehow the damn thing cut through stone, if he swung it right, which helped when fighting a giant rocktopus.

  He didn
’t engage at first—ran around the perimeter instead, calling to scared tourists, urging them inside, into the crown jewel chamber or into the Tower. Most didn’t need urging, but he kept them safe on the retreat. Ellsdale and Soo went about their business, Soo swooping down from the sky, sticking her spear right through the rocktopus’s rocky hide, letting magma blood flow into its many eyes, while Ellsdale battered the thing with his chains and claws. The Beefeaters and Radcliffe had formed a perimeter between the rocktopus and the retreating tourists, striking the creature’s thrashing legs with their spears, without much effect. Liam chopped off a tentacle that almost snagged Radcliffe. “You can’t hurt it! Help the people into cover. Go!”

  They went, at once.

  Liam realized, a second later, that he had just given Beefeaters orders, and they’d obeyed. If dear old Da could see me now.

  Then he ran back into the fight—into the burnt flesh smell of the lava, into the screams, into the torn earth and the sweeping tentacles of rock, toward that gnashing beak. He was afraid, of course. He rolled beneath a sweeping blow that would have knocked his head clean off his shoulders. Tentacles struck earth, and staggered him. The sheer stinking weight of this creature was an affront to God and decency. It didn’t belong here.

  But he did.

  The fear, the terrified melting faces glimpsed through the gnashing beak, all ran together. He could do something now, though: he could cut, and parry, and fight.

  He lay about himself with the blade, carving wounds, avoiding the hot blood spray; thin ropes of stone tumbled free of the main body and thrashed on the ground, kicking earth into the air. Liam saw a blow aimed for Ellsdale’s head, and cried a warning, and brought his blade around and up with two hands, severed the arm at the shoulder. Triumph!

  The ground shifted beneath him, and he felt himself seized and tossed into the air, a tentacle wrapped around his ankle. Pain seared through his hip. The world inverted. That beak snapped, and he gagged in breath that stank of rot. Still had the sword—just had to cut the tentacle, figure out the rest on the way down. But it shook him like a rag doll, and he could not bring the blade around. Barely held onto it at all.

  Then Soo swooped down with a high whoop like a hawk’s plunging cry, and pierced the arm with her spear. The rocktopus let him go, which only left him with the small problem of being fifteen feet off the ground—but Soo caught him by the waist and bore him from the nest of tentacles, her wingbeats smooth. “See?” she said, as she set him down. “Fun!”

  A tentacle whipped toward her, and he cut it off before it could strike.

  They worked together after that: Soo tormenting from the sky, Ellsdale fierce and silent from the ground, Liam taking what chances he could seize. It was hot work, heavy, and hard; he messed up, once, and felt a rib crack, and counted himself lucky—that could have been his arm. Or his neck.

  They tired. The monster did not. Overcome by the pain in his side, Liam watched for his opening, bided his time. Counted seconds. It would come, it would come. And—yes, there—Ellsdale grappling eight arms at once, while Soo dove through a forest of tentacles up high, distracting the creature’s attention and giving Liam a path to run, silent, blade down, straight in, toward the immense weight of its body, and sink the sword into it, and drag the cut open, cursing, overcome by the hot, burnt-hair stench of its innards.

  It screamed in a language of torn metal, and began to fall.

  With Liam underneath it.

  Christ.

  He turned, scrambled on earth, tried to run—the blade caught, he tugged it free. That enormous bulk would crush him to paste.

  Okay. Don’t dwell on it. Just run. Make it if you can.

  He could tell from the shadow on the ground that he wouldn’t.

  Someone called his name; the world blurred, and he tried to catch his breath, but could not.

  He lay on the grass at the edge of the courtyard. Behind him, the rocktopus fell, and cracked the earth. Bells rang nearby. Maybe he imagined them.

  Grace stood over him, silhouetted against the dreadful pink sky.

  “Grace!” He scrambled to his feet, forgetting his sword and the pain in his side. “You’re okay!”

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” she said, when he hugged her. “Come on. Not time for us to die yet.”

  He let her go. “Something’s happened?”

  “Sal just got word from Asanti. We have a mission.”

  3.

  They gathered at the foot of the Tower Bridge. Sal’s police—well, they weren’t technically her police, but they followed her orders—had erected sandbag barricades in a half circle across the footpath that led up to the bridge. Shah’s men moved among them, eager and heavily armed. And past that barricade, near the foot of the bridge: Asanti, Menchú, and Frances. Sal had heard their voices over the radio, but a voice over a radio could be anything. Her teammates looked tired, injured, but alive, which was all that mattered. She shouted to them, and waved; Asanti waved back, her smile broad as Shah’s frown.

  “This won’t work,” Perry said.

  “You don’t know that. In fact,” she drew that word out, teasing him, “you know it can. You’re just saying it won’t because you don’t want to get your hopes up that we might live through this.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I’m your sister, remember? Now, come on. Let’s prove you wrong.”

  The Team One cordon opened to admit them. Radcliffe ordered the Beefeaters who had followed them to join the line; the spears and swords they’d looted from the Tower’s armory museum looked comical, but they’d do better against demons than the cops’ sidearms, if it came to that. Team One passed around silver-flashed ammo; sometimes that worked.

  And then they were through the camp, and Menchú was hugging her, and Asanti did the same, and even Shah shook her hand with grim respect, though all she’d done was give the London police a quick course in demon fighting. Ellsdale and Soo saluted Shah, reported in safe; Liam still carried Soo’s sword, and sudden lines about Shah’s eyes betrayed that she’d almost smiled, seeing that. Grace and Menchú embraced, once, and broke—relieved.

  Relief could not last forever. There was work to do.

  “Into the rift,” Sal said. The bridge led straight into the fountain of pink light that rose from the earth to the mystic bubblegum sky. It reminded her of the old Team Four’s world, between times; she’d hated that too. As the bridge approached the pink light, its surface bent down, or else magic curved the image, like a straw bent by a glass of water.

  Asanti nodded. “That’s the idea. I summoned the contractors before, so I’ll perform that ritual out here; Frances will widen the rift from within. I wish I could go.” She sounded as if she really did—though Sal couldn’t understand it, Asanti yearned to see what lay beyond. It wasn’t fair. Sal had been across, dragged by demons, sent on a mission to rescue her own brother’s soul, while Asanti had only ever walked to the edge. Perhaps she would like what she saw when she finally crossed over—more than Sal did, anyway. Not that that was hard. “We need to send as few people as possible. The stuff that’s coming out of the rift is alive, or something like it. I’m not certain there’s a difference between life and death out there. This will be like reaching into an open wound. The smaller our party, the better.”

  “So we go, and Team One guards our backs.” Sal nodded.

  Shah shook her head. “No way. With all due respect, your team hasn’t shown the greatest discretion when it comes to magic. Frances goes in alone, with …” She frowned, surveyed her surviving troops. “Ellsdale.”

  The grim knight snapped a salute. His gauntlet rang off his forehead. Frances looked worried, and Sal didn’t blame her. Team One hadn’t made her transformation a Society issue, exactly, but they spent their lives killing people touched by magic. Sal didn’t know Ellsdale well, but he had the set jaw and fractured-glass gaze of a true believer—probably why Shah had chosen him in the first place, thinking that he could step in if Franc
es went power mad and decided to destroy them all—which was a bullshit fear, but then, Shah’s experience with wizards was generally of the power-mad-and-trying-to-destroy-her-squad sort. Shah didn’t see that the same things that made Ellsdale trustworthy might make him snap, and hurt Frances before she could save them. But Shah had command authority in the field.

  “Fine,” Grace said. “I’ll go with them. Whatever’s there, Ellsdale might not be strong enough to stop it.”

  Shah shook her head. “Absolutely not. We need you out here, on the line.” Where she couldn’t stop Ellsdale from doing whatever he wanted. “Haddad and Ellsdale. That’s it.” The ground trembled. Windows shattered in buildings. Something big was coming. “We don’t have time. Get to the line.”

  “You forgot me,” Perry said.

  “I really didn’t. This is a Society mission, and you are not going in there with them if I have anything to say about it.”

  “I’m on your side.”

  “You’re not even human anymore. You’re a monster, an outsider. A demon.”

  “A demon?” Perry drew himself up to his full height, which didn’t help. He was taller than Shah by a good four inches, but it was a beanpole kind of height that made him look not so much threatening as about to blow away in the next stiff breeze. The ground shook again, and he had to take a step to steady himself. “I’m not some interloper here, some griefer or intruder. I am a fully fledged developer—or I was. I am, in short, what you would call an angel.”

  “Whatever that means,” Shah said, “it’s just one more reason I won’t let you into that rift.”

  Perry rolled his eyes, and settled for ignoring Shah entirely. “Frances. Have you ever manipulated a rift before? To close it or open it?”

  “No,” she admitted.

  “Have you ever used the mystic machinery that maintains the Tellurian Project?”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “Commander,” Perry said. “I have—well, a part of me has—spent thousands of years maintaining your world. Frances is brilliant, and she has power, and she knows magic as you understand it. But without me she might not merely stretch this rift, but tear it open. Can you risk being wrong?”