Jim Hines - Libriomancer

Lena folded her arms and studied me. “If you can’t get him out of there, then I guess I’ll just have to go in after him.”

“An automaton is no simple tree,” Gutenberg warned.

“Simple?” Lena laughed. “Have you ever studied the network of a tree’s roots as it seeks out water? As the tree pipes that water through a body an order of magnitude larger than your own, and does so without the crude central pump that leaves you humans so vulnerable? As it survives winters that would leave you a frozen meatsicle in the snow?”

I braced myself, but Gutenberg merely laughed. “I concede the point,” he said. “But the automatons weren’t created to house living flesh. You might be able to enter and leave your trees at will without losing your sense of self, but have you ever brought another human being with you?”

“No,” Lena said softly.

“Yet you intend to attempt it anyway.” He clucked his tongue and led us back into the office, where he grabbed a Saberhagen novel off the desk. He swiped his fingers through the book, sweeping away the magical lock like smoke. With one hand, he pulled a long, gleaming sword from the pages. “I can’t predict what might happen to you both. You might lose yourself as well as Isaac. If you do manage to succeed, I suspect you’ll have need of this blade. It should heal any physical damage… assuming he survives at all. Now if you’ll excuse me, I believe I’m needed in Detroit.”

“You offered me a favor.”

He looked pointedly toward the sword. I ignored the hint.

“Tell me what I saw in Charles Hubert.”

“You saw that, did you?” He gestured for me to step closer. “Are you sure you want to know?”

“Yes.”

“So be it.” He touched my chest, and I felt a tugging sensation, as if a hook had lodged behind my breastbone. “If you survive, I’ll tell you what I know.”

Gutenberg snapped his fingers, and for a moment, I felt part of the automaton’s magic tear free, enveloping him like a blanket. An instant later, Gutenberg vanished in a flash of sunlight.

I looked up at the ceiling, imagining the sky beyond. The automaton was battered and possibly dying, but surely I had enough strength to make it back to the moon. Could I reach Mars in the time I had left?

Lena reached for the exposed wood of my face. I pushed her aside. “You’d be risking your life.”

“I heard the old man, too,” she snapped. “And I’m not interested in any noble bullshit. I’m not letting you die in that thing. Now shut up and hold on.”

She grabbed my forearm in one hand and cupped my face in the other. Chunks of black wood crumbled away as she tightened her grip on my arm, but she simply squeezed harder. It was a gruesome sight, and I thanked Gutenberg again for not giving his creations a sense of pain.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m not sure.”

I heard her voice inside me, even as the automaton’s senses picked up her words. Her warmth infused the cold, dead wood of my body. Her emotions twined with mine, hot and passionate. Metal blocks fell away, ringing against the floor as she pressed deeper into my body.

Whatever magic had created Lena Greenwood, her emotions were as genuine and powerful as any I had ever felt. Perhaps more so. It shamed me that I had ever believed otherwise.

I saw her love for Doctor Shah. Through Lena’s eyes, I saw not the calm, detached psychiatrist who had oh-so-coldly signed the papers that once ended my dreams of magic, but a passionate, devoted woman who walked the border between magic and mundane, giving everything she could to try to help those who fought the demons and the darkness.

I saw Shah’s grief when a Porter named Jared killed himself four years ago: the deep, shaking sobs she had refused to let anyone but Lena see. I shared Lena’s helplessness as she tried to comfort her lover. In the end, Shah’s grief transformed to determination. Shah worked even harder to help those she could, like a libriomancer whose husband was killed by a spell gone wrong.

I also saw Lena’s memories of the attack a week before. I heard the crash of furniture from inside the house, where Shah struggled against impossible foes to try to give Lena a few more seconds, and I felt Lena’s anguish as her own strength failed her. I shared her fear, her despair at the death of her tree, and the seductiveness of its death. A part of her had wanted to give up then, to enter her tree and never emerge.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. To Lena. To Nidhi Shah as well.

“I told you to shut up.”

As Lena focused her attention on me, I touched new memories. I saw myself as she saw me, practically glowing with excitement as I worked over the fallen automaton at Hubert’s cabin. I watched my passion and joy turn to outrage as I realized what Gutenberg had done.

I saw my grief over Ray’s death as we examined his apartment, and my pathetically transparent attempts to keep that grief and pain to myself, to project an aura of strength.

I saw everything. Lena’s earliest memory, stumbling forth from a tree with no awareness of who or where she was. Her first kiss with Nidhi Shah. A trip they had taken to Wyoming so Lena could try to climb Devil’s Tower, and the nights they had spent in their tent together.

I had always known Lena was strong enough to break me like a twig, but I had never comprehended her strength as a person. She understood exactly what she was. She knew that someday she would lose Nidhi Shah, and when that happened she would lose herself as well. She knew, and she wasn’t afraid.

Even the murder of her tree and the loss of her lover hadn’t broken her. She had grieved as deeply as anyone, but like Shah, she turned that grief into another source of strength. She had sought me out, determined to live, to choose what she would become.

As I explored Lena Greenwood, she did the same, seeing me from within.

“Wait, you went to the moon?” I felt Lena’s amazement and laughter, her pride as she relived those memories with me, sharing my delight at fulfilling a childhood dream, my sense of wonder as I stared up at our world overhead. My awe at what I had done, and my excitement as I realized how much more magic could accomplish.

It was in that moment, as I saw myself through her eyes, that Lena reached deeper and pulled.

I clamped my fingers around her hand without thinking. My true fingers: flesh and blood, and cold like winter snow as they left the emptiness of the automaton’s body and emerged into the night air.

For several seconds I existed in two bodies at once. The automaton stumbled, and my awareness jolted backward, trying instinctively to recover my balance.

“Oh, no, you don’t.” Lena’s grip tightened hard enough that my knuckles popped. She pulled harder.

Metal letters dropped like rain. Pain exploded in my side. I gasped and fell into Lena’s arms. Blood flowed down my side. I had been dying when I crawled into the automaton, and the wound remained. I felt her scoop me up and carry me to the cot. I curled my body into a ball and clutched my side, barely able to think beyond the pain.

It radiated out from where Lena had stabbed me. I couldn’t breathe. Lena’s bokken must have punctured a lung.

“Don’t move.” Lena stood over me, examining the metal sword Gutenberg had left. I pointed to my wound, pantomiming what needed to be done. She gripped the hilt in one hand and the blade in the other, aiming the tip at the center of the blood pooling on my side.

I closed my eyes. I knew the sword was made to heal, but that didn’t mean I wanted to watch her stab me with it.

Warmth spread through my ribs, and I gasped, filling my lungs for the first time in what felt like weeks.