Libriomancer

Chapter 13

I stood frozen as the thing approached.

I had faced monsters before. I had my books, my magic… if I could shut out the voices long enough to use them. But I didn’t know what we were fighting. It looked like nothing so much as a burnt corpse. There was no face, nothing but faint impressions that could have been eyes and a mouth. I couldn’t even figure out what to call it.

Lena’s swords flattened in her hands. I could feel the wood responding to her magic, like a low, warm buzz through my bones as the edges grew sharper.

I shouldn’t have been able to feel it. That was another warning sign. The boundaries between me and magic were dangerously thin.

“Is that thing contagious?” Lena asked.

I hadn’t even considered whether it would carry the virus. “Possibly.”

“No offense, but I don’t like Plan B anymore.” Lena slid one foot forward and swung.

Her bokken hit the thing’s neck and snapped like a rotten branch. The impact knocked the creature back a step, but didn’t appear to have injured it. Lena stared at her broken weapon.

Georgia McCain was the protagonist of the book. If this was a conglomeration of characters, she should be the strongest. “Georgia, I know you’re in there. Can you hear me?”

It snatched up the other piece of her sword and began to gnaw on it, doglike.

“She’s feeding on magic,” I said. Meaning any weapons I might be able to conjure would be worse than useless. Blasting the thing with a disruptor beam would only make it stronger. I glanced at Smudge, who was staying safely out of the way. But if this got worse, he would try to help. He had to. It was how he was written. And he would be nothing but a bite-sized snack to this thing.

Lena tossed her swords aside, scooped up a brick, and threw. It tore an ugly wound through Georgia’s shoulder. Paper skin flapped loosely, but the damage healed within seconds. Lena made a face and retreated toward a broken section of wall, where she ripped out a six-foot length of rusted rebar and gave it a quick spin with both hands. Bits of concrete clung to one end of the bar.

I backed away as whatever it was lurched toward me. Lena strode up to it and swung her metal staff like a baseball bat. The impact flattened the thing’s head and knocked it to the ground, but it merely groaned and pushed itself to its knees. Lena smashed it back down, spinning her staff to batter it about the head and limbs. “Join in any time.”

I tried to remember the calming exercises Doctor Shah had insisted on teaching me. I needed to focus, to think, but every time I looked at this thing, I saw only darkness returning to devour me.

Not just me. It would have to kill Lena to get to me. Smudge, too, unless I found a way to stop it.

The thing showed no sign of strategy or planning. As far as I could tell, it was simply going after the closest and strongest source of magic.

“It’s like fighting a pinata from Hell,” Lena said, breathing hard.

“He didn’t send something through the book,” I said slowly. “He reshaped the book itself.”

“Terrific. So how do we kill it?”

Smudge was a magical creature given physical form. You could hurt or kill him by destroying that form, but this was a book, a literal portal to magic. No matter what we did, it could re-form itself.

A part of me wondered at the limits of such magic. If we flung the damn thing into the sun, how long could it endure? As I had no convenient way of launching it into space, that was a dead end. I needed more time to study the damn thing.

Lena cried out and jumped back. Her pants leg was torn, and blood dripped down her ankle. “It’s cold!”

I pulled a cyberpunk book from my jacket. My fingers shook as I flipped to the dog-eared page I wanted. I hesitated. I had performed libriomancy a thousand times, but now I was afraid. I felt like a child again, terrified of the book and what lay beyond.

Rationally, I knew this book should be safe. Yet it took all of my willpower to force myself to reach into those pages.

Even as I tried, a girl’s voice condemned my recklessness: another character from Rabid, decrying the dangers of biological warfare.

I shouted to drown out the voices and plunged my hand deeper, grabbing a simple handle reminiscent of a sword hilt.

“I thought you said this thing fed on magic,” Lena said. Sweat shone on her face as she continued to strike.

“Lead it in here.” I ran through an open wall into the cool shade of what had once been an assembly line. Rust and graffiti covered the metal support pillars. A rat scurried through a gap in the far wall. Overhead, sparrows fluttered angrily from their nests in the steel rafters, protesting my intrusion.

They were going to be a lot more upset soon.

Lena smashed the thing to turn it around, then struck again, knocking it after me. She reminded me of a hockey player controlling the puck. Her jacket was torn, and her cheekbone was vivid red.

I pointed the handle away from me and activated it. A monofilament wire shot out, held in place by a powerful magnetic field which had probably fried every one of the credit cards in my wallet. I extended the blade to its maximum length and flicked my wrist. The pillar to my left shivered. Dust and flakes of old green paint rained down. The cut was invisible at first, but then the pillar shifted ever so slightly out of alignment. “Can you pin it to the floor?”

“Not for very long.” Lena landed an overhead blow that bent the creature double. Its hands grabbed Lena’s knee, and she yelled in pain. She brought her other knee into its jaw, but it clung tight. She had to jab the bar through the thing’s hand and pry the arm back to free herself.

It grabbed the other end of the bar, and Lena’s mouth tightened into a smile. She stepped back, yanking it off-balance, and speared the end of the bar through its chest.

Lena lifted the opposite end of the bar, then thrust downward. Steel punched through the old concrete floor. Lena bent the end of the bar double like an oversized staple through the thing’s chest, then jumped backward, collapsing to the floor as her leg gave out.

I swung at another pillar, then grabbed Lena’s arm. She did her best to keep up as I all but dragged her away.

The first pillar shifted and ripped free of the roof, showering metal and rust as it slammed to the ground with an impact that swayed the whole building, but the roof remained standing.

I cut through several more pillars from the doorway, then flicked off my weapon. “This would probably be a good time to get the hell out of here.”

What followed sounded like a drawn-out explosion. I stopped only long enough to grab Smudge as we hobbled away, taking shelter in an open doorway of the next building. The center of the ceiling collapsed first, steel and concrete and tarred roof crumbling inward. The ground shook, and dust shivered down from above.

I glanced around, wondering if I had miscalculated. None of these structures were terribly stable, and if they came down, I doubted we would be able to escape. Lena apparently had the same thought. She grabbed my arm and pulled me down, sheltering me with her body the best she could. She was tough enough to endure falling glass and debris, but if the whole place collapsed, we were both squashed.

Slowly, the cracking and rumbling quieted. Dust clouded the air like brown fog. It looked like about half of the building had fallen, and there was no sign of whatever the other libriomancer had sent after us.

Lena’s arm and leg were both bleeding. I wasn’t sure what would happen if she became infected. Her magic defined her; could a magical disease rewrite what she was? But the cold hum of the book’s magic was absent. I hoped and prayed that meant she was safe.

I started to dissolve my weapon back into the book. I stared at the pages, momentarily confused. I didn’t have time to read old novels, not with a potential Category A bioterrorism event. I should be back in the lab, not… what was this place?

“Isaac?” A heavyset woman touched my shoulder.

“What are you doing out here without a biosuit?” I started to back away, and the woman reached out to grab my arm. An electric shock jolted my nervous system.

No, not an electric shock; a magical one. Lena. This was an old auto plant in Detroit, not a quarantined lab in Phoenix. I staggered back, gasping for breath.

Lena caught my elbow. I slipped the book and handle into my pocket. Dissolving a magically-created object was simple enough, but right now I couldn’t risk it. “Sorry. Spaced out for a moment, that’s all.”

“Bullshit. What just happened?”

“Monofilament sword,” I said, deliberately misinterpreting the question. “Maximum length of twenty meters. Cuts through almost anything.”

“Isaac-”

“Later, once we’re safe.”

She glared, but didn’t press me. “You think that thing is still alive under there?”

“Yep.” I could feel it underneath the ruins, an open book leaking magic into our world. “That was the easy part.”

I started toward the source of that magic, but Lena grabbed my collar and hauled me backward. “Give it a minute to make sure the rest of the building isn’t about to come down. You can use the time to tell me who or what we’re up against.”

I fought the urge to flee, uncertain whether the impulse was my own or an artifact of the characters fighting to take hold in my head. “This isn’t Gutenberg’s work. I got his names. Some of them, at least.”

“How many do most libriomancers have?”

“Shah was right. He’s possessed. James Moriarty, from Sherlock Holmes. Hannibal Lecter, a serial killer from Thomas Harris’ books. Ernst Stavro Blofeld is a James Bond villain, and Norman Bates comes from Robert Bloch’s Psycho.”

“Lovely company.” Another chunk of the roof crashed down, making her whirl. She stood unmoving, attention fixed on the mess, before lowering her bokken. “Doesn’t anyone ever get possessed by Mary Poppins?”

“That wouldn’t help. The transition from the book would destroy the mind, and you’d end up with one mad nanny. But you’re right, possession tends to involve more aggressive minds.” I wondered who would be first to take up residence in my head if I kept pushing. “I heard one name I didn’t recognize: Jakob Hoffman. It might be the libriomancer’s true name, or it could have been another character. Either way, I’ve never heard of him.”

“All of them live inside his head?”

“Mad as hatters. And once possession takes hold, it becomes easier for other characters to sneak in. You become the doorway for the book’s magic.” Given what I had seen, it wouldn’t be long before that magic burned him out completely. The problem was the damage he could do in the meantime. “Whoever he is, he hated me.”

“He knew you?”

“Even through the book.” The thing he had sent after me could have been the manifestation of his madness, the raw, out-of-control hunger and fear.

I pushed the memory aside and clasped my trembling hands together, trying to think. Every libriomancer had a specialty. Deb DeGeorge did history. I was a sci-fi geek. The characters he had named were from mysteries and thrillers… but nobody local fit that pattern.

“Can possession be cured?”

“I wouldn’t know how. People like Doctor Shah are supposed to make sure it never gets to this point.” There was nothing physical to dissolve back into the book. You’d have to use magic to try to unravel the original mind from the characters, but how? You couldn’t reach into a man’s mind like he was a book and pull out what you needed.

I blinked and turned that thought over in my head. Slowly, I climbed to my feet. “Time to take care of that thing.”

“We should call the Porters,” Lena said. “Let someone else deal with the aftermath so you can rest.”

“We don’t have time. How long do you think this will hold it?” I made my way inside, testing every step. Lena stayed with me, using her remaining bokken as a cane to support her injured knee. Roughly four feet of rubble covered the spot where she had pinned the thing like an insect. One of the walls creaked, making me jump. “I need to examine the body.”

Lena scowled. “Of course you do.”

Digging a hole through the mess would have been hard enough without the characters shouting in my head, warning me to don protective gear, to call in a team to sterilize the entire place. I was constantly jumping at imagined noises and movement that vanished as soon as I turned to look.

Bricks shifted, and a blackened hand reached for Lena’s wrist. She fell backward. “There you go.”

I crawled over to where she had been working. I could just make out part of the face and left arm. The skin had changed. The charring was worse, and black dust fell away from the fingers every time it moved, reaching unerringly toward me.

I picked up a metal bolt and poked the back of the hand. It felt like burnt leather.

Was this my fault? Had I damaged the book so badly in my attempt to find the killer that I had allowed him to send this twisted, unfinished creature back after me?

“I could try to finish what he started,” I mumbled. “Separate it from the book and fix it in this form long enough to destroy it.” But even if I knew how to do that, who was to say the character I created wouldn’t carry the virus? “You think the vampires would let me borrow their dungeon to study this thing?”

Lena didn’t answer.

I couldn’t heal a book, and ultimately, that was all this was: a burnt, pissed-off book oozing magic all over the place. “I need to lock it.”

“I thought you said you didn’t know how to do that.”

“I don’t.” I sat back and rubbed the dust from my eyes, remembering hastily scrawled Latin reaching out to constrict me. “But Gutenberg figured this out centuries ago. All I have to do is duplicate his work.”

“He probably wasn’t sitting on top of a killer book at the time.”

I forced a chuckle at that. Gutenberg probably hadn’t been so burned out that the simplest spell could have cost him his sanity, either.

I pulled a paperback from my pocket and brought it toward that blackened hand. Instead of a lock, maybe I could simply dissolve it into another book?

The instant the fingers touched the book, black char spread like charcoal dust through the pages. I yanked it back. So much for that approach.

“Magic is a two-part process. Access and manifestation,” I whispered. Both I and my counterpart had accessed the book’s magic. He had controlled the manifestation of that magic.

I closed my eyes, rereading the opening chapter of Rabid in my mind, rebuilding the scene until it was as real as I could make it. The story surged through me, threatening to drag me down. I did my best to walk the line between magic and madness. I needed that connection to the story, but if I lost myself, we were all screwed.

Without looking, I reached out and grabbed its wrist.

“Isaac!”

Dry fingers clamped around mine. But even as it tried to crush my bones, my hand sank through its skin as easily as the pages of the book. “Part one: access.”

I lay flat, reaching deeper. It couldn’t hurt me now, though it certainly tried. The arm passed through my throat and face without effect.

“I don’t care what Nidhi’s files say,” Lena whispered. “You are completely insane.”

“Not yet.” I don’t think she heard me, but the voices surged in response, screaming for me to get away. I touched what felt like burnt cardboard. My fingers closed around a book, the pages wrinkled and brittle like autumn leaves. “Part two: manifestation.”

I carefully closed my hand around the book, leaned back, and pulled out the thing’s heart.

The creature collapsed into black smoke and dust. As its mass dissolved, the rubble shifted beneath me. I squawked and tumbled onto my side, bruising my elbow and scraping my hip. I rolled down like a child on a hill, and likely would have brained myself on the cement if Lena hadn’t caught me.

She held my elbow as we limped back into the clearing, where I examined my prize. The lower part of the book’s cover was completely illegible, but I could make out a bit of the red-and-gray artwork in the upper right corner. When I opened the book, more of the cover flaked away. The interior pages were ash black.

“It’s still leaking,” I said quietly. The dust on my hands charged my skin with magical pseudolife, trying to re-form. “Not as quickly as before, but given enough time, we’ll have to fight that thing all over again.”

“So have Smudge finish destroying it,” Lena suggested.

“ Every copy of this book is damaged. Eliminating this one could protect us, but it could also shunt the other libriomancer’s magic elsewhere.” I grabbed Feed from the sack, studying the lock. Gutenberg had locked these books using a quote from the Bible. He was a libriomancer, after all. It made sense his magic would come from books.

And how was I supposed to concentrate on magic when I needed all of my focus just to cling to sanity, to hold on to who I was? Voices had broken down into screams, and they were getting stronger.

The lock I had seen was a fragment of Biblical magic. Which would have been useful information if I had a copy of that Bible on hand, and Gutenberg looking over my shoulder to tell me how to use it.

“Isaac?”

The screams drowned Lena’s words. Only the shape of her lips told me she was speaking my name. Shouting. The world beyond was a blur. I squinted at Lena, then at the blazing ball that was Smudge. I was out of time.

I shoved my hand into Rabid, and the world around me vanished. I couldn’t see my hands, but I felt them, the jagged magic of the unlocked book flaying one, and the cold heaviness of the locked text in the other. Praying this worked, I thrust the locked book into the heart of Rabid, willing that lock to expand and encompass them both.

The screaming stopped. The world snapped into focus, and Rabid fell away. Lena was shouting at me. I pushed myself up and started to speak, but my legs gave way. I watched the ground approach with all the inevitability of an oncoming plow, sweeping consciousness to the curb like the first slush of winter.