Codex Born (5 page)

“Be careful,” Nidhi said quietly, though I had no doubt Helen heard her warning as clearly as I did.

“Aren’t I always?” Nidhi had been my therapist for several
years, and she knew better than most the trouble I had gotten myself into when I was younger. I turned the pages and skimmed the story. “You might want to back up a little.”

“You do know what you’re doing, eh?” asked Helen.

I gnawed my lower lip. “Farther than that.”

Unlike the lifeless screen of an e-reader, the pages of Asimov’s story welcomed me. From the opening paragraphs, I could hear Arnold Potterley’s quiet desperation as he petitioned for permission to use chronoscopy. I felt the resigned bitterness of the man forced to refuse that petition. I flipped ahead, imagining the excitement and anticipation of a working chronoscope—anticipation shared by countless readers over time.

My fingers sank through the page, sending a thrill through my body. I had performed this same act hundreds of times over the years, and there were days I still fought to keep from giggling like a kid on Christmas morning. No matter what happened, no matter what monsters tried to eat my flesh or steal my thoughts, I could do
magic
.

I saw the chronoscope in my mind, a template created by the imagination and belief of the readers. Normally, the next step would be to use that template to transform the magical energy into solid form and pull it free.

The hard part was
not
doing so. All my training urged me to create, to grasp the chronoscope from Asimov’s world, even though I could never bring it into our own.

In magical terms, I was manipulating a semi-collapsed matrix of potential energy through an open portal maintained by my own belief and will. Practically speaking, it was like carrying a Labrador retriever over a tightrope and having a squirrel race past.

I pulled my hand free while trying to draw that partially formed energy into our world. My connection to the text wiggled away like a fish diving back into the pages. I rubbed my eyes and concentrated on slowing my breathing before trying again.

“This would be easier if the book wasn’t forty years old,” I
muttered. Belief didn’t last forever, though it was impossible to calculate the exact rate of decay.

“Why not use a newer one?” asked Helen.

“Because Gutenberg magically locks pretty much everything to do with time travel or spying on the past. Partly because the amount of magical energy it would take to actually travel in time would probably burn you to a crisp, and even if through some miracle you survived, there’s too much risk of accidentally stepping on the wrong butterfly and destroying all of humanity.”

“What’s the harm in just looking?” asked Lena.

“If I had to guess, I’d say Gutenberg doesn’t want anyone prying into his past.” I tapped the book. “Asimov’s chronoscope has a limited range. If you try to look more than a hundred and twenty years in the past, you get interference, meaning Gutenberg’s early days are safely out of reach.” I wiped my hand on my shirt and tried again to touch the book’s magic.

“Relax,” said Lena. “I might not know as much about libriomancy as you do, but I’ve seen you do magic, and you don’t normally look like a constipated librarian trying to pass a hardcover.”

I made an obscene gesture in her direction.

“Maybe later,” she shot back.

I snorted, but the exchange did help me to relax. I tried again, allowing my eyes to unfocus until the text became a blur of ink on the page. I reread the story in my mind, concentrating not on the specific details, but the emotion, the excitement and wonder, the
possibilities
blossoming from Asimov’s story.

With this book, you could watch the truth about the JFK assassination or see what really happened right before the Berlin Wall came down. Or if you preferred, you could just hunker down on your couch beneath the blankets and watch the lost episodes of
Doctor Who
when they first aired.

More than a century of history at your fingertips. The technology could be abused, as the ending demonstrated, but that was true for most technology, magic or not. And there was so much we could learn.

“Isaac,” Lena whispered.

When I blinked, static fizzed across my vision. It vanished before I could focus. “Did you see that?”

“Only for a second or two,” said Nidhi.

I almost had it. I reached deeper into the book until my arm appeared to end just below the elbow. I could feel the fuzz of static electricity, like I was touching an old glass television screen. I imagined the room beyond, the cobbled-together chronoscope of the story flickering to life. The chronoscope was too big for me to bring through, but the images it displayed were nothing but light. I used my other hand to raise the book, and concentrated on pushing those images out into the world.

Helen jumped back as the air between us flickered gray. A rectangular space the size of a suitcase gradually settled into focus, showing a grainy picture of the trees beyond.

Manic laughter was generally considered undignified, but when I tried to swallow my triumphant glee, the noise that came out was more like a coughing hiccup. So much for dignity.

“This will show us what happened?” asked Helen.

“Exactly! It will—um.” Oh, right. I had created the effect, but I hadn’t made any of the controls. I tried to will the spell to move backward in time, to show me what had happened roughly eight hours ago. My efforts had absolutely no effect.

Nidhi walked toward me and gently grasped my wrist. “Your respiration and pulse are both too high,” she warned. “Don’t take too long.”

“Got it. Could someone take Smudge?”

Lena gently lifted the spider from my shoulder. I walked toward the vision, half-expecting it to pop like a soap bubble. Instead, images flashed before me. An array of vacuum tubes. A bronze statue of the god Moloch, a furnace glowing in his belly. A child trapped in a house fire.

Grief flowed through the book, so intense it knocked me back a step. Had you asked me in that moment, I would have sworn it was my own child dying in the flames.

“Why is it showing a fire?” Helen asked. “Nothing burned here.”

“The magic is ‘tuned’ to the story. It’s showing us the past, but it’s the fictional past Asimov created.” I needed to refocus the spell to this world, and I needed to do it quickly, before the story moved into my thoughts and made itself at home.

“There are other ways to find whoever did this,” Nidhi said.

“Just give me a minute.” This was a known problem, one that arose with crystal balls, magic mirrors, and other scrying techniques. Time after time, they worked exactly as they had been written: showing images from the fictional world they had come from. Reorienting those toys to the real world was all but impossible.

Or so I had been taught. In the past months, I had jotted down three theories on how to bypass that particular rule. A strong enough libriomancer could break past the confines set by the book, but someone strong enough to do that shouldn’t need books to do magic in the first place.

Locking the book should also sever the connection between the book and the created object, giving me a better chance of refocusing the chronoscope to find our killer. Which would have been perfect, if I had the slightest clue how Gutenberg locked his books.

Time to test theory number three. I handed the book to Nidhi. “There’s a lead-lined bag of flower petals in my satchel. Could you please rub the petals over the book and press them between the pages, especially this page?”

Lena looked over Nidhi’s shoulder. “When did you take up flower power?”

“I’ve been experimenting with ways of preserving Moly.” The flower came from
Odysseus
, and could be used to nullify magic. I had requested a specially enchanted bag just so I would be able to carry the petals around without canceling out every spell in a five-foot radius. The one time I got careless, Smudge had lost his flame for a day and a half. When he finally recovered, he set my favorite T-shirt on fire. I couldn’t prove it, but I was certain he had done it deliberately.

I had soaked this latest batch of flowers in a glycerin solution, removing the moisture while preserving the shape and texture. Tiny lines of brown crisscrossed the petals. They weren’t as potent as newly-formed Moly, but they should work.

As Nidhi pressed the petals into the book, the fictional flames faded, until I saw only a grainy image of the clearing. I reached out with one hand, imagining the resistor dials and adjusting them one by one. The minutes flew backward in my mind. A crow swooped down and vanished again. The scene darkened as the sun dipped beneath the eastern horizon. That put us past the eight-hour window. Were we in the wrong place, or had I misjudged the time of death?

And then the wendigo appeared, surrounded by blood and gore. It was twilight from the evening before, putting the time closer to eighteen hours ago. I would need to recheck my figures. Two other people crowded over the wendigo and disappeared, moving far too quickly for me to make out any details. The wendigo vanished a second later.

I adjusted my mental controls again, allowing the scene to play out in normal time. There was no sound. The chronoscope should be capable of reproducing sound as well as light, but I was doing well just to get this aspect working. Lena had taken Nidhi’s camera, and was clicking away behind me. I wondered briefly whether a camera would be able to capture these images, but if they could see it, that meant I was manipulating visible light. As long as she didn’t use a flash, they should turn out.

The creature who staggered into the clearing looked nothing like the withered body Lena had retrieved. The blocky pattern of broken ice armoring its body reminded me a little of The Thing from the Fantastic Four. All told, it probably weighed half a ton. It was digging at a wound in its shoulder, black claws the size of my fingers gouging through ice and fur.

The wendigo jerked, then toppled onto its back. It continued to claw at itself for a time, before curling into a ball. Once it stopped moving, two other figures appeared at the edge of the clearing.

“They’re blurry,” said Lena. “Can you zoom in on their faces?”

“It’s not that simple.” One of the men moved forward, but his face remained stubbornly out of focus. Other details were horrifyingly clear, like the ice ax he used to hammer away at the wendigo’s frozen hide, and the skinning knife he pulled out next.

“Jumalauta,” whispered Helen. I heard the meaning in my head, both a curse and a prayer, somewhere between “God dammit” and “God help us.” Both were appropriate for what followed.

“Is he wearing metal?” asked Nidhi.

I had noticed the same thing. The gleam of sunlight on polished metal, pebbled like oversized scales. Armor, maybe? Though it looked nothing like any historical mail I had ever seen.

The man’s companion held back at the edge of the clearing. I studied him instead, trying to determine if he was in charge of this butchery, or merely the guard.

Darkness flowed over both men, as if someone had moved to block our view. I looked more closely, focusing not on the men, but whatever hid them from us. Static danced over the rest of the scene, but the shadow remained. “Am I crazy, or does that look like a woman?”

“I see it, too,” said Lena. “Isaac, look at the man in back. His left hand.”

The shadow moved to one side as if it had heard, but not before I spied the book the second man clutched in his hands. It was far larger than the paperback I had used.

“Is that another libriomancer?” Helen breathed.

The shadow continued to grow—no, it was moving toward us. “I think she’s reacting to my spell.”

“How?” asked Lena. “I thought we were looking at the past.”

No, we were looking at a magical recreation of the past. The spell itself existed in the present, which suggested that whoever or whatever this woman was, she was here with us now, working within the spell to block my efforts.

“You need to end this,” Nidhi said sharply.

I had come to the same conclusion. How long had I been standing here? Ten minutes? Fifteen? My arm was numb, and my eyes were so dry I could barely see anything beyond the chronoscope’s window.

A flicker of red light told me Smudge had reacted to the threat in his usual way. Lena had moved him onto the trunk of a tree, presumably to keep him away from the Moly’s effects. Hopefully he wouldn’t set anything on fire.

I tried to collapse the spell, but whoever or whatever this was, she was fighting me. The images stretched and distorted, and black fingers reached toward us.

“Move,” snapped Lena.

I ducked aside as Lena snatched
The Best of Isaac Asimov
from Nidhi and hurled it directly through the center of the chronoscope’s image. A pained scream stabbed my mind, and I stumbled backward. The spell collapsed to a single point of silver light, then disappeared.

Lena caught me by the arms. I forgot sometimes how strong she was. I started to pull away, but the world had gotten much more wobbly, and I thought better of it. “Give me five minutes to rest. I’ll be fine.” Then I could try to figure out what the hell we were up against, and exactly how much trouble we were in. “Nice throw.”

Lena grimaced. “Touching that stuff makes me want to vomit. But I figured whatever was trying to come through wouldn’t like it any more than I do.”

Nidhi peeled back one of my eyelids, then checked my pulse. She didn’t look happy. “I told you to be careful.”

“Yeah.” I sagged against Lena. “I really need to start listening to you.”