Codex Born

12

Eight months into our relationship, I returned home to find Nidhi sitting on the couch, her hands folded over a book in her lap.

When I sat down, she stiffened like she was fighting the urge to pull away. “I’m sorry I was late.” I had been volunteering with the local food bank, encouraging the fruitfulness of their gardens. I thought I had told her we were picking and packing today, but maybe I’d forgotten. “Nidhi, what’s wrong?”

“It’s not you. Not anything you’ve done.” She shifted to face me, putting more distance between us in the process. It felt like she had physically struck me. “The Porters have encountered a handful of dryads over the centuries, but the things you can do don’t match their accounts. I’ve been reading about dryads ever since we found you.”

She set the book on the coffee table and slid it toward me. It was an old library book, the spine heavily creased. She had tucked an origami butterfly into the pages to mark her place.

“Nymphs of Neptune?” The hairs on my neck and arms rose when I touched the book, like I had entered a haunted graveyard. I had to force myself to read the opening pages.

The words made me ill. I could get through brief passages, but the longer, descriptive sections left me dizzy and confused. I struggled to focus as the words blurred and doubled, and when I looked up, it felt like the house was tumbling around me. I squeezed my eyes shut, waiting for the effects to pass. “What is this?”

“The Porters who found you believed your tree was magical, created through libriomancy. I think they might have been right.”

I closed the book and read the back cover. The summary text didn’t hit me as hard as the story had, at least not physically. “You think I’m a character from this book? A slave?” I whispered.

“A fantasy.” She answered so quietly I barely heard.

I wanted to destroy the book, to rip it apart and burn the pieces. Instead, I carefully set it back down and tried to absorb what I had read. If I was one of these nymphs—and both my reaction to the story and the description of the nymphs’ powers suggested I was—then Nidhi hadn’t been helping me. She had been molding me, transforming me into her perfect lover. I dug my fingers into the cushions, feeling the rage expand in my chest, a scream demanding release.

I had never experienced anger like this when I was with Frank Dearing. He had wanted an obedient, compliant companion, and so he had denied me my anger. He couldn’t have known. He hadn’t noticed or cared that I was…incomplete. What else had he taken?

And what had Nidhi kept from me?

“Why?” Humans asked the same questions. Why am I here? What’s my purpose? But my question could be answered. James Wright had deliberately written these nymphs into his book, describing every curve in meticulous detail.

I was here to fulfill the needs and desires of my lovers.

“We think someone pulled an acorn or sapling from the book,” Nidhi said. “I doubt they even realized what they had done. If it was a fluke, an untrained accident, they probably scared themselves and ran away, leaving you to grow in this world.”

That’s why I had been alone when I awoke.

“I’m so sorry, Lena.” This angered her, too. I could see it in the tightness of her body.

I refused to cry. “What will you do now that you know what I am?”

“I’m not sure. Nobody has the right to…to control another person like this.”

“But I’m not really a person, am I?” My hair, my skin, my favorite flavor of ice cream, everything about me was a reflection of her. I was a fantasy. I had more in common with the airbrushed centerfold of a men’s magazine than I did with a real human being.

I stormed away to our bedroom and slammed the door. I could hear Nidhi crying, and part of me longed to comfort her. Instead, I clung to the anger, nurturing it like a sapling. What if she sent me away? My next lover could be someone like Frank. I might never experience this kind of hurt and anger again.

When Nidhi joined me, hours later, I was sitting amidst a circle of her comic books. Ridiculously clothed women stared up at me from the pages, bodies contorted into bone-bending poses that better displayed their exaggerated curves.

“If you leave me, what then?” I reached out to turn the page of a recent issue of Catwoman. In one panel, the breasts straining to burst from her leather bodysuit were larger than her head, and her waist was thinner than her neck. “Who will I be passed to next, and what will I become?”

Nidhi didn’t answer. She didn’t have to. My anger was nothing but a reflection of her own conflict, meaning she hated this just as much as I did. And dammit all to hell if that didn’t make me love her more.

She sat down beside me, kissed my hair, and whispered, “Huun tane prem karuu chuun.”

“I love you, too,” I said automatically. Whatever I was, those feelings were real to me. “When I was born, I looked for the other dryads of my grove. For my sisters.” I picked up a Red Sonja comic. “I’ve finally found them.”

THE OTHERS FELL IN behind us as we walked deeper into the woods. I counted eleven wendigos and twenty-three humans, not including August Harrison. Far too many to fight, even if Harrison hadn’t swiped my books.

How many ghosts walked with us? At least ten of my captors carried books. I thought of Bi Wei’s magic ripping through me. She had been alone, trapped within her book. What might they do together if they were freed?

“Who were they?” Lena asked, pointing toward the wendigos.

“Some are volunteers,” said Harrison. “The students of Bi Sheng assign one reader to each book. The readers’ magic is too weak for the Porters to notice or care about, but they’re trained to use that magic to maintain the life of their books. Often, their friends and family are recruited to serve as protectors. I just made those protectors stronger.”

He brought us to a small, circular clearing. Fresh stumps marked where other trees had been cut down to create space around the oak in the center. How long had they been preparing for this?

“You remind me of my son.” Harrison pulled my ratty old copy of Star Wars from his back pocket. He must have grabbed it from my jacket. “Always certain you’re smarter than everyone else, that only you have the answers.”

He ripped the book in half, then flung it into a puddle. Insects flowed down his leg to chew the pages into pulp.

I had owned that book for seventeen years. I couldn’t remember how many times I had read it; I had stopped counting after forty-three.

“Easy,” Lena whispered. She slipped an arm through mine to stop me from doing anything stupid.

I nodded slightly. This was what he wanted. To prove his power over me. There was no other reason to destroy my books. Even if I managed to get my hands on one, his millipede would stab its blade through my spine before I read a single sentence.

As my initial anger passed, I noticed something interesting: I wasn’t the only one glaring at Harrison. Several of his companions were frowning, including Guan Feng. One man turned away in disgust.

“Bi Wei is waiting.” Guan Feng walked toward the tree, turning her back on Harrison, so she missed the way his jaw tightened at being upstaged. She crouched at the base of the tree and carefully set her book into a depression among the roots.

“What exactly are you expecting me to do?” asked Lena.

Harrison straightened, visibly regaining his composure. “Two months ago, Isaac lost his physical body. He entered an automaton, transforming himself from flesh and blood to magic, just as the survivors of Gutenberg’s attack did so many years ago. And then you accomplished something none of the students of Bi Sheng have been able to do, though they’ve tried for more than five hundred years. You pulled him back. You recreated his body.” He waved at the tree. “Feng will guide Bi Wei’s ghost into the tree. You will make her human again.”

Lena approached the tree. Four rifles snapped up to point at her, and the wendigos snarled. The millipede tightened around my throat. Lena simply shook her head. “I saved the life of my lover, and it almost killed me. What makes you think I can restore a stranger from a book I’ve never read?”

“The magic is the same,” Guan Feng said. “You recreate your human body each time you emerge from your tree. The tree holds the pattern of your human form, just as this book does for Bi Wei.”

She was paraphrasing my own reports about Lena. Harrison must have shared my private files with them all. “What do you get out of this?” I asked him.

“That’s none of your concern,” he snapped.

“Maybe I’ll offer your friends a better deal,” Lena said lightly. “Isaac and I will do everything in our power to restore Bi Wei, and in return, they’ll stay out of the way while I kick your ass.”

“After so many centuries, do you think they’re going to trust a Porter and his slave?” Harrison asked. “They need me. I can give them the location of every Porter archive and network server. I can provide personnel files on the Regional Masters, or the psychological assessments suggesting who in Gutenberg’s organization could most easily be turned against him.”

“None of which will bring back their dead,” Lena pointed out. “If they want me to try to help them—”

“This isn’t a negotiation.” A portion of his magical hive poured off of his body and flew onto mine. Metal feet poked through my clothes, and tiny barbs tugged my skin. “The only question is how much pain you’ll put your lover through before you cooperate.”

Lena stepped toward Harrison, and suddenly a hundred metal stingers were stabbing my body.

I’ve read a lot of books where people get tortured. Conan the Cimmerian was unbreakable, enduring whatever his captors inflicted through sheer, testosterone-fueled barbarian rage. The Jedi from Star Wars could separate their minds from their bodies, surviving torture through mental discipline. In Feist’s Riftwar books, torture led the character of Pug to a magical breakthrough, making him more powerful than ever.

What few of those books ever bothered to truly explain was how much torture hurts! I tried and failed to keep from screaming. My muscles were rigid. I tried to physically pull the bugs away, tearing cloth and skin, only to have their hinged legs reverse and dig into the meat of my fingers. I clenched my fists, but that only drove their stingers deeper.

I tried to stand, though there was nowhere I could run to escape. Even as I pushed myself upright, they crawled into my shoe and stung the bottom of my foot, making me stumble. Others crawled up my pants legs to attack the skin behind my knees.

I had no books, nor could I have concentrated long enough to use them if I did. I could hardly breathe, let alone read. The knife Lena had given me wouldn’t do anything against these bugs. I did manage to scoop a rock from the dirt and hurl it at August Harrison’s head between spasms. I missed, but the gesture made me feel a tiny bit better.

My muscles began to give out, and I curled into a ball, covering my face with my hands and praying they wouldn’t crawl into my ears or…into anything else. As the assault dragged on for what felt like hours, I thought about the wendigo outside of Tamarack. He had fallen into the same agonized position right before he died.

“Enough,” said Harrison.

The insects stopped moving, but it still felt like the barbed slivers of metal were thrusting obscenely into my skin, an echo of pain that refused to end. I gasped and blinked tears from my eyes. Lena was walking toward the tree, escorted by two wendigos. Her fingers sank into the tree. The roots curled around the book.

Guan Feng started forward, but an older woman caught her by the shoulder. Neither spoke, but the subtext was easy enough to read. Guan Feng was terrified. She brought her hands together, fingertips touching her chin, as if in prayer or meditation. She paced slowly, each step careful and deliberate, but it didn’t ease the tension in her body. She never took her eyes from her book.

Lena reached deeper, stepping into a parody of an embrace with the tree.

This was my fault. I looked at Harrison, at the hybrid wendigos he had created with frozen chunks of skin, and fought to keep from throwing up. Whoever Lena helped them create, whatever Bi Wei and the others did once they were restored to this world, I was the one who had given them the key.

I started to push myself to my hands and knees, but a series of warning stings killed that idea. Instead, I curled tighter and slipped the wooden knife from my sock, transferring it to my sleeve.

As Lena stepped into the tree, a handful of insects rose from Harrison’s body and flew toward her. They landed on her back, and then she was gone, taking the insects with her.

Guan Feng whirled. “What did you do?”

“You know what she is,” Harrison shot back. “What she could do to us from within that tree. I’m protecting us all.”

Green leaves sprinkled down. A branch as thick as my arm fell to the earth, barely missing Guan Feng. The wendigos backed away, but she remained at the base of the tree, crouched protectively over her book.

“What’s happening?” asked the woman who had stopped Guan Feng.

“All magic has a cost,” I said before Harrison could answer. I remembered how much it had taken for Lena to pull me back from the automaton, and I was someone she had known and loved. How much harder would it be to restore a stranger, one who had been gone for so many years? “You can’t create life from nothing. That life comes from the tree.”

And from Lena herself.

The roots shifted, and the book sank deeper into the earth.

“Bi Wei!” Guan Feng grabbed the book, but it slid inexorably downward.

“How long does this take?” Harrison asked. “You, drag Isaac over here. Perhaps when her roots taste his blood, she’ll try to speed things up.”

A wendigo yanked me upright. Cold, foul breath puffed against the back of my head as she hurled me forward. My foot caught in the roots, and I fell hard on my side. Dozens of metal legs pierced my skin, driven deeper by the impact.

I looked like a victim from a bad horror movie. My shirt was red with blood, and my skin was swelling, making my movements stiff. Individually, the stings I had suffered were relatively minor, but there were so many. One bee sting was an annoyance, assuming you weren’t allergic. A thousand could kill a full-grown man.

I had landed less than a foot from Guan Feng. My fingers tightened on the knife beneath my sleeve. I was close enough to stab her before anyone reacted, but what good would it do?

Looking up at her, I wasn’t sure I could have done it. She had released the book, and now twisted her fingers into her shirt. Her lower lip was trembling. She reminded me of a frightened child.

“They’ll be all right.” I placed my hand on the base of the tree. “She knows we’re here.”

The look Guan Feng gave me suggested she would happily take over for Harrison’s insects and finish skinning me herself, but after a moment, she reached out and touched the roots closest to the book.

“We’re waiting,” Harrison said.

“Bèn dàn, indeed,” I muttered.

A flash of emotion—amusement, maybe—passed over Guan Feng’s features. It vanished as quickly as it had appeared.

Lena’s hand pushed out through the bark, knocking chunks of dry, dead wood onto the two of us. Her arm muscles strained as if she were trying to scale a cliff. I reached up to take her hand, but the insects stabbed my wrist and elbow, killing that plan.

Slowly, Lena emerged from the tree. Normally, the bark would have re-formed behind her, but not this time. Branches broke away with every movement, and the entire tree creaked, drawing nervous whispers from around us. Neither Guan Feng nor I budged.

Lena gasped for air and stopped, one leg and arm still trapped within the wood. Her eyes narrowed when she saw me. “Get those damned things off of him.”

My head sagged. “I love you, beautiful.”

“I know.”

“You have Bi Wei?” asked Harrison.

Lena wrenched her other arm free. A slender bronze-skinned hand clasped hers.

Metal wings vibrated against my wounds, and then they were gone, returning to their master.

Lena braced her other hand against the tree and pulled, like she was hauling Bi Wei out of a pit. The woman she dragged forth was naked, roughly Lena’s height, but emaciated. Her skin hugged her ribs and hipbones. Atrophied legs collapsed, and she clung to Lena’s arm to keep from falling.

“ Bi.” Tears spilled down Guan Feng’s cheeks.

Another woman stepped forward holding a heavy robe of deep maroon silk, trimmed in gold. Before she could reach them, Lena’s fingers sank back into the tree and pried loose a two-foot length of pale wood, which shifted into a long, curved dagger. She curled her arm around Bi Wei’s throat, placing the tip of her newly created weapon under her chin.

Guan Feng screamed. “Stop! Wei has done nothing to you!”

Harrison simply smiled. “You have no power here, dryad. My pets will strip the skin from your lover’s body, a millimeter at a time.”

Lena matched his smile. “You think you know me because you read an old book? That’s cute.” She shifted her stance, and a wooden tendril punched out of the dirt and circled his ankle.

He snarled and grabbed the root with his hands, trying to rip it loose. Bad idea. More roots moved like serpents, twining around his wrists. I could see smaller tendrils stabbing into his skin, poetic justice for what he had done to me.

“I’ve read Isaac’s reports,” he snarled. “Bi Wei is an innocent woman. You won’t kill her. But you know I won’t hesitate to end him.”

“You know what Isaac wrote about me. You don’t know me.” Lena’s words grew softer. “Isaac Vainio is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, but he makes mistakes. A surprising number, actually.”

“Thanks a lot.” To Harrison, I said, “What do you think Lena will be doing to you while your bugs kill me? I’ve watched this woman go toe-to-toe with an automaton and win. And believe me, you’ve pissed her off far more than that automaton ever did.”

Behind Harrison, the cat crouched, metal tail lashing through the dirt. I wasn’t the only one to call out a warning. Guan Feng and one of her friends shouted at Harrison to stop, but the cat was too quick. It bounded toward Lena and leaped for her face.

Lena’s toes curled into the roots as her left hand shot out to catch the cat by the throat. Lena grimaced, but kept her knife to Bi Wei’s throat while the cat dug steel claws into her wrist and tried to rake her arm. Lena stepped to the side, dragging her prisoner along with her, then swung the cat in an arc, smashing it against the oak tree like she was beating dirt from a rug.

She tossed the remains of the metal cat at Harrison’s feet. It looked like someone had run over a garbage disposal. Broken legs twitched, and with every movement, small gears and scraps of metal popped free. “Don’t do that again.”

Harrison snarled, and the insects on his body began to buzz. Two wendigos started toward Lena. She spun, keeping Bi Wei between herself and the closer of the wendigos. I lunged forward and stabbed my knife into the other’s thigh. It wouldn’t have worked on a full wendigo, but this one’s armor was weak. The blade slid through the cracks in the ice, into the flesh beneath. It backhanded me to the ground, then howled and clutched its leg, where the knife appeared to have taken root.

A cloud of insects rose from Harrison’s body, but as one, their bodies locked up and they fell into the dirt. The roots twined around Harrison’s limbs stopped moving. Lena’s forehead furrowed, but the roots no longer responded to her will.

Four students of Bi Sheng stood with their books open, whispering to whatever presences lived within those pages. Had I been able to see their magic, I knew I would have seen four ghosts suppressing both Harrison’s magic and Lena’s.

Harrison tore the roots from his limbs and started toward Lena. Bloody welts marked his forearms, and his pants were shredded.

Guan Feng jumped to stand between him and Lena. “Everyone stand back.”

Lena’s knife never wavered. They might be able to stop her from reshaping the wood, but I doubted they could prevent her from stabbing the blade through flesh.

My hands shook as I ripped the lifeless millipede from my throat, prying one segment free at a time. Blood made the metal slippery, and the damn thing had dug in pretty good, but I finally got it free. I flung it onto the ground, and Lena smashed it with her heel.

Lena kept her attention on Harrison. Bi Wei was breathing so fast I thought she might hyperventilate or pass out. She had one hand on Lena’s arm, but lacked the strength to pull the knife away from her neck. Her head moved in frightened twitches, like a rabbit trapped by wolves.

“Do you remember your name?” I asked. She stared blankly. I mentally kicked myself. Torture had apparently messed with my faculties. Of course she wouldn’t recognize twenty-first century English, and my knowledge of Mandarin was limited to a few simple phrases from a trip six years ago. “Ni jao…shen ma ming zao. No, wait. Ming zi?” Dammit, where were my books? I needed a universal translator.

“Isaac Vainio?”

The hairs on my arm stood straight up when she spoke my name. There was no recognition in her eyes, but for an instant, contempt edged her voice. Not only did something within her know me, it hated me. What the hell had Lena brought back? I reached out and touched her arm, and a dozen weapons jerked toward me.

I pulled away. That one touch had confirmed my hunch. The power flowing beneath Bi Wei’s skin was like the pages of a magically active book.

She spoke again, but I understood nothing. Whatever her friends had done, it had suppressed my ability to understand other tongues. Guan Feng answered in the same language.

If they had blacked out my magic, what had they done to Lena? “Are you all right?”

“It’s not pleasant,” she said tightly, “but I’ll survive.”

“What now, Porter?” asked one of the men in accented English. “Will you kill her and finish what Gutenberg began?”

“No.” Kill her? I wanted to talk to her. Lena had just restored a woman centuries old, one who had vanished into magic and somehow survived. I had a thousand questions. How had she held on to who she was? Had she been aware of the passage of time, able to observe the world? I wanted to ask about her magic, the students of Bi Sheng, her conflict with Gutenberg. I would have been utterly content to spend the next year learning from her.

Lena snorted.

“What?”

In a low voice, she said, “You’ve just been tortured, you’re surrounded by people who wouldn’t hesitate to kill you, and to top it off, you’re standing in front of a naked woman. If I’m not mistaken, all you can think about is the history lessons you could learn.”

I flushed, then gestured to the woman with the robe. She stepped forward, her every movement as slow and careful as a surgeon’s. Lena kept her knife in place while Bi Wei slipped her arms through the sleeves and hugged the robe shut.

“Isaac isn’t the only one who will pay for your choices today.” Harrison had regained some of his composure, but his face and neck were red with barely restrained rage. “Doctor Nidhi Shah lives at 189 Depot Street, yes? Apartment C, according to the Porters’ records.”

Lena went utterly still. “Sooner or later, one of the people you’ve crossed is going to catch up with you. You should pray very hard that it’s not me.”

The woman who had carried Bi Wei’s robe hissed in frustration. “Enough, all of you!”

Harrison whirled. “Have you forgotten what the Porters did to your ancestors, Crystal?”

Crystal stood like a statue. “Never.”

I would have been thrilled to see this kind of split within Harrison’s ranks under other circumstances, pretty much any circumstance that didn’t have Lena and me in the middle of that conflict.

Despite what Lena had said, I doubted she would kill Bi Wei. Lena was exceptionally protective of those she saw as victims, and Bi Wei had nothing to do with our current situation.

“Toss me the keys to the truck,” I said. Every second we stood here was another chance for the situation to explode. “I want my books back, too.”

A man tossed a set of keys on a Rubik’s Cube keychain into the dirt in front of me. “Your belongings are in the back seat.”

“Tell Bi Wei to cooperate, and we’ll let her go,” said Lena.

Guan Feng did so. At least, I assume she did. I hated being unable to understand what people were saying. August Harrison simply stared as if imagining the many inventive ways he could kill me.

Lena moved toward the trail, the knife never wavering. The circle parted to let her pass.

“Wait.” I shoved the keys into my pocket, then dug in the dirt at the base of the tree. The roots were dry and crumbled like cork. Lena had killed this tree in the process of restoring Bi Wei. One strong wind, and it would come toppling down. I just hoped it would wait until Lena and I were out of reach.

I brushed the dirt away from Bi Wei’s book. Roots passed through the cover and pages like giant worms. I grabbed the broken millipede from the ground and used the blade to saw through the roots, trying to cut the book loose without ripping or damaging anything.

“Please don’t,” Guan Feng called. Despite everything, the anguish in her words made me hesitate.

“I’m sorry.” I severed the last of the roots, jammed the millipede into the dirt, and pulled the book free. If she hadn’t hated me before, she certainly did now. But I needed time to study and better understand what we were dealing with.

Bi Wei was remarkably calm as we retreated to the parking lot, especially for someone who had been reborn only minutes before. Though who knew what she and Lena had shared during that process? If it had been anything like Lena’s restoration of me, Bi Wei would have had a nice little mind meld. She would know Lena was unlikely to harm her unless absolutely necessary.

When we reached the lot, I carefully set the book into the back seat of the truck. Harrison and the others stopped at the end of the trail. Pretty much every gun was pointed my way, and I was certain their magic was prepped to take us down if we gave them the slightest opening.

I pointed to an older woman with a black handgun. “Do me a favor and shoot out the tires on the rest of these cars. It’s nothing personal, but I really don’t want you all following us.”

It took a frustratingly long time, and we had to wait for her to reload twice, but eventually she put a bullet through the last tire. I opened the truck’s tailgate and kept an eye Harrison and the rest while Lena and Bi Wei climbed into the back.

“You promised you’d let her go,” Guan Feng said.

“And we will, just as soon as we get a mile down the road. Assuming nobody and nothing tries to follow us.” I climbed into the truck, started the engine, and opened the window to the back. “Ready?”

“Don’t drive too fast,” Lena said. “Potholes and knives don’t mix.”

I toyed with the idea of trying to take Bi Wei with us. It wouldn’t be the most honorable move, but she was dangerous. She might have the shape of a woman who disappeared five hundred years ago, but she carried something else inside. She had become the embodiment of everything I had learned to fear these past months. Of everything Gutenberg had feared since the founding of the Porters.

But she was also a refugee from a magical war that had been erased from our history. She hadn’t asked for any of this. She hadn’t known what she would bring back. More practically, I didn’t have a clue how we’d be able to hold her. Lena couldn’t keep a knife to her throat forever, and Bi Wei’s magic could flatten any spell of mine.

We pulled away at a leisurely pace. I split my attention between the road and the mirrors, watching for any of Harrison’s metal pets.

After five minutes, I stopped long enough for Lena and Bi Wei to get out. Lena walked Bi Wei to a birch tree at the side of the road. She twined the branches and roots around Bi Wei’s wrists and feet, and molded a wooden blindfold as well. Another branch held the knife to Bi Wei’s throat.

I slammed the gas pedal to the floor the instant Lena was inside. The rear tires spun out, raising a cloud of dirt as we tore down the road. I didn’t know what Bi Wei could do, but I didn’t expect Lena’s precautions to hold her for long.

I watched the rearview mirror, but nobody appeared to be following us. Not yet. But they would. And next time, they would have all of Bi Wei’s power to back them up.