Codex Born

“I know.” We both knew what Harrison would turn her into. Just as we knew she would choose to die before she let him take that choice away. “You should have run.”

“I couldn’t.” She didn’t try to hide her frustration. “Isaac, where did these people come from?”

Harrison slid open the window. “Speak English, or shut the hell up.”

She put a hand on the aluminum frame, blocking him from shutting the window. “Don’t the bugs creep you out?”

“They’re tools. Solid and reliable.” He plucked a silver dot the size of a ladybug from his sleeve and watched it crawl over his fingers. “Victor was always better with machines than he was with people. Caused him no end of grief in school. I tried to help, to teach him to stand up for himself, but his mother insisted on coddling him.”

I fought the urge to reach through the window and throttle him, but Lena simply nodded. Her quiet anger from moments before had vanished, and she listened raptly to Harrison’s every word. “You wanted him to be strong.”

“That’s right.” He glanced at me. “I didn’t want my son to grow up to be the kind of man who let his girlfriend fight his battles for him.”

Lena cut me off before I could respond. “He didn’t. He was outnumbered, but he killed several vampires and injured more.”

“It wasn’t enough, though, was it?”

“I guess not.”

I stared. He couldn’t possibly be buying into Lena’s submissive act…or maybe he could. This was a man who had treated both his wife and son as mere possessions. Why wouldn’t he look at Lena in the same way? He might see Lena’s passiveness not as a front, but as her right and natural state. Especially if he had read Nymphs of Neptune.

And Lena knew it.

“Isaac killed the man who was responsible for Victor’s death,” Lena said softly.

“I know. I read about what happened.” Harrison turned away.

“Who are your friends?”

“They call themselves Bi Sheng de du zhe.”

Normally, I would have heard the words in English as well as Mandarin, but that only worked if the speaker knew what his words meant. Fortunately, Guan Feng turned and repeated the phrase, correcting Harrison’s pronunciation without bothering to disguise her annoyance. “Bi de du .”

I stared at Guan Feng, wondering if I had heard correctly. The students of Bi Sheng. The actual meaning blurred the line between “students” and “readers.”

Bi Sheng had begun experimenting with movable type during China’s Song Dynasty, centuries before Gutenberg invented his press. But Bi Sheng’s porcelain letters had been too fragile for large-scale printing.

“I don’t understand.” I ignored Harrison and spoke directly to Guan Feng. “Bi Sheng’s press couldn’t produce books in large enough numbers for magic.”

She glared. “The Porters’ flaw has always been arrogance.”

“That’s not—okay, yeah, you’re probably right.” I started to say more, but the millipede’s legs pinched my neck.

Harrison dragged the backs of his fingers down over the metal shells covering his chest, making an irregular clinking sound. “I could force that millipede to crawl into your mouth,” he said lightly. “To clamp its legs into your tongue and dig its sting into the back of your throat.”

“How did you find them?” Lena asked. “The Porters don’t even know they exist.”

I thought back to Gutenberg’s reaction when I described our attackers. One Porter had known, or at least suspected.

“Victor built his pets to seek out magic.” Harrison clearly enjoyed being in a position of power, doling out knowledge like an animal trainer tossing scraps to a performing monkey. “Feng and her fellow caretakers have hidden for centuries, but they couldn’t hide from me.”

“Hidden from what?” Lena asked.

“From us.” I braced myself, but Harrison let my guess pass without punishment. He even smiled, like his pet had mastered a new trick.

“Would you like to learn the true history of libriomancy, Isaac?”

I knew he was taunting me, but dammit, he had also discovered a branch of magic I had never heard of. If Victor’s bugs were as good as I suspected, he had probably gotten into areas of our network I had never seen, too. I tried not to let too much of my annoyance show. “Sure, I love a good story.”

“I suppose Gutenberg told you he invented libriomancy?” Harrison rested his elbow through the window.

“You’ve got a better theory?”

It was Guan Feng who answered. “Bi Sheng and his students were exploring the magical potential of books centuries before Gutenberg. Gutenberg discovered our art and stole what secrets he could. He spent years trying to duplicate Bi Sheng’s magic.”

“He never—” I stopped myself. Who was I to say what was or wasn’t true? More than a decade of Gutenberg’s early life was a mystery. Not even Porter historians knew what he had been up to during the 1420s, though there were plenty of theories.

“Gutenberg was afraid of competition,” Guan Feng continued. “Afraid to let anyone else have power. So he created his automatons and sent them to wipe us out.”

Gutenberg’s invention had spawned upheavals that spread throughout the world. The printing press had spread chaos on every level imaginable: political, religious, and even magical. In a single generation, he upended a magical balance of power that had existed for millennia. While Gutenberg and his growing guild of libriomancers lacked the raw might of the old sorcerers, they made up for it in numbers.

According to the histories I had read, other practitioners had been jealous of Gutenberg, afraid of the following he was amassing. They sought to destroy him, and he created his automatons out of self-defense. Gutenberg had eventually used the automatons to help establish the Porters. Together, they united the world’s magic-users and laid out the laws to put an end to such conflicts.

I knew those histories were incomplete. They made no reference to the other mission of those original twelve Porters. Even then, Gutenberg had been aware of the devourers, and his Porters had worked to keep them from entering our world.

What else had Gutenberg omitted? History was written by the survivors and reshaped by those with power. Few people had ever gained as much power as Johannes Gutenberg. He portrayed himself as a man forced to make ugly choices for a greater purpose. But he had enslaved the souls of his enemies to create the automatons and enforce peace. He manipulated the minds of his own Porters to keep them from abusing their power.

If he had seen the students of Bi Sheng as a threat, he would have acted without hesitation.

“Gutenberg is a tyrant,” Harrison said. “His army has manipulated this world from the shadows for centuries.”

“If we ruled the world, I guarantee you they never would have cancelled Firefly,” I countered.

He sighed. “Make your jokes while you can. Thanks to you, Gutenberg’s army will soon fall.”

I was no longer listening. I stared at the book in Guan Feng’s lap as I made the connection. I forgot about Harrison, the metal millipede around my neck, everything except that ancient text and what it represented. “When I grabbed that book, you shouted a name. Bi Wei.”

Guan Feng’s eyes widened, and she tightened her grip on the book as if I would somehow snap through my bonds, rip it from her grasp, and plunge my hand into the pages to seize its magic.

“Holy shit,” I breathed. “That’s where they went, isn’t it? When Gutenberg’s automatons attacked, they preserved themselves in their books.”

Automatons worked similarly, trapping ghosts…souls…whatever you wanted to call them. A single phrase etched in metal bound the mind to the wooden body. But I had entered an automaton and touched the mind trapped inside. There had been precious little left of her humanity.