Libriomancer

Chapter 21

For roughly one and a quarter seconds, the automaton ceased to exist. I was nothing but magic and light. There was no sense of movement as more than two hundred thousand miles rushed past, and then I was tumbling out of control toward a pockmarked gray desert.

I fell for close to a minute before slamming face-first into the moon. Fine dust exploded outward from the impact. Despite the lessened gravity, my mass was unchanged, and I bounced a good thirty feet into the air.

My arms whirled like windmills. I landed at an angle, my feet skidding through the dust. I fell again, and when I finally slid to a halt, I was on my back staring up at the Earth. Darkness shrouded half the planet; the other half was blue and white and perfect.

I sat up and scooped a handful of regolith. It trickled through my wooden fingers like sand, only grittier. The hills and craters stretching out around me banished all thought of Charles Hubert, of the battle far overhead in Detroit, of the automatons who would no doubt be coming after me. I was on the moon!

I had aimed for Mare Insularum, safely within the sunlit side of the moon, but I had no idea how close I had come.

I jumped into the air, marveling at the slight but visible curve of the horizon. My feet sank into the grit, and I jumped again, turning to look at the sun. If I had hit my target, Kepler Crater should be somewhere west of here.

I shook with what could have been laughter, had there been air to carry the sound. I had dreamed of this since I was a child watching clips of Armstrong’s historic first steps during the Apollo 11 mission.

Could automatons travel to other planets as well? Depending on where Mars was in its orbit, it would take anywhere from five to twenty minutes to reach the surface traveling at the speed of light. It might require multiple jumps, though. I had come in high when I arrived at the moon, and any errors would be magnified on a longer journey. But it should be possible.

Maybe there was a way to cheat. Automatons traveled as light. What if I used a telescope to find my target, to pinpoint exactly where I wanted to go?

I was like a child who had discovered the way to Neverland. I wanted to clap and laugh and run and explore. This was true magic. This was wonder and awe and exploration. Had any Porter traveled like this before? We could go anywhere.

The possibilities were endless. I was in a position to revolutionize our understanding of the universe. We could explore the entire solar system and beyond. I turned toward the sun. How would magic fare against the power of the sun’s corona?

Gutenberg must have known what his automatons could do. Was this another aspect of magic he had hidden from us? He could have sent his automatons anywhere. NASA spent billions to send their rovers to Mars. An automaton could travel there and back within an hour.

This was a sin greater even than what he had done to Charles Hubert. To have access to such knowledge, and to choose not to use or share that access…

Light flickered to my left, like lightning robbed of its thunder. Four automatons popped into existence a short distance overhead and began to fall.

Right. Euphoria faded slightly as I remembered why I had fled to this place. I dug through the dirt until I found a rock the size of a human skull. I hurled it at the nearest automaton, hitting it in midair and sending it into a backspin.

Welcome to the moon! I crowed silently. Let’s see how your five-hundred-year-old minds cope with one-sixth gravity.

I skipped toward them, taking great bounding steps. Before, I had been the clumsy one. Now the others stumbled as they tried to adjust to this new environment. I would have smiled, if my hinged jaw had allowed it. I landed hard, bending my knees to absorb my momentum and sliding into the closest automaton. It reached for my head, but I crouched lower, gripping it by the waist and hurling it skyward.

I wasn’t strong enough to toss it into orbit, but judging by the arc of ascent, it wouldn’t come back down for a good half mile or so.

Another automaton charged me. I dug my feet into the ground and braced myself as it slammed a wooden fist into my side. I skidded backward, but it was the other automaton that lost its footing, spinning in a circle from the power of its own attack. I seized it by the head and twirled, swinging it like a club against the next of its fellows.

Unfortunately, my makeshift weapon was already adapting. Hinged fingers tightened around my wrists, twisting hard enough to strain my joints. I raised it overhead and slammed it to the ground, but it refused to let go. Another automaton closed in, hands outstretched. I was still outnumbered, and once they got their hands on me, the moon’s weaker gravity wouldn’t stop them from ripping me apart piece by piece.

The automaton’s fingers dug through the metal blocks on my wrist, tearing several of them free. A strip of my wrist went numb as that spell died. I allowed myself to fall backward, raising both feet to my chest. The other automaton followed me down, and I kicked it in the neck with all of my strength. The automaton snapped away, spinning like a bicycle tire.

I fled, stalling as long as I could, trying to absorb every detail of the experience: the gentle pull of gravity; the way the dust dropped in a vacuum, every speck falling like a lead weight; the Earth hanging overhead, so large it gave the impression it could come crashing down on us at any moment. I scooped up another rock and held it as if it were more precious than gold.

They spread out to surround me. Two bounced through the air, while the third kept to the ground, looking like a slow-motion jogger. Interesting… different automatons adapted differently, suggesting they retained at least a little individuality and independence within their wood-and-metal shells. The fourth flickered into view to my left.

Ready for another ride?

How much time had passed since I arrived? Five minutes, maybe? It would never be enough. I stared at the Earth, mentally reorienting myself so that I was no longer looking up, but down. That was an awfully long way to fall.

The nice thing about this body was that I appeared to be incapable of experiencing vertigo. Fear, on the other hand, I could feel just fine.

I studied the Pacific Ocean, still shining in the sunlight. Another automaton flew at me. I jumped away, doing my best to estimate distances and calculate acceleration. I had to guess at both. The radius of the Earth was roughly 6400 kilometers. Using that as my guide, I picked a spot roughly 7000 kilometers up, activated the automaton’s magic, and disappeared.

Earth’s gravity began to pull me home from the moment I materialized. There was no air here, which meant I had no way to control my fall, and nothing to slow my acceleration.

For the first time, I noticed a significant design flaw in Gutenberg’s automatons: there was no way to close my eyes. I tried to lose myself in math instead. This high up, the pull of gravity would be fractionally less than 9.8 meters per second squared. Maybe eighty percent of normal?

The other automatons flickered into view around me, but I fell right past them. They vanished and reappeared, trying to get ahead of me, but each time they lost momentum.

I used my own magic to travel to a point just above them, shedding velocity in a brilliant flare of light. We weren’t quite close enough to touch each other. Light-speed travel didn’t allow for precision. One appeared directly below me, but I plowed through it like a locomotive, leaving it pinwheeling overhead.

After that, we simply fell together. For the moment, they seemed content to follow. Nothing could flee forever.

This body lacked the inner sense of balance and acceleration that would have allowed me to gauge our speed or how long we fell. Earth grew noticeably larger, and continued to expand below us. Given time and a calculator, I might have been able to estimate our height based on the apparent size of the planet, but that was beyond my ability to do in my head.

My thoughts began to drift. What would the Porters tell my parents? They couldn’t exactly head out west, knock on the door, and say, “We regret to inform you that your son was stabbed by a dryad, then lost his body when he entered a clockwork golem.”

They should make pamphlets. How to cope with the loss of a loved one: A guide to selective magical amnesia. I could have used some instructions back in college, for that matter. How to make your girlfriend believe you’re really not cheating on her, and you’re just a member of a secret magical organization called Die Zwelf Porten?re, founded by a guy who supposedly died in 1468.

Die Zwelf Porten?re. The Twelve Doorkeepers. Books were a doorway to magic, and the automatons were living books. I had passed through that doorway. Surely there was a way to pass back, to re-create my physical body…

Doorkeepers. Guardians.

I thought back to my first encounter with Hubert, in Detroit. Whatever had come after me in that book had felt like a living mind. Not a character, not a spell, but another presence, desperate and starving.

What if Hubert hadn’t sent that thing through the book? What if it had already been there, living in magic itself? Locked away. What had Hubert said? Everything comes down to locking the doors. Creating prisons.

It made sense. That was why Pallas had wanted to keep me under guard. I had reached too deep into magic, and she was afraid of what I might have brought back.

Turbulence jolted me back to the present. At this speed, even the thinnest air at the very edge of Earth’s atmosphere battered me harder than any automaton. I spread my arms and legs, tilting my hands like rudders to spin myself toward the closest automaton. The air below grew hotter as I flew closer.

It reached out to grab me, but this time I welcomed the attack. I wrapped the other automaton in a bear hug, wrenching us both around so it was beneath me. “Ever wonder why meteorites burn up in the atmosphere? Welcome to your first and last lesson in twenty-first-century physics.”

By now, we should have been traveling at many times the speed of sound. Our bodies compressed the air, superheating the gases below us until they reached temperatures hot enough to vaporize rock… or melt metal. Most meteorites burned up within seconds. My timing would have to be perfect.

I did my best to stay atop the other automaton, using it as my own personal heat shield. The metal skin on my exposed arms began to melt. The air around us turned to flame. I concentrated on the other automaton’s magic, watching spells snap and melt away. The wooden body began to crumble as its protections vanished. I could feel my own magic struggling to hold me together.

“Yeah, it’s a short lesson.” Praying this worked, I concentrated on the ground below and shouted, “Dixitque Deus fiat lux et facta est lux!”

I imagine I looked a bit like the Human Torch as I materialized above the parking lot, my arms blackened, my body covered in flame. I dropped a good forty feet, smashing through a Hummer that was too slow to drive out of the way.

My hands were useless lumps of coal, held together only by magic. The air rippled from the heat rising off my body. But I was alive, more or less. I rolled off the crumpled remains of the truck and climbed to my feet. The winged vampire who had been guarding the roof swooped toward me, then apparently thought better of it.

I strode through the open garage door. Hubert stared at my glowing form. “What did you do?”

“Research.” I could still bend my left arm at the elbow. My right arm was dead from the shoulder. Blobs of molten metal streaked the charred wood.

Hubert backed away, hands shaking as he clutched his silver cross like a shield.

Time in this body had acclimated me to its senses. I could see Hubert’s possession, the other minds tumbling and fighting for control like some sort of magical spin cycle. What remained of Charles Hubert was tattered, shredded almost to nothingness.

I could see something else, too: a darker thread of consciousness woven through those invading minds, seeping into Hubert from elsewhere. “End this, Charles. Let me-”

“Let you help me?” He sounded weary. “You and I both know we’re past that.” He raised his cross to his forehead. Behind him, Lena lifted a black revolver.

I rapped my left hand against my metal-clad chest. Chunks of charred wood fell away from my fingers. “You can’t kill me with that.”

Lena pressed the barrel of the gun beneath her chin.

“Oh.”

A true sorcerer could have manipulated the gunpowder in the bullets, transforming it into something inert. I needed my books, and a way to pause time or freeze Lena in place before she pulled the trigger.

“Show me how you claimed that body for your own, and I will give Lena back to you.”

Give him and the darkness that infested him the ability to take a new form, one which would be all but unstoppable? “This isn’t your fault,” I said softly. “You didn’t know what was out there.”

Hubert jabbed the cross at Lena. “I will kill her.”

I looked down at myself. I could try to drain the magic from the cross, but that would take too long. I couldn’t risk Lena pulling that trigger.

“And the delusions of their magic art were put down,” I whispered, finding the corresponding text on my body that shielded me from hostile magic. Two years ago I had performed libriomancy without a book, channeling the magic of War of the Worlds through myself to destroy the zombies that would have slaughtered me. Now I was the book. I concentrated on that single line of text, the spell which shielded me from outside magic, and flung it around Lena and Smudge.

Metal blocks fell away from my body and clinked on the floor. I hadn’t counted on that. Having extended that spell to others, I had lost its protection for myself… but it did what I had hoped. Slowly, Lena lowered her weapon.

Deranged and dying, Hubert was still a genius. He was several geniuses, in fact, if you included the various characters in his head. He looked from Lena to me, and his face twisted into a snarl as he put the pieces together. He pointed the cross toward me, and I felt its magic take hold of my mind and body. “Kill her.”

To my horror, I moved to obey. Lena jumped to the side and fired the gun. Hubert fell, blood dripping from his arm. The silver cross clattered away, but didn’t release me from his final command. I swung at Lena with my remaining arm.

She rolled out of the way, then jumped over one of the open repair bays. She picked up Excalibur from the floor and lunged at me. The blade chipped deep into my right arm. The blackened wood cracked, and the lower part of my arm fell away.

“I’m sorry, Isaac.”

I swung again, then jumped forward, using the weight of my body to knock her off-balance. She stumbled, and I kicked at her knee. She twisted to avoid the worst of the blow, but my foot caught her thigh, and she fell.

I felt Hubert’s will guiding mine, manipulating my thoughts… and then the strings snapped. I froze, my leg raised to stomp Lena’s chest. Slowly, I lowered my foot and turned around.

Hubert screamed. Standing atop the silver cross was Smudge, doing what could best be described as an eight-legged jig. White-hot flames danced over his body.

I straightened. “You should not have pissed off the fire-spider.”

A ruby fell free and rolled across the floor as the cross softened beneath Smudge’s onslaught. Hubert crawled toward it on hands and knees, his shoulder leaking blood. He snatched up the ruby, then reached for the cross.

Lena and I both shouted at him to stop, but he ignored us. His hand closed around softened metal, and I heard the sizzle of burning flesh. Smudge skittered back, his work done. When Hubert lifted the cross, it sagged and melted around his hand.

The winged vampire had entered through the garage door. Fangs bared, he clutched his rifle with both hands, looking from Lena to me to Hubert.

Tears poured down Hubert’s face. His hand shook violently. One bar of the cross broke free and fell to the ground. “Why?” he demanded. “Why do you protect them?”

I glanced at the vampire, who tossed the gun to the floor and bolted away. “They’re what we made them. Our magic. Our belief. Our books.”

Hubert’s sobs changed to laughter. He looked up, and his eyes literally shone. “You can’t stop us,” he mumbled.

I studied the pattern of magic, trying to discern who or what was speaking. Charles Hubert was all but gone, drowned in the whirling energies trapped in his body. They were consuming him, burning his life from the inside.

Burning… I started toward him as I realized what was happening. “Charles, don’t!”

I was too late. The light in his eyes spread, destroying him just as he had destroyed his vampire slaves. One by one I watched the other minds die, until only one remained. Eyes of flame stared into mine. I had touched that presence once before, and it terrified me. The hatred was just as powerful as the last time, but now it was personal. I felt it studying me. Remembering me.

And then it, too, was devoured, and nothing remained of Charles Hubert.