Codex Born by Jim C. Hines

Author:Jim C. Hines [Hines, Jim C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: DAW Book Inc.
Published: 2013-08-05T16:00:00+00:00

“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.

Lena shifted her weight, resting her head on my shoulder. “So I’ve heard.”

“What happens if one person reads the same book thousands of times?”

“I imagine they’d get extremely bored.”

“Depends on the book. Remind me to give you a copy of Good Omens when we get home.”

Back in the sixties, a libriomancer named Ghalib al-Mun’im had collaborated with the

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