Libriomancer

Chapter 12

Neither of us spoke much after that. Not that I could blame Lena for her silence. Thanks to me, her lover was still trapped underground.

I had planned it all out. The love magnet, the extra weapons to hand over, convincing anyone watching that I had been disarmed…

Smudge had known. He had tried to warn me, but I was convinced I knew what I was doing. That I was smarter than the bloodsuckers in their nest, smarter than the killer. And because of that arrogance, the killer had used me to infiltrate the nest and destroy our one potential lead.

At Mackinac Island two years ago, I had at least managed to stop my enemies before almost destroying myself. This time, all I had accomplished was to help a murderer. If Lena hadn’t been there and given me time to retrieve that detonator, I’d probably be dead by now.

“I should have called Pallas,” I said quietly. “Asked her to send a real field agent to question the vampires.”

“You could call her now,” Lena suggested.

I shook my head. Having helped to eliminate the one person who might have led us to Ray Walker’s murderer, I could think of only one other option, and there was no way Pallas would sign off on it.

I closed my eyes, remembering Shah’s expression as we were dragged away. Shah had the best poker face of anyone I knew, but she had been trapped down there for days, surrounded by creatures who considered her little more than livestock. She hadn’t been able to hide her despair.

“It doesn’t make sense. Gutenberg knows the dangers of possession better than anyone.” Gutenberg had written the laws of libriomancy. But Chesa had been enslaved by libriomancy, and who else could command Gutenberg’s automatons? Ponce de Leon was powerful, but he was no libriomancer. Nicola Pallas used bardic magic. Deb DeGeorge’s power was fading, and she had shown no symptoms of possession. I mentally reviewed the other libriomancers I knew, but not one of them was strong enough to challenge Gutenberg.

“Power makes people believe they’re invulnerable,” said Lena.

“But why now, after so many lifetimes of practicing magic? And why didn’t anyone notice the signs?” I sagged back in the seat.

“Maybe someone did. Maybe they pointed it out to him, and he brushed their concerns aside until it was too late.” Her words were pointed, and she still didn’t look at me.

“I’m all right,” I said. For the moment, anyway. What I was planning could change that all too easily.

Within two more miles, we had traded the busy streets for an old neighborhood that felt like a ghost town. Abandoned houses watched over the road through empty, jagged-edged windows. Up ahead, a maple tree had fallen through the roof of a two-story house with faded siding. Weeds and shrubs were well on their way to reclaiming driveways and sidewalks.

“What is this place?” I asked.

She pointed to a large brick complex up ahead. The closest building was twice as long as a football field. A broken sign over the entrance read:- motive Plant of Detroit. “This is one of the largest abandoned factory complexes in the country. It was shut down decades ago. The city wants to bulldoze the whole place, but attorneys from both sides are still duking it out in the courts.”

The car lurched drunkenly as we passed beneath the old sign. The road looked like it had been bombed back to the Stone Age. Lena downshifted and did her best to avoid the worst of the gaping cracks and potholes.

The whole place had a post-apocalyptic feel. Graffiti covered the walls of the main plant and the various connected buildings. I spotted everything from simple gang tags to a full mural showing a stylized George Washington gunning down a field of robots, which was actually pretty awesome.

We passed what might have once been a warehouse, but was now little more than a blackened patch of cement surrounded by weeds. A few metal support beams jutted from the ground at the edges.

Weeds brushed the underside of the car as Lena pulled into a crumbled blacktop parking lot. I retrieved Smudge and climbed out. The movement reawakened the throbbing pain in my neck and head.

I adjusted the familiar weight of my armor-laden jacket, then grabbed the paper bag full of books out of the back of the car. The air here smelled like dandelions, clover, and urine. I strode past the nearest building. The outer wall was long gone, and the pillars within the three-story structure made it feel like a parking garage.

An old, wooden boat with a cracked hull and peeling paint had been dragged inside. It looked like someone had dumped it here, where it had been repurposed into a makeshift shelter.

“This place was the cutting edge of modern technology during World War II, rolling out bombers and other military hardware,” said Lena.

Glass, wood, and rubble crunched under my feet. We cut through the corner of the building and emerged into a courtyard of sorts. Brick walls rose up on two sides. Little grew here, the ground being smothered in a layer of debris and red bricks. Green vines climbed the far wall, nearly reaching the top of the three-story building.

I brushed off a broken slab of cement and sat carefully on the edge, then turned Smudge loose to hunt. This place was pretty much an all-you-can-eat buffet for a creature who lived on insects. He was relatively cool to the touch, which was reassuring.

I pulled a book from my jacket and used it to create a gold-plated handgun.

“What are you doing?”

I gripped the gun with both hands, sighted in on a patch of bare earth, and pulled the trigger twice. Dirt and pebbles sprayed the air, and Smudge flared into a tiny torch. He settled down quickly, though not before giving me a nasty eight-eyed glare.

“Signaling to anyone here that this is a good time to make themselves scarce.” I set down the gun and grabbed the first book from the paper bag. This was an older fantasy novel by Fred Saberhagen, and included a magical sword with the power to kill anyone, anywhere in the world.

“You haven’t told me what you’re doing,” Lena said.

I read the first few pages, searching for the tingle of magic. I felt nothing but the unpleasant jolt of the lock. “A locked book is magically useless to anyone except maybe Gutenberg himself, but not even he should be able to use its power. Not unless he first rips away that lock.”

I set the Saberhagen aside and picked up the next book, Mira Grant’s Feed. “Magic 101.” I skimmed the opening scene. “Libriomancy works because we can create identical copies of a text. That generates a kind of magical resonance between books. Libriomancers essentially reach into every copy of a book at once in order to access the cumulative belief of readers.”

Feed was locked as well, thankfully. I wasn’t up for fighting a worldwide zombie epidemic this week. I set it aside and reached for a Soviet-era thriller called Rabid, by C. H. Shaffer, in which a Russian scientist develops a new, weaponized version of the rabies virus.

I hadn’t read this one, but as I ran my fingers down the opening pages, magic sparked through my bones, making me yelp. I tried again, pressing harder until my fingers pierced the paper.

I could feel the tattered remains of the lock, but it didn’t stop me from accessing the book’s magic. Block-printed Latin text swirled beneath my skin. I had never been able to read the text of a magical lock before. Excitement pushed everything else aside as I concentrated on the words. “Et magicae artis adpositi erant derisus et sapientiae gloriae correptio cum contumelia.”

“Which means?” Lena asked impatiently.

“‘And the delusions of their magic art were put down, and their boasting of wisdom was reproachfully rebuked.’ Gutenberg used the Bible to lock this book.”

I pressed deeper. It was like reaching through a broken window. I could touch the book’s magic, but the lock jabbed and sliced my flesh as I did. I slowly withdrew my fingers. My skin was undamaged, but my joints felt cold and stiff.

I turned the book over to read the summary. The heroine was a beautiful doctor working for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She was the first to diagnose the new form of rabies, making her a target for Russian spies. I skimmed the back, then flipped through the final chapter, searching for any mention of a vaccine or cure. “Nothing,” I whispered. “They burn down the Russian lab and irradiate the last samples. CIA guy gets shot, but it’s just a flesh wound. Meaning this book could be used to create a highly contagious and deadly virus, one with no known cure.”

“Can you lock it again?”

Now that I had seen how Gutenberg did it… I shook my head. “I’d need more time to study, and even if I did, what’s to stop him from ripping open the rest?” I wiped my hands on my jeans. “But I can use this book to find him.”

Lena sat down beside me, resting her twin bokken on her thighs. “This is what Nidhi tried to warn you against, isn’t it? What will it do to you?”

“I have no idea. I’ve never done it before.” I held up Rabid. “Imagine magic as a frozen lake, one which coexists with the world around us. The book is the auger that helps us drill through the surface, and that hole gives definition to the energy beneath.”

“Magic as ice fishing. That’s different.”

“Every copy of this book chips away at the same hole, including the one our killer has been working with.”

“You can spy on him through that hole? Through your copy of the book?”

“In theory.” It violated half the rules of libriomancy, but there was precedent. “Gutenberg did it once, back in World War II. He used a copy of Mein Kampf to gather intelligence about the Germans. Every copy of the book becomes a kind of magical bug.” As I understood the story, that experience had come dangerously close to killing him. Drowning him, to extend the metaphor. Magical objects dissolved back into energy when returned to their books. What would happen to my mind if I lost my mental grip and slipped beneath the ice?

The only consolation was that I probably wouldn’t last long enough to know I had failed.

“I know that look,” Lena said. “What aren’t you telling me? How am I supposed to help if I don’t know-”

“You can’t help,” I snapped, and instantly regretted it. I opened the book and started reading.

Lena plucked it out of my hands and read the back. “So what’s the risk? Are you going to infect yourself with this virus? If so, we can find another way. I’m not watching you die.”

I shook my head. “The danger isn’t physical. Even if I succeed… there’s a possibility that something might come back through me.”

“You’re worried about being possessed, like Gutenberg?”

I didn’t bother trying to snatch the book away from her. “If I do this, we have a shot at finding him. If I lose myself, you can drag my body back to the vampires. All I know is that if I don’t try, Doctor Shah dies.”

Lena stiffened. She gripped the book with both hands. For a moment, I thought she might refuse to return it. A part of me hoped she would. But she reached out, offering the book back to me.

Neither of us spoke. There was no need.

I blinked, trying to concentrate on the story. The opening was fast-paced, full of danger and tension as emergency room doctors tried to save a patient from a nearby university who had been infected with an early form of the virus. As I read, the pages grew warmer. I imagined the characters’ voices, the shouts as the patient turned violent, trapped in the terror of fever-induced hallucinations. Tears streamed down his face, and he sprayed spittle as he screamed. He struck a nurse and jumped off of the gurney, only to collapse as his legs gave way. From the shadows, a figure in a dark suit calmly documented it all.

I gradually allowed my fingertips to melt into the page. The pain of Gutenberg’s broken magic wasn’t as sharp this time. So long as I moved slowly, I could keep from crying out. My hand sank to the wrist. At this point, I could have taken anything I wanted from the story: weapons, medicine, infected blood… “So far, so good.”

“What next?” asked Lena.

It looked exactly like someone had severed my hand and grafted a book onto the stump. I flexed my hand. I could feel my fingers, but what did that really mean? Some Porters argued that your body retained its physical form when you reached into a book; others claimed your flesh and bones ceased to be, and that only the “persistence of belief” in your own body allowed you to maintain and re-create your flesh while performing libriomancy. “Have you ever wondered where the ‘self’ is?”

The question was rhetorical, but she responded without pause. “Shared between this body and my tree.”

“Really? Can you feel your tree even when you’re separated from it? Does distance change- Never mind.” I hauled my attention back to the book. “Possession occurs when characters from a book reach into the Porter’s mind. I need to do the opposite, to push my mind, my self into the book.”

Voices whispered in my ear. I recognized them all. Georgia McCain, the dedicated doctor who worked to track the virus from the university back to its source. Brad Ryder, the agent whose investigation brought him to Georgia’s front door. I felt their fear, their anger, their unspoken attraction, and their desperation to save the world. But those emotions weren’t their own. The characters were nothing but words on a page. Whatever pseudolife I felt had been created by readers and magic.

My boundaries were weak from the exertions of the past several days, and the longer I maintained my connection to the book, the more those voices would push through the cracks in my mind.

“Isaac?” Lena touched my shoulder. Her words sounded slurred and distant.

“I’m all right.” I shoved her hand away, concentrating on those voices, immersing myself in the spell laid out by Shaffer, a spell as magical as anything cast by the sorcerers of old. I could feel the book’s potential power, a tingle that ran just beneath my skin, waiting to be shaped. Wanting to be shaped.

The voices were louder now: panicked screams and furious arguments. A politician’s cool, calming speech. The grief of a parent mourning a child.

I couldn’t see Lena or the factory anymore. Images flickered, taunting me from the edge of my awareness. I waited impatiently as they gradually came into focus, if “focus” was the right word for the collage of shifting figures that surrounded me. I stared at one, trying to will it into clarity, but my efforts merely made my head hurt. It was as if someone had taken a thousand photographs of similar-looking women and layered them atop one another, until you lost all but the rough suggestion of a woman in a white lab coat.

Every one of those layers was a reader’s mental image of Georgia McCain. I was seeing their belief. Excitement surged through me, followed by a single question. Now that I’m here, how do I get out again?

My body felt numb and heavy. I tried to flex my hands, but there was no way of telling whether I succeeded. I hesitated, but if I tried to escape now, I’d have accomplished nothing. I tried to relax, to calm my thoughts, even as more figures shuffled toward me.

In the real world, thousands of copies of Rabid were spread across the globe; magically speaking, every one of those copies coexisted here. But only one of those books had been used recently to manipulate magic. I searched for any lingering trace of magic, trying to let the current guide me.

Pain returned. I welcomed it. This was the first physical sensation I had felt since losing myself in the book. The shattered lock cut deeper this time, and I could see the text more clearly, both the Latin, laid out in neat blocks and rows, and a second spell made up of broken scrawls, all but illegible.

Both the lock and that second spell had been placed upon the physical copy of the book I was looking for. I clung to them, letting the pain flow through me as I reached out to touch that physical book.

Darkness. Cold air that smelled like oil and gasoline. The heavy, dead magic of locked books. This wasn’t from my copy of Rabid; I was sensing wherever that other book was being kept.

My mind leaped at the implications. Could two libriomancers communicate this way? Could messages be passed through matching books? If so, would there be a delay, or would the process be instantaneous? What about physical objects? Could I transport something from one book to another?

A new voice caught my attention, not a character from the book but a man arguing with himself. He spoke in sharp, angry sentences that jumped and fell in volume like a broken radio. I tried to see, and was rewarded with the image of a vague, manlike shape. I had to concentrate to fill in each detail. He was white. Slender, wearing a filthy coverall and heavy boots. A jagged scar ripped the side of his head and face.

“You think I don’t hear you?” He grabbed a handful of books, snarled, and threw them aside with a careless disregard that made me cringe. No true libriomancer would treat books so harshly. “Always watching. Always spying. Ripping out the pages of my brain.”

This wasn’t Johannes Gutenberg. The voice was unfamiliar. I couldn’t yet focus well enough to identify the speaker.

His fingers closed around Rabid, and his tone shifted, becoming deeper. “I see you, Isaac.”

My mind ran at a manic pace. This is awesome I’m talking to someone through a book oh shit he’s going to kill me how the hell do I get out of here?

He muttered in Latin, and I saw his words, like hastily scrawled ropes shooting outward. He was trying to lock the book again, with me inside.

“Who are you?” I demanded, projecting the question with everything I had.

He hesitated, and I heard… I felt different voices trying to respond. James Moriarty. Jakob Hoffman. Doctor Hannibal Lecter. Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Norman Bates.

There were more, but the original voice shouted them down, struggling to make himself heard. More Latin snaked toward me. He grabbed a pen, scribbling the words onto the pages as he spoke.

I fled, seeking the magic of the story. If I could follow the killer’s magical current to him, I should be able to follow whatever trail I had left for myself when I reached into the book. But before I could find it, another presence crashed into me from below.

I screamed, only to have my fear devoured and spilled back over me, increased a thousandfold. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t think. I clung to myself as that tide dragged away everything I was. Memories, dreams, everything crumbled like a sand castle on the beach.

“Isaac!”

The syllables meant nothing, but I reached out instinctively, like an infant grabbing for his mother.

My eyes snapped open. My brain rebelled as it tried to reorient to a physical world of light and matter. My throat was hoarse. Lena sat beside me, shaking my shoulders and shouting, but I couldn’t hear her over my own screaming. My vision faded, and I felt myself topple sideways.

Strong hands caught me, easing me down. My body was rigid, muscles cramping in pain, but I couldn’t relax. I could feel that other presence following me through the book. I didn’t know what he had sent after me, or how. All I knew was that I had to get away; I had to stop it from following.

My hands were empty. Where was the book?

There, discarded on the ground. Smudge stood to one side, covered in orange fire. I pointed and screamed something I never would have imagined myself saying. “Burn it!”

Smudge couldn’t understand English, but he was perfectly fluent in terror. He raced to the book and jumped onto the cover, turning and dancing and igniting the pages.

“Isaac, look at me!” Lena cradled my face, her eyes wide as she searched mine. “What happened?”

I shuddered. Sobs ripped through me. I clung to her, trying to shut out the memory of being consumed, of the inhuman rage and hatred that would have drowned me.

She held me, one hand combing through my hair. “You’re safe,” she whispered, over and over.

I shook my head and closed my eyes. I don’t know how long I might have stayed there if I hadn’t sensed the magic leaking from the book, brushing my bones. I yelled and jumped to my feet.

Smudge scurried toward us, leaving blackened weeds in his wake. Behind him, burnt pages fluttered in an unseen breeze: pages damaged both by fire and by magical char.

Lena grabbed her bokken, raising them both in a defensive stance. “Tell me what happened, Isaac.”

“I found him.” The words hurt my throat. “He tried to trap me in the book.”

Only whatever that last attack had been, it hadn’t felt like a magical lock. It was more like… hunger. Desperate, furious, raw hunger. The memory started me trembling again. I doubled over and grabbed my knees, squeezing hard so the pain would prove I was still real. That I still existed.

“Isaac…” Lena shifted sideways. “What is that?”

The book’s movement grew more violent. Pages tore loose, whirling about in tight circles. “I think he sent someone… something… to follow me.”

Lena snatched at one of the pages, then swore. Blood welled from her fingertips. She moved to stand between me and the book.

None of this should have been possible. Peering through books was one thing, but physically reaching through that book to strike another libriomancer? Gray smoke whirled within the pages, coalescing into solid form. This could change everything we knew about libriomancy, and all I wanted to do was flee.

I forced myself to stand. Characters shouted in my head, their words as loud and real as Lena’s, thanks to my immersion in the book.

Smudge scrambled up the closest wall, burning like a beacon. This was the sort of threat Gutenberg’s automatons had been created to fight. They could absorb magic, devour whatever this thing was and destroy the book in the process. I, on the other hand, was close to losing myself to my own magic.

Smoke and blackness began to coalesce. I could feel the thing pushing, struggling to find form. Arms and legs separated from the smoke. A man-shaped shadow took a slow, shuddering step toward us. The whirling pages clung to its body, a blackened paper skin. “I think… I think it’s a character from the book.”

“Which one?”

I listened to the voices as the thing took another step. “All of them.”

The figure didn’t seem to care about the various laws of magic its existence violated as it trudged toward us, propelled by the one drive every character in the book shared: the need to destroy their enemies.