“From us.” I braced myself, but Harrison let my guess pass without punishment. He even smiled, like his pet had mastered a new trick.
“Would you like to learn the true history of libriomancy, Isaac?”
I knew he was taunting me, but dammit, he had also discovered a branch of magic I had never heard of. If Victor’s bugs were as good as I suspected, he had probably gotten into areas of our network I had never seen, too. I tried not to let too much of my annoyance show. “Sure, I love a good story.”
“I suppose Gutenberg told you he invented libriomancy?” Harrison rested his elbow through the window.
“You’ve got a better theory?”
It was Guan Feng who answered. “Bi Sheng and his students were exploring the magical potential of books centuries before Gutenberg. Gutenberg discovered our art and stole what secrets he could. He spent years trying to duplicate Bi Sheng’s magic.”
“He never—” I stopped myself. Who was I to say what was or wasn’t true? More than a decade of Gutenberg’s early life was a mystery. Not even Porter historians knew what he had been up to during the 1420s, though there were plenty of theories.
“Gutenberg was afraid of competition,” Guan Feng continued. “Afraid to let anyone else have power. So he created his automatons and sent them to wipe us out.”
Gutenberg’s invention had spawned upheavals that spread throughout the world. The printing press had spread chaos on every level imaginable: political, religious, and even magical. In a single generation, he upended a magical balance of power that had existed for millennia. While Gutenberg and his growing guild of libriomancers lacked the raw might of the old sorcerers, they made up for it in numbers.
According to the histories I had read, other practitioners had been jealous of Gutenberg, afraid of the following he was amassing. They sought to destroy him, and he created his automatons out of self-defense. Gutenberg had eventually used the automatons to help establish the Porters. Together, they united the world’s magic-users and laid out the laws to put an end to such conflicts.
I knew those histories were incomplete. They made no reference to the other mission of those original twelve Porters. Even then, Gutenberg had been aware of the devourers, and his Porters had worked to keep them from entering our world.
What else had Gutenberg omitted? History was written by the survivors and reshaped by those with power. Few people had ever gained as much power as Johannes Gutenberg. He portrayed himself as a man forced to make ugly choices for a greater purpose. But he had enslaved the souls of his enemies to create the automatons and enforce peace. He manipulated the minds of his own Porters to keep them from abusing their power.
If he had seen the students of Bi Sheng as a threat, he would have acted without hesitation.
“Gutenberg is a tyrant,” Harrison said. “His army has manipulated this world from the shadows for centuries.”
“If we ruled the world, I guarantee you they never would have cancelled Firefly,” I countered.
He sighed. “Make your jokes while you can. Thanks to you, Gutenberg’s army will soon fall.”
I was no longer listening. I stared at the book in Guan Feng’s lap as I made the connection. I forgot about Harrison, the metal millipede around my neck, everything except that ancient text and what it represented. “When I grabbed that book, you shouted a name. Bi Wei.”
Guan Feng’s eyes widened, and she tightened her grip on the book as if I would somehow snap through my bonds, rip it from her grasp, and plunge my hand into the pages to seize its magic.
“Holy shit,” I breathed. “That’s where they went, isn’t it? When Gutenberg’s automatons attacked, they preserved themselves in their books.”
Automatons worked similarly, trapping ghosts…souls…whatever you wanted to call them. A single phrase etched in metal bound the mind to the wooden body. But I had entered an automaton and touched the mind trapped inside. There had been precious little left of her humanity.
The books were different. I had guessed Guan Feng’s book to be several hundred years older than Gutenberg. “The books had to have been prepared long before the attack. Passed down and guarded for emergencies, like magical escape pods. They fled into those books, and you’ve protected them ever since.”
“Gutenberg wanted to destroy us,” Guan Feng said. “He failed.”
How long could you survive like that before the madness took you? Before despair turned to hunger, to resentment and hatred toward everything you had lost. Until all that remained was the need to devour whatever you touched.
“You couldn’t save all of the books, could you?” I asked. Her silence was answer enough. I turned to Harrison. Despite the summer heat, I suddenly felt cold. “You said you found them. Are you sure?”
He frowned. “What are you talking about?”
I thought back to what Jeneta had said about the insects, about the devourers who had attacked her thoughts. The queen was telepathic, and telepathy went in two directions. “How do you know they didn’t find you?”
“You know what’s worse than going over the Mackinac Bridge in my little convertible?” I spoke softly, with as little movement of the neck or mouth as possible. Harrison hadn’t been pleased about losing control of our earlier conversation, and he had expressed his annoyance by perforating the skin beneath my jawbone.
“Going over the bridge in the back of a pickup?” Lena guessed.
I closed my eyes as we moved onto the metal grating in the center lanes, where wind rushed up from below and the only thing keeping us from plunging into the Great Lakes was a stretch of glorified screens.
I understood the engineering well enough to recognize that we were perfectly safe. Unfortunately, intellect had a hard time making itself heard over my gut, which was currently insisting we were all about to plunge to our deaths.
She twined her fingers with mine. “Captured by a murderer with a metal worm around your neck, and you’re worried about heights.”
“Did you know the middle of this bridge can sway more than thirty feet in high winds?” In truth, I was almost grateful for the distraction. I had spent the past hours thinking about Guan Feng’s book and the devourers, trying to understand our true enemy. There were too many gaps, too much I didn’t know.
The first pages of her book were block printed. In theory, if enough copies of the text had been made, that could create the magical resonance you needed for libriomancy. But the rest of the book had been copied by hand.
Was this an unfinished work? If the original wood blocks had been lost, someone might have tried to finish it manually, but not even the most careful scribe could have achieved the perfection of the printing press.
Ask yourself the real question, coward. If the students of Bi Sheng fled into their books, and some of them were lost to madness, does that mean the Porters created the devourers?
The timeline didn’t fit. Gutenberg had shared documented encounters with the devourers from centuries before his time, meaning they had come into existence before Gutenberg was ever born. I supposed those documents could have been faked, but why?
The voice I heard at the church—Bi Wei’s voice—hadn’t been a devourer. She was frightened and angry, not crazed. Her power had sapped our magic. She hadn’t destroyed us.
I banged my head against the side of the truck, then twisted to watch Guan Feng, who had been reading for at least two hours. Was that how she communicated with Bi Wei? Her eyes scanned slowly up and down the text, completely focused.
“Libriomancy only works if thousands of people have read the same book,” I said quietly.