Codex Born (35 page)

I staggered to my feet. Ash stung my eyes, but I spotted Nidhi on the floor. She was still breathing. I started toward her, but the vampire was back on her feet, the poker protruding from her chest.

I felt the moment the oak’s strength failed, when the weight of the tree overwhelmed the wood that remained. Fibers snapped and popped, and the world swayed around me. The vampire punched me in the side, cracking two ribs, but I barely felt it. My senses were imprisoned by the slow fall of my tree.

“Run,” said Nidhi.

The oak slammed into the earth hard enough to shake the house. I screamed from pain and grief, forgetting vampires, forgetting even Nidhi as a part of me died.

Then I was ducking and falling back by reflex as the vampire attacked. I made it to the backyard, where her partner came at me with the chainsaw. Had I been stronger, I would have wrested it from his grip and cut him down, just as he had done to me. But the oak was my strength, and it lay on the ground, branches smashed through the fence. Leaves and broken sticks littered the yard.

I jumped onto the trunk and ran through the branches. My oak protected me one last time as the life leaked from the wood. The branches let me pass while snatching my pursuers like barbed wire.

Seconds later, I was alone.

J
EFF AND NIDHI GOT to the library around nine in the morning. Jeff stopped in the doorway, wrinkled his nose, and announced, “I’ll be out by the car, where it doesn’t smell like I’ve fallen into a chemical toilet.”

Lena got up to greet Nidhi, leaving me to pore over a chart I had begun working on more than a month ago. They kept their reunion low-key. The library was mostly empty, save for
Alex at the main desk, and Dustin LaJoie, who was checking out a stack of
Curious George
books for his two-year-old daughter.

Lena had created a second bokken from a tree down the street, and had reshaped them both into a spiral cane. It thumped against the floor as she and Nidhi walked over to join me at the public computer terminal.

“Do you have Smudge?” I asked.

Nidhi checked to make sure Alex wasn’t watching, then pulled a translucent yellow hamster ball from her purse.

“You put him in plastic?” I opened the lid, and Smudge darted up my arm. His feet dug into my sleeve as he crouched protectively on my shoulder. Jennifer would have yelled at me had she been here, but Alex thought the spider was, in his words, “freakishly awesome.”

“It’s the first thing I could find at the pet store,” Nidhi said. “If Harrison came after us, melted plastic was going to be the least of our worries.”

“Hey, buddy.” I pulled a jellybean from my candy pocket and handed it to him. Lena made puppy-dog eyes, so I tossed one to her as well.

“What’s this?” asked Nidhi.

“A chart of all recorded encounters with the devourers.” I traced the curve of the two-axis graph. The horizontal was labeled
Year
, while the vertical tracked the decreasing interval between incidents. “Gutenberg first touched these things in 1488, though he believes there are references going back at least a thousand years. For the next few centuries, there were only four recorded times when they reached through to touch our world.”

I pointed to different points along the graph. 1523. 1601. 1699. 1743. As I moved closer to the present, the frequency began to increase. Several were flagged and linked to names in red, beginning with Géza Csáth in 1919 and running through François Robin in 2008.

“Who were they?” asked Nidhi.

“Writers. Specifically, writers who committed suicide. When
Gutenberg examined their published writing, he found traces of devourer magic. He believes they may have had minor magical abilities, enough to call to the devourers through their work. He locked them all as a precaution.” H. P. Lovecraft was noted in yellow with a question mark. He hadn’t killed himself, but having read his work, the man hadn’t been entirely right in the head, either.

A click of the mouse added a vertical dotted line. “This is the point where the interval is projected to become zero, and for all practical purposes, the devourers fully enter our world.”

A point both Gutenberg and I had estimated to be within the next ten years, tops.

I pointed to the start of the sixteenth century. “Correlation doesn’t prove cause, but the increase began right around the time Gutenberg founded the Porters. I thought it might be something we were doing. Libriomancy meant far more people could perform magic. Maybe that was weakening the barriers between magic and the real world. Or maybe magic simply called to them. They might see magic as anything from a challenge to a mating call for all we knew. But the timing also coincides with Gutenberg’s assault on the students of Bi Sheng.”

I had spent the past hour scribbling notes on colored flyers from last year’s library sale. I spread them over the table and pointed to the lime-green one. “Normally, when a libriomancer returns an object to a book, it dissolves into undifferentiated magical energy. If you tried to put Smudge back in his book—well, he’d just set it on fire. But if you found a way, he’d be gone. You could create another Smudge, but it wouldn’t know us. It wouldn’t have his memories or experiences.”

Because it helped me to think more clearly, I had sketched out the equations for converting magic into real-world matter and energy, and vice versa. We had never been able to fully work out the formulas, but we could do a rough approximation for certain basic feats of magic.

Because I was overtired, I had then illustrated the equations with a doodle of Smudge looking unhappy and setting things on fire.

“Bi Wei endured because of her connection to her book, a book which was read countless times through the centuries.” Those readings would have become ritualized, almost religious in nature. A prayer connecting Bi Wei and her readers. “There was no physical dissolution. Nobody cut off her head and stuffed her brain into the book. Instead, the book became the backbone for an unbroken chain of belief linking Bi Wei’s last moments in the temple to the oak tree where Lena brought her back.”

I pointed to another flyer. “What happens when that chain breaks?”

“You get a devourer?” Nidhi guessed.

“But if they lost that magical template of belief
and
they have no physical bodies or anchors in the real world, they should have dissolved into nothingness.” I had illustrated the devourers as a series of swirls that looked like badly-drawn tumbleweeds. “So what keeps the devourers alive?”

Nidhi pointed to the computer. “Could they be using the authors and libriomancers they possessed? Traveling from one mind to another?”

“There are too many gaps,” I said excitedly. “Only one incident in the sixteenth century? What happened to them for the next seventy-eight years?”

“You think they have another anchor,” said Lena.

I snatched another set of equations. “It’s only a theory. I don’t know if it’s more books or another kind of magical artifact, or something else we’ve never considered, but the simplest explanation is that something or someone is preserving them, just like the students of Bi Sheng did for Bi Wei.”

Shouts from outside made me jump. Smudge spun to face the front of the library, but he wasn’t burning. Lena snatched her cane and headed for the door.

I opted for the window. Outside, Jeff was holding the arms of a woman with bright green hair. “It’s all right,” I assured Alex.

“How exactly is this all right?” asked Nidhi. “If she knows where we are, we should either be fighting or running.”

“I’m not sure.” But Smudge wasn’t worried, and when I listened to Guan Feng arguing with Jeff, I didn’t hear a threat. Only fear and desperation. “Lena, would you please ask Jeff to bring her inside?”

Guan Feng sat down between us. Her foot tapped nervously against the floor. Jeff had taken the seat behind her, while Lena sat with me, not-so-subtly surrounding her.

All that remained was to get Alex to stop staring. I thought at first that he had noticed one of us doing something magical, but it wasn’t us he was watching. His interests were more natural than supernatural.

He gathered his courage and walked around the desk. When he saw me looking, he veered away and pretended to reshelf a book. One casual step at a time, he made his way toward Guan Feng. “Hey, are you okay? You look pretty shaken up.” The rest of us were effectively invisible. “I could get you a pop from the break room if you’d like, or maybe some tea?”

“Feng’s an English major at NMU,” I said. “She’s looking for summer work, and stopped by to ask about the library.”

Alex lit up. “You’d love working here. Do you need me to show you around?”

“She has a boyfriend,” I added.

Alex blushed so hard I couldn’t help but feel bad for him. “Oh. I mean, that’s all right. It’s still a great place to work.” He retreated far more hastily than he had approached, and busied himself sorting through the returned books.

“How did you find us?” I asked Guan Feng.

She gave the answer I had expected. “Bi Wei.”

“Does Harrison know?”

She shook her head, and her eyes turned glassy. I wasn’t happy about how easily she had tracked us down, but Smudge remained calm. If this was a trap, or if she had brought one of Harrison’s bugs, even unknowingly, he’d have set something on fire by now.

“What happened?” Nidhi asked gently.

“He put one of those things around her neck while she slept.” She had an accent, but spoke with the confidence of long practice. “Like he did with you. But it wasn’t enough. He built three metal snakes, only a few inches long. The millipede held its blade to her neck while they burrowed into the skin of her chest. He says they’re coiled around the aorta.”

“Why?” I whispered.

It was Lena who answered. “To control her.”

Tears spilled down Guan Feng’s cheeks. “For six years, ever since my father died, I’ve been her reader. I was only thirteen years old, one of the youngest to be given such an honor. To become a reader, let alone a reader for a direct descendant of Bi Sheng…It was my responsibility to sustain and protect her. And if we could find a way, to restore her.” She raised her chin. “I would rather see my ancestors sleep another five hundred years than let Harrison chain them as he did Bi Wei.”

“He sent his insects into the tree when I brought Wei back,” said Lena. “Why did he need more?”

“He lost his connection to them, and believes they were destroyed,” Guan Feng said furiously. “He doesn’t understand the truth. They became a part of her, a tumor spreading through her spirit.”

I leaned closer. “Does Bi Wei know?”

“Yes. She recognized the touch of the
duì, the Ghost Army.”