Unbound (27 page)

“Maybe he felt guilty,” Nidhi suggested. “Gutenberg enslaved others to power his automatons, but he was forever
conflicted about them. Gerbert d’Aurillac might have felt the same about using his former student.”

“Let’s ask her.” To the sphere, I said, “Did Gerbert d’Aurillac enchant this intentionally to allow you to indicate yes or no, but with no other voice?”

Yes.

“A true voice might have allowed her to use magic,” Nidhi suggested. “Or to persuade someone to free her.”

As a precaution, it made sense to limit Meridiana’s ability to communicate with the outside world, but I couldn’t see Gerbert d’Aurillac forcing her to serve as his own personal oracle. The man whose memories I had touched had never been cruel. Imprison a murderess, certainly, but this? He would have been revolted by such enslavement. There had to be another reason, something we were missing.

I unhooked Smudge’s cage from the ceiling as I thought. He had been squeezed in that flattened rectangle for too long. I opened the door and let him scurry up my arm. He crouched on my shoulder to watch the sphere, as if it was a metal monster ready to pounce.

“Rotting
hell!
” Lena staggered backward into the wall, both hands clutching her ribs.

Nidhi and I were at her side a moment later, each of us grabbing one of her elbows to support her.

“What’s wrong?” asked Nicola.

Lena jerked free of my grip and slammed a fist against the wall behind us. The blow left a foot-long crack. Through gritted teeth, she said, “That
really
hurts.”

She appeared uninjured. “Your tree?” I guessed.

Lena nodded.

Whatever was happening, it had to be in response to us retrieving Meridiana’s prison. “There should be Porters near the house. Nicola can contact them—”

“Meridiana has a message for us.” Sweat beaded Lena’s brow, and her eyes brimmed with unshed tears.

“You can hear her?” Ponce de Leon asked sharply.

“She’s carving the words into my oak.” Lena took several quick, tight breaths. “She wants to meet to discuss a truce.”

“The question isn’t whether or not it’s a trap,” said Ponce de Leon. “It’s whether or not we can turn the trap to our advantage.”

“I can’t allow it.” Nicola was insisting the only safe choice was to ignore Meridiana’s offer and proceed as planned. “The moment any of us approach Meridiana, she’ll rip the location of the sphere from our memories and send her forces to take it and kill the rest of us.”

“There are ways of shielding those memories,” said Bi Wei.

Nidhi and I sat with Lena. Sweat drenched her skin. Dark lines twitched and bulged on her arms as the grafts inside of her responded to the ongoing assault on her tree. Her lips parted. Through clenched teeth, she said, “Meridiana is threatening to release the Ghost Army if we refuse to talk.”

“Can she do that?” asked Jackson.

Behind him, the armillary sphere reconfigured itself in response to his question. A brief exchange between Jackson and Bi Wei over the date of Jackson’s birth confirmed the answer:
Yes
.

“She’s desperate,” said Ponce de Leon. “We know Lena can survive the death of her oak. If we strike quickly enough—”

“Are you that confident you can destroy the sphere before she looses her army?” I asked. “And what about Jeneta?” I spun to face the desk. “If we destroy the sphere, will Jeneta Aboderin be harmed?”

Yes.

“Will she die?” I pressed.

The sphere didn’t respond.

“Jeneta is one child.” Ponce de Leon raised his cane like a baseball bat, and for a second I thought he meant to physically smash the sphere. Instead, he rested it on his shoulder and
sighed. “We might yet find another way to rescue her, but if we can’t, she’s too dangerous a weapon to leave in Meridiana’s hands.”

“She’s not a weapon,” I shot back. Nobody answered. They didn’t have to. With the exception of Jackson, we all knew what Meridiana had accomplished with Jeneta’s magic.

“Is Meridiana’s offer of a truce genuine?” Nidhi spoke so quietly I almost missed it, but the sphere heard.

Yes.

“If Meridiana releases the Ghost Army now, will she be able to control them?” I didn’t know which possibility was more frightening.

No.

Ponce de Leon swore under his breath.

“We’re at a stalemate,” I said. “We’ve got Meridiana’s life in our hands, and she has the Ghost Army.” As well as Jeneta and Lena’s oak. To the sphere, I asked, “Can you hear us if we move into the hallway and shut the door?” The archive was both physically and magically soundproofed, but we didn’t know the sphere’s full abilities.

No.

I kissed Lena on the forehead and stood up, leaving her with Nidhi. I tapped Ponce de Leon and Nicola, who followed me out of the room.

“You have an idea?” asked Ponce de Leon once the door was closed behind us.

“Maybe.” I turned to Nicola. “Who took over tech support for the Porters after Victor died?”

“Kirsten LaMontagne.”

I didn’t know the name. “Meridiana is using Jeneta’s magic. Together, they’re working libriomancy beyond anything I’ve seen, but it’s still done through e-books and other electronics. Her monsters? Transformed using books from her e-reader. The devourers she sent through the television in Chicago? She probably uploaded them somehow.”

“Where are you going with this?” asked Ponce de Leon.

I smiled. “Ask Kirsten how close I’d have to get to hack Jeneta’s e-reader.”

If I hadn’t known how much trouble was waiting at my house, Smudge would have warned me. The closer Lena and I got, the more he flattened himself against the floor of his cage, red flames rippling over his back like the northern lights.

“What the hell?” Parked cars lined my street, most of them clustered directly in front of my place. A few had pulled onto the grass, and a white news van blocked the driveway. I had to drive to the end of the block to park the Jeep. “This doesn’t look good.”

“Meridiana is in my grove.” Lena had stopped sweating, but her face remained pale. “There’s a crowd. I can feel their feet on my roots.”

“The Ghost Army?” I checked my shock-gun out of habit, reached for Smudge’s cage, then changed my mind. Bringing Smudge along wouldn’t warn us of anything we didn’t already know. It would simply put him in danger, too.

“I can’t tell.”

As we walked back to the house, I searched the street for the Porters who were supposed to be watching the place. I didn’t find them.

Lena readied a single bokken, leaving the second thrust through her belt. I switched my gun to a lower setting, one that would stun but not kill. None of our weapons were likely to do much against Meridiana herself, but hopefully it wouldn’t come to that.

A familiar, shrouded figure approached us on the street. I fought the urge to look away. So long as the burqa hid the gorgon’s gaze, we were safe. Lena and I spread apart as we walked, wordlessly preparing to hit the gorgon from both sides should things go wrong.

“Hello, Deanna,” I said.

“Deanna?” Lena repeated.

“That was her name, back when she was a Porter. Before Meridiana killed her. Deanna tried to warn me about Meridiana’s angel, back in Rome.”

The gorgon turned to me. “Meridiana asked me to give you this.” Her slender, jaundiced hand offered an old e-reader.

I checked the monochrome display, but didn’t touch it. “Douglas Adams?”

“This is for your protection.” Her words were like honey and tea, sweet and seductive, with a thick Texan drawl. You barely noticed the shifting and hissing of her hair. “I’m told the effect is called a ‘somebody else’s problem’ field. Stay close to the reader, and nobody else should pay any attention to your presence.” She stood motionless for several seconds, like she was listening. “Your phone. Please turn it off.”

“No way. I’ve got an open connection to Nicola Pallas. If that call goes dead, so does Meridiana.”

“All right.” She motioned for me to take the e-reader.

I hesitated, but if Meridiana wanted to kill us, she didn’t need to trick me into taking an e-book to do it. My fingers brushed Deanna’s. Her skin was hot and dry. I wondered if she was warm or cold-blooded. Between the sun and the burqa, she couldn’t have been comfortable.

“Do you remember who you were?” asked Lena.

She stopped in midstep and studied Lena closely. “Do you?”

Deanna led us around the house. A little over a month ago, Jeneta Aboderin and I had sat on the deck discussing dreams and magic and poetry. Now Meridiana waited before a crowd in front of the oaks. Her angel perched twenty feet up, white wings outstretched among the branches.

Meridiana looked much as she had the last time I saw her. She wore a pink-and-white leather jacket with fake jewels decorating the sleeves. I assumed they were fake, at least. Colorful plastic beads clicked at the end of her braids. She stood upon a tangle of roots, giving her an extra foot of height over the crowd. Her own e-reader was clutched in her left hand.

“There are forty or so people here,” I muttered for Nicola’s benefit. “Including a news crew near the front.” Their camera was rolling. Jeneta’s parents would see this. What was I supposed to tell them when they called?

Lena and I each held one end of the older e-reader, but that didn’t stop Jeneta—Meridiana—from spotting us. She gave a brief nod of acknowledgment, then addressed the crowd. “If you had a plentiful supply of water and came across a man dying of thirst, would you refuse to offer him a drink? Would you stand by and watch him expire?”

The angry muttering made me suspect Meridiana had been working them for a while, stoking their emotions. I couldn’t tell if she was using magic to strengthen her influence.

Deanna wove through the crowd and slipped between the trees of the grove, disappearing into the shadows.

“Magic is not a thing to be feared,” Meridiana continued. “The world is sick, starving for hope. How many people have died in conflicts that could have been solved with magic? How many loved ones have you lost to disease and death? There is a vacuum, an emptiness in the world where magic was always meant to exist. Thanks to those who hoard their secret power, that void has come to be filled by suffering and despair.”

The worst part was that I couldn’t entirely disagree. Obviously, things weren’t as simple as she made it sound. Magic brought new dangers of its own. And yet the Porters had the ability to help so many people . . .

I glanced down at my phone and activated the app Kirsten had e-mailed me. It immediately began pinging for other devices. It picked up a number of other smartphones as well as the neighbors’ wireless modem, but I didn’t see Jeneta’s e-reader on the list yet.

Meridiana raised her hands to quiet the crowd’s anger. “The men and women who kept this secret are human, just as you and me. We are all flawed beings under God. But their flaws have brought the world to the edge of damnation. You know of the Porters, I assume?”

Shouts of affirmation and accusation. By now, everyone had seen or heard about Bi Wei’s letter.

“The Porters have unearthed an artifact from a thousand years ago, a prison for unimaginably powerful souls, ghosts who would devour this world.”

She looked at me when she said “devour.” My nails dug into my skin. Jeneta was the one who had coined the term “devourers” for the Ghost Army, during a conversation here in my backyard.

“I can protect this town. I can prevent another massacre like the one you suffered before.” Meridiana pointed to the angel. “This is Binion, a friend who found the courage to leave the Porters to help me do what’s right. He, Deanna, and a handful of other courageous souls will do everything in their power to stop an even greater threat.”

What I wanted was to send a bolt of lightning into Meridiana’s lying mouth. But their magic was strong enough to deflect or dissolve anything I could throw their way, and in the unlikely chance something did get through, it would hurt Jeneta more than Meridiana. Binion hadn’t
chosen
to leave the Porters. Meridiana would have battled him to exhaustion, transformed his body, and ripped out his mind, replacing him with one of her ghosts. Whoever he had once been was gone, either dead or sent to join Meridiana’s ghosts, to be tormented in his afterlife until nothing remained but power and madness.