Unbound (18 page)

Lena laughed and lured him away with an M&M. “Gerbert d’Aurillac designed this so people could retrieve the sphere if they needed to. He
wanted
you to figure it out.” She kissed me again, then pulled away before Smudge could return. “Let me know when you do.”

This is a photo of my nine-year-old daughter Klara.

Three days ago, she was in the ICU waiting for the tumors that had colonized her body to finish killing her.

Today we brought her home.

The doctors can’t or won’t explain how a terminal patient, a little girl who spent the majority of her young life fighting a losing battle with cancer, could overnight become the model of health. I’m terrified this is a dream, that I’ll wake up tomorrow morning and be back in that hell, listening to my princess struggle to breathe.

Klara says the night she got better, she woke up to see a teacher standing over her. Her mother and I asked why she thought it was a teacher. She told us, “Because she had lots of books, and she smelled like coffee.”

Whoever it was, she gave Klara a drink of something sweet. Something that “tasted like magic honey.”

The next morning, Klara was literally bouncing in her hospital bed.

Go ahead. Tell me it wasn’t a miracle. Tell me how else but magic the tumors that riddled her body could literally vanish overnight.

A week ago, I lived in a world where I had to watch my dying child fade one day at a time. Today, I live in a world where Klara won’t stop pestering us to go to Disney World in the United States so she can get Peter Pan’s autograph.

Klara’s magic teacher healed two other children that night. The best medical care in the country had failed our angels. Magic saved them.

There are no words for the relief, or for the terror that it will somehow be yanked away. I prayed for so long, bargained with God and screamed at him, offered my life for hers. I’ve broken down crying ten times a day since Klara got better.

Most of the time, they’re tears of joy. Other times . . .

When your child is seriously ill, you get to know other families struggling through the same thing. You share their triumphs, and you mourn with them when their child finally escapes the pain. When they earn their wings, as one mother described it.

Where was the magic for those children? How many of them could have been saved? Why were we blessed when so many other parents had to bury their little ones?

I don’t have the answers, and the questions haunt me every night. But tonight we watched Klara devour an ice cream sundae the size of her head, watched her run through the house like a miniature tornado in Reksio pajamas, and finally tucked her in to her own bed.

I don’t understand. I don’t know who Klara’s magical teacher was, or whether she’ll ever see this note. But whoever you were, thank you from the bottom of our hearts.

G
UTENBERG SET A STACK
of books on the coffee table and settled down on the sofa with the topmost book. Grateful for the excuse, I abandoned my ever-growing hill of notes to see what he was reading. Though “reading” wasn’t precisely correct, given that Gutenberg didn’t bother to open the books, let alone look at the text inside. He simply held each one, stared at it for several seconds to absorb the contents, and set it aside.

Learning how he did that was high on my To Do List if I ever got my magic back.

I picked up the book he had just discarded and turned it over, skimming the summary on the back cover. “You never struck me as a Nora Roberts fan.”

“I prefer Jude Deveraux for romance,” he said. “In this
case, however, Miss Roberts had the better preorder numbers, meaning a stronger pool of reader belief.”

There was no particular theme to the books, save that all were brand new, and all were by popular authors. I spotted two thrillers, three more romance novels, a fantasy, a tell-all, and a political memoir. I snatched up the fantasy. “I didn’t think Simon Green’s new one was coming out until next month.”

“We manipulated the release schedule.” Gutenberg scowled and tossed another book onto the table. “The official publication date isn’t for another week and a half. We arranged to delay printing of the ‘corrected’ versions as long as possible in order to minimize the chances of anyone noticing our changes and pulling them from production.”

“What was corrected?” I asked.

He pointed to the Green. “Chapter nine now introduces a magic wristwatch that allows line-of-sight teleportation. Patterson’s novel includes a thumb drive with a program that hacks into every camera in the world—cell phones, satellites, streetlights, security feeds—to locate and track a particular individual. Roberts’ book is set out west. In chapter three, we added an old six-shooter that supposedly belonged to Billy the Kid. According to legend, the gun always hits its target dead center in the heart, no matter how far away.” For a moment, he almost looked embarrassed. “As this is supposed to be a romance novel, I tried to write it as a metaphor for love, a kind of Old West version of Cupid’s arrow.”

I stared. “
You
wrote these books?”

“Only some of them, and only the extra scenes.” He opened one and touched the first page of the prologue. “None of which do us a damned bit of good until people read the bloody things.”

“Tell him about the Rowling,” said Ponce de Leon. He and Lena were darting to and fro by the window, bokken and cane clacking together as they fenced. His bad leg didn’t slow him down much. His technique was far more precise than Lena’s, but her strength and endless energy was balancing that out.

“You have a new book by J. K. Rowling?” I scanned the pile.

He pulled out an oversized hardcover. “
Harry Potter and the Goblin’s Scepter.
”

I stared open-mouthed and fought the urge to snatch the book from his hands and barricade myself in the bedroom for the rest of the day. “No. Fucking. Way.”

“I’m afraid not. Several years ago, we enlisted a popular fanfiction author to pen a plausible eighth book in Rowling’s universe. We needed something that would guarantee instant, worldwide readership.”

A new Harry Potter would certainly do that. “When is it coming out?”

“In two days. There will be an immediate backlash, of course. I expect the lawsuits and the negative publicity may utterly destroy a good publishing house. I have eight people working full-time to keep the book’s release a secret, even from the printers and publishing staff. Nobody should know anything until the book arrives simultaneously in bookstores throughout the world. The stores will be confused, naturally. Some will contact the publisher for clarification, but once they realize what they have, most will begin selling, unwilling to delay and risk losing out to their competitors.”

A sharp, triumphant cry pulled my attention to Lena, who had driven Ponce de Leon into the corner where the bookshelves met the windows. She jabbed her bokken at his leg.

He slapped her weapon aside with his cane while reaching with his other hand to grab a book from the shelf. He flung the book toward her face.

Lena lowered her head, taking the impact on her brow, but it distracted her long enough for him to tag her thigh with the tip of his cane.

Gutenberg coughed. “If you two idiots want to bash each other’s brains out, fine. But I’ll thank you to leave my books out of it.”

Ponce de Leon backed away and mopped his brow with his
sleeve. “I believe that’s one point to me,” he said calmly. To Gutenberg, he added, “They deserve the whole truth, Johannes.”

The Porters were using other authors’ work to create tools and weapons for their war against Meridiana. To forge a Rowling book suggested they needed something stronger, something that required the belief of millions. “What does the Goblin’s Scepter do?”

“It’s a last resort,” Gutenberg said wearily. “In the story, the goblins of Rowling’s universe design a doomsday weapon for use against the wizarding world. One with the power to end magic.”

Lena shoved her bokken through her belt. Nidhi lowered the e-book reader she had curled up with. Even Nicola turned away from her computers.

“What do you mean ‘end magic’?” I asked softly.

Gutenberg pointed to my forehead. “What was done to you would be done to the world. It would be irreversible, and it would put an end to the threat Meridiana and the Ghost Army present.”

When I recovered enough to speak, I could only whisper. “You’re insane.”

He took the book from my hand. “Was Hamlet mad, or merely desperate? I won’t use the scepter until all other options fail. I’m not keen on the idea of ending my own immortality. But Meridiana could destroy this world, Isaac. If we eliminate magic, we eliminate her power. The mere threat of this weapon may be enough to persuade her to surrender.”

“What happens to Lena if you use that thing?” I asked. “To Smudge?”

“That’s a fascinating question.” Ponce de Leon leaned more heavily than usual on his cane as he joined us. Sparring with Lena had winded him. “Where’s the line between natural and supernatural? My body is healthy flesh and blood, which suggests I could live another sixty years without magic, assuming good diet and exercise. But what of your average vampire?
What traits are bound to their flesh and blood, and what relies on magic? The truth is, we don’t know.”

“I never imagined myself saying this, but I vote we continue on in ignorance.” I couldn’t conceive of how such a spell would operate, let alone the impact it would have. The power required would likely destroy whoever tried to cast the spell. “You can’t know what kind of impact that would have on the world. Twenty-six years ago, a Porter researcher theorized that sentience itself was an evolutionary adaptation to magic. It was a crackpot theory, but if there was any truth to it—if intelligence and consciousness are dependent in any way on magic—”

“None of us can foresee the consequences of such a step.” Ponce de Leon ran his fingers through his hair, smoothing it back into place. “Though after centuries of watching mankind, I sometimes suspect intelligence is overrated.”

Gutenberg returned the last of the books to the table. “As the truth emerges, bookstores and publishers will pulp their remaining stock of our altered titles. Their power will wane. We have only a limited window during which this option will be open to us.”

Ponce de Leon cleared his throat. “I believe that’s his not-so-subtle way of telling you to get back to work, Isaac.”

“Yah, I got that, thanks.” Like I hadn’t been under enough pressure already.

I paced the length of the bookshelves, shoving another bite of cinnamon raisin bagel into my mouth without tasting it. Nidhi had insisted I stop and eat something. I was finishing up the last few bites when it hit me.

“Two-dimensional thinking!”

My exclamation was loud enough to make Nicola jump. She turned from her computers, searching the room for whatever had made me cry out.

“Sorry.” I held up my hands. “It’s a line from
Star Trek II
. Spock points out that Khan’s pattern ‘indicates two-dimensional thinking.’”

Nicola frowned. “I don’t understand.”

“I’ve been thinking like a twenty-first-century librarian. Gerbert d’Aurillac was brilliant, but he was also a product of his age. He lived in a time when Arabic numerals were the hot new thing in Europe, and the zero hadn’t caught on.”

I swallowed the last of the bagel and returned to my desk. D’Aurillac had been fluent in multiple languages, but he had written his poem in Latin, the language of the church. He would have wanted it to be understood by another educated man. Back then, that meant someone familiar with Latin, along with the trivium—grammar, logic, and rhetoric—and the more advanced quadrivium—arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. He would also have assumed that whoever found his poem would have a grounding in magical theory.

I stared at the poem until my vision blurred. I tried to focus not on words, but shape. Geometry and mathematics. Circles and angles and spokes. Seven spokes. That was a deliberate choice. Every stroke of the pen had been drawn for a reason. Seven . . . seven days of creation in the Old Testament. Seven musical notes in a scale. Seven deadly sins.

On a whim, I searched for “septem,” the Latin word for seven. In order to help me find potential words, I had jotted down a table showing the frequency with which each letter appeared in the poem. The P was the least-used letter in the word septem, so I scanned for Ps, looking for anywhere they connected to E and T.

I didn’t notice Ponce de Leon approaching until he sat down across from me.

“The last time, it was a lost book of the Bible,” he said quietly.

Letters crawled across my vision like tiny insects. I blinked and sat back, mentally marking my place in the word puzzle. “Huh?”

“The atomic bomb terrified him.” He turned to watch Gutenberg, who had emerged to check one of the computer screens. “The Cold War was before your time. You didn’t live through the fear. What could magic do against the power that had devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki? For years, we watched the sky and waited for the scream of the sirens that would herald the end of everything.

“So Gutenberg prepared his lost book. He knew some would accept it at face value while others denounced it as a forgery, but they would all read the alleged prophecies of Christ. Their belief and imagination would fuel those prophecies. Including one in which ‘the sword of the archangel Michael, commander of God’s armies, shall lay waste to the wicked and their tools of destruction. The angelic blade shall rip the sky asunder and rain brimstone upon those who would wage war.’”

Most swords fit easily through the pages of a book. “He wanted to create a superweapon.”

“A
preemptive
superweapon. In order for his plan to work, Johannes had to strike first. He couldn’t watch over the entire Earth, nor could he sit back and wait for the first missiles to launch. We didn’t have satellite television or instant social media updates back then. By the time we learned of a nuclear launch, it would be too late to save the world.”

“This is what you were talking about in Rome,” I said quietly. “The split between you and Gutenberg.”

“What gives any of us the right to play God over humanity? To judge and punish?”

I thought about the phrasing of Gutenberg’s Biblical prophecy. “What counts as ‘those who would wage war’?”

“Exactly.” Ponce de Leon nodded slowly. “Had Johannes gone through with his plan, he would have eliminated the world’s nuclear stockpile, but slaughtered half the globe in the process. The power of such magic would have certainly killed him as well. We fought for so long over that book. Over his need for control and his lack of faith.”

“You stopped him.”

“I did.” He didn’t elaborate. He didn’t have to. The haunted emptiness in those two words conveyed how much his actions had cost him. “But this time is different. Even if I wished to do so again, Johannes will have taken steps to prevent me.”

“Maybe he’s right,” I said.