Description: My name is Bi Wei. I was born in the Ming Dynasty, shortly before the alleged death of Johannes Gensfleish Gutenberg, the man most people today know as the father of the printing press. We knew this man not as a creator, but as a force of death and destruction. Johannes Gutenberg was a thief, a fraud, and a murderer. Gutenberg did not die in 1468 as history claims. His body was not laid to rest at a Franciscan church in Mainz, a church later destroyed, conveniently erasing any evidence of his deception. Johannes Gutenberg, like myself, survives to this day. And he is not alone. At the end of the fifteenth century, Gutenberg founded an organization known as Die Zwelf Portenre. The Porters, as they are more commonly known, devote themselves to the elimination of all those Gutenberg views as a potential threat, and to the secrecy of magic. I learned the art of magic from my great grandaunt. I touched the power of printed words my ancestors had passed down for generations. I added what strength I possessed to their work. I served my family and my people. I harmed no one. Most of my friends and family were killed the day Gutenberg attacked our temple. My teachers fought to give the rest of us time to escape. My brother died to protect me. To this day he walks with me in my dreams. He knew death approached, and he couldn''t hide his fear from me, but he was determined to complete his duty. Gutenberg has hidden many things from you. He has rewritten history and buried fact beneath myth and legend. He has worked to control magic, to keep it from the larger world, and he has committed atrocities for the sole purpose of "protecting" you from the truth. He has failed. Gutenberg and the Porters have brought this world to the edge of destruction. They have awakened the s gu jun du, the Ghost Army. They are the restless dead, bound as slaves to one who would devour this world. They grow in number and in power, and they are coming. They wait like a tiger in the shadows, unseen as they creep ever closer. Their claws are bared to strike. No doubt you will laugh and dismiss my story as the fanciful imaginings of a child. For you know that such things are not possible in the real world. We are descended from a man called Bi Sheng, who explored the magic of books centuries before Gutenberg''s birth. The B Sheng de d zhe survived Gutenberg''s assault on our home. We have returned. We ask only to be left in peace. In exchange for that boon, we offer you the gift of truth. From Gutenberg''s computers, we have pulled the location of all Porter archives: secret libraries hidden from public view. They house magical artifacts and books deemed too dangerous for magical use. Those locations are listed below. Use caution when investigating these archives. The Porters will defend themselves from perceived threats. They will deceive you, twist your perceptions, and alter your memories. We have watched them do all this and worse. They would kill us for telling you this, but they cannot hide the truth forever. A friend from your time recently said to me, "You can''t stop the signal." We will learn soon enough whether he was correct. To Gutenberg and the Porters, the Ghost Army is coming. Give up your efforts to find and destroy us, and abandon your centuries-old lies. Turn your attention to the true enemy. Like Shen Yuanzhi, whom stories say slumbered for a hundred years at Lanchang Palace to cheat death, we escaped our fate. We slept for five centuries, trapped alone with our nightmares, and awoke to find the world changed. It is time for the rest of the world to do the same. It is time for you to awaken. --From a letter that appeared in George R. R. Martin''s A Dance with Dragons Chapter 1 Ted Boyer--hunter, fisherman, vampire, and general pain in my ass--was gone. Dirt and gravel crunched beneath my sneakers as I crossed the empty lot where his yellow doublewide trailer once stood. A rectangle of flattened earth, striped by old, cracked cement, marked the site of Boyer''s former home. There was no sign of the secret basement he had dug to hide his coffin and store his blood supply. Wherever Boyer had fled to, he wasn''t planning to come back. "There are weeds starting to poke through the dirt." Short, heavyset, and stronger than five humans combined, Lena Greenwood looked as tired as I felt. She crouched on the cement and touched one of the tiny green shoots. "He left at least a week ago." There had been a time, back when I was a field agent for the Porters, when I would have been thrilled to see Ted gone from Marquette, and preferably gone from Michigan''s Upper Peninsula. Let someone else take on the responsibility of checking in on him and blowing the bomb in his skull if his blood tests ever showed he had gone back to feeding on Boy Scouts. But Ted was a lifelong Yooper, stubborn as hell and determined to live out his afterlife here in Marquette. I had resigned myself to sharing the peninsula with him until one of us was dead and buried for good. "Do you think he left willingly?" Lena asked. I shrugged. Ted didn''t exactly have a lot of friends, and he had collected a decent list of enemies over his lifetimes. If one of them had used the chaos last month as cover to come after Ted, he could be dead by now. Deader. But why would they bother to haul away his trailer and his truck? More likely, he simply wanted to get away before all hell broke loose. Some would say hell had broken a month earlier, when my home town of Copper River ended up in the crossfire of a three-way magical battle between the Porters, the B Sheng de d zhe--a group thought to have been wiped out more than five hundred years ago by the aforementioned Porters--and an army of mindless ghosts fighting to return to this world to kill . . . well, pretty much everything. At least thirty-four of my friends and neighbors had died in that battle. Then there were the Porters and werewolves who had fallen trying to protect Copper River in a conflict that promised to be merely the precursor of things to come. "Keep looking." Fossilized beagle shit, half-hidden by weeds, turned much of the grass into a minefield. I crouched by one pile and stared as though I could use the droppings to divine where Ted had gone, but all they told me was that we were too late. I continued to search. Cigarette butts littered the ground by the woods beyond the driveway, where Ted used to work during the night, skinning and butchering whatever game he brought back. I found a couple of old beer cans by the trees. "Isaac . . ." Lena studied my face, then shook her head. "Never mind." Anger tightened my jaw. I knew what she was going to say, and I didn''t want to hear it. The manager of the trailer park said Ted had simply vanished. He had left an envelope full of cash to pay off his bills, which was more than I would have expected from Ted. More likely, he had simply messed with the manager''s mind to make him believe everything was squared away. That would better fit Ted''s style and budget. "I need to find him." "How? By staring at dog crap all day? This must be a new school of magic I hadn''t heard about. My lover, the fecomancer." On another day, I would have smiled. That was before I had lost a fourteen-year-old girl to the Ghost Army. A girl who was potentially more powerful than any libriomancer in history, with the possible exception of Johannes Gutenberg. A girl who had been under my care and protection. Jeneta Aboderin had the ability to perform libriomancy using electronic media. The rest of us needed printed books to shape our magic. We could reach into the pages to create anything from futuristic laser pistols to fizzy lifting drinks from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory , as long as we had a physical copy of the book. Jeneta could pull the mockingjay pin from The Hunger Games out of her smartphone, and carried an entire library around on her e-reader. Nobody fully understood how she did it, nor did we know the limits of her power. I searched the dirt driveway next. This was my third time studying the dark patches of oil that had leaked from Ted''s old Ford Bronco. I knew a Porter who could have used that stain not only to track Ted''s truck, but to bring it to a screeching halt wherever he might be. Or there were books whose magic could help me to find him myself . . . if I had still been a member of the Porters. If Johannes Gutenberg hadn''t locked my mind to prevent me from ever using magic again. I closed my eyes and fought off a now-familiar surge of despair. "There''s nothing here," Lena said softly. "I know." I took a long, slow breath, trying to ease the walnut-sized lump in my throat. "We''ll have to find someone else to help me. Ted isn''t the only one who can touch people''s minds." "Would you really want that man messing around in your nightmares?" "I saw her, Lena." Two nights before, I had jerked awake, my body dripping with sweat, my hands reaching helplessly for power I no longer possessed. For two days that memory had stalked me, taunting me from every corner. "Jeneta?" "The woman who took her." The name darted into view like a dragonfly and vanished again before I could grasp it. "I know who she is, but something''s blocking the memory. I need help. Someone who can help me remember." Wisps of black hair hung over Lena''s red-veined eyes. Her lips pressed together with worry and helplessness, along with a dash of skepticism. It was an expression I had come to know well over the past

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