Codex Born

10

Winter whispers his song.

Strips her branches,

Abandons her naked before the heavens

As souls slumber beneath,

And dirt becomes stone.

Spring celebrates the tandava,

And the newborn feels only the

Heartbeat of the dance,

Sings only her love

Of an undiscovered verdant world.

Under a moonless night,

She remembers the cold.

Her song warms the earth,

And her dance begins anew,

Celebrating the return.

But none shall ever sing so purely

As the newborn spring.

Forever after, her dance is tempered

By foreknowledge of winter’s return.

I LEFT SMUDGE BEHIND with Jeff and Nidhi. Without his cage, I didn’t trust him on the back of a motorcycle. I waited while Lena strapped her spare helmet over my head, then climbed onto the back of the bike. I tucked the bottom of my jacket between us to keep it from getting caught in the wheels.

“Hold tight,” she said, and then we were darting onto the road.

I felt her laughter as she wove through traffic. On another day, I might have shared it. Lena had the irrepressible ability to not only find joy in life, but to express it without fear or self-consciousness. She loved without fear. It was one of the things that made me crazy about her.

But even as I clung to her waist, feeling her body pressed against mine, breathing in the woodsy smell of her hair, I couldn’t stop thinking about August Harrison. About how casually he had threatened to murder innocent people. About the anger I had seen when he murdered that wendigo in Tamarack. About his willingness to transform human beings into monsters, using techniques I had developed.

Where had he found his would-be wendigos? Were these allies who had volunteered to be transformed, or were they more victims? They had dragged the unconscious bodies away, leaving nobody who could answer those questions.

The magic in Harrison’s two pelts wouldn’t last forever. The rat had reverted to normal after three days, though that had been a smaller sample of skin, one which had been preserved for years before use. We didn’t know how long the magic of a fresh skin might endure.

I kept an eye out for insects, but either Harrison hadn’t noticed Lena’s bike, or else I had stung him too badly when I swatted his last batch.

Another possibility taunted me. Maybe this was what Harrison wanted. He had tried to get the two of us to surrender back in Columbus, and here we were, speeding down the highway to find him. Victor had been a genius. I couldn’t afford to underestimate his father.

The GPS led us to a small Baptist church. Scorch marks covered the parking lot. Streaks of black rubber showed where someone had swerved around a car parked by the main entrance. The van was here, having smashed into a basketball hoop on the far side of the lot. Tire tracks on the grass suggested the truck had kept going into the field behind the church, where a row of pine trees stood like a living fence.

Lena parked her bike on the side of the road. I tugged my helmet off with one hand and clipped it to her bike. As we approached, I heard shouts from the field.

“Oh, shit.” Lena took off running toward the front door. A body lay slumped against the brick wall, half hidden by the bushes alongside the walk. Lena pushed the bushes aside, and from the way the urgency drained from her movements, I knew we were too late.

Sharp claws had opened the woman’s throat and shoulder. Her eyes were wide. Blood dribbled from the wounds, soaking into the gravel. Whoever she was, she didn’t look like she could have presented a threat. Thick glasses, a close-permed frizz of brown hair, and a round face gave her a vaguely jovial appearance, even in death. She had died clutching her purse to her chest. I knelt and opened her purse.

“What are you doing?” Lena whispered.

“I’m not sure.” I just wanted to know her name. This murder struck harder than the others. Maybe the still-warm body just felt more real than vampires who turned to dust or ash, or the wendigos who had been hacked apart until they were nothing but meat. Or maybe it was my own human prejudices, the idea that a human death meant more than the others. After all, wasn’t I the one who had experimented with old wendigo hide like it was nothing more than a toy?

I pulled out a leather wallet. The driver’s license identified her as Christina Quinney, age fifty-three. Killed by monsters because she was in the way. I returned the wallet and closed her eyes. As I stood, I ripped the blanket away from my hand and stretched the armored fingers, then donned my enchanted sunglasses. “Come on.”

Lena tested the edges of her bokken, then nodded. I debated preparing an additional weapon or two of my own, but I didn’t want to push it. Not yet. Smarter to wait until I knew exactly what would be most effective at ending August Harrison.

We made our way around the back of the church, keeping close to the wall. The pickup had driven through a small flower garden, overturning a bench and smashing a birdbath before coming to a stop by the trees. A starburst of blackened grass and the smell of sulfur showed where the automaton had taken another shot at the truck. Through my glasses, the charred grass shimmered as if someone had spilled gold glitter: the remnants of the automaton’s magic.

The battle had moved to the edge of the woods, where three people stood around the automaton. Insects lay dead and scattered, like flickering embers. Harrison and his wendigos formed a second ring, but only those inner three were actually fighting. Each held a book, and with the sunglasses, I could see three ghosts circling the automaton, draining the life from its body.

What the hell were they? I had seen possession before, where fictional characters crept into the mind of a careless libriomancer. If I kept pushing things, I’d see it a lot closer. But that was a known and somewhat understood magical phenomenon. Like possession, these beings appeared to come from books, but they behaved like the absence of magic.

“How long do you think we have before the police show up?” Lena asked.

“They won’t. Not until this is over. Automatons can become invisible when necessary, but they also divert the attention of anyone who doesn’t know what they are. Call it an apathy field, for lack of a better term.” The automaton stumbled. A patch of metal fell away from its wooden body, and three of the spells woven into its shell went dark. “Anything magic I throw their way, they can intercept.”

Lena stepped away, returning a short time later with several chunks of broken blacktop. “So we hit them hobbit style. Nothing magical about a flying rock.”

“I don’t know what’s sexier,” I said. “Watching you prepare to take on bad guys, or the fact that you’re making Lord of the Rings references as you do it.” I pulled out a copy of The Marvelous Land of Oz. “If we hit them from two directions, we should be able to draw off their attack enough for the automaton to start smacking heads.”

The automaton staggered, and the others closed in. More of its armor dropped into the grass. Two more insects flew in and burrowed into the exposed wood.

I set the Oz book aside and grabbed Plato’s The Republic. Reading was tricky with only one working hand, but I soon held the Ring of Gyges. I had done an honors paper as an undergraduate, arguing the similarity between Plato’s tale and Tolkien’s One Ring. I shoved The Republic back into my pocket and started in on The Marvelous Land of Oz.

“Dare I ask what you’re planning to do with a ring and an old pepperbox?” Lena asked when I was done.

I beamed. “It’s a surprise. Give me two minutes to get ready.”

I slipped the ring onto my finger and vanished. In theory, true invisibility should have left me blind. Vision relied on the interaction between light and the cells at the back of the eye, but thanks to the ring, the light passed through me as if I wasn’t here.

Fortunately, libriomancy obeyed belief over physics, and few modern-day readers thought about invisibility on a cellular level. I ran back to Christina Quinney and took a lipstick from her purse, then hurried toward the garden. Once there, I dropped behind the overturned bench.

The seat and back were slabs of polished black granite. The engraving along the back read, In memory of Annette Butler. Had the truck hit this thing head-on, it probably would have broken both the bench and the truck, but it looked like they had struck it at an angle.

“I’m sorry about this, Annette.” I uncapped the lipstick and drew two red eyes and a large mouth. I wasn’t much of an artist, especially since the lipstick had turned invisible when I picked it up, but it left visible, waxy lines on the granite. I added a pair of angry eyebrows as well, along with uneven ears to either side.

I put the lipstick away and pulled out the pepperbox. Creating the powder of life from The Marvelous Land of Oz had been the easy part. The challenge was getting through the ritual to use it. I opened the box and sprinkled the powder over the bench, then raised my left pinky and said, “Weaugh.” Next was the right thumb. “Teaugh.” Finally, I raised both arms and waved them like a dancer doing jazz hands. “Peaugh.”

L. Frank Baum wrote some weird magic. I just hoped I had pronounced it correctly.

Through my glasses, the powder looked like white sparks melting into the metal and granite. The whole contraption gave a shiver. Lipstick eyes blinked, and the ears perked up.

“Hello there,” I said. “I need you to do me a favor…”

A wendigo was the first one to spot the bench bounding toward them. With a snarl, it broke away from the circle to meet this new threat.

The bench didn’t even slow down. It charged with a straight-on waddle, as if it wanted nothing more than for that wendigo to plop down and enjoy a nice, comfy seat. Instead, the wendigo grabbed the bench and lifted one end into the air.

It was an impressive display of strength, one which did the wendigo no good whatsoever as the seat and back clapped together like enormous granite jaws. The wendigo let out a high-pitched yowl of pain.

Lena used the distraction to sprint toward the trees. Two of the wendigos spotted her, but a chunk of brick downed one before it could react. A lucky shot with my shock-gun took care of the second. I was a lousy shot with my left hand, but the nice thing about the shock-gun was that even grazing the target was enough to drop it.

Harrison whirled, but thanks to the Ring of Gyges on my hand, he stared right through me.

He recovered quickly, ordering the wendigos back. A ghost flew from the automaton and swooped through the bench, weakening my spell.

My gun spat lightning at the three mages, but it fizzled into nothingness without reaching them. With everyone worrying about me and the bench, Lena was able to race out from between the trees, slip an arm around a wendigo’s throat, and haul it backward.

The wendigo’s choked cry was enough to attract attention. Two more wendigos bounded after Lena. I almost felt bad for them. Attacking Lena among the trees was a particularly bad idea.

I moved to the corner of the church and braced my arm against the bricks, sighting in on August Harrison, but one of the ghosts swooped into my line of fire. It could see me, even if Harrison couldn’t.

In the field, the bench staggered as another ghost continued to siphon its magic. Cartoonish eyes drooped, and its movements turned sluggish. But when another wendigo approached, the bench valiantly reared up and kicked it in the chest.

The ghost in front of me closed in. I pointed over its shoulder, uncertain whether it would see or understand the gesture. “Too late,” I said, grinning.

With two of the three ghosts focused on us while Harrison and the wendigos chased after Lena, the remaining book-mage was left alone to try to contain the automaton. It wasn’t enough. Wooden hands creaked, and a blast of hellfire shot outward. The woman with the green hair tried to jump out of the way, but the flames caught her in the side. She spun away, protecting her book even as she screamed in pain.

She tried to run, but the automaton struck a wendigo hard enough to knock its body into her. They both went down, and her book flew into the grass. The ghost in front of me peeled away, streaking back toward the automaton.

I didn’t stop to think. I simply ran. I held my shock-gun ready, but my attention was on that book. The wendigo who had been hit was very dead, but Green was groaning and trying to pull herself free from beneath the body. She was reaching for her book.

I got there first. The book disappeared when I snatched it up with my armored hand. The woman screamed again, fury overpowering pain as she struggled to follow.

I retreated to the church to study my prize. It became visible again as soon as I set it down. White silk cords bound wooden boards covered in red cloth. I opened the cover, then pulled my hand back. “Rice paper,” I whispered.

Strong and smooth, the paper held the ink far better than most modern paper. The columns of brown Chinese characters were as clear and sharp as the day they had been drawn. The pages were folded and pasted together, like a long scroll flattened accordion-style and bound into a single book. There were illustrations, but no color.

Based on what I had seen, this book was more than seven hundred years old. Give or take a century. That made it significantly older than Gutenberg himself. Of course, I was no expert, and I couldn’t know anything for certain without further research.

I turned carefully to the front pages and frowned. The first few pages were printed, either woodblock or movable type. But the inner pages appeared to have been written by hand.

I moved the book out of sight behind me and returned my attention to the fighting. Only two of the ghosts remained, and all but three wendigos were unconscious or too injured to make a difference. Harrison was red-faced, his angry shouts growing shrill with panic. My animated bench was limping and the automaton was in bad shape, but we were winning. Harrison launched another small swarm at the automaton, only to have their magic sucked away before they reached their target. Harrison cried out again, this time in pain. I grinned and started shooting, and he dove for cover behind the truck.

“Guan Feng?”

The voice belonged to a woman, and it had come from the book. I had heard whispers from books before, but this was different. It didn’t feel like misplaced snippets of dialogue sneaking into my thoughts. Whoever had spoken sounded more aware, more here.

At the tree line, roots broke through the earth to twine around a wendigo’s ankles. I aimed at the two remaining book-mages and pulled the trigger.

The book behind me screamed. The words were in another tongue—one of the Chinese languages, I thought…possibly Mandarin—but I understood them perfectly as they tore through my skull.

“Begone, Porter!”

In order for my magic to translate her words, those words had to be spoken by a living mind. This was no character brought to pseudolife to fight for August Harrison. Not only was this a real person, she knew what I was. And she was terrified.

“Bi Wei!” The woman with the green hair dragged herself free and began hobbling toward us. Harrison shouted an order, but she ignored him. I heard the book calling out to her, to Guan Feng, pleading for help.

I raised my shock-gun. I had endless questions, but we could sort things out as soon as everyone stopped trying to kill me.

The book screamed a second time. Magic poured forth, and I watched the gun dissolve in my hand.

The fact that I could see my hand meant the Ring of Gyges was fading as well. I scooted backward, but Guan Feng had spotted me. The book continued to scream, and a shadow darkened my vision. The sunglasses fell apart and dropped to the ground, leaving me blind to the magic swirling around and through me.

I couldn’t see what she was doing, but I could feel it. The armor on my right hand broke away like oversized scabs. I supposed I should have been grateful for that small blessing, but it didn’t stop.

As the ghost tore through me, my mind flashed back to the attack in Detroit. The devourer had seized me from the inside out, claws unraveling my memories and my thoughts. I had come so close to drowning in its hunger and rage. It had been an incoherent, instinctive attack. The devourer had no understanding or awareness of what I was, or of anything save the need to destroy me. This was different. Instead of incoherent fury, I sensed both fear and determination. Her attack was similar, but more controlled.

She was also stronger. These books, and whoever or whatever was acting through them, had been holding back.

I felt her attention splinter. She lashed out to slap the bench, which broke in two and stopped moving. Another strike knocked the automaton to the ground. She had plunged us all into a whirlpool of naked power. Even Guan Feng looked afraid as she limped toward us.

Where had they come from, and why would they follow a man like Harrison? Their power dwarfed whatever magic he had managed to steal from the Porters.

“Lena, get out of here!” I crawled away from the book and used the wall to push myself upright. A wendigo was bounding toward me on all fours. “Tell them we’ve been chasing Saruman.”

I hoped she would understand. Saruman was a dangerous villain in Lord of the Rings, but he hadn’t been the true threat. If whoever or whatever was trapped in these books got loose, they would make Gutenberg look like an amateur stage magician fumbling his way through cheap card tricks.

Several hundred pounds of wendigo slammed into me like a wrecking ball. My head bounced against the ground, and I rolled several times before coming to rest. As my vision gradually came back into focus, I found myself looking up at a snarling, frostbitten face that retained just enough humanity to be truly monstrous.

“I think you and I both know Lena’s not going to leave you alone.” August Harrison strode toward us, one thumb hooked through his belt loop. Metal creatures crawled over his chest and shoulders, like piglets fighting for their mother’s teat. Many were larger than the insects we had seen before, more like those Madagascar hissing cockroaches some people kept as pets. I searched for the queen, the cicada Nicholas had described, but couldn’t find it.

Harrison pulled an old paperback from his back pocket and fanned through the pages. I swore when I spotted the cover art. A yellow-and-red border framed an image of two scantily clad warrior women fighting over a well-muscled man chained to an oak tree. Harrison had tracked down a copy of Nymphs of Neptune.

“You write well, Isaac. Such detailed reports. I can’t begin to tell you how helpful you’ve been to my little army.” He tugged a rusted metal millipede off of his shirt and held it out for me to see. “I might not have Victor’s gifts, but I know my way around a machine shop. If he had shared these secrets with me, let me help him build sturdier, stronger creatures, he might have survived that attack.”

I heard genuine regret, even grief in his words as he stared past me. Despite everything he had done, Victor had been a part of his life for years. What must it have been like when the cicada arrived? If it was telepathic, did that mean it had shared Victor’s final, agonized moments with August Harrison?

Harrison brought the millipede closer, and any sympathy I had disappeared. Pointed iron legs clicked together. A series of overlapping brackets formed the segmented shell. Instead of antennae, a single slender blade protruded from the center of the millipede’s face, like some kind of stiletto-headed unicorn bug. The millipede was long enough to circle Harrison’s wrist with several inches to spare.

He dropped it onto my chest. I tried to fling it away, only to have the wendigo stomp on my arm. If I had been on pavement instead of grass, he would have shattered bone. I lay perfectly still as the millipede crawled higher and circled my neck.

Harrison turned to shout. “Miss Greenwood, I’m tired of games. I’ll give you thirty seconds, and then I’m going to let one of my pets bore a hole through your lover’s skull.”

He was sweating beneath that coat of bugs. I could see the dampness as they moved. His face was red, and he was out of breath.

Guan Feng approached, hugging her book to her body. She scowled at me like I was the genetically engineered offspring of Adolf Hitler and Jack the Ripper.

“Perhaps she needs more encouragement.” Harrison turned to the trees again. “You’ve lost one oak this year. Are you strong enough to survive the death of another?”

“Going after Lena’s tree didn’t work out too well for you last time,” I said. “How many more of your son’s toys can you afford to lose?”

He waved a hand, and the millipede’s grip tightened with a metallic click.

“You have no idea what you’ve allied yourself with, do you?” I asked. I didn’t bother hiding my smirk. If he was going to kill me, the least I could do was piss him off before I died. “You’re nothing but a parasite. I don’t know what they need you for, but as soon as they get it—”

“August.” Lena emerged from the trees carrying a long wooden spear. One of the wendigos jumped in front of Harrison to shield him, but Lena only laughed and hefted the spear over one shoulder. “You think I can’t put this thing through both of you?”

The millipede raced onto my face. It was heavier than I had expected, and its legs stung like thorns. I heard a whirring sound, and pain pierced the center of my forehead.

Harrison raised his book. “Even if that were true, killing me would guarantee Isaac’s death, and we both know you can’t do that.”

Blood dripped down the side of my head. I turned my head to keep the blood from running into my ear, which brought Guan Feng into the center of my vision. She was staring at Lena, and her eyes had filled with tears. She didn’t seem to be afraid. Not of Lena, at any rate. If anything, she looked like she was afraid to trust what she was seeing, like she wanted to touch Lena to confirm that she was real. She noticed me watching, and her expression turned to stone.

Lena stabbed her spear into the earth. The millipede pulled back, obeying Harrison’s unspoken command. My jaw unclenched, and I forced myself to breathe normally.

“Search her,” Harrison barked at Guan Feng. “Strip her of any magic, and don’t let her have any wood. Not even a toothpick.”

Lena smiled and spread her arms, never taking her eyes from August Harrison. Her unwavering attention even made me nervous. “If you hurt Isaac, I will shove an acorn down your throat and force it to take root in your gut. Care to guess how tall it will grow before you finally die?”

Harrison stepped forward and backhanded her. I pushed myself up, but the wendigo gave me an almost absentminded kick in the head.

Lena never even blinked. “Is your hand okay?”

Harrison grimaced and rubbed his knuckles. “It doesn’t matter. As long as I have him, you’re mine. And once you’ve spent enough time in my company, you’ll kill him yourself.”

Lena’s gaze dropped to me, and for the first time, her confidence cracked. As strong as she was, we both knew Harrison was right.