Codex Born (25 page)

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
.”

Eight months into our relationship, I returned home to find Nidhi sitting on the couch, her hands folded over a book in her lap.

When I sat down, she stiffened like she was fighting the urge to pull away. “I’m sorry I was late.” I had been volunteering with the local food bank, encouraging the fruitfulness of their gardens. I thought I had told her we were picking and packing today, but maybe I’d forgotten. “Nidhi, what’s wrong?”