“Lux.” I checked the blocks to be sure. “Latin for light.”
Lena pried more letters free from both sides of the word. Even with her magic, they clung hard. It took ten minutes to remove and reconstruct the rest of the sentence.
“Dixitque Deus fiat lux et facta est lux,” I read. “And God said, ‘Be light made,’ and light was made.”
“From the Bible?”
“Genesis.” Latin text. I stared at the blocks, excitement prickling the back of my neck. “Pry off the next row. Hurry!”
I stopped myself from reaching past her to try to rip the letters free, knowing it would be futile. I placed the letters together one by one while I waited, trying not to fidget. “Et magicae,” I whispered as more words formed.
“Magic?” Lena asked.
“Yes!” I flushed and lowered my voice. “Yes, that’s right.”
She laughed, but pulled more letters free until I had laid out the entire sentence. “Et magicae artis adpositi erant derisus et sapientiae gloriae correptio cum contumelia.” I jumped up, laughing like a madman. “That’s the same spell Gutenberg used for his lock. I knew it sounded familiar.”
“Which means what?” Lena caught my arms. “Spill it.”
“And the delusions of their magic art were put down, and their boasting of wisdom was reproachfully rebuked.” I picked up one of the letters, cupping it in my hands. “This is from the Latin Vulgate Bible. The Mazarin Bible.”
“Some of us aren’t libriomancers, and don’t spend our lives memorizing everything we read.”
“Also known as the Gutenberg Bible,” I said. “This thing is a walking Bible.” But not a line-by-line reconstruction of the Bible. Gutenberg’s Bible had been well over a thousand pages. This was more like clippings, rearranged and hammered into place to create something new. The first line was from Genesis, while the next was from a completely different part of the Bible. The Book of Wisdom, if I was remembering right.
“Wasn’t Gutenberg a devout Christian?” Lena asked. “Maybe this was a reflection of his belief. Let your faith be your armor, and all that?”
“Not just armor.” I reread the first row, thinking of how the automaton had first arrived. “Be light made. It’s a spell. That’s how they travel. Their bodies transform into light.”
Lena looked at the second sentence. “The delusions of their magic were put down… another spell. To protect it against magical attacks?”
I sat down hard. Multiple spells bound together. Individual, self-contained spells combined to power the whole. “Belief is bound and anchored to books. Gutenberg took that book and pulled it apart, remaking it into this.” I realized I was shaking my head. “But you can’t do that! If you cut up a book, you start to lose the magical resonance with other copies of that book. You can’t-”
“ You can’t.” Lena pulled off another block. “He could.”
I snatched up one of the letters, trying to understand. If they had been smaller, taken from the press itself, then maybe some of the book’s magic would have flowed backward through the keys that had created it. Maybe. But these blocks were too large to have come from that press. “It doesn’t make sense!”
“How many years did it take Gutenberg to develop printing and libriomancy?” Lena asked gently.
“Decades.” I continued to examine the letters. Gutenberg’s studies had included both alchemy and sympathetic magic. Maybe if he melted down the keys from the original press and blended them into-
“And you expect to figure it all out in one afternoon?”
“Not all of it, but- You don’t understand. This creates a whole new model of libriomancy. It’s like Copernicus reshaping our understanding of the solar system. It’s revolutionary. Everything I thought I knew… there’s so much more, just sitting here. Waiting to be deciphered.”
“What do you think Charles Hubert is doing while you pore over these blocks?”
I could have spent weeks, even months examining the automaton, but she was right, dammit. “You were able to soften the wood to remove the letters. Do you think you could heal it?”
“Maybe.” She studied the split skull and the wood impaling the body. “Why would I do that, exactly?”
“The automatons were created to protect Gutenberg. Hubert destroyed this one, which suggests it wasn’t under his control. So if we can repair it, it might lead us to them both.” One by one, I pressed the letters back into the matching indentations in the wood. They snapped into place, as if the wooden body was the world’s strongest magnet. When I was done, Lena gripped the branch in its chest and twisted. Her fingers sank into the wood, all the way to the knuckles. The muscles in her arms, shoulders and neck tightened like ropes as she slowly pulled it free. The other end of the branch had penetrated a good four feet into the earth, hammered by the weight of the falling tree.
“Aside from the hole in the chest, the most significant damage was to the head.” I scooted over to examine the two halves, which had fallen away like the shell of an enormous coconut. The jaw hung from a bent brass pin on one side. I gathered other gears and rods from the ground. There were no springs that I could find. Magic took the place of mechanical propulsion.
A metal rod an inch wide jutted from the neck. Broken silver chains threaded through smaller, brass-rimmed holes. I picked up a small wooden wheel which appeared to fit into the back of the empty eye socket. A second wheel followed at an angle from the first. I pressed the glass eye into place. A metal ring was supposed to screw into the front of the socket to hold it there, but that ring was dented beyond repair.
“Move your hand.” Lena touched the eye socket, and the wood swelled slightly, just enough to keep the glass sphere from rolling free. She rotated the eye one way, then another. I could hear gears grinding behind the glass.
“The head rotates side to side on a primary axis here.” I tapped the rod in the neck. “This rod threads through a hole in the larger one to allow it to look up and down, giving it a full range of motion.” I fitted a small gear over the first rod, pressing it down into the neck. The chains would have looped up over the secondary rod, fitting with two spiked gears to provide movement on the vertical axis.
I could visualize most of the mechanism. A secondary chain and gear system ran to the jaw. A copper cone fitted up against the ear, providing hearing. But there were a handful of larger gears and disks that lacked any obvious function. They appeared to fit in the center of the head, but they didn’t connect to anything, nor did they provide any additional articulation.
I rubbed the disks clean on my shirt. There were letters along the edges. J-O on one, S-T on another, beautifully etched in careful, flowing calligraphy. The J was even decorated, like an illuminated manuscript in brass. “This is another spell.”
“Maybe that’s the automaton’s brain.”
“That depends on when it was made. In the early sixteenth century, people still didn’t understand the brain. Many scientists, da Vinci among them, thought the brain was the seat of the soul.” If Gutenberg had subscribed to such beliefs, this wouldn’t necessarily be the source of the automaton’s artificial thoughts, but the metaphorical heart of its magic.
I slid the gears onto either side of the horizontal rod. A smaller gear added a pair of Ns. A sharp-toothed crown-wheel escapement slid over the top of the vertical rod, bringing an H-A. I rotated them together until the letters lined up: JOHANN.
“Gutenberg wouldn’t be the first artist to autograph his work,” Lena suggested.
I pointed to the S-T on the second disk. “We’re missing a piece.”
It was Lena who found the thick cylinder, an inch-high pipe with a jagged upper edge and a magnificently carved F, followed by a smaller U.