“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?”