Magic City

by Paula Guran

  “Vocabuvores,” said Master Molnar when they had stopped in a place of apparent safety, “goblin-like creatures that feed on any new words they learn from human speech. Their metabolisms turn vocabulary into body mass. They’re like insects at birth, but a few careless sentences and they can grow to human size, and beyond.”

  “Do they eat people, too?” said Laszlo, shuddering.

  “They’d cripple us,” said Astriza, wiping vocabuvore slop from her sword. “And torture us as long as they could, until we screamed every word we knew for them.”

  “We don’t have time to wipe that colony out today,” said Molnar. “Fortunately, vocabuvores are extremely territorial. And totally illiterate. Their nests are surrounded by enough books to feed their little minds forever, but they can’t read a word.”

  “How can such things have stolen in, past your gates and sorcery?” asked Lev.

  “It’s the books again,” said Molnar. “Their power sometimes snatches the damnedest things away from distant worlds. The stacks are filled with living and quasi-living dwellers, of two general types.”

  “The first sort we call externals,” said Astriza. “Anything recently dumped or summoned here. Animals, spirits, even the occasional sentient being. Most of them don’t last long. Either we deal with them, or they become prey for the other sort of dweller.”

  “Bibliofauna,” said Molnar. “Creatures created by the actions of the books themselves, or somehow dependent upon them. A stranger sort of being, twisted by the environment and more suited to survive in it. Vocabuvores certainly didn’t spawn anywhere else.”

  “Well,” said Astriza, “We’re a bit smellier, but we all seem to be in one piece. We’re not far now from twenty-eight Manticore East. Keep moving, and the next time I tell you to shut up, Laszlo, please shut up.”

  “Apologies, Librarian Mezar—”

  “Titles are for outside the library,” she growled. “In here, you can best apologize by not getting killed.”

  “Ahhh,” said Molnar, gazing down at his guiding ideogram. The lights within the red lines had turned green. “Bang on. Anywhere on the third shelf will do. Aspirant d’Courin, let Astriza handle the actual placement.”

  Yvette seemed only too happy to pass her satchel off to the sturdy Librarian. “Cover me,” said Astriza as she moved carefully toward the bookcase indicated by Molnar’s spells. It was about twelve feet high, and while the dark wood of its exterior was warped and weathered, the volumes tucked onto its shelves looked pristine. Astriza settled Yvette’s book into an empty spot, then leapt backward, both of her swords flashing out. She had the fastest over-shoulder draw Laszlo had ever seen.

  “What is it?” said Molnar, rushing forward to place himself between the shelf and the four aspirants.

  “Fifth shelf,” said Astriza. She gestured, and one of the hovering lanterns moved in, throwing its scarlet light into the dark recesses of the shelves. Something long and dark and cylindrical was lying across the books on that shelf, and as the lantern moved Laszlo caught a glimpse of scales.

  “I think—” said Astriza, lowering one of her swords, “I think it’s dead.” She stabbed carefully with her other blade, several times, then nodded. She and Molnar reached in gingerly and heaved the thing out onto the floor, where it landed with a heavy smack.

  It was a serpent of some sort, with a green body as thick as Laszlo’s arm. It was about ten feet long, and it had three flat, triangular heads with beady eyes, now glassy in death. Crescent-shaped bite marks marred most of its length, as though something had worked its way up and down the body, chewing at leisure.

  “External,” said Astriza.

  “A swamp hydra,” said Lev, prodding the body with one of his clawed feet. “From my homeworld . . . very dangerous. I had night terrors of them when I was newly hatched. What killed it?”

  “Too many possible culprits to name,” said Molnar. He touched the serpent’s body with the butt of his staff and uttered a spell. The dead flesh lurched, smoked, and split apart, turning gray before their eyes. In seconds, it had begun to shrink, until at last it was nothing more than a smear of charcoal-colored ash on the floor. “The Tree of Knives used to scare predators away from this section, but it’s uprooted itself. Anything could have moved in. Aspirant Bronzeclaw, give me the notes for your book.”

  “Private Reflections of Grand Necrosophist Jaklur the Unendurable,” said Astriza as Molnar shared the notes with her. “Charming.” The two Librarians performed their divinations once again, with more urgency than before. After a few moments, Astriza looked up, pointed somewhere off to Laszlo’s left, and said: “Fifty-five Manticore Northwest. Another hell of a walk. Let’s get moving.”

  The second stage of their journey was longer than the first. The other aspirants looked anxious, all except Casimir, who continued to stroll while others crept cautiously. Caz seemed to have a limitless reserve of enchantment with the place. As for Laszlo, well, before another hour had passed the last reeking traces of the vocabuvore’s gore had been washed from his face and neck by streams of nervous sweat. He was acutely aware, as they moved on through the dark canyons and grottos of the stacks, that unseen things in every direction were scuttling, growling, and hissing.

  At one point, he heard a high-pitched giggling from the darkness, and stopped to listen more closely. Master Molnar, not missing a step, grabbed him firmly by his shoulders, spun him around, and pushed him onward.

  They came at last to one of the outer walls of the library, where the air was clammy with a mist that swirled more thickly than ever before. Railed galleries loomed above them, utterly lightless, and Astriza waved the party far clear of the spiral staircases and ladders that led up into those silent spaces.

  “Not much farther,” she said. “And Casimir’s book goes somewhere pretty close after this. If we get lucky, we might just—”

  “Get down,” hissed Molnar.

  Astriza was down on one knee in a flash, swords out, and the aspirants followed her example. Laszlo knelt and drew his sword. Only Molnar remained on his feet.

  The quality of the mist had changed. A breeze was stirring, growing more and more powerful as Laszlo watched. Down the long dark aisle before them the skin-chilling current came, and with it a fluttering, rustling sound, like clothes rippling on a drying line. A swirling, nebulous shape appeared, and the mist surged and parted before it. As it came nearer, Laszlo saw that it was a mass of papers, a column of book pages, hundreds of them, whirling on a tight axis like a tornado.

  “No,” shouted Molnar as Casimir raised his hands to begin a spell. “Don’t harm it! Protect yourselves, but don’t fight back or the library will—”

  His words were drowned out as the tumbling mass of pages washed over them and its sound increased tenfold. Laszlo was buffeted with winds like a dozen invisible fists—his cloak streamed out behind him as though he were in free-fall, and a cloud of dust and grime torn from the surfaces nearby filled the air as a stinging miasma. He barely managed to fumble his sword safely back into his scabbard as he sought the floor. Just above him, the red lanterns were slammed against a stone balcony and shattered to fragments.

  From out of the wailing wind there came a screech like knives drawn over slate. Through slitted eyes Laszlo saw that Lev was losing his balance and sliding backward. Laszlo realized that Lev’s torso, wider than any human’s, was catching the wind like a sail despite the lizard’s efforts to sink his claws into the tile floor.

  Laszlo threw himself at Lev’s back and strained against the lizard’s overpowering bulk and momentum for a few desperate seconds. Just as he realized that he was about to get bowled over, Casimir appeared out of the whirling confusion and added his weight to Laszlo’s. Heaving with all their might, the two human aspirants managed to help Lev finally force himself flat to the ground, where they sprawled on top of him.

  Actinic light flared. Molnar and Astriza, leaning into the terrible wind together, had placed their hands on Molnar’s staff and wr
ought some sort of spell. The brutal gray cyclone parted before them like the bow-shock of a swift sailing ship, and the dazed aspirants behind them were released from the choking grip of the page-storm. Not a moment too soon, in fact, for the storm had caught up the jagged copper and glass fragments of the broken lanterns, sharper claws than any it had possessed before. Once, twice, three times it lashed out with these new weapons, rattling against the invisible barrier, but the sorcery of the Librarians held firm. It seemed to Laszlo that a note of frustration entered the wail of the thing around them.

  Tense moments passed. The papers continued to snap and twirl above them, and the winds still wailed madly, but after a short while the worst of the page-storm seemed to be spent. Glass and metal fragments rained around them like discarded toys, and the whole screaming mess fluttered on down the aisle, leaving a slowly falling haze of upflung dust in its wake. Coughing and sneezing, Laszlo and his companions stumbled shakily to their feet, while the noise and chaos of the indoor cyclone faded into the distant mist and darkness.

  “My thanks, humans,” said Lev hoarsely. “My clan’s ancestral trade of scale-grooming is beginning to acquire a certain tint of nostalgia in my thoughts.”

  “Don’t mention it,” coughed Laszlo. “What the hell was that?”

  “Believe it or not, that was a book,” said Astriza.

  “A forcibly unbound grimoire,” said Molnar, dusting off his armor. “The creatures and forces in here occasionally destroy books by accident. And sometimes, when a truly ancient grimoire bound with particularly powerful spells is torn apart, it doesn’t want to stop being a book. It becomes a focus for the library’s unconscious anger. A book without spine or covers is like an unquiet spirit without mortal form. Whatever’s left of it holds itself together out of sheer resentment, roaming without purpose, lashing out at whatever crosses its path.”

  “Like my face,” said Laszlo, suddenly aware of hot, stinging pains across his cheeks and forehead. “Ow, gods.”

  “Paper cuts,” said Casimir, grinning. “Won’t be impressing any beautiful women with those scars, I’m afraid.”

  “Oh, I’m impressed,” muttered Yvette, pressing her fingertips gingerly against her own face. “You just let those things whirl around as they please, Master Molnar?”

  “They never attack other books. And they uproot or destroy a number of the library’s smaller vermin. You might compare them to forest fires in the outside world—ugly, but perhaps ultimately beneficial to the cycle of existence.”

  “Pity about the lamps, though,” said Yvette.

  “Ah. Yes,” said Molnar. He tapped the head of his staff, and a ball of flickering red light sprang from it, fainter than that of the lost lamps but adequate to dispel the gloom. “Aspirants, use the empty book satchel. Pick up all the lantern fragments you can see. The library has a sufficient quantity of disorder that we need not import any.”

  While the aspirants tended their cuts and scoured the vicinity for lantern parts, Astriza glanced around, consulted some sort of amulet chained around her wrist, and whistled appreciatively. “Hey, here’s a stroke of luck.” She moved over to a bookcase nestled against the outer library wall, slid Lev’s grimoire into an empty spot, and backed away cautiously. “Two down. You four are halfway to your sixth year.”

  “Aspirant Vrana,” said Molnar, “I believe we’ll find a home for your book not a stone’s throw along the outer wall, at sixty-one Manticore Northwest. And then we’ll have just one more delivery before we can speed the four of you on your way, back to the carefree world of making requests from the comfort of the reading rooms.”

  “No need to hurry on my account,” said Casimir, stretching lazily. His cloak and armor were back in near perfect order. “I’m having a lovely time. And I’m sure the best is yet to come.”

  It was a bit more than a stone’s throw, thought Laszlo, unless you discarded the human arm as a reference and went in for something like a trebuchet. Along the aisle they moved, past section after section of books that were, as Master Molnar had promised, completely unharmed by the passage of the unbound grimoire. The mist crept back in around them, and the two Librarians fussed and muttered over their guidance spells as they walked. Eventually, they arrived at what Molnar claimed was sixty-one Manticore Northwest, a cluster of shelves under a particularly heavy overhanging stone balcony.

  “Ta-daaaaaa,” cried Astriza as she backed away from the shelf once she had successfully replaced Casimir’s book. “You see, children, some returns are boring. And in here, boring is beautiful.”

  “Help me!” cried a faint voice from somewhere off to Laszlo’s right, in the dark forest of bookcases leading away to the unseen heart of the library.

  “Not to mention damned rare.” Astriza moved out into the aisle with Molnar, scanning the shelves and shadows surrounding the party. “Who’s out there?”

  “Help me!” The voice was soft and hoarse. There was no telling whether or not it came from the throat of a thinking creature.

  “Someone from another book-return team?” asked Yvette.

  “I’d know,” said Molnar. “More likely it’s a trick. We’ll investigate, but very, very cautiously.”

  As though it were a response to the Master Librarian’s words, a book came sailing out of the darkened stacks. The two Librarians ducked, and after bouncing off the floor once the book wound up at Yvette’s feet. She nudged it with the tip of a boot and then, satisfied that it was genuine, picked it up and examined the cover.

  “What is it?” said Molnar.

  “Annotated Commentaries on the Mysteries of the Worm,” said Yvette. “I don’t know if that means anything special—”

  “An-no-tated,” hissed a voice from the darkness. There was a strange snort of satisfaction. “New!”

  “Commentaries,” hissed another. “New, new!”

  “Hells!” Molnar turned to the aspirants and lowered his voice to a whisper. “A trick after all! Vocabuvores again. Keep your voices down, use simple words. We’ve just given them food. Could be a group as large as the last one.”

  “Mysteries,” groaned one of the creatures. “New!” A series of wet snapping and bubbling noises followed. Laszlo shuddered, remembering the rapid growth of the thing that had tried to jump him earlier, and his sword was in his hand in an instant.

  “New words,” chanted a chorus of voices that deepened even as they spoke. “New words, new words!” It sounded like at least a dozen of the things were out there, and beneath their voices was the crackling and bubbling, as though cauldrons of fat were on the boil . . . many cauldrons.

  “All you, give new words.” A deeper, harsher voice than the others, more commanding. “All you, except BOY. Boy that KILL with spell! Him we kill! Others give new words!”

  “Him we kill,” chanted the chorus. “Others give new words!”

  “No way,” whispered Astriza. “No gods-damned way!”

  “It’s the same band of vocabuvores,” whispered Molnar. “They’ve actually followed us. Merciful gods, they’re learning to overcome their instincts. We’ve got to destroy them!”

  “We sure as hell can’t let them pass this behavior on to others,” whispered Astriza, nodding grimly. “Just as Master Molnar said, clamp your mouths shut. Let your swords and spells do the talking. If—”

  Whatever she was about to say, Laszlo never found out. Growling, panting, gibbering, screeching, the vocabuvores surged out of the darkness, over bookcases and out of aisles, into the wan circle of red light cast by Molnar’s staff. Nor were they the small-framed creatures of the previous attack—most had grown to the size of wolves. Their bodies had elongated, their limbs had knotted with thick strands of ropy muscle, and their claws had become slaughterhouse implements. Some had acquired plates of chitinous armor, while others had sacks of flab hanging off them like pendulous tumors. They came by the dozens, in an arc that closed on Laszlo and his companions like a set of jaws.

  The first to strike on either side was Casi
mir, who uttered a syllable so harsh that Laszlo reeled just to hear it. His ears rang, and a bitter metallic taste filled his mouth. It was a death-weaving, true dread sorcery, the sort of thing that Laszlo had never imagined himself even daring to study, and the closest of the vocabuvores paid for its enthusiasm by receiving the full brunt of the spell. Its skin literally peeled itself from the bones and muscles beneath, a ragged wet leathery flower tearing open and blowing away. And instant later the muscles followed, then the bones and the glistening internal organs; the creature exploded layer by layer. But there were many more behind it, and as the fight began in earnest Laszlo found himself praying silently that words of command, which were so much babble to non-magicians, couldn’t nourish the creatures.

  Snarling they came, eyes like black hollows, mouths like gaping pits, and in an instant Laszlo’s awareness of the battle narrowed to those claws that were meant to shred his armor, those fangs that were meant to sink into his flesh. Darting and dodging, he fought the wildest duel of his career, his centuries-old steel punching through quivering vocabuvore flesh. They died, sure enough, but there were many to replace the dead, rank on writhing rank, pushing forward to grasp and tear at him.

  “New words,” the creatures croaked, as he slashed at bulging throats and slammed his heavy hilt down on monstrous skulls. The things vomited fountains of reeking gore when they died, soaking his cloak and breeches, but he barely noticed as he gave ground step by step, backing away from the press of falling bodies as new combatants continually scrambled to take their places.

  As Laszlo fought on, he managed to catch glimpses of what was happening around him. Molnar and Astriza fought back to back, the Master Librarian’s staff sweeping before him in powerful arcs. As for Astriza, her curved blades were broader and heavier than Laszlo’s—no stabbing and dancing for her. When she swung, limbs flew, and vocabuvores were laid open guts to groins. He admired her power, and that admiration nearly became a fatal distraction.

  “NEW WORD!” screeched one of the vocabuvores, seizing him by his mantle and forcing him down to his knees. It pried and scraped at his leather neck-guard, salivating. The thing’s breath was unbelievable, like a dead animal soaked in sewage and garlic wine. Was that what the digestion of words smelled like? “NEW WORD!”