Codex Born

through me as if I wasn’t here.

Fortunately, libriomancy obeyed belief over physics, and few modern-day readers thought about invisibility on a cellular level. I ran back to Christina Quinney and took a lipstick from her purse, then hurried toward the garden. Once there, I dropped behind the overturned bench.

The seat and back were slabs of polished black granite. The engraving along the back read, In memory of Annette Butler. Had the truck hit this thing head-on, it probably would have broken both the bench and the truck, but it looked like they had struck it at an angle.

“I’m sorry about this, Annette.” I uncapped the lipstick and drew two red eyes and a large mouth. I wasn’t much of an artist, especially since the lipstick had turned invisible when I picked it up, but it left visible, waxy lines on the granite. I added a pair of angry eyebrows as well, along with uneven ears to either side.

I put the lipstick away and pulled out the pepperbox. Creating the powder of life from The Marvelous Land of Oz had been the easy part. The challenge was getting through the ritual to use it. I opened the box and sprinkled the powder over the bench, then raised my left pinky and said, “Weaugh.” Next was the right thumb. “Teaugh.” Finally, I raised both arms and waved them like a dancer doing jazz hands. “Peaugh.”

L. Frank Baum wrote some weird magic. I just hoped I had pronounced it correctly.

Through my glasses, the powder looked like white sparks melting into the metal and granite. The whole contraption gave a shiver. Lipstick eyes blinked, and the ears perked up.

“Hello there,” I said. “I need you to do me a favor…”

A wendigo was the first one to spot the bench bounding toward them. With a snarl, it broke away from the circle to meet this new threat.

The bench didn’t even slow down. It charged with a straight-on waddle, as if it wanted nothing more than for that wendigo to plop down and enjoy a nice, comfy seat. Instead, the wendigo grabbed the bench and lifted one end into the air.

It was an impressive display of strength, one which did the wendigo no good whatsoever as the seat and back clapped together like enormous granite jaws. The wendigo let out a high-pitched yowl of pain.

Lena used the distraction to sprint toward the trees. Two of the wendigos spotted her, but a chunk of brick downed one before it could react. A lucky shot with my shock-gun took care of the second. I was a lousy shot with my left hand, but the nice thing about the shock-gun was that even grazing the target was enough to drop it.

Harrison whirled, but thanks to the Ring of Gyges on my hand, he stared right through me.

He recovered quickly, ordering the wendigos back. A ghost flew from the automaton and swooped through the bench, weakening my spell.

My gun spat lightning at the three mages, but it fizzled into nothingness without reaching them. With everyone worrying about me and the bench, Lena was able to race out from between the trees, slip an arm around a wendigo’s throat, and haul it backward.

The wendigo’s choked cry was enough to attract attention. Two more wendigos bounded after Lena. I almost felt bad for them. Attacking Lena among the trees was a particularly bad idea.

I moved to the corner of the church and braced my arm against the bricks, sighting in on August Harrison, but one of the ghosts swooped into my line of fire. It could see me, even if Harrison couldn’t.

In the field, the bench staggered as another ghost continued to siphon its magic. Cartoonish eyes drooped, and its movements turned sluggish. But when another wendigo approached, the bench valiantly reared up and kicked it in the chest.

The ghost in front of me closed in. I pointed over its shoulder, uncertain whether it would see or understand the gesture. “Too late,” I said, grinning.

With two of the three ghosts focused on us while Harrison and the wendigos chased after Lena, the remaining book-mage was left alone to try to contain the automaton. It wasn’t enough. Wooden hands creaked, and a blast of hellfire shot outward. The woman with the green hair tried to jump out of the way, but the flames caught her in the side. She spun away, protecting her book even as she screamed in pain.

She tried to run, but the automaton struck a wendigo hard enough to knock its body into her. They both went down, and her book flew into the grass. The ghost in front of me peeled away, streaking back toward the automaton.

I didn’t stop to think. I simply ran. I held my shock-gun ready, but my attention was on that book. The wendigo who had been hit was very dead, but Green was groaning and trying to pull herself free from beneath the body. She was reaching for her book.

I got there first. The book disappeared when I snatched it up with my armored hand. The woman screamed again, fury overpowering pain as she struggled to follow.

I retreated to the church to study my prize. It became visible again as soon as I set it down. White silk cords bound wooden boards covered in red cloth. I opened the cover, then pulled my hand back. “Rice paper,” I whispered.

Strong and smooth, the paper held the ink far better than most modern paper. The columns of brown Chinese characters were as clear and sharp as the day they had been drawn. The pages were folded and pasted together, like a long scroll flattened accordion-style and bound into a single book. There were illustrations, but no color.

Based on what I had seen, this book was more than seven hundred years old. Give or take a century. That made it significantly older than Gutenberg himself. Of course, I was no expert, and I couldn’t know anything for certain without further research.

I turned carefully to the front pages and frowned. The first few pages were printed, either woodblock or movable type. But the inner pages appeared to have been written by hand.

I moved the book out of sight behind me and returned my attention to the fighting. Only two of the ghosts remained, and all but three wendigos were unconscious or too injured to make a difference. Harrison was red- faced, his angry shouts growing shrill with panic. My animated bench was limping and the automaton was in bad shape, but we were winning. Harrison launched another small swarm at the automaton, only to have their magic sucked away before they reached their target. Harrison cried out again, this time in pain. I grinned and started shooting, and he dove for cover behind the truck.

“Guan Feng?”

The voice belonged to a woman, and it had come from the book. I had heard whispers from books before, but this was different. It didn’t feel like misplaced snippets of dialogue sneaking into my thoughts. Whoever had spoken sounded more aware, more here.

At the tree line, roots broke through the earth to twine around a wendigo’s ankles. I aimed at the two remaining book-mages and pulled the trigger.

The book behind me screamed. The words were in another tongue—one of the Chinese languages, I thought…possibly Mandarin—but I understood them perfectly as they tore through my skull.

“Begone, Porter!”

In order for my magic to translate her words, those words had to be spoken by a living mind. This was no character brought to pseudolife to fight for August Harrison. Not only was this a real person, she knew what I was. And she was terrified.

“Bi Wei!” The woman with the green hair dragged herself free and began hobbling toward us. Harrison shouted an order, but she ignored him. I heard the book calling out to her, to Guan Feng, pleading for help.

I raised my shock-gun. I had endless questions, but we could sort things out as soon as everyone stopped trying to kill me.

The book screamed a second time. Magic poured forth, and I watched the gun dissolve in my hand.

The fact that I could see my hand meant the Ring of Gyges was fading as well. I scooted backward, but Guan Feng had spotted me. The book continued to scream, and a shadow darkened my vision. The sunglasses fell apart and dropped to the ground, leaving me blind to the magic swirling around and through me.

I couldn’t see what she was doing, but I could feel it. The armor on my right hand broke away like oversized scabs. I supposed I should have been grateful for that small blessing, but it didn’t stop.

As the ghost tore through me, my mind flashed back to the attack in Detroit. The devourer had seized me from the inside out, claws unraveling my memories and my thoughts. I had come so close to drowning in its hunger and rage. It had been an incoherent, instinctive attack. The devourer had no understanding or awareness