Codex Born

17

Plato once said that human beings were created with two heads, four arms, and four legs, until Zeus split them in half. Ever since, humans have spent their lives searching for their other half, the one person who could complete them.

What a narrow-minded, messed-up, asinine system.

Do the math. There are more than seven billion people on this planet. Say you do a lot of traveling, and manage to meet a million of those people in your lifetime. That gives you a mere 1 in 7000 chance of finding “the one.”

Maybe that’s why they created me. To be their other half, the answer to the myth. Easier than scouring the planet for an impossible dream. Easier, too, than learning to set aside the dream and embrace a human being who is as flawed and imperfect as you.

Humans are so obsessed with true love, the perfect relationship. They imagine that one elusive person who fits their quirks and foibles and desires like a puzzle piece. And of course, when a potential mate falls short of that perfection, they reject them. They were too old, too young, too silly, too serious, too fat, too thin. They liked the wrong TV shows. They hated chocolate. They voted for the other guy. They didn’t put the toilet seat down.

They invent a million excuses for rejection, a million ways to find others unattractive. Their skill at seeing ugliness in others is matched only by their ability to see it in the mirror, to punish themselves for every imagined flaw. No matter who I’ve become, I never understood that facet of humanity.

I remember when Isaac introduced me to Doctor Who. In one episode, the Doctor met a man who said he wasn’t important. The Doctor replied, “I’ve never met anyone who wasn’t important before.”

I’ve never met anyone who wasn’t beautiful. People have simply forgotten how to see.

Frank Dearing was a selfish, petty, controlling bastard, but when he was working in the field, the hard muscles of his body shining with sweat as he coaxed life from the dirt…the man was an asshole, but he was a hot asshole.

Nidhi Shah was softer. She dressed to minimize the physical. Age and stress had mapped faint lines onto her face. And she was gorgeous. Even before you stripped off her clothes and kissed your way down her neck…

Then there was Isaac Vainio, a skinny geek of a man who lugged his pet spider around everywhere he went. But he had such passion, such raw joy and excitement. That passion transformed him into something sexier than any rock star.

The more we narrow the definition of beauty, the more beauty we shut out of our lives.

IT WAS AS IF I had put the entire universe on pause. Time hadn’t stopped; I had simply sped myself up by a factor of a hundred thousand or so. If all went well, I’d have taken care of the dragon before the phial had fallen more than an inch.

I wanted to run, but even my cautious, steady pace warmed my skin and clothes, courtesy of friction and compression of the air. Relatively speaking, I was a meteorite streaking through the atmosphere, and it would be all too easy to burn myself to a crisp.

“Why doesn’t the Flash ever have to worry about this?” I sank slowly to the floor to retrieve my shock-gun. Weapon in hand, I began climbing over the crumbled remains of our front wall.

Something stung the side of my face. I thought at first that Harrison’s insects had found a way to get at me, but when I looked, I saw a triangle of broken glass hovering in the air. Other shards sparkled like ice, frozen in time and sharp enough to do all kinds of damage if I wasn’t more careful.

I grabbed a broken section of shelving and moved it to and fro like a broom, pushing the glass shards out of the way. Even a relatively slow impact shattered the shards into smaller fragments. I was tempted to try to calculate the amount of kinetic energy in each swing, but Wells’ magic formula had a limited duration. I could play with the math later.

Once I had cleared a path, I ducked outside and made my way down the steps onto the sidewalk. An overturned Chevy Cavalier had smashed into the front wall. I couldn’t see whether there was anyone inside. The dragon’s tail was curved back like a bullwhip, ready to rip through the library a second time.

“My name is Isaac Vainio,” I said. “You smashed my library. Prepare to die.”

Everything went better with Princess Bride references. I aimed at the base of the tail and squeezed the trigger.

There was an interminable wait while the ionized pellet crawled toward the dragon. It took what felt like five seconds just to travel the six feet between me and my target. I watched, fascinated, as the pellet deformed and broke apart.

I braced the gun with both hands, waiting for the lightning and rethinking my plan. In real time, the lightning followed within a fraction of a second, meaning the barrel of the gun was still aligned with the path laid out by the tracer pellet.

What happened if the gun moved? Would the lightning make a new path? My arms were starting to tire.

Five seconds to travel six feet. The gun was supposed to have an effective range of almost a mile. Call it six thousand feet for easy math, and assume the speed of light to be more or less instantaneous, which meant the lightning couldn’t start until the pellet had time to travel the full mile. In real time, it all happened too quickly for human senses to follow. At my relative speed, I’d be waiting more than an hour.

Screw it. I let go, and the gun began to accelerate downward at 9.8 meters per second squared. It should fire long before it had descended the first inch.

I returned to the library and removed a hardcover of John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War from the shelves. Reading without utterly destroying the book was harder than I had expected. After accidentally tearing the binding and four separate pages, I was ready to toss the book aside and attack the dragon bare-handed.

Instead, I released the book and used both hands to slowly and carefully search for the chapter I needed.

The all-in-one superweapons from Scalzi’s novel were much too large to fit through the book. Even if I could create them, I wouldn’t be able to fire the CDF standard-issue MP-35 Infantry Rifle without some extra hardware in my brain.

The projectiles, on the other hand, I could create. Specifically, projectiles that had just left the gun.

The MP-35 had six modes. The only question was whether to use the rockets or the grenades…

I was dragging Lizzie Pascoe back into the barbershop when the shock-gun discharged a bolt of lightning into the dragon’s tail. I set Lizzie down behind the counter, away from the windows. I did the same with her husband and their single customer. I checked the post office across the street next. One by one, I dragged everyone into the back, laying them out like firewood. The antiques store was a lost cause, full of ceramics and glass. I ended up hauling the occupants over to the barbershop instead.

The shock-gun shouldn’t have gone off yet. Either my math was off, or the time-dilating effect of Wells’ story was beginning to wear off. By the time I finished getting everyone behind cover, I was confident my math was correct. I couldn’t hear the thunder from my gun, but I could feel it, like a subsonic massage to my skeletal system.

I grabbed my gun out of the air and double-checked to make sure the street was empty. As I hurried back to the library, I could see the three small projectiles inching their way into the beast’s open maw.

My exposed skin felt like I was rubbing it with sandpaper. When I got inside, I brought Lena, Nidhi, Jeff, and Feng to the break room. After one last trip to grab Smudge, I hunkered down with them to wait.

By the time the explosion went off, the spell had pretty much ended. I heard glass shatter, and the shock wave shook the entire building.

“How did we get—Isaac, what did you do?” Nidhi shouted. I could barely hear her over the echoes of the explosion, and her voice was far deeper than normal, presumably due to a kind of temporal Doppler effect.

I crept out of the break room. The explosion had taken out every remaining window in the library. Books and papers were everywhere, and shrapnel had torn through the walls.

Outside, the dragon’s head lay in three pieces on the ground. The tail had snapped free, and spasmed like the death throes of a decapitated snake. The rest of the body simply stood there. “Maybe I only needed two grenades.”

We knew the destruction of Harrison’s insects pained him. I hoped that pain scaled with mass, and that I had just handed him the mother of all migraines.

I retrieved Smudge, who scrambled up to my shoulder and clung there, but he wasn’t—quite—hot enough to burn me, which I took as a good sign. Lena was already checking on Alex out back.

I sagged against the wall. The worst part was knowing every building on the block had been hit by the same shock wave. I had wrecked buildings and businesses that had stood here for more than a hundred years.

I couldn’t possibly come up with a story to bury this. Copper River was a small, tightly knit town. If gossip was a competitive sport, we’d have been sending teams to the Olympics and bringing back gold. There must have been at least fifty witnesses to what just happened, not to mention the dead metal dragon blocking the road. “I am so screwed.”

“You’d be surprised how much humanity will ignore when it falls outside of their beliefs.”

The calm words were an electrical shock through my spine. I straightened like a cadet coming to attention before an officer. Johannes Gutenberg stood by the crumpled book return bin, an oversized red book tucked beneath his arm.

“You couldn’t have gotten here five minutes sooner?” I asked.

For all his power, Gutenberg was a physically unimposing man. Short and slender, he looked to be in his mid-thirties. A thick black beard and mustache couldn’t conceal the narrowness of his face, especially the nose. A fringe of hair poked out from beneath a black small-brim fedora. He wore a brown vest and scarf over a white shirt, with matching white pants.

“We arrived ten minutes ago, in fact. Time enough to take care of the dragon’s keeper before he could counter your magic.” He bent over to pick up the H. G. Wells collection. “Temporal acceleration. That would explain your windburned complexion.”

“We?” asked Jeff.

“I have eleven field agents setting up a perimeter around the library. Two others will be going door-to-door. Jeneta Aboderin is safe, by the way. Myron Worster is keeping an eye on her.” Outside, the lightning-flash of automatons announced the arrival of more reinforcements.

Reinforcements who would be working their magic on my neighbors, editing the memories of people I called friends. Lizzie Pascoe had tried to help against an enemy she couldn’t have understood. She had stepped forward despite her fear. In return, I had blown out every window in her shop, and now her very thoughts would be violated and rewritten.

“You certainly seem to have gotten Mister Harrison’s attention.” Gutenberg rapped a knuckle against the book he carried. “Fascinating spellcraft. Far more stable than I would have guessed, to last for so many years with so little corruption. The fellow imprisoned in these pages was able to contain our magic long enough for his master to escape. Fortunately, I believe I can eliminate that threat.”

He plucked a gold fountain pen from his breast pocket and opened the book.

“What are you doing?” Guan Feng shoved past me. “Stop!”

Gutenberg tilted his head, the nib of the pen hovering over the rice paper. “You must be one of the Bì de dú .” His expression didn’t change, but the air inside the library seemed to drop twenty degrees. “You neglected to mention a prisoner in your phone call to Nicola, Isaac.”

“She came to ask for our help,” I said. “Harrison was able to create his own dryad. He’s going to use her to restore the rest of Bi Sheng’s students from their books, and to enslave them.”

“His friends have done an excellent job of hiding him. But all magic has limits.” He touched pen to paper and began to write.

Guan Feng lunged for the book, but Lena caught her in a bear hug and held her back. I stepped closer, trying to see what Gutenberg was doing. The pen left no visible mark on the paper, but I could feel the book reacting to the words.

I shouldn’t have been able to feel it at all. I was too raw and exposed from the past few days. “You’re hurting him.”

“Indeed,” he said without looking up. “It will be over soon enough.”

Smudge crawled around to the back of my head, tickling my neck. I half expected him to set my hair alight, but he was unnaturally cool to the touch. Whoever was bound to that book, he was lashing out, trying to counter Gutenberg’s magic. Invisible fingers curled through my body, searching for purchase. Gutenberg merely clucked his tongue and continued to write.

“Please.” Guan Feng’s face was wet. She had stopped struggling against Lena. “He’ll die.”

“He died five hundred years ago,” Gutenberg said. “This was a collection of memories, nothing more.”

“You’re locking the book.” More than anything, I felt disoriented. Off balance, as if I was falling in every direction. Desperation built like steam—desperation that belonged not to me, but to the man bound to that book. I heard a whisper in my head, but I didn’t understand the words. And then the struggle simply stopped, replaced by resignation and a sense of acceptance.

A second later, there was nothing.

“Very good.” Gutenberg capped his pen and returned it to his pocket.

I reached over to touch the book. Magically, it was cold and dead. “He’s gone.”

Guan Feng wiped her face, the movement violent. “His name was Lan Qihao. He was a poet. He was seventeen years old the day your automatons attacked. His parents were farmers. He lost his sister at the age of twelve, during a flood.”

She stared at the book, her eyes unfocussed. “He was in love with another student, a girl of nineteen, from Hopei. She was from a riverboat family. They spoke of running away together, but neither would dishonor their studies. When shelved, their books were always placed next to each other.”

“A touching story,” Gutenberg said. He drew a thin paperback from within his vest and turned in a slow circle.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“I want to be certain Harrison hasn’t left any of his pets behind to eavesdrop.” He clapped the book shut. “Isaac, I’m told you had acquired one of these books when you and Lena escaped from August Harrison.”

With his attention on me, he didn’t see the sudden panic on Guan Feng’s face, nor the desperate pleading in her eyes.

“It was stolen during the fight,” said Nidhi. “While the dragon distracted Isaac and Lena, a second creature entered the library. A metal dog or wolf. It snatched the book and tried to attack Guan Feng. Lena was able to fend it off.”

I had never been a good liar, but Nidhi was amazing. Perhaps a second and a half of real time had passed while I battled the dragon and moved people to safety. There was no way Lena had fought anything during that time. Yet as I listened to Nidhi, I almost believed her.

“I see.” Gutenberg somehow managed to shove the oversized book into the back pocket of his trousers. Another trick I would love to learn one of these days.

“Harrison and Bi Sheng’s students aren’t the only threat.” I told him about the Army of Ghosts. “They’ve infested Harrison’s insects, and they did the same to Bi Wei when Lena restored her. We’ve got to assume everyone he and his dryad restores will be similarly infected.”

Gutenberg frowned. “Victor didn’t create his insects to house such things. Every documented encounter has involved human beings.”

“He did make them telepathic, though,” I said. “When we spoke to Victor’s ghost, he said at least one insect had gone missing overseas. It was supposed to be seeking out magic.”

“We’ll have to see about finding that lost insect,” said Gutenberg. “In the meantime, our priority is August Harrison. The Ghost Army is using him. They helped him learn how to build monsters for his protection, and how to restore the students of Bi Sheng, all as a way to provide vessels for their own return.”

“Harrison knows where I live,” I said. “Nidhi, too.”

“We have both places under observation. For now though, we’ll remain here.”

“Here?” I stared. “But he’s already attacked the library once. If they return—”

“Stop thinking so defensively, Isaac. Small and damaged though it may be, this library is our strongest fortress.”

“Small?” I bristled, but held my tongue before I could say things I would regret. On a per capita basis, the Copper River Library had more books than just about any other library in the country. I watched in silence as he browsed the broken shelves, selecting a book seemingly at random. He fanned the pages, and Guan Feng dropped to the floor unconscious. Nidhi crouched to touch the girl’s neck.

“She’s alive,” Gutenberg said, pulling out his gold pen once more. As he moved toward Guan Feng, understanding twisted my stomach.

All libriomancers knew Gutenberg could lock books, sealing away the most dangerous magic. Only a few of us knew he could do the same to people, suppressing any magic they might possess. He had even been known to wipe people’s memories of magic, and to erase them from the memories of others. Gutenberg argued that it was the most humane way to deal with magical criminals, and he wasn’t entirely wrong. You couldn’t exactly send them off to a mundane prison, which meant the only other alternative would be to kill them.

To most of us, death would be preferable. “She doesn’t have any magic.”

“Are you certain?” asked Gutenberg.

“What she does have is a connection to Bi Wei,” I continued. “A connection we don’t understand. Bi Wei appeared sane when we escaped. For all we know, Guan Feng is the one helping her to hold on to that sanity, and to resist the influence of the Ghost Army. Do you know what severing that bond might do?”

He pursed his lips. “When did you learn such caution, Isaac?”

“About the fourth time I nearly eradicated myself from existence.” I watched his pen as if it were a loaded gun. “Why did you try to wipe out the students of Bi Sheng?”

Gutenberg slid the pen back into his pocket. “Do you think I was the first to attempt to build an organization like Die Zwelf Portenære? There were many guilds and circles of magic-users throughout the world. Some were only too happy to join with me. Others viewed the Porters as a group of impertinent upstarts with no respect for the laws of magic who threatened the proper order.”

“It sounds like you threatened more than ‘the proper order.’” My throat was dry. Provoking Gutenberg was near the top of my list of stupid ideas, just below throwing snowballs at a wendigo.

“The Archbishop Adolph von Nassau was the first to challenge me. He sent his soldiers to burn my press when he learned what I could do. Two of my apprentices died in the blaze. I would have been killed as well if not for the protection I gained from the grail. This was no ordinary fire, Isaac. The flames were alive, sent by magic. After five hundred years, I can still see the smoke pouring forth, like the black breath of hell itself.” He shrank inward. “I pulled Peter from the fire, but I was unable to save him.”

He brushed his sleeves, visibly regaining his composure. “That was the first of many such attacks. We were at war. My discovery meant the mastery of magic was no longer limited to a handful of individuals. Hundreds, even thousands now had the potential to use such power, and to challenge those who once thought themselves untouchable.” He pursed his lips in amusement. “The great conquistador Juan Ponce de Leon took particular offense at my presumption, at least in the beginning.”

“Your discovery?” I pressed.

He inclined his head in acknowledgment. “Bi Sheng crafted a primitive form of book magic. I took libriomancy to its full potential.”

“Bi Sheng’s ‘primitive’ magic preserved his followers for five hundred years,” Lena pointed out.

He waved her comment off with a sharp gesture. “The original twelve Porters were under constant assault. Some campaigns were waged through rumor and gossip, seeking to destroy our reputations in both the magical and the mundane worlds. Other practitioners arrived to challenge us directly. The only way to prove the legitimacy of my art was to accept and defeat all such challenges.”

“Bi Wei never challenged you,” I said quietly. “She knew nothing of Porters or European libriomancy. Her ancestor’s magic showed her the stars, and you sent your automatons to kill her.”

“Did she tell you about the ?”

The words translated to “dark afflictions.” I shook my head.

“They were similar to Victor’s insects in some respects. The are small creatures of folded paper, made from the pages of books penned by Bi Sheng’s students. They stowed away on Portuguese trading vessels and eventually made their way to Germany. They came during the night, cutting flesh so cleanly their victims never even stirred. The wounds resisted magical healing. I watched five of my students suffer for weeks, their wounds turning septic.” He unbuttoned his vest and the top of his shirt, then pulled back the collar to display a thin purple scar over his shoulder. “Even I never fully healed.”

“Earlier this year, a former Porter enslaved and destroyed vampires. Should the rest of the vampires retaliate against all Porters, like you did with Bi Sheng’s followers?”

“It’s easy to stand in judgment,” Gutenberg said softly, “from the luxury of the magical peace and security I provided. And perhaps you’re right. Ponce de Leon thought as you did, and it’s true I’ve made mistakes. But while you stand there self-righteously condemning my choices and actions from five hundred years ago, August Harrison and his followers prepare for war. I suggest you reconsider your priorities, Isaac.”

He righted a table and began gathering books. I waited without speaking until he vanished into the history section, then hurried to grab my things from behind the desk. I pulled Bi Wei’s book out of my bag and shoved it into a file drawer, behind a bulging folder of old library card applications.

By the time Gutenberg returned with more books, I was standing at the front of the library looking through the ragged opening at the Porters talking to Lizzie Pascoe. As I watched, she smiled and invited them into the barbershop.

“Whatever remains of Bi Wei’s mind now shares a body with the devil itself.” Gutenberg sighed, and for a moment, I saw not the most powerful libriomancer in the world, but an old man, exhausted from burdens he had carried for centuries. “This isn’t a war between Porters and Bi Sheng’s descendants, Isaac. Do you think the Ghost Army will stop with the Porters? You’ve felt their hunger. They will devour everything.” He pointed outside to the broken dragon. “And they will begin with Copper River.”