Codex Born (29 page)

“As much as anyone can understand that man’s mind. There hasn’t exactly been a lot of research on immortal wizards.”

“Bi Sheng was working with movable type long before Gutenberg was born. He and his followers developed their own form of book magic. Do you think Gutenberg could have stolen those ideas? Then tried to wipe out Bi Sheng’s students to make sure no one found out?”

Nidhi didn’t answer right away, and when she did speak, her words were slow and careful. “I don’t know. He’s not the same man he was. How much have you changed in your lifetime, Isaac? Your beliefs, your values, your knowledge, they all evolve with time and experience. Gutenberg has been evolving
for five centuries.” She paused, then added, “Besides, you don’t really want to know what I think. You’ve already come to your own conclusion. You just want me to talk you out of it.”

I had forgotten how annoying Nidhi could be when she was right.

“Thanks. We’ll check in again soon.” I hung up and tried to concentrate on the road.

Invention always built on the shoulders of those who came before. Would Gutenberg have been able to develop his machine if he had never seen a wine press, or if others hadn’t developed wood-block printing and engraving plates? If not for the metallurgists, the coin-stampers, and more? Not to mention the foundations of magic, work and research going back thousands of years.

But the Porters’ records had no information about Bi Sheng. Gutenberg had obviously known of them, which meant he had deliberately omitted that information from our archives.

A year ago, I would have taken on faith that Gutenberg had a good reason for his actions. Maybe Bi Sheng had discovered magic strong enough to turn all of humanity into sentient custard, or summon Cthulhu to devour Australia. Maybe Gutenberg was trying to make sure nobody ever recreated and used those spells.

Or maybe he was simply hiding evidence of his own crimes.

Bi Wei and Guan Feng had seen the Porters as monsters. I was starting to fear they might be right.

My house appeared to be undisturbed. I waited while Lena circled around to the backyard. A minute later, the lights came on inside the house. She opened the front door to wave me in.

“I half expected to find the house burned to the ground,” I said.

“Are you complaining?” Lena shot back.

“It makes me nervous. Harrison knows where we live. How
hard would it be to send a few bugs to short out the fuse box? What are they up to that he didn’t have time for a little petty revenge?” I shook my head. “The man was pissed. Sooner or later, he’s going to want payback.”

“He’s not the only one,” said Lena.

I hurried to the office to grab my laptop and the July issue of the
New York Library Bulletin
. A paper clip on page forty-six marked an article I had originally wanted to use to try to decipher the Voynich manuscript, a fifteenth century tome currently housed at Yale.

I stuffed the magazine into my bag and hurried to the living room. Lena stood at the back door, looking at her oak. “I hate moving,” she said quietly.

“I could rig up a force field to protect the garden.”

“And any one of the students of Bi Sheng could use their books to rip it down. Anything you do to protect my tree, they can counter.”

“So you find another oak,” I said.

“They sniffed me out once. What’s to stop them from doing it again?”

I had circled through the same arguments in my head as we drove. I hadn’t yet found an answer. How did you fight people who could both sense and consume magic? Maybe shrinking her tree really was the best option. But then she’d be unable to enter it. Like libriomancy with books, Lena’s tree needed to be large enough to physically hold her.

She left the house, heading toward the garden. I started to follow, but she stopped in mid-step.

“I’d prefer to be alone for this,” she said without turning around.

Her answer surprised me. Lena was pretty much the opposite of shy. “Let me know when you’re ready.”

While I waited, I tossed my ruined outfit in the garbage and grabbed an old pair of jeans and a blue T-shirt Deb had sent me as a present back when I started working at the Copper River Library. Not that I could wear a shirt that said “Librarians:
Kicking Ignorance in the Balls for Over 4000 Years” on the job.

I returned to the kitchen and sat down at the table with the
New York Library Bulletin
. It had been ages since I tried to use a magazine for libriomancy. In theory, magazines worked precisely the same as books, but there were several complicating factors. Magazine circulation had been declining for years, resulting in fewer readers and less cumulative belief for us to tap into. The fact that more people tended to skim articles or skip some altogether didn’t help either. Then there was the impermanence of the format. How many magazines ended up in the recycling bin within a month? The power attached to magazines faded far more quickly than with books.

These days, print publications had to compete with the Internet, and the NYLB hadn’t had a huge readership to begin with. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see it go fully digital within the next few years.

I wondered if Jeneta Aboderin’s magic would work with Web sites. If she could use e-books, why not online content? That opened up a tremendous number of possibilities, some more disturbing than others. She could flood the entire planet with kittens and porn, not to mention certain categories of fanfiction…

I read the article again, concentrating on the paragraphs that described research into smart glasses that could scan and translate text as you read. My fingers moved over the glossy print, trying to reach beyond.

Nonfiction was a different beast than fiction, but the emotions were the same. I touched eagerness and excitement, imagination and possibility. I pressed until my fingernails whitened, and then I was through. My fingers closed around thick-framed glasses, which I pulled carefully from the pages. I swore as my palm snagged on a staple. Yet another downside of magazine-based libriomancy.

“Those are…not stylish,” Lena said from the doorway. In her hands, she held a single branch from her oak, roughly four
feet long. It looked like she had filled a small plastic bag with damp soil and tied it around one end of the branch. Leaves on the opposite end rustled gently as she shifted on her feet.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“I feel broken.” She managed a pale smile. “What’s up with the geek specs?”

Black earbuds dangled from the hinges. The single-piece lens was dark glass, and might have looked awesome if not for the bulky gray frames and the red-ringed camera that stuck out from the nosepiece like a high-tech zit. “These are going to help me read Bi Wei’s story.”

We drove to Tori’s Pub, one of the oldest businesses in town. People said the first miner came to Copper River on a Tuesday, and by that Thursday, Tori’s bar was fully stocked and ready to go.

The smell of peanuts, pizza, and stale beer poured over us as I opened the door. Old logs paneled the walls, giving the place a woodsy cabin feel. Framed newspaper articles from the local paper hung on the wall closest to the bar, along with color photos of high school football teams going back to my parents’ time. Sheets of acrylic plastic covered the tables, preserving graffiti carved into the wood more than a hundred years ago.

A handful of people called out greetings. I waved and forced a smile, then hurried to snag a small booth where we would be able to keep an eye on anyone coming in.

I brought out Bi Wei’s book while Lena ordered a late dinner of pizza, chocolate ice cream, and a Long Island Iced Tea. “And Isaac will have a pasty. With extra rutabaga.”

“I’m not hungry,” I protested.

“I don’t care.” Her eyes dared me to argue.

I surrendered as gracefully as I could. After double-checking the instructions in the
New York Library Bulletin
, I donned the glasses and pressed a small button on the right side of the frame. A cheerful ding rang through the earbuds.

“Translation on,”
said a pleasant but stiff female voice. I opened the book and studied the vertical characters on the first page. My vision flickered, and the image froze for a quarter second. A second picture appeared over the first. The new layer was semi-transparent, but easy enough to read.
The [UNTRANSLATABLE] of Bi Wei
.

“Sweet!” I turned the page and waited while the glasses translated the text.

“How do they work?” asked Lena.

“Optical character recognition networked to the world’s largest translation engine. At least, that’s the theory. The translation database doesn’t exist in the real world yet. So far, the company’s prototypes only do very basic word- and phrase-level translations, and their software is limited to English, Spanish, and French. But by the end of the decade, they’re hoping to create and market a set of glasses that will translate any language pretty much instantly. That’s what I used for the spell.”

I tapped the hinges of the glasses and read aloud. “‘The palace lady takes no delight in idleness, but devotes her mind to the latest verse. For poetry can be a substitute for the flowers of oblivion.’ Remind me to have Jeneta look through this thing.”

I flipped ahead to the handwritten portion of the book and continued reading.

At thirteen I raised my gaze from the moss-covered paths to the angler with his brush and ink. As the slivered moon smiled
down, he gathered me to his net of words. My grandfather’s tears shone from Heaven, and his pride opened the waters of the world.

The glasses converted everything into a simplistic computerized font, but I could also see the characters Bi Wei had brushed onto the page, the precision and the artistry with which she wrote.

“The angler could be Bi Sheng,” said Lena.

“Or another of his followers or descendants. Bi Sheng died
centuries before Gutenberg’s time. Bi Wei wouldn’t have known him.” Or maybe we were reading too much into it, and Bi Wei just liked fishing a lot. Poetry wasn’t my strong suit. “She really did it. She wrote herself into the book.”

How many weeks had she spent preparing? How desperate must they have been to believe such precautions were necessary?