Codex Born

11

I understand humans are unable to remember their first years of life. Their bodies and minds develop so much, and so quickly during that time. Perhaps that’s why I remember so little of those early sessions with Nidhi Shah. I’ve read her case notes, but much of the person she describes is a stranger.

Only two thoughts etched themselves into my memory during that first meeting. The first was Nidhi’s smile, beautiful and warm and reassuring. The second was my realization toward the end of the day that I was completely in love with her.

I learned so much from her. Nidhi said one way Frank controlled me was to make sure I never acquired the skills to be independent. Because it made her happy, I threw myself into study.

I mastered reading in three weeks. We began with children’s stories, like Doctor Seuss and the Berenstain Bears. (I learned later that she had deliberately avoided giving me a copy of The Giving Tree.) Once I could make it through those, she brought me a handful of comic books.

I devoured them. Tank Girl and Wonder Woman, She-Hulk and Batman, Catwoman and Katana. I wanted to meet them. I wanted to be them. I shaped my first wooden sword from my oak tree, mimicking the exaggerated, thick-bladed weapon from Katana’s appearance in an early Outsiders comic.

I was catching up on Black Widow one evening when I felt Nidhi watching me. I continued reading, enjoying her attention. I knew she was attracted to me. I could feel her fighting it every time we spoke, every time I hugged her or sat beside her on the couch. She had brought me into her home because I had no place to go. Now I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.

“You’ve changed your hair,” she said.

I pulled my fingers through the black locks. I had done nothing. I hadn’t even noticed the darkening color until a week ago. My skin had turned a deeper brown as well, far more than it ever had before, even when I was working day in and day out beneath the sun. “Do you like it?”

She didn’t answer, but instead walked over to see what I was reading. “I loved that issue.”

“Me, too.”

I could have seduced her as I had done with Frank Dearing, could have taken her desire and grown it like a new-budded flower. But I refrained. Whatever happened, it was important that it be her choice. I wanted her to love me on her own terms.

She sat down, not on the couch beside me, but in the rocking chair at the end of the coffee table. “You’ve grown so much since you lost Frank. The Porters are asking for my evaluation. I believe you’re ready to live on your own.”

I jumped to my feet, heart pounding. “I’m not. I can’t—”

“You don’t need a counselor anymore,” Nidhi said. “You’ve adjusted to everything so easily. You’re far stronger than any of us imagined.”

It was the way she lowered her eyelids that did it, shielding her eyes while staring at me through her lashes. A month ago she had been a stranger, and now I could read her simply by watching those long, expressive lashes. “You’re right,” I said. “I don’t need a counselor anymore.”

I saw her swallow, saw the skin of her neck and face darken slightly. “Lena, it’s normal for a patient to develop feelings for her therapist…”

“What about the therapist’s feelings for her patient?”

“I care about you. I hope you haven’t misunderstood—”

“I haven’t misunderstood anything.” I smiled, trying to show her that it was okay. “I know what you want. I can feel it.”

To her credit, she didn’t try to lie. Her forehead crinkled. “You can sense emotions?”

“Only that emotion.” I laughed, delighted to see her blush deepen. “I didn’t say anything because I thought it would make you uncomfortable.”

“It would be inappropriate,” Nidhi said, but I could feel her resolve melting.

I leaned back in the couch, my skin tingling with the anticipation of her touch. “I certainly hope so.”

She blinked once, then started to laugh. I had heard her laughter before, but never like this. Loud, joyful, and utterly unrestrained, her delight called to my own, until I was laughing with her.

She joined me on the couch and placed a hand on my thigh, and soon laughter gave way to other sounds.

A PAIR OF HARRISON’S wendigos shoved us into the back of the pickup truck. It was like being manhandled by Frosty the Snowman, only Frosty’s breath probably hadn’t smelled of raw hamburger, nor would his claws have drawn blood. The millipede circled my neck like a grotesque choker, the tip of the blade resting against the base of my skull.

A metal cat jumped awkwardly onto the tailgate behind us. It appeared to have been pieced together with scraps from a wrecked car. This was a cruder creation than the others I had seen. The head looked like a rotor assembly from the alternator, and the major joints were exposed wheels and belts, as if someone had simply smashed the engine into a new form. Smaller insects were crawling through its innards.

“That’s disturbing.” I tucked my feet in close, out of reach. “What’s your name?”

The cat arched its back and made a sound like the grinding of worn-out brake pads. Its teeth were mismatched slivers of fiberglass, and the claws were black metal screws. Various rods and springs acted as tendon and muscle.

August shut the tailgate and the truck cap, locking us in. He climbed into the back seat of the pickup and slid open the rear window so he could talk to us. His smugness had returned in force, perhaps compensating for his earlier fear.

“Give me your hands, Vainio.” He used a thick plastic zip tie to bind my wrists together. “The cat will look better once he’s finished.”

“How does it work, exactly?” I asked. “You come up with the idea, and Victor’s insects bring it to life?”

“Don’t be naïve. That thing’s no more alive than this truck.” He shouted out the door for everyone to hurry up, then turned back to me. “I spent twenty years working as an electrical engineer for the power company. Last year, we lost another line worker after a storm. Damn fool had been working overtime, and wasn’t paying attention. Tell me, Isaac, why did that man have to die when something like Victor’s bugs could have made the repairs faster and more safely?”

“You’re saying you want to fix things? Because so far, all you seem to have used them for is killing people.”

“You and I have very different definitions of people.” He didn’t bother to tie Lena’s wrists. He simply pointed to the cat, then to the millipede around my neck. “We’ll be watching.”

Guan Feng climbed into the seat opposite Harrison. One of the wendigos took the front passenger seat, which would have been amusing to watch from a safer distance. First he caught his fur in the door, and then he fumbled with the seat belt for a good minute before giving up. I felt a little sorry for him.

Another of the book-mages drove, which surprised me. Harrison didn’t strike me as the kind of guy to let someone else take the wheel. Maybe the battle had taken more out of him than I thought.

“I was able to call Nidhi and tell her what was happening,” Lena said.

I grinned, then nodded to show I understood. Harrison could listen in all he wanted, but I doubted he was fluent in Gujarati. I might not be able to respond in kind, but half a conversation was better than none. Better yet, this meant the translation spell in my brain was working again. Whatever Guan Feng’s book had done to me, the effects were already fading.

I checked out our mobile prison, doing my best to avoid any sudden motion that might spook the cat. The truck cap was old, made of fiberglass and plastic on an aluminum frame. The tinted plastic would hide us from view, but Lena could rip this thing apart without breaking a sweat. And Harrison would kill me the instant she tried.

She sighed and leaned against me. Between the sounds from outside and the changing speed, I was able to tell when we reached the highway. The sunlight filtering through the window meant we were heading roughly north. Back to Michigan, then.

I watched the insects crawling in and out of the metal cat like shiny maggots on a corpse as I tried to fit the missing pieces into place. The magic in Guan Feng’s book was strong enough to stop any libriomancer. Why hadn’t they killed Lena’s tree? Why had they held back at Victor’s house? I doubted all of us together would have been a match for what I had just seen and felt. Or maybe the question was what had been holding them back?

I looked through the window at Guan Feng. It was only after I had taken her book that everything went to hell. She wasn’t a libriomancer, but what if she was the book’s keeper? Though the relationship was deeper than that. The voice I heard had been terrified for Guan Feng. And terrified of me.

“I won’t let him turn me against you,” Lena said quietly.

“I know.” We both knew what Harrison would turn her into. Just as we knew she would choose to die before she let him take that choice away. “You should have run.”

“I couldn’t.” She didn’t try to hide her frustration. “Isaac, where did these people come from?”

Harrison slid open the window. “Speak English, or shut the hell up.”

She put a hand on the aluminum frame, blocking him from shutting the window. “Don’t the bugs creep you out?”

“They’re tools. Solid and reliable.” He plucked a silver dot the size of a ladybug from his sleeve and watched it crawl over his fingers. “Victor was always better with machines than he was with people. Caused him no end of grief in school. I tried to help, to teach him to stand up for himself, but his mother insisted on coddling him.”

I fought the urge to reach through the window and throttle him, but Lena simply nodded. Her quiet anger from moments before had vanished, and she listened raptly to Harrison’s every word. “You wanted him to be strong.”

“That’s right.” He glanced at me. “I didn’t want my son to grow up to be the kind of man who let his girlfriend fight his battles for him.”

Lena cut me off before I could respond. “He didn’t. He was outnumbered, but he killed several vampires and injured more.”

“It wasn’t enough, though, was it?”

“I guess not.”

I stared. He couldn’t possibly be buying into Lena’s submissive act…or maybe he could. This was a man who had treated both his wife and son as mere possessions. Why wouldn’t he look at Lena in the same way? He might see Lena’s passiveness not as a front, but as her right and natural state. Especially if he had read Nymphs of Neptune.

And Lena knew it.

“Isaac killed the man who was responsible for Victor’s death,” Lena said softly.

“I know. I read about what happened.” Harrison turned away.

“Who are your friends?”

“They call themselves Bi Sheng de du zhe.”

Normally, I would have heard the words in English as well as Mandarin, but that only worked if the speaker knew what his words meant. Fortunately, Guan Feng turned and repeated the phrase, correcting Harrison’s pronunciation without bothering to disguise her annoyance. “Bì de dú .”

I stared at Guan Feng, wondering if I had heard correctly. The students of Bi Sheng. The actual meaning blurred the line between “students” and “readers.”

Bi Sheng had begun experimenting with movable type during China’s Song Dynasty, centuries before Gutenberg invented his press. But Bi Sheng’s porcelain letters had been too fragile for large-scale printing.

“I don’t understand.” I ignored Harrison and spoke directly to Guan Feng. “Bi Sheng’s press couldn’t produce books in large enough numbers for magic.”

She glared. “The Porters’ flaw has always been arrogance.”

“That’s not—okay, yeah, you’re probably right.” I started to say more, but the millipede’s legs pinched my neck.

Harrison dragged the backs of his fingers down over the metal shells covering his chest, making an irregular clinking sound. “I could force that millipede to crawl into your mouth,” he said lightly. “To clamp its legs into your tongue and dig its sting into the back of your throat.”

“How did you find them?” Lena asked. “The Porters don’t even know they exist.”

I thought back to Gutenberg’s reaction when I described our attackers. One Porter had known, or at least suspected.

“Victor built his pets to seek out magic.” Harrison clearly enjoyed being in a position of power, doling out knowledge like an animal trainer tossing scraps to a performing monkey. “Feng and her fellow caretakers have hidden for centuries, but they couldn’t hide from me.”

“Hidden from what?” Lena asked.

“From us.” I braced myself, but Harrison let my guess pass without punishment. He even smiled, like his pet had mastered a new trick.

“Would you like to learn the true history of libriomancy, Isaac?”

I knew he was taunting me, but dammit, he had also discovered a branch of magic I had never heard of. If Victor’s bugs were as good as I suspected, he had probably gotten into areas of our network I had never seen, too. I tried not to let too much of my annoyance show. “Sure, I love a good story.”

“I suppose Gutenberg told you he invented libriomancy?” Harrison rested his elbow through the window.

“You’ve got a better theory?”

It was Guan Feng who answered. “Bi Sheng and his students were exploring the magical potential of books centuries before Gutenberg. Gutenberg discovered our art and stole what secrets he could. He spent years trying to duplicate Bi Sheng’s magic.”

“He never—” I stopped myself. Who was I to say what was or wasn’t true? More than a decade of Gutenberg’s early life was a mystery. Not even Porter historians knew what he had been up to during the 1420s, though there were plenty of theories.

“Gutenberg was afraid of competition,” Guan Feng continued. “Afraid to let anyone else have power. So he created his automatons and sent them to wipe us out.”

Gutenberg’s invention had spawned upheavals that spread throughout the world. The printing press had spread chaos on every level imaginable: political, religious, and even magical. In a single generation, he upended a magical balance of power that had existed for millennia. While Gutenberg and his growing guild of libriomancers lacked the raw might of the old sorcerers, they made up for it in numbers.

According to the histories I had read, other practitioners had been jealous of Gutenberg, afraid of the following he was amassing. They sought to destroy him, and he created his automatons out of self-defense. Gutenberg had eventually used the automatons to help establish the Porters. Together, they united the world’s magic-users and laid out the laws to put an end to such conflicts.

I knew those histories were incomplete. They made no reference to the other mission of those original twelve Porters. Even then, Gutenberg had been aware of the devourers, and his Porters had worked to keep them from entering our world.

What else had Gutenberg omitted? History was written by the survivors and reshaped by those with power. Few people had ever gained as much power as Johannes Gutenberg. He portrayed himself as a man forced to make ugly choices for a greater purpose. But he had enslaved the souls of his enemies to create the automatons and enforce peace. He manipulated the minds of his own Porters to keep them from abusing their power.

If he had seen the students of Bi Sheng as a threat, he would have acted without hesitation.

“Gutenberg is a tyrant,” Harrison said. “His army has manipulated this world from the shadows for centuries.”

“If we ruled the world, I guarantee you they never would have cancelled Firefly,” I countered.

He sighed. “Make your jokes while you can. Thanks to you, Gutenberg’s army will soon fall.”

I was no longer listening. I stared at the book in Guan Feng’s lap as I made the connection. I forgot about Harrison, the metal millipede around my neck, everything except that ancient text and what it represented. “When I grabbed that book, you shouted a name. Bi Wei.”

Guan Feng’s eyes widened, and she tightened her grip on the book as if I would somehow snap through my bonds, rip it from her grasp, and plunge my hand into the pages to seize its magic.

“Holy shit,” I breathed. “That’s where they went, isn’t it? When Gutenberg’s automatons attacked, they preserved themselves in their books.”

Automatons worked similarly, trapping ghosts…souls…whatever you wanted to call them. A single phrase etched in metal bound the mind to the wooden body. But I had entered an automaton and touched the mind trapped inside. There had been precious little left of her humanity.

The books were different. I had guessed Guan Feng’s book to be several hundred years older than Gutenberg. “The books had to have been prepared long before the attack. Passed down and guarded for emergencies, like magical escape pods. They fled into those books, and you’ve protected them ever since.”

“Gutenberg wanted to destroy us,” Guan Feng said. “He failed.”

How long could you survive like that before the madness took you? Before despair turned to hunger, to resentment and hatred toward everything you had lost. Until all that remained was the need to devour whatever you touched.

“You couldn’t save all of the books, could you?” I asked. Her silence was answer enough. I turned to Harrison. Despite the summer heat, I suddenly felt cold. “You said you found them. Are you sure?”

He frowned. “What are you talking about?”

I thought back to what Jeneta had said about the insects, about the devourers who had attacked her thoughts. The queen was telepathic, and telepathy went in two directions. “How do you know they didn’t find you?”

“You know what’s worse than going over the Mackinac Bridge in my little convertible?” I spoke softly, with as little movement of the neck or mouth as possible. Harrison hadn’t been pleased about losing control of our earlier conversation, and he had expressed his annoyance by perforating the skin beneath my jawbone.

“Going over the bridge in the back of a pickup?” Lena guessed.

I closed my eyes as we moved onto the metal grating in the center lanes, where wind rushed up from below and the only thing keeping us from plunging into the Great Lakes was a stretch of glorified screens.

I understood the engineering well enough to recognize that we were perfectly safe. Unfortunately, intellect had a hard time making itself heard over my gut, which was currently insisting we were all about to plunge to our deaths.

She twined her fingers with mine. “Captured by a murderer with a metal worm around your neck, and you’re worried about heights.”

“Did you know the middle of this bridge can sway more than thirty feet in high winds?” In truth, I was almost grateful for the distraction. I had spent the past hours thinking about Guan Feng’s book and the devourers, trying to understand our true enemy. There were too many gaps, too much I didn’t know.

The first pages of her book were block printed. In theory, if enough copies of the text had been made, that could create the magical resonance you needed for libriomancy. But the rest of the book had been copied by hand.

Was this an unfinished work? If the original wood blocks had been lost, someone might have tried to finish it manually, but not even the most careful scribe could have achieved the perfection of the printing press.

Ask yourself the real question, coward. If the students of Bi Sheng fled into their books, and some of them were lost to madness, does that mean the Porters created the devourers?

The timeline didn’t fit. Gutenberg had shared documented encounters with the devourers from centuries before his time, meaning they had come into existence before Gutenberg was ever born. I supposed those documents could have been faked, but why?

The voice I heard at the church—Bi Wei’s voice—hadn’t been a devourer. She was frightened and angry, not crazed. Her power had sapped our magic. She hadn’t destroyed us.

I banged my head against the side of the truck, then twisted to watch Guan Feng, who had been reading for at least two hours. Was that how she communicated with Bi Wei? Her eyes scanned slowly up and down the text, completely focused.

“Libriomancy only works if thousands of people have read the same book,” I said quietly.

Lena shifted her weight, resting her head on my shoulder. “So I’ve heard.”

“What happens if one person reads the same book thousands of times?”

“I imagine they’d get extremely bored.”

“Depends on the book. Remind me to give you a copy of Good Omens when we get home.”

Back in the sixties, a libriomancer named Ghalib al-Mun’im had collaborated with the Bibliothèque nationale de France to develop a list of the most commonly reread titles, books that were checked out again and again by the same patrons. The Porters had learned to estimate the strength of a book’s potential magic based on the number of readers. Al-Mun’im wanted to build on their work to measure the impact of rereading.

According to his findings, those frequently reread books were less powerful than books read an equal number of times by unique individuals. I remembered his math being rather fuzzy in several spots, but he had suggested that if the Porters wanted to increase the power of books, encouraging more people to read a wider variety would be roughly five times as effective as pushing them to reread their favorites.

But what if you didn’t have a large pool of potential readers? What if you had only a few copies of the books in question and couldn’t risk printing more, for fear that your enemies would find out?

How many times had that book been read and reread through the centuries? How many times had it been repaired to survive, or did Bi Wei somehow strengthen the physical book?

I squinted out the window, trying to guess where we were going. I was almost certain we had taken 28 after the bridge. We stopped for gas a short time later, but the sign outside told me nothing beyond the cost of cigarettes and unleaded gas.

The sun was setting when we finally left the highway. I had started to drift to sleep. The change of speed jolted me from a Wonderland-style nightmare in which I fled through an endless library, my footsteps echoing on the marble floor, trying to escape from invisible pursuers. I was relieved to be free of my dream, up until I remembered where I really was.

We drove into a hilly, wooded area. I felt the road turn to gravel, and the truck’s jostling made the millipede around my neck twitch and dig in tighter.

“Let Harrison feel like he’s in control,” Lena whispered in Gujarati.

“He pretty much is.”

She swung a leg over my lap to straddle me. She kissed my ear, then brought my bound hands toward her. She pressed my fingers against a hard lump beneath the skin of her forearm, like a dislocated bone. Before I could ask what it was, she tensed her arm, and a sliver of wood poked through the skin to jab my fingers. “Take it,” she whispered.

I took the tip of wood and pulled. Lena gasped, but with her body blocking the mechanical cat’s view, Harrison would hopefully take that as a sound of passion rather than pain. I slid a thin wooden stiletto about eight inches long from her skin.

“How?” I asked.

“Flesh. Blood. Wood. They’re all a part of my body.” She kissed me again. “August Harrison is as arrogant as any Porter, and it’s going to cost him dearly.”

Harrison pounded a fist on the window. “I said knock it off with that foreign talk.”

Lena winked at me, then helped me to tuck the knife into my sock. I can only imagine what Harrison thought we were doing.

The truck stopped, and a man I hadn’t seen before unlocked the back. Lena exited first, then offered me a hand as I climbed down from the tailgate. I leaned against the truck and tried to rub the stiffness from my thighs. I smelled water, though I couldn’t see the lake. The cold, fresh air tasted like home.

We were in a parking lot edged with wooden posts. Seven small brown cabins were spread out before us, identical in shape and size. Maple and spruce trees shaded most of the lot.

A pair of metal rats perched like gargoyles atop an old freezer humming outside the closest cabin. The freezer’s curved lines and heavy steel handle, along with the orange rust along the bottom, suggested the thing was probably as old as I was. Such freezers could store enough venison to feed a small family for months. Or preserve the hides of murdered wendigos.

“More friends of yours?” I asked, nodding toward the other cars.

“The followers of Bi Sheng bought this place two months ago,” announced Harrison. The cat bounded down and waddled along behind him like a bad-tempered and extremely pointy duckling.

A path beyond the cabins led down to what appeared to be sand dunes. The U.P. was full of these small lakeside hotels and campsites. The building marked as the office had a “Closed” sign, and the windows were dark. But people were emerging from the other cabins. I spotted two more carrying the oversized books. Others held rifles pointed in my direction. I got the impression that they knew exactly who and what I was, and that any one of them would be happy for an excuse to pull the trigger.

“Is this the dryad?” asked one of the men.

“I told you I’d bring her, didn’t I?” Harrison snapped.

“You also told us the libriomancer was no threat, that you’d have them both long before they discovered you and your stolen magic.”

Harrison sniffed and turned to address the group as a whole. “I brought the dryad. Let’s get on with it.”

“Where are the others?” someone else asked in Mandarin.

“They’re safe,” Guan Feng answered in the same language. “The van was destroyed. They’re making their way back. The Porter and his friends were stronger than Harrison anticipated.” She checked Harrison, as if making sure he wasn’t paying attention. “They were able to report back to Gutenberg. He sent one of his automatons.”

The man with the rifle swore. “How much do they know?”

“I don’t know. I was too busy saving this bèn dàn.” She gestured toward Harrison.

I bit my lip to keep from smirking as I made a mental note of that one. If I survived, I could teach Deb how to call someone a dumbass in Mandarin.

“All right, you’ve busted your asses to catch us,” I said. “What happens next?”

Guan Feng looked down at her book. When she spoke, her words were soft and reverent. “Now the dryad will help us to restore the Bì de dú .”