Unbound (12 page)

He had constructed a model of the known universe, lacking
only one thing: a true model of Gerbert d’Aurillac’s universe required the presence of God.

Anna was that final piece. Gerbert invited her to look through the sighting tube, not from the bottom, as a mere mortal gazing up at the sky, but from the top, like God peering down at his creation. When she placed her eye to the end of the tube, her soul was drawn into that bronze universe, bringing completion to Gerbert’s masterpiece. The entire model began to move on its own. Planets rotated through their orbits. Stars began their inexorable seasonal journeys.

Meridiana wanted the universe. Gerbert had given it to her.

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“JACKSONVILLE COACH SUSPENDED FOR ALLEGED USE OF MAGIC,”
by Laura Mckinsey

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“This whole story is bullshit! Magic? What is this, the 18th century? Even if you believed the accusations, they can’t fire Coach Lutz without proof. That’s the very definition of a witch hunt! So much for innocent until proven guilty.”

J. Davies | August 8, 2:15 p.m.

“J. Davies—Did you even read the article? Nobody’s been fired. Lutz was placed on administrative leave
with pay
while they investigate the accusations. The police have three different witnesses. What if three people had witnessed him molesting kids? Would you still want him around your son or daughter? Shut up and let the system work.”

WildcatsFan31 | August 8, 2:44 p.m.

“Gandalf would make an awesome football coach, especially on defense. NONE SHALL PASS!  
”

FrodoLives | August 8, 3:51 p.m.

“I’ve read some shoddy stories in the Jacksonville Urinal before, but this is the worst. McKinsey should be fired, along with whatever editor approved this garbage. It’s yellow journalism at its worst, nothing but sensationalism at the cost of a man’s career and reputation. There are no facts, no proof, nothing but rumors. Shame on you all!”

Carla Clark | August 8, 4:01 p.m.

“The mainstream media is a dinosaur.”

DFG | August 8, 4:22 p.m.

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“@Carla Clark—Did you see the video of the last game? It’s on YouTube. Look at the 5:02 mark and watch the pass Johnson makes to Hayes. They say the wind made that ball shift direction, but I was at the game. THERE WAS NO WIND.”

T.L., Former Referee | August 8, 4:50 p.m.

“Coach Lutz should sue the district, the parents, the school board, the newspaper, and everyone else spreading these lies.”

Diane Rodgers | August 8, 6:24 p.m.

“Check out the YouTube video I made:
Hitler weighs in on accusations of football witchcraft.
”

Steven P | August 8, 6:41 p.m.

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“I don’t know about Coach Lutz, but I’m pretty sure Mrs. Black who teaches seventh grade math is a zombie.”

Jason | August 8, 8:40 p.m.

G
ERBERT D’AURILLAC WAS TOO
late to undo the damage Meridiana had begun. She had manipulated kings and queens, bishops and popes, planting the seeds for what would come to be known as the Dark Ages. And though d’Aurillac could never prove it, he believed her final act had been to curse him for his betrayal. Or perhaps it was God punishing him for his mistakes and his arrogance.

His life began to crumble. King Robert of France burned two of Gerbert’s students as heretics. A rebellion drove Gerbert and Otto III from Rome. Rumors spread that Gerbert d’Aurillac was a sorcerer in league with the devil.

“Meridiana is searching for the sphere,”
I said. She hadn’t been able to free herself from her metal prison, but nothing was eternal. Over time, Gerbert’s magic would have weakened
enough for her to begin building her army of the dead, and eventually, to reach out and take Jeneta.

Through Gerbert’s memories, I watched him prepare a poem in careful Latin. It was a work that took three months to finish, a puzzle with layer upon layer of meaning. He laid the letters out in the shape of a triangle. Within the triangle was a wheel of text. A second, smaller circle sat within the first. A cross divided both circles, and three additional lines connected the inner circle to the outer one.

When at last the poem was complete, he removed the bronze sphere from its wooden frame and set it atop the poem. He spoke to the sphere as if Meridiana—as if
Anna—
might yet hear him. He prayed over her for a full day and night, then recited an incantation I couldn’t understand.

The sphere melted into the text.

I had dissolved magical items into books using libriomancy, transforming them back into potential magical energy, but this was different. Both the prison and Meridiana had survived the transition. Gerbert had simply transferred the sphere to somewhere else, or perhaps transformed it into the text itself. A prison within a prison.

It was an amazing work of magic, and I would have loved to understand how he had done it. I pushed the yearning aside, and tried to focus on Gerbert d’Aurillac.
“What did you do with the poem that held the sphere?”

“He sent it away,” came a familiar voice.

Oh, shit.
I tore myself away from the cenotaph. I blinked, trying to focus on the real world. People were whispering and backing away. To my left, Mahefa rummaged through his bag of blood.

Jeneta Aboderin stood in the center of the aisle about twenty feet away, flanked by two large bodyguards. One was clad head to toe in an emerald green burqa. A matching veil hid the eyes from view. The other was clearly inhuman, eight feet tall and covered in orange fur. Some kind of sasquatch?

“He’s a
yeren
, not a sasquatch.” The unspoken
“Duh”
beneath her words was so familiar, I felt an instant of hope that she had somehow thrown off Meridiana on her own. Hope that died when I saw the arrogance and disdain in her expression.

Jeneta looked much as she had the last time I saw her. Her hair hung in tightly braided cornrows. Blue polish on her nails matched the plastic frames of her sunglasses. She had lost weight. Her cheekbones were more defined beneath her brown skin. She wore loose cargo pants with oversized pockets, and clutched a black e-reader with both hands.

I glared at Mahefa. “I told you to keep an eye out.”

“I did,” said Mahefa. “But I spotted this hot little bambolina, and then your friend showed up with her pet gorilla, and—”

“Stop talking.” Jeneta tapped her screen, and Mahefa’s left hand turned to stone. The canister he had been holding slipped from his fingers and spilled blood across the floor.

The only person I’d ever seen perform magic like that was Johannes Gutenberg, and even Gutenberg needed the physical book.

“What the hell did you do?” Mahefa’s fingers were perfectly sculpted obsidian. His arm muscles tightened from the weight.

“Get everyone out of here.” I kept my voice calm and tried not to do anything remotely threatening.

“Fuck this.” Mahefa gripped his bag in his good hand and bolted for the closest exit. Neither Jeneta nor I tried to stop him.

I studied Jeneta’s shrouded companion. Beneath the veil, her scalp bulged and shifted like boiling molasses. If this wasn’t the gorgon who had helped Jeneta break into the library in Beijing, I was betting it was another of her kin. All she had to do was pull back her veil, and this church would have a lot more statues.

“Where’d you get the muscle?” I nodded toward the yeren and the gorgon.

“I made them.”

Whispers and questions surrounded us. The tourists hadn’t switched over to full-on panic yet. Few of them had seen or understood the transformation of Mahefa’s hand, and the yeren was alien enough that they weren’t yet certain how to react. For now, they kept a safe distance and snapped pictures.

“Jeneta . . .” I had spent the past month searching for her, and here she was, ready to kill me with a flick of her fingers. “I’m sorry.”

She looked around. “I expected to find more of your Porters here.”

“The Porters lost you at the airport. Your parents haven’t stopped searching for you.” I hoped Jeneta could hear me, that she understood we hadn’t given up. “I’ll find a way to fix this.”

She drummed her fingers on the e-reader’s screen. “Do I need to turn your limbs to stone to get your attention? I could transform you to gold or a pillar of salt. I’ve an entire library of possibilities at my fingertips.”

I fell back on the oldest defense I knew: smart-assery. “When I get home, I’m firing my travel agent. I specifically asked for a
monster-free
vacation. All I wanted was a few days to relax and enjoy my retirement. You do know I’m retired, right?”

Jeneta and her monsters moved closer, stepping in eerie synchronicity that reminded me of the children of Camazotz from
A Wrinkle in Time
, bouncing balls and jumping rope in perfect unison.

“What have you learned, Isaac?”

“Well, the basilica’s façade was built by Alessandro Galilei in the eighteenth century, and—”

The yeren growled, a sound so low I could feel it. More and more people were scurrying from the church. Those who remained gawked like this was some new form of street theater. How long before the police showed up, or had Meridiana taken steps to make sure no one stopped her from interrogating me?

“Where did he send the poem?” she continued. “Not to his colleague in Beijing. Nor to Miro Bonfill. He certainly didn’t hide it here.”

“Why don’t you ask him yourself?”

She made a brushing-off motion with one hand, a gesture both regal and utterly foreign to Jeneta. “He won’t speak to me, or to anyone under my control. Dead for a thousand years, and still he thwarts me. But he shared his poem with you. I can see the design in your thoughts.”

Other voices tugged at my awareness: fragmented whispers that seemed to come from Meridiana’s monsters. The yeren’s lips were pulled into a taut snarl. Even if that muzzle was capable of producing human speech, there was no way it was speaking Mandarin without moving its jaw or—

The realization was like ash in the back of my throat. The blood I had consumed let me hear the dead, and whoever these two people used to be, Meridiana had killed them to create her inhuman guardians. She had likely picked up the yeren during her attack on the Beijing library. I wondered if he had been one of the students of Bi Sheng.

The gorgon—rather, the woman whose body Meridiana had transformed into a gorgon—called to me in English. Her name was Deanna Fuentes-McDowell, and she had been a Porter. She told me how Meridiana had tracked her like an animal, following the scent of her magic and exhausting her until she fell, then turning her body into a vessel for one of her ghosts.

I started to reach for my shock-gun. The gorgon touched a slender hand to the corner of her veil. I spread my hands and did my best to look harmless.

“Now that we’re all acquainted, it’s time for you to choose,” said Meridiana. “Help me, and I’ll restore you in return. I’ll remove the spell Gutenberg carved into you.”

“Sure, why not? That kind of bargain always ends well.”

She rolled her eyes, and once again, I saw flashes of the
teenager who had gotten so exasperated while trying to talk to me about poetry.

The yeren leaped into the air, coming to land atop the head and shoulders of a statue. His next jump took him past me, cutting off any escape. The impact cracked the tile floor.

“An angel waits for you outside,”
whispered the dead Porter, Deanna.

I could tell she was trying to help, but I had no idea what she meant. I was standing in front of a would-be destroyer of worlds, and the ghost decided it was time to play it cryptic?

One of Deanna’s memories floated like smoke across my vision. I saw Jeneta standing in a Porter archive. I didn’t recognize the facility, but the layout and contents were unmistakably ours. Deanna lay powerless and exhausted on the ground. Meridiana used her e-reader to pull up a book on Greek mythology. I saw her reach into the screen and fling
something
toward Deanna, like an inky cobweb made of words.

That was how Jeneta had transformed her servants. Instead of reaching into the text and pulling out a fully-formed object, she had seized the pattern of belief, using it as a template to reshape living bodies. It was as if she had inverted libriomancy.

Meridiana reached out, fingers curved like claws. I doubled over. My stomach convulsed, and I coughed up blood. The same blood I had swallowed to speak with Gerbert d’Aurillac. “You think to hide your conversations with the dead from
me?
Your thoughts are as simple to read as a children’s book, Isaac Vainio.”

The whispers in my head fell away. Gerbert d’Aurillac shared one last memory, and then he was gone.

I continued to heave. My mouth tasted of blood and ash.

The sight of me puking blood pretty well emptied the church. By the time I managed to stand, we were alone. My skin was clammy, and my stomach spasmed. “I finally get some magic back, and you had to steal it away.”

If Meridiana could read my thoughts, I’d just have to act without thinking. Lena would say that was one of my strengths.
I concentrated on d’Aurillac’s final message, letting that memory fill my mind.

Meridiana gave an anguished cry as she saw Gerbert d’Aurillac holding his poem to the flames. “Damn him. He didn’t send the poem away. He destroyed it.”

I was already moving. I lunged at the gorgon and seized her veil. With my eyes squeezed shut, I pulled hard. Cloth tore in my grip. Angry hissing and the snapping of tiny, fanged jaws told me I had successfully unveiled one of the most dangerous creatures in Greek mythology. Way to go, Isaac.

I turned my back on the gorgon to face the yeren. The yeren who had maneuvered around behind me, putting himself directly in the path of the gorgon’s gaze. He had one enormous paw over his eyes, like an oversized “See no evil” monkey. I yanked out my shock-gun and pulled the trigger. Lightning crackled over his body, and he fell to the ground with a whimper.

I sent my next shot into the ceiling. The gold leaf conducted the charge, and the light momentarily blinded everyone who remained. Droplets of molten gold rained down, searing my skin like acid. I hoped Jeneta would forgive me for any scars, but hopefully the pain would distract her for a few seconds.

I heard shouts behind me, but didn’t dare turn to see what had happened. I sprinted toward the closest exit, emerging into a crowded stone courtyard where the church walls joined the Lateran Palace.

The crowd’s panic and confusion would give me a little cover. It looked like the commotion had caused at least one accident in the street beyond. Traffic had come to a halt. So much for catching a taxi.

I slowed when I realized most of the people weren’t looking at the church itself, but at the roof. A large figure wielding a double-edged broadsword stood atop the church between the statues. Broad wings stretched from his shoulders. He jumped from the edge, and his wings turned the fall into a glide. Long,
ragged red hair framed a face twisted with righteous fury. He swooped past me, cutting me off from the street.

An angel waits outside.
This was what Deanna had tried to warn me about. I shot at the angel, but the lightning died before it touched him. I feinted left, then sprinted to the right, keeping close to the wall of the palace. On foot, his wings slowed him down as he fought through the crowd to try to intercept me. My feet hit the blacktop. I wove between parked cars. Two seconds later, I heard the slap of his sandals behind me.

When I reached the other side of the road, I turned the shock-gun up to level six and blasted the blacktop directly in front of him.

The angel was moving too fast to stop. His sandals sank into half-melted tar, and he fell hard. His sword slipped away and clanged against the sidewalk.

I cringed at the sight of so many cameras and cell phones. Hopefully I wouldn’t end up on the news or online. I turned a corner and searched for a place to hide. I didn’t have much time before—