Codex Born

16

Even deep within the slumber of my oak, Nidhi’s scream cut through me like the freshly sharpened blade of an ax.

I leaped from my tree, one of six oaks planted in a row on the northern side of Nidhi’s small yard. My feet hadn’t even touched the grass when a man slammed into me like a rhino. We crashed together into the tree.

“Not smart.” I spat blood, twisted a branch from the tree, and clubbed my attacker in the side of the head.

In my hands, the branch grew into a short spear. Whatever he was—I suspected a vampire, given his strength and speed—he didn’t seem surprised. My toes gripped the roots for balance as I stepped toward him. My next strike knocked him into the yard.

He had destroyed my garden, uprooting every plant, from the grapevines to the tomatoes. My roses were torn to mulch. One way or another, this bastard was going down.

He came at me again, and the roots wrinkled like inchworms. His speed worked against him now. The roots looped up to catch his ankle and hardened like steel. The end result was a vampire face-first at my feet, screaming in pain as he tried to free his dislocated ankle.

I jammed my spear through his shoulder to pin him in place. “How many?”

He hissed and reached for my wrist, so I twisted hard.

“Three more,” he cried. “Inside the house.”

I didn’t want to kill him. Most vampires had no more choice or control over what they became than I did. Their condition rarely involved truly informed consent. I let the spear take root, which should have been enough to keep him from causing further trouble. But he was stronger than I realized. He snarled and reached behind him, crushing the wood with one hand. He pushed himself up off of the broken spear, and his ankle popped into place with a sound like cracking stone.

I kicked him in the chest, then pulled the broken spear free. When he came at me again, I sidestepped and swung two-handed, forming an edge even as the wood hummed through the air. The newly-made blade cut cleanly through his neck. I was inside the house before he had finished dissolving into ash.

I ran through the living room and vaulted the couch. Two figures were dragging Nidhi toward the front door.

I ran one through and used my weapon as a lever to fling him back. The second threw Nidhi against the wall and flew at me. Literally. She seized my neck and slammed me into the brick fireplace.

I dug my fingers into her hands. I might not be human, but I still needed oxygen, and my brain liked its blood flow. I managed to break her left thumb, but that only pissed her off.

And then I heard the chainsaw snarl to life in the backyard. Metal teeth bit into my oak, and I screamed. The saw felt like it was cutting through my bones, and while the oak was strong, every second chewed through bark and wood. I tried to strengthen the tree, but I needed to free myself first.

Instead of fighting the vampire’s hold, I jabbed my fingers at her eyes. Either the eyes were vulnerable, or she hadn’t been dead long enough to outgrow her human reflexes. She flinched back, one hand coming up to protect her face.

I punched her in the throat, grabbed her hair, and flung her over me and into the fireplace. If we had kept it burning, we could have had a proper fairy-tale ending. I settled for grabbing an iron poker and running her through.

I staggered to my feet. Ash stung my eyes, but I spotted Nidhi on the floor. She was still breathing. I started toward her, but the vampire was back on her feet, the poker protruding from her chest.

I felt the moment the oak’s strength failed, when the weight of the tree overwhelmed the wood that remained. Fibers snapped and popped, and the world swayed around me. The vampire punched me in the side, cracking two ribs, but I barely felt it. My senses were imprisoned by the slow fall of my tree.

“Run,” said Nidhi.

The oak slammed into the earth hard enough to shake the house. I screamed from pain and grief, forgetting vampires, forgetting even Nidhi as a part of me died.

Then I was ducking and falling back by reflex as the vampire attacked. I made it to the backyard, where her partner came at me with the chainsaw. Had I been stronger, I would have wrested it from his grip and cut him down, just as he had done to me. But the oak was my strength, and it lay on the ground, branches smashed through the fence. Leaves and broken sticks littered the yard.

I jumped onto the trunk and ran through the branches. My oak protected me one last time as the life leaked from the wood. The branches let me pass while snatching my pursuers like barbed wire.

Seconds later, I was alone.

JEFF AND NIDHI GOT to the library around nine in the morning. Jeff stopped in the doorway, wrinkled his nose, and announced, “I’ll be out by the car, where it doesn’t smell like I’ve fallen into a chemical toilet.”

Lena got up to greet Nidhi, leaving me to pore over a chart I had begun working on more than a month ago. They kept their reunion low-key. The library was mostly empty, save for Alex at the main desk, and Dustin LaJoie, who was checking out a stack of Curious George books for his two-year-old daughter.

Lena had created a second bokken from a tree down the street, and had reshaped them both into a spiral cane. It thumped against the floor as she and Nidhi walked over to join me at the public computer terminal.

“Do you have Smudge?” I asked.

Nidhi checked to make sure Alex wasn’t watching, then pulled a translucent yellow hamster ball from her purse.

“You put him in plastic?” I opened the lid, and Smudge darted up my arm. His feet dug into my sleeve as he crouched protectively on my shoulder. Jennifer would have yelled at me had she been here, but Alex thought the spider was, in his words, “freakishly awesome.”

“It’s the first thing I could find at the pet store,” Nidhi said. “If Harrison came after us, melted plastic was going to be the least of our worries.”

“Hey, buddy.” I pulled a jellybean from my candy pocket and handed it to him. Lena made puppy-dog eyes, so I tossed one to her as well.

“What’s this?” asked Nidhi.

“A chart of all recorded encounters with the devourers.” I traced the curve of the two-axis graph. The horizontal was labeled Year, while the vertical tracked the decreasing interval between incidents. “Gutenberg first touched these things in 1488, though he believes there are references going back at least a thousand years. For the next few centuries, there were only four recorded times when they reached through to touch our world.”

I pointed to different points along the graph. 1523. 1601. 1699. 1743. As I moved closer to the present, the frequency began to increase. Several were flagged and linked to names in red, beginning with Géza Csáth in 1919 and running through François Robin in 2008.

“Who were they?” asked Nidhi.

“Writers. Specifically, writers who committed suicide. When Gutenberg examined their published writing, he found traces of devourer magic. He believes they may have had minor magical abilities, enough to call to the devourers through their work. He locked them all as a precaution.” H. P. Lovecraft was noted in yellow with a question mark. He hadn’t killed himself, but having read his work, the man hadn’t been entirely right in the head, either.

A click of the mouse added a vertical dotted line. “This is the point where the interval is projected to become zero, and for all practical purposes, the devourers fully enter our world.”

A point both Gutenberg and I had estimated to be within the next ten years, tops.

I pointed to the start of the sixteenth century. “Correlation doesn’t prove cause, but the increase began right around the time Gutenberg founded the Porters. I thought it might be something we were doing. Libriomancy meant far more people could perform magic. Maybe that was weakening the barriers between magic and the real world. Or maybe magic simply called to them. They might see magic as anything from a challenge to a mating call for all we knew. But the timing also coincides with Gutenberg’s assault on the students of Bi Sheng.”

I had spent the past hour scribbling notes on colored flyers from last year’s library sale. I spread them over the table and pointed to the lime-green one. “Normally, when a libriomancer returns an object to a book, it dissolves into undifferentiated magical energy. If you tried to put Smudge back in his book—well, he’d just set it on fire. But if you found a way, he’d be gone. You could create another Smudge, but it wouldn’t know us. It wouldn’t have his memories or experiences.”

Because it helped me to think more clearly, I had sketched out the equations for converting magic into real-world matter and energy, and vice versa. We had never been able to fully work out the formulas, but we could do a rough approximation for certain basic feats of magic.

Because I was overtired, I had then illustrated the equations with a doodle of Smudge looking unhappy and setting things on fire.

“Bi Wei endured because of her connection to her book, a book which was read countless times through the centuries.” Those readings would have become ritualized, almost religious in nature. A prayer connecting Bi Wei and her readers. “There was no physical dissolution. Nobody cut off her head and stuffed her brain into the book. Instead, the book became the backbone for an unbroken chain of belief linking Bi Wei’s last moments in the temple to the oak tree where Lena brought her back.”

I pointed to another flyer. “What happens when that chain breaks?”

“You get a devourer?” Nidhi guessed.

“But if they lost that magical template of belief and they have no physical bodies or anchors in the real world, they should have dissolved into nothingness.” I had illustrated the devourers as a series of swirls that looked like badly-drawn tumbleweeds. “So what keeps the devourers alive?”

Nidhi pointed to the computer. “Could they be using the authors and libriomancers they possessed? Traveling from one mind to another?”

“There are too many gaps,” I said excitedly. “Only one incident in the sixteenth century? What happened to them for the next seventy-eight years?”

“You think they have another anchor,” said Lena.

I snatched another set of equations. “It’s only a theory. I don’t know if it’s more books or another kind of magical artifact, or something else we’ve never considered, but the simplest explanation is that something or someone is preserving them, just like the students of Bi Sheng did for Bi Wei.”

Shouts from outside made me jump. Smudge spun to face the front of the library, but he wasn’t burning. Lena snatched her cane and headed for the door.

I opted for the window. Outside, Jeff was holding the arms of a woman with bright green hair. “It’s all right,” I assured Alex.

“How exactly is this all right?” asked Nidhi. “If she knows where we are, we should either be fighting or running.”

“I’m not sure.” But Smudge wasn’t worried, and when I listened to Guan Feng arguing with Jeff, I didn’t hear a threat. Only fear and desperation. “Lena, would you please ask Jeff to bring her inside?”

Guan Feng sat down between us. Her foot tapped nervously against the floor. Jeff had taken the seat behind her, while Lena sat with me, not-so-subtly surrounding her.

All that remained was to get Alex to stop staring. I thought at first that he had noticed one of us doing something magical, but it wasn’t us he was watching. His interests were more natural than supernatural.

He gathered his courage and walked around the desk. When he saw me looking, he veered away and pretended to reshelf a book. One casual step at a time, he made his way toward Guan Feng. “Hey, are you okay? You look pretty shaken up.” The rest of us were effectively invisible. “I could get you a pop from the break room if you’d like, or maybe some tea?”

“Feng’s an English major at NMU,” I said. “She’s looking for summer work, and stopped by to ask about the library.”

Alex lit up. “You’d love working here. Do you need me to show you around?”

“She has a boyfriend,” I added.

Alex blushed so hard I couldn’t help but feel bad for him. “Oh. I mean, that’s all right. It’s still a great place to work.” He retreated far more hastily than he had approached, and busied himself sorting through the returned books.

“How did you find us?” I asked Guan Feng.

She gave the answer I had expected. “Bi Wei.”

“Does Harrison know?”

She shook her head, and her eyes turned glassy. I wasn’t happy about how easily she had tracked us down, but Smudge remained calm. If this was a trap, or if she had brought one of Harrison’s bugs, even unknowingly, he’d have set something on fire by now.

“What happened?” Nidhi asked gently.

“He put one of those things around her neck while she slept.” She had an accent, but spoke with the confidence of long practice. “Like he did with you. But it wasn’t enough. He built three metal snakes, only a few inches long. The millipede held its blade to her neck while they burrowed into the skin of her chest. He says they’re coiled around the aorta.”

“Why?” I whispered.

It was Lena who answered. “To control her.”

Tears spilled down Guan Feng’s cheeks. “For six years, ever since my father died, I’ve been her reader. I was only thirteen years old, one of the youngest to be given such an honor. To become a reader, let alone a reader for a direct descendant of Bi Sheng…It was my responsibility to sustain and protect her. And if we could find a way, to restore her.” She raised her chin. “I would rather see my ancestors sleep another five hundred years than let Harrison chain them as he did Bi Wei.”

“He sent his insects into the tree when I brought Wei back,” said Lena. “Why did he need more?”

“He lost his connection to them, and believes they were destroyed,” Guan Feng said furiously. “He doesn’t understand the truth. They became a part of her, a tumor spreading through her spirit.”

I leaned closer. “Does Bi Wei know?”

“Yes. She recognized the touch of the duì, the Ghost Army.”

“Wait, you know what they are?” For two months I had pored over old manuscripts and reports, trying to piece together fragments of information and rumors going back five centuries. Meanwhile, Guan Feng knew our enemy by name.

“Some are students of Bi Sheng who lost their way. Their books were destroyed, or their readers neglected their duties. Others…we don’t know. The ghosts existed before Bi Sheng’s time. Throughout the years, there have been attempts to control them and the power they command.”

She turned to the computer and attacked the keyboard with two fingers. A short time later, she opened up a translated Tang Dynasty poem by Dù Hàorán titled “Waiting for my Teacher to Return From the Land of Midday Dreams.” She scooted to the side so I could read.

“‘Dark clouds grow thin, and the song shall summon the dead to war.’” The poem described a sorcerer named Yuan Jiao and her battle against a man who had drowned in the river of magic. The man’s ghost had returned, far more powerful than before. He sought to drag others down. Yuan Jiao set forth into the Land of Midday Dreams, where she battled the ghost for seven days. But the more she fought, the stronger he became.

I thought about my hallucinations earlier this morning, how I had attacked Lena without recognizing her. Midday Dreams, indeed. I had come close to losing myself in Detroit, drowning in my own magic. That was when the devourer had struck.

“What will happen to Bi Wei?” I asked.

“She spent five hundred years adrift in the river of magic. That river flows through her now. It gives her tremendous power, but the first time she loses control, the ghosts will pull her down.” She stomped one foot on the floor. “August Harrison dismissed the dangers as ‘ignorant fears born of Oriental folklore and superstition.’ He and his dryad will turn our ancestors into vessels for the Army of Ghosts.”

Lena went rigid. “His dryad?”

“Wei pulled a single acorn from the book before Isaac destroyed it.” Guan Feng’s mouth tugged into a grim smile. “August was furious when Wei told him what you had done. He started swearing and talking about what he planned to do to punish you. But he had the acorn, and Bi Wei helped it to grow. The dryad was born hours after the attack on your archive, near St. Ignace. He named her Deifilia.”

Deifilia, meaning daughter of God. How egotistical could Harrison get?

Nidhi took Lena’s hand. “Do the others know what Harrison and the Army of Ghosts have done to Bi Wei?”

“They know, but they don’t believe. Some agree with Harrison.” Her nose wrinkled and her lips tightened, as if the words soured her mouth. “The Army of Ghosts is little more than a legend, but Gutenberg and the Porters are real. We remember what the Porters did to our ancestors. Every time we read their books, we relive their fear as they watched Gutenberg’s ambition grow. They see Bi Wei’s power. She lived for years as a woman, but spent five centuries as a creature of magic. Her rebirth blended both lives. The others believe Harrison has given us the chance to not only restore our ancestors, but to fight back against the Porters.”

“What does August get in return?” Nidhi asked.

“His son. He believes Victor can be restored as Bi Wei was.”

From the way Nidhi stared, she obviously hadn’t expected that answer any more than I had.

Jeff was the first to speak. “How’s he expect to pull that off? Victor didn’t have one of those old books.”

“He hacked our network.” I spoke slowly, giving myself a chance to piece together what we knew. “He has Victor’s notes and reports. Magic was Victor’s life.”

“Would that be enough to bring him back?” asked Lena.

“Not by any magic we understand,” said Guan Feng. “The books must be printed and bound using the same materials, the same techniques. The individual’s words are encased by Bi Sheng’s magic. Computer files would not work. We’ve explained this to him, but he refuses to accept that his son is gone.” She looked at the floor. “And…we allowed him to hold on to that hope.”

“If he thinks there’s a chance, he’ll keep helping you,” Nidhi said.

“Yes.”

“I don’t get it,” I said. “August and Victor hated each other.”

“The dynamics of abuse are complicated and ugly.” Nidhi paced behind us. “August Harrison did unforgivable things to his wife and son, but there were moments of kindness as well. He taught Victor how to work with machines, how to build and repair circuit boards. Victor described moments of pride, even warmth and love. I imagine those were the moments Victor clung to when he sent the cicada to his father. But by the time August arrived, he was too late to save his son. He might see that as his ultimate failure as a father.”

What would happen when he realized he couldn’t restore his son, that Bi Sheng’s magic couldn’t affect a collection of computer files any more than I could reach into…

“What?” asked Jeff.

I was already making a phone call. I browbeat the boy who answered into running out to make sure Jeneta was okay. If August Harrison had read my work, he knew Jeneta was his best option at turning electronic files into magic. I twitched impatiently until the boy confirmed Jeneta was out canoeing with the rest of the girls from her cabin.

“Great,” I said. “Tell her—” Dammit, her e-reader was destroyed, and I hadn’t had time to get her a new one. But she could work magic with her phone, too. “Tell her that poems can protect you from nightmares, and to make sure she has some ready.”

“You want me to give her a message about poetry?”

“It’s a librarian thing. She’ll understand.” I hung up and called Nicola Pallas next. “We need a Porter at Camp Aazhawigiizhigokwe. August might be going after Jeneta next.”

Pallas rarely wasted time on idle chitchat or pointless questions. “I can have a field agent there in twenty minutes. I believe Myron Worster is closest.”

“Thank you. If anything happens, have Myron get her out of there. Don’t try to fight.” I covered the mouthpiece and asked Guan Feng, “Are they still in St. Ignace?”

“We left the fort as soon as you destroyed the dryad’s book. I snuck away after we stopped for the night. I don’t know where Harrison meant to take Deifilia.”

I relayed that to Pallas, and promised to fill her in on the rest when she and Gutenberg arrived.

Guan Feng was twisting her hands into her pants. “I’ll tell you anything you want, but please give me back Bi Wei’s book. She struggles to hold on. Let me help her.”

“We will.” I rummaged through my own books. “Has Harrison been creating more wendigos?”

“Yes. He took two people from the fort yesterday, and talked of collecting others.”

“He killed a Porter,” I said. “He knows Gutenberg will be coming in force.” I donned my jacket and pulled another shock-gun from Time Kings. I shouldn’t have been doing magic so soon after ripping holes in Nymphs of Neptune, but sometimes the universe didn’t wait around for you to rest up. I knew the gun would take a wendigo down or cook one of his metal bugs. I was more worried about how to counter Bi Wei’s power.

The smell of burning dust rose from my shoulder. Smudge was watching the door, and waves of orange rippled over his thorax, dangerously close to my hair.

Nidhi saw it too. “Feng, is there any way you could have been followed?”

Comprehension and fear widened Guan Feng’s eyes, and she jumped to her feet. “I was careful. I didn’t tell anyone where I was going. I swear on my father’s grave.”

“He probably forced Bi Wei to tell him where you were.” I shoved the gun into my pocket, pulled on my jacket, and grabbed the rest of my books. “It’s all right. He would have found us anyway. I’m a little surprised the destruction of Nymphs of Neptune didn’t attract his swarm, but it sounds like he was busy practicing horticulture.”

Lena untwisted her cane into two sharpened swords and strode toward the door.

“How many?”

“Only one. But you might want to make sure you’ve got a change of underwear before you see this thing.”

Alex came around the desk to intercept me. “Isaac, tell your girlfriend she can’t bring weapons into holy-shit-your-spider’s-on-fire!”

I clapped him on the shoulder. “Alex, this would be a very good time for you to go on break. Somewhere else.”

Jeff had joined Lena by the door. Neither one of them moved. Not a good sign.

The scream of tearing metal filled the street, followed by silence. I shoved past Alex toward the back and hurried to see what we were up against.

“All right,” I whispered. “I admit it. I’m impressed.”

I had been expecting to see Harrison, Bi Wei, and the dryad at a minimum, along with his insects. Possibly wendigos as well, depending on whether or not he was ready to announce his presence to the world.

I hadn’t expected a six-legged dragon made of old mining and construction equipment.

The thing was roughly the size of a bus. The yellow legs looked like they had come from mismatched backhoes. The mouth was a pair of toothed bulldozer blades. Heavy steel wings folded over the body to form an additional layer of armor.

The tail was perhaps the most terrifying. Imagine Paul Bunyan’s chainsaw. Disengage the chain and make it prehensile, then start whipping it through the streets of Copper River. As I watched, it peeled the roof from a parked car and gouged brick from the building beyond.

“Go on break,” whispered Alex. “Right.”

“I promise I’ll explain later.” Not that it would matter. If this thing didn’t kill us all, the Porters would be by to erase Alex’s memories, along with everyone else in town. So far, people were keeping off the street, but I saw faces pressed against windows, and at least two phones filming the carnage.

A gun went off from across the road, but the dragon didn’t appear to notice. Standing in the doorway of the barbershop, Lizzie Pascoe raised her hunting rifle to her shoulder and squeezed off another shot.

The dragon was more interested in the library. Thick steel cables flexed and tightened within its body as it charged.

The entire building shook, and a good chunk of the front wall crumbled away. I yanked out my shock-gun, switched it to maximum, and sent lightning crackling into the dragon’s mouth. The attack left a glowing orange patch of metal the size of a dinner plate, but the dragon didn’t even slow down. The tail swiped through the wall, destroying windows, books, and the Back-to-School book display I had spent two hours putting together. Books and debris battered us all, and the shock-gun fell from my hand.

Lena hauled me toward the back of the library. Once there, I snatched The Complete Short Stories of H. G. Wells from my jacket and turned to “The New Accelerator.” I had been meaning to try this story for a while.

I struggled to focus on the words as enormous jaws ripped away part of the roof like it was made of cardboard. I kept remembering the ruins of the MSU library, reduced to a heap of crumbled brick and twisted metal. I was not going to let Harrison’s latest pet do that to my library. I reached into the story and pulled out a small, green phial of thick liquid.

“If Bi Wei and the others are here, they’ll be able to counter any magic you use,” Guan Feng warned.

“Sure,” I said. “If they’re fast enough.”

I transferred Smudge to the drinking fountain where he’d be less likely to set anything alight, then downed the potion and closed my eyes while I waited for the magic to take effect.

The sounds of battle slowed, then died completely. I opened my eyes again and strode carefully past my seemingly-motionless companions, releasing the phial over the trash can on my way out. It hovered in the air, its downward motion invisible to my hyperaccelerated eye.

Beneath the anger and, if I were honest, the overwhelming terror, a part of me was looking forward to this. It was the same part that cheered for every David-and-Goliath tale of underdogs triumphing over impossible odds and unbeatable foes.

It was time to slay a dragon.