The Wanderer in Unknown Realms by John Connolly

said.
    Under other circumstances I might almost have laughed in her face, but her expression brooked no such mockery and, truth be told, I was already inclined to believe her. After all, I had seen the change in Maggs’s rooms and had listened to the pained, desperate testament of her father.
    â€œHow? How can a book rewrite the world?”
    â€œLook around you, Mr. Soter. Books are constantly changing the world. If you’re a Christian, you have been changed by the Bible, by the word of God, or what was left of it when it was finally wrung through the hands of men. If you are a Muslim, look to the Koran; if a Communist, to Marx and Engels. Don’t you see? This world is constantly being altered by books. The Communist Manifesto was published in 1848, less than a century ago, and Das Kapital is younger still, yet already Russia has fallen to them, and other nations will soon fall, too.”
    â€œBut those are ideas,” I said. “The books communicate them, and the ideas take hold in the minds of men. The books themselves are not responsible, no more than a gun can be culpable for the bullet that it fires, or a blade for the wound that it inflicts. It is men who fire bullets and wield knives, and men who change the world. Books may inspire them, but they are passive objects, not active ones.”
    She shook her head.
    â€œYou’re a fool if that is what you truly believe. A book is a carrier, and the ideas contained within its covers are an infection waiting to be spread. They breed in men. They adapt according to the host. Books alter men, and men, in their turn, alter worlds.”
    â€œNo, that’s—”
    She leaned over and placed her hand upon my arm. Though we were seated in the warmth of the fire, her touch chilled me to the bone. I felt a physical pain, and it was all I could do not to recoil. This woman was unnatural.
    â€œI can see that you believe me,” she said. “You are altered in aspect since last we met. Tell me of Maggs. Tell me what you saw.”
    How could she know of Maggs? I wondered. Yet somehow she did.
    â€œThere were holes burned in his skull through the sockets in his eyes,” I said. “There were creatures, insects or crustaceans, but not like anything I have seen or heard of in this world. I believe it was these creatures that bored their way out of Maggs’s head, emerging through his eyes. I destroyed them both.”
    â€œMaggs,” she said, with a hint of sorrow to her voice. “He hated books, you know. He saw them only as a source of wealth. He loved only the hunt and not the object of it, but he had not always been that way. He had come to fear them. It happens, sometimes, to those in our particular trade: not all the books that we handle are beautiful inside and out. We breathe in the dust of the worst of them, fragments of their venom, and we poison ourselves. I think that is what happened to Maggs. He sourced books, and the stranger the better, but he would not read them. Yet I believe his curiosity about the Atlas overcame his fear: he looked upon it, and something in it took root in his brain.”
    â€œHow did he find it?”
    â€œHe had always been seeking it, hunting rumors and whispers.Maggs was a scout unlike any other, and he wanted to achieve what others before him had failed to do. Then Maulding came to me. I tried to dissuade him from looking for the Atlas , but Maulding had begun to lust after it, too. If Maggs was a scout unlike any other, then Maulding was a unique collector. It was a combination of forces, a perfect conjunction of circumstances: it was the book’s opportunity, and it chose to reveal itself.”
    â€œYou speak of it as though it were alive,” I said.
    â€œYou still don’t understand,” she said. “Books are not fixed objects: they transmit words and ideas. Their effect on each reader is unique. They put pictures in our minds. They take root. You saw Maggs.