Codex Born

19

The automaton was centuries old, charred and cracked from the unimaginable heat of Isaac’s battle. Fingers of carved walnut hung limp, hinged with pegs fitted so precisely they were invisible. The body and limbs were oak, taken from a tree that had stood for more than a hundred years before falling to the bite of the ax.

The jaw creaked open, shedding chips of black-and-gray carbon. “You’d be risking your life,” said Isaac Vainio.

He didn’t understand. How could he? He was human. Had been human, rather. Before he pulled his dying flesh into the body of a wood-and-metal monster, a golem built by one of the most powerful magicians in history, all to stop a madman.

I could feel the life slipping from the wood, like water leached away by too much sunlight. The automaton was dying, and Isaac with it. Had it been a tree, the leaves would be brown, and the branches would have snapped in the slightest wind.

Gutenberg had known. He understood my nature far better than Isaac. Better than Nidhi. Perhaps even better than me. I loved Isaac Vainio. Loved him as much as Nidhi, though in different ways and for different reasons. I couldn’t let him go.

My fingers tightened around the burnt limb. With my other hand, I pulled myself up to touch the carved, featureless face.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“I’m not sure.”

I reached for the memory of oak, and the feel of Isaac’s arms around my body, my mouth on his. He had tasted like coffee with not enough cream, just as I had doubtless tasted of waffles and strawberries, but neither one of us had been willing to break off that first frantic kiss.

My fingers sank into the automaton, and I felt my own life fighting to inhabit the dead wood. Cells long-since dried and broken struggled to heal, and then to grow as I forced myself deeper into the broken body of my lover.

And then we were one. The libriomancer and the dryad, joined in a way I had never known, not with Nidhi, nor with Frank.

Nidhi’s love had given me strength and power. Now Isaac’s love gave me the strength to use that power in a way I had never imagined.

If you ask Isaac when we first made love, he’ll say it was two days later, in the damp grass of his backyard. Which isn’t as romantic as you’d think, given the mosquito population here in the U.P. They didn’t bother me, but he kept squirming and slapping until I laughed and rolled us over, climbing on top of him and driving all other distractions from his mind.

But what we did beneath the cloudy sky that night was merely the completion of what we began in that dying wooden body.

“CALL GUTENBERG,” I said. “Tell him what he’s facing.”

“What is he facing?” asked Nidhi.

“Hell if I know.” The Ghost Army wouldn’t care about restoring Victor Harrison, which meant Jeneta should be safe. They cared only about their own return. “Bi Wei, when Deifilia restored your two companions, what did she do to their books and their readers?”

Her grief surged through me, confirming my guess. “How did you know?”

“We’re very clever. She destroyed them, didn’t she?”

“Chu Zao was the first to be brought back. No sooner had Deifilia drawn him forth than she used the insects to destroy the book. His reader was taken away to become another wendigo. What remained of Chu Zao…his body lives, but my friend is gone. I tried to stop Deifilia, and her insects almost killed me. By the time I awoke, she had done the same to another of us.”

“They’ve tried to possess Porters through the years, but even when it worked, they were trapped in a damaged body with an even more damaged mind. They tried to take you, but you fought back.”

“It appears I owe you thanks,” Bi Wei said. “Deifilia would have torn my own book to pulp if you hadn’t taken it, and I would be dead.”

“Wei, are the other books the same as your own? The same appearance, the same format and title?”

“The Yang/Soul/Story, yes.”

There was no equivalent English word, but I saw in her thoughts the untranslatable characters from the cover of her own book. The Yang/Soul/Story of Bi Wei, safeguarding her spiritual soul. “I have an idea, but I’ll need names.”

She saw what I had in mind, and gratitude flooded through our shared connection. In that instant, I knew the names of her fellow students as well as she did.

Raw fury followed a moment later, so sudden I cried out. Lena yanked me away, and Nidhi slammed the book shut. A part of me cringed to see such an old book handled so roughly, but it worked. My connection to Bi Wei weakened, though I could feel her horror and guilt as she realized what had happened.

The Army of Ghosts was still inside her. I hadn’t sensed them through our connection, but they had been listening from the shadows of her mind. “I need McKinley’s Beauty, and we’re about to have visitors.”

“No more magic,” Nidhi insisted. Lena moved to stand beside her, their shoulders touching. Jeff simply looked puzzled.

“Deifilia restored two more of the students of Bi Sheng. And then she destroyed their books. It ripped their minds and souls apart, leaving the bodies as vessels for the Army of Ghosts. She’s going to do the same to the rest.”

“The ghosts—the devourers—were deranged,” said Lena. “How is Deifilia controlling them?”

That made me pause. “I have no idea.”

“Call another libriomancer,” Nidhi insisted. “Let them do the spell.”

“They don’t know the books we need.” I could see the titles in my mind, but I lacked the words to explain them, even to a fellow libriomancer.

I touched the duct tape square on my shirt. “Toni, how much of this did you hear?”

“Enough.” Strange to feel her voice buzzing against my chest. “Gutenberg’s team is at the mine, but it will take time to work their way through the tunnels. The ghosts are already weakening their magic. Isaac, we’ve got incoming, and they’re playing dirty.”

“What’s going on?”

“Most of them are flying high and fast. Aimee says they took some of ’em out at the bridge, but the damn things didn’t even slow down. Looks like they’re heading your way.”

“Understood.” Where was the book? I had returned it to the reserves shelf, which had fallen when the dragon attacked.

“I’m going up to intercept them. Let’s see these fuckers try to ignore me.”

“Be careful.” There, beneath an overturned filing cabinet. The spine was ripped, and the pages were beginning to tear free. This needed professional repair. I couldn’t do anything but press the pages carefully back into place and hope for the best. As I finished gathering my things, fire bathed Smudge’s body. He crouched low, watching the sky. “I think we’re out of time.”

Jeff ripped a leg off of a table. “Get out of here. I’ll watch over Guan Feng and give you as much time as I can.”

Three metal falcons streaked into the library. Lena stepped past me, and her bokken whipped through the air to rip the wing off the first. Two more went after Jeff.

True falcons shouldn’t have been able to hover and dart about like hummingbirds. Within seconds, Jeff’s hands were bleeding where they had cut him with their knifelike beaks. Screams in the distance meant the rest of Deifilia’s forces were closing in fast.

I pulled out my shock-gun, dropped to one knee, and braced my arm against the shelves. My first shot missed, but my second sent a falcon into a tailspin. Jeff smashed it, then took out the third falcon on the backswing.

“Go,” said Jeff. “I’m gonna call in a few friends, see if we can’t teach you Porters how to fight.”

“Thank you.” I handed Nidhi my keys. These things would shred her rental car like tinfoil. “Please tell me you know how to drive a stick.”

Oily black smoke streaked the windshield over Smudge. He was keeping an eye—all eight of them, actually—on the metal mob chasing us down the road. He would have melted right through the dashboard by now if not for the trivet secured to the plastic.

We drove with the top down so Lena could protect us from aerial assaults. She sat in my lap, one knee in the seat. In her left hand, she swung her bokken at anything that came within range. With her right, she fired lightning bolts into the sky.

I did my best to ignore the thunderclaps going off two feet from my head and read. I couldn’t save the two books Deifilia had already destroyed, but if I could concentrate, I might be able to create backups of the rest.

From the moment I touched the pages, I felt the characters trying to reach into my head. The conflict of the title character Honour, who preferred to be called Beauty. Her brother-in-law’s fearful warnings about the woods. Her father’s shame as Beauty chose to give herself to the Beast to save his life. The one thing the characters shared was the need to escape, whether it was the hardship of their new lives in Blue Hill, the father’s guilt, or the Beast’s castle. And my mind would provide them that escape if I wasn’t careful.

I didn’t have time for careful. I grabbed another book and turned it diagonally, trying to pull it free without destroying both books in the process. Beauty was a hardcover, but the books I needed were larger, and if the binding completely failed, the book would fall apart in my hands. I slid the book out and tucked it behind the seat.

“Where are we going?” Nidhi asked.

“Water tower,” I said. “Toni’s team ought to be able to help us out, and the tower’s built on a hill, so it should be more defensible.”

Lena shifted her weight and smashed a beetle that had landed on the trunk.

“Watch it,” I protested.

Nidhi yanked the wheel, swerving around an overturned truck. A wendigo was clawing at the truck’s door, and I heard screams from inside. Nidhi slowed long enough for Lena to shoot both the wendigo and the truck. Hopefully the rubber tires had insulated the driver.

“Hold on.” Nidhi lurched over the curb and into a parking lot. We wove between cars, barely missing the cart corral in front of the grocery store.

“Where did you learn to drive?” Lena demanded as we zoomed around the back of the store and down the grassy hill beyond.

“Isaac’s always bragging about what this car can do,” she said tightly. “I wanted to see if he was exaggerating.”

I could feel the Triumph’s traction spells kicking in, fighting to cling to the wet grass and mud. Even as the magic won out and we climbed onto the road, the book distorted my perceptions, turning black steel into exhausted horses, their coats streaked with sweaty froth.

“Isaac?” Lena fired at another falcon, set her bokken down, and squeezed my shoulder. “Stay with us.”

There were too many books to create. The longer I held Beauty open, the stronger the voices grew. If the ghosts got hold of me now, I doubted I’d be able to resist them. I needed to end this.

I spread the book on my lap. Given the battering it had taken, the hardest part was overcoming my own revulsion at what I was about to do. I gripped half the pages in each hand, prayed for forgiveness from whoever might be listening, and finished cracking the book’s spine. I tugged the covers until the endpaper began to tear free, then plunged my hand back into the Beast’s library.

My vandalism allowed me to stretch the pages an extra three quarters of an inch. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to speed the process along. The crack of thunder faded. Nothing mattered but the next book.

“Isaac…” Lena grabbed my hand, then pointed up the road as we crossed the railroad tracks and saw the war waging in front of us.

“Oh, my God.”

The water tower had fallen onto the road. It looked like a giant jellyfish, the body partially crushed under its own weight, the metal tentacles bent and stiff. One of the legs had smashed a minivan, nearly cutting it in half. The water had flooded the parking lot of the restaurant on the opposite side of the road, pushing two cars into the front wall.

Toni Warwick stood uphill on the broken concrete foundation of the water tower. She appeared to be holding off a small swarm of bugs with a drinking straw and a yo-yo. A team of libriomancers flanked her, fighting a small herd of rusty metal beasts. Lawrence Hume held a bulky rifle of a design I didn’t recognize, while Whitney lay on the ground flinging pennies at their attackers. Even from here, I could see that her leg was broken.

One of her coins bounced off the head of a wolf, who slipped and rolled into the path of a charging moose.

“Unlucky pennies,” I guessed. The moose trampled the wolf, which didn’t get back up. “Nice.”

Nidhi pulled off the road and killed the engine. I scooped Smudge onto my shoulder, grabbed the books, and snatched the keys from the ignition. I hurried to the back and popped the trunk. The Triumph had better protective spells than any of us. I shoved the books inside and slammed the trunk.

Lena handed me the shock-gun. “How many were you able to get?”

“Ten, including Bi Wei’s.” Beauty had fallen apart when I tried to pull out the eleventh book. It wasn’t enough.

I counted five fallen beasts, but others were circling the three Porters, trying to get up the hill to surround them. In addition to the wolf and the moose, there were several deer, two dogs, what looked like a fox, and a handful of rats. Sparkles on the ground showed where Toni had taken out many of the bugs.

I stopped to shoot at a metal snake which was trying to circle around to flank them. My third shot took it down, but attracted the attention of its friends, and the metal mob that had pursued us from the library was closing in fast.

“I hope you have a plan, Vainio!” Toni shouted.

Lawrence used the confusion caused by our arrival to fire at another wolf. The metal body began to hum like a tuning fork, the sound rising in pitch until my eardrums threatened to rupture. Then the wolf simply blew apart. Shrapnel dented a deer, but it regained its balance and kept coming.

“I need a hand. ‘Eat me.’ End of chapter one.” I yanked Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland from my jacket and flung it toward Whitney. I gave Nidhi a boost up the hill and started to follow, but the moose had recovered from its collision with the wolf and was charging toward me.

“Mine.” Lena sprinted past, swords raised. Just before she collided with the moose, she jumped to the right and stabbed one of her swords into the joint where the front leg met the torso. The move took her off balance, but she turned her fall into a roll and bounced to her feet, gripping her remaining weapon in both hands and knocking a rusty dog aside.

The moose staggered. Sprigs of green sprouted from the shaft of the sword. It was the same trick she had used with the toothpick and the metal beetle back in my office. Her bokken grew through the moose, entangling and paralyzing the inner workings before it could reach me.

“Incoming,” Whitney yelled, pointing toward the swarm of birds and bugs flying up the road. She turned her attention to my book, reached inside, and yanked out a small glass box.

I scrambled up the hill to snatch it from her hand. Inside was a small cake. Currants spelled out the words “EAT ME.” I collapsed on the dirt, opened the box, and set both it and Smudge on the ground. “Time for lunch, buddy.”

A swarm of rats had cut Lena off from the rest of us. I readied my gun, but before I could aim, Lawrence shouted, “Watch the trees!”

A pair of wendigos bounded toward us. I rolled and hit one in the leg. Lawrence shot the other, causing the ice that armored its skin to shatter. I didn’t know what kind of weapon he was using or where he had gotten it, but next chance I got, I was definitely looking that sucker up in the Porter database.

On the road, Lena jumped onto the back of the dying moose and smashed a rat off of her leg. Another sank metal teeth through her shoe. She cried out, then kicked off the shoe and rat both. More rats climbed up the moose. I grabbed another book, hoping Whitney or Lawrence could control the rust magic better than I had.

I didn’t get the chance to find out. With crumbs of magic cake stuck to his mandibles, Smudge charged into the fray.

I had cared for that spider since high school, and he had saved my life more than once. He was more than a partner. He was family. And despite all we had been through, the primitive, reptilian part of my brain wanted only to get as far as I could from the flaming spider I had magically enlarged to the size of a station wagon.

Apparently magic rats felt the same way. They jumped off of the moose and backed away.

They weren’t fast enough. Smudge snatched the first one up without breaking stride. His mandibles punched through the metal body like an old-fashioned can opener, and then he was moving toward the next.

Exhaustion and triumph made me giddy. I pumped my fist in the air and whooped like a hockey fan at the bar during playoffs. Smudge grabbed a possum-looking creature and bit into it. Two rats tried to climb his leg, but his flames deepened from red to purple, and they fell back.

There was little question that Smudge remembered what these things had done to him back at the house. Nor was there any doubt in my mind that he was enjoying his payback.

I began firing into the second wave, trying to slow their approach. Once Smudge cleared most of the smaller creatures away from Lena, he charged toward the swarm Toni had been holding off. As he neared, fire rolled off his body and legs. Glowing bugs fell like rain.

Toni shouted and dropped to the ground. She slapped frantically at her dreadlocks, swearing up a storm. Smudge’s enthusiasm had burned through her yo-yo string as well.

“Easy, buddy!” I shouted. “She’s on our side!”

With everything I had seen today, the sight of a giant flaming spider slinking sheepishly back to the road barely warranted a second glance. Whatever guilt he felt didn’t last long. He skittered toward the railroad tracks and reared up on his back four legs to snatch an oversized batlike thing from the air. The rest of us took up positions around Nidhi.

“Whitney, get your Pratchett ready.” Toni jammed her straw through her belt and pulled out a portable fan, roughly the size of a small digital camera. “The rest of you, cover us.”

Lawrence and I shot at anything shiny that got too close, while Whitney switched books and started reading. Lena moved toward the trees to intercept another wendigo.

Whitney hobbled over to join Toni. Her face was white with pain, but she made it. She clutched Toni’s shoulder for support, then opened another book with her free hand. “Isaac, get your spider out of there.”

I switched my gun to my left hand and grabbed a laser pointer from another pocket. I had to shine the dot directly over Smudge’s face to get his attention, but once I did, he was all over it. I played the laser over a metal coyote, which Smudge happily trampled as he pursued the elusive red dot uphill.

“Man, you have the weirdest pet,” Toni said. The plastic blades of her fan whirred to life. “Brace yourselves!”

It was as if she had uncorked a portable hurricane. The wind blew insects and birds back, and even the larger creatures had to dig their claws into the pavement to hold on.

We were out of the wind’s direct path, but the negative pressure yanked my coat like a cape, the weight of my books threatening to drag me away. I pocketed my gun and grabbed the broken concrete foundation of the water tower. Lena stabbed her bokken into the ground and clutched it with one hand. Her other was locked around Nidhi’s wrist.

“How are we supposed to shoot these things if we can’t even stand?” I yelled.

“It’s a two-part plan. That was part one.” Toni and Whitney stood together in the eye of the storm, seemingly untouched. Whitney maneuvered her open book like a tray full of fine china, raising it above and slightly in front of the fan. Then she tilted the book forward.

Liquid spilled from the pages and sprayed forth like mist. Toni and Whitney turned together, moving to and fro like firefighters attacking a blaze.

“Welcome to part two,” Whitney crowed.

Whatever the stuff was, it hit the metal creatures like a blowtorch to an igloo. By the time Toni switched off the fan, the moose had fallen backward in a frothing, bubbling mass. The crumpled water tower had begun to dissolve as well. The pools of water in the parking lot bubbled and steamed like a Halloween cauldron.

Whitney closed her book, clipped it back onto her belt, and collapsed to the ground.

“What book was that, exactly?” Lawrence asked.

Whitney managed a grin. “Mort, by Terry Pratchett. That was pure scrumble. One of the most potent drinks in all of Discworld. You should try it. That shit makes the best tequila taste like distilled water. Now shut up and let me do something with this leg.”

If she had tasted the stuff and survived, then presumably it wouldn’t do to flesh what it had done to metal. I made my way down to the road, gun ready in case any stragglers had survived. “If you messed up my car with that crap, I…oh, no.”

I sprinted across the road. On the far side of the water tower, partly hidden by the wreckage, was the flattened remnant of an old SUV. The metal continued to dissolve, courtesy of Whitney’s aerosolized scrumble. Though the shattered windshield obscured the details, I recognized Loretta Trembath in the driver’s seat. She was a regular at the library, always coming in to e-mail her grandchildren.

I reached instinctively for a book from one of my front pockets, but it was too late for magic to make any difference. From the look of things, Mrs. Trembath had died instantly.

I made my way to the restaurant next. It had begun its life as a residential home back in the early 1900s. From a distance, it seemed to have escaped more or less unscathed. Not so the people inside.

The doorframe was splintered inward. Blood mixed with the water pooled on the floor. Metal claws had gouged deep lines in the walls.

I spotted three bodies in the dining area. I knew them all. Andy Marana fixed computers for the mine and sold racy pinup-style oil paintings on the side. I had gone to high school with Peg Niemi’s little sister. Joe Malki had just started up a landscaping business this summer.

“I’m sorry, Isaac,” Lena said quietly.

I moved toward the kitchen. “Is anyone there?”

The restaurant was silent. I found Steve Guckenberg in the back, along with a metal beast that looked like a housecat with six-inch blades for fur. I switched the shock-gun to setting six and melted a hole through the damned thing.

How many more bodies lay broken and dead throughout Copper River? No magic, at least none the Porters knew of, could truly restore the dead. The few recorded attempts to do so had ended badly. “August Harrison came here because of me.”

“This isn’t your fault,” Lena snapped. “If not you, then he would have gone after some other Porter. It would have happened anyway.”

“It happened here.” I knew this place, these people. Peg walked her hyperactive border collie past the library every morning, rain or shine. I always thought the crazy thing was going to yank her arm out of the socket. Joe had mowed my parents’ lawn after I went downstate for college.

I walked outside, stopping at the remains of the metal moose. It lay on its side, broken and pinned by the wooden sword that continued to grow through its body. Roots dug into broken concrete, and bright green leaves had begun to uncurl from new-formed branches.

The smallest bolt was thicker than my thumb. The cables inside were too big to flex. They might as well have been steel rods.

“More mining equipment?” Lena guessed.

I nodded. “The rear legs look like rock drills.” Normally, the drills could punch deep holes into solid rock, but they had been magically warped to fit the shape of the moose. A few kicks from those could easily have brought down the water tower.

Toni was walking down to join us. She held a slightly-charred wooden yo-yo in one hand, and was replacing the string. A corroded beetle was stuck to one side of the yo-yo. That must have been how she had held off the rest of the bugs, by whipping this one in a whirling pattern and imparting the same motion to its friends. “The moose charged the tower before we could stop it. Lawrence barely had time to jump free.”

Sweat sparkled on her forehead, and she was on the verge of hyperventilating. “No more magic,” I said, tugging the yo-yo from her hand. “You need a break.”

“We all do.” She coiled one of her dreadlocks around her hand and closed her eyes. “The other teams around town report that they’re in a little better shape. We’ve got three injured and one dead. Damn.” She blinked and stared at me. “Apparently a trio of shotgun-wielding werewolves in a pickup truck just ran down a wendigo. Your doing?”

“Jeff’s,” I said gratefully.

“Nice.”

“Remind them that the wendigos are victims,” Lena said. “Harrison did this against their will.”

“Will do.” Toni tucked her chin into her shoulder, relaying the reminder through her own hair. “Nicola, what’s happening with Bookmaster G?”

While Toni communed with Nicola, I turned to Lena and Nidhi. “How many ghosts do you think there are? How many broken minds trying to dig and claw their way back into the world?”

“Too many,” said Lena. “Thus the word ‘Army.’”

“They’ve found the tree,” Toni said before I could respond. Her next words turned relief to dread. “The mine was abandoned. There were a few ambushes and some partially-constructed metal nasties, but no wendigos, no resurrected cultists, and no dryad.”

“They knew we were coming.” I could use Bi Wei’s book to find them again, but not without Deifilia and the Ghost Army being aware.

Could she have gone after Jeneta after all? I grabbed my phone to call the camp, but before I could dial, Lena’s fingers clamped around my wrist.

“I know where they went,” she whispered, her face pale.

“How—” Understanding sank its fist into my gut. “Your tree.”

“She’s inside me. I can hear her.”

Nidhi took Lena’s elbow, and we lowered her carefully to the ground.

“What’s going on?” Toni asked.

Lena could barely stand. I had a shock-gun, a giant spider, and a collection of books that would probably cost me my sanity if I tried to use them at this point. There was no way we could take on Deifilia by ourselves, let alone the ghost wizards she had resurrected.

Gutenberg might have a chance if they struck fast enough, hitting Deifilia with everything they had.

“What about the graft from your tree?”

She glanced at Toni, then switched to Gujarati. “If I hadn’t taken that graft, I’d be comatose right now. You don’t understand. She’s inside me. I can’t separate myself.”

Meaning if Gutenberg dropped a magical nuke on Deifilia, it would kill Lena as well.

Lena grimaced. “She’s offering a trade. The books…”

I nodded to show I understood. The books for Lena’s life. I took out my car keys. “Toni, I need you to hide something for me.”

“Oh, hell, Isaac. What are you planning?”

I peeled the square of tape from my shirt. To Nidhi, I said, “If you don’t hear from us in thirty minutes, tell them.”

Nidhi nodded. Together, we helped Lena to her feet. Her body was trembling. She rested against me and whispered, “My oak is just the start. If you don’t give her those books, she’ll destroy Copper River and everyone in it.”