by Jeff Somers
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For Danette, who I love with all my heart and who always tells me I’m a genius, despite all the evidence to the contrary.
I.
1.
I WOKE UP, twisted in the scratchy sheets. The room was hot, humid with my own exhalations, and dark, that curious dark you got when it was desert-hot outside, the sun white and relentless, and you’d blocked it out with a heavy blanket tacked over the window. You could feel the light trying to push its way in, and you could feel the dark ready to flee because it knew it was someplace it shouldn’t be.
I lay and stared up at the ceiling, old tin work that had been painted a hundred times. I thought about the dream I’d been having. My father. Of course, as usual, inevitably. I didn’t dream often, but when I did, it was usually about good old Hilly Vonnegan, and we were usually in his shit-brown Oldsmobile having adventures. He always smelled like hard work and sweat, and he always had a pint of something in a brown paper bag that he sipped on as he drove. He would start off happy. Any time Dad showed up to kidnap me, it was Happy Days for the first hour or two. Dad would hum along with the radio, tapping the beat on the steering wheel and glancing at me with a smile.
“You and me, Lemmy,” he would say. “Headin’ out for the hills, where the boom bands play!”
It was from a book he’d read to me when I’d been small. Smaller. He was fond of the phrase.
I swung my legs onto the floor and sat for a moment, feeling tired and tight. My right arm ached and was numb at the same time; the ache deep inside, surrounded by numb. I sat and worked my hand, making a fist and releasing it, and slowly the numbness receded. But not completely.
I leaned forward and peeled the edge of the blanket away from the window. The sun burned in, making me flinch. It was hot and bright and clear, not a cloud in the sky. Too many fucking photons for clouds, the atmosphere dense with light and heat. I was dripping sweat. I thought about casting a little mu to cool things down a little—a little ustari air-conditioning—but I didn’t feel up to bleeding the gas for it, and had a big day ahead. I needed every drop I could muster, and I wasn’t going to be hanging around the squat anyway.
I washed up as best I could in the basin. There was no running water or electricity, but it was dry and off the radar and, most important, free.
DRESSED, THE HEAT was worse, and the fleeting relief of washing up evaporated as I hoofed it down Hudson Street, wondering if the fabric of this cheap suit was going to melt into my skin. Sweat streamed and poured off me, the sun forcing my eyes into little slits.
“There ’e is,” Murray the Fell shouted as I approached. “Our fuckin’ Scribe.”
Murray was a fierce little man leaning against a newspaper vending box, hunched over at all times as if he carried a terrible, invisible weight. He was, as a result, taller than he initially seemed, which also lent him a simian aspect because his limbs seemed to be far too long for his body. Nothing fit; the suit he was wearing wasn’t the worst suit I’d ever seen, but it was rendered a wrinkled, sloppy mess because he was a coiled spring of a man, pulled into himself, boiling with potential energy and violence. He called himself the Fell because he’d read a poem, once, that used the phrase to mean dangerous, powerful, but like most men—and just about every single Trickster I’d ever met—the bigger the name, the less powerful they actually were.
Still, Murray had just walked up to me in Rue’s. “I have purchased your debt from that simpleton Pell,” he’d said. Impressive, calling an Archmage a simpleton in a place where it could be overheard and passed up the chain, which made me think well of Murray. Still, it made me nervous. Mycroft Pell and I had a lot of shitty history all of a sudden, but I’d been unaware that him hating my guts now constituted a debt.
That was mages for you: none of the normal rules applied. Sometimes figuring out what rules did apply was what scientists called a challenge. And if you were just a lowly Trickster like me, you didn’t argue. If an enustari like Mycroft Pell decided you owed him a debt because you’d insulted him and then gotten Evelyn Fallon, the Fabricator, to go to war to save your ass, well then, as far as the universe was concerned you owed him a debt. And if he decided to sell your debt to some fierce little man, there was no stopping him.
“We got a room in the back,” Murray barked around his unlit cigar. He was always chewing on one. As far as I could tell, he ate them.
The place was a bowling alley, a long bar on the left, some cramped tables on the right, a narrow lane between them. I followed Murray through a haze of gas and smoke; this wasn’t like Rue’s, where we had an unspoken agreement not to cast on each other. This place was open for business. I reminded myself to keep my eyes open, make sure no one was laying any subtle Charms on me.
The back room was small and covered in cheap wood paneling. There was a separate bar set up in the back, small and cramped, but it wasn’t stocked and looked like it hadn’t been used in a long time. A tiny wooden stage was similarly neglected. Three ancient folding tables had been set up in the middle of the room, and a group of Tricksters lounged in the uncomfortable-looking metal folding chairs, sweating freely in the stuffy heat of the place, smoking cigarettes, staring at me.
“This here is Lem Vonnegan,” the Fell said, his breathing loud and damp as he moved the disgusting cigar around in his mouth. “He’s gonna be our Wordsmith, follow?”
He said follow like it was an entirely different word: Falla?
The four faces looked me up and down. Three women, one man, all of them with some mileage. I was reminded of my time at Heller’s circus in Jersey, running games and fleecing the Normals, but those people had been freaks, not hard cases. You didn’t want to be friends with them. You didn’t want to get to know them. But you didn’t worry too much about them. These people looked low, and I was regretting my latest in a very long line of terrible decisions. But a man had to eat.
The Fell proceeded to introductions. I paid attention, because I wanted to recognize whoever it was that eventually—fucking inevitably—would try to screw me over. With each name, Murray provided a colorful job description so there would be no confusion over our roles.
The Bleeder was obvious, a tall, broad-shouldered black woman named Redix with a short e. She wasn’t so much fat as just plain big, a giantess. Her face nearly expressionless, round and puffy, her skin shiny. She allowed herself a single nod after Murray introduced her, then staring around the table, her eyes flat. Challenging. A woman, I thought, who knew what ustari thought of Bleeders and didn’t care for it one bit.
The Face was a young woman, square-shaped and flat-chested, her face hangdog jowls and deep-set, suspicious eyes. He told us to call her Bella Grace, and she wore a man’s suit and kept her limp brown hair pulled back in a messy ponytail. She was smoking a cigarette with yellowed fingers and glanced around furtively when the Fell named her.
The Enforcer was the other man. Reggie. He was middle-aged and wore a suit like a second skin—not that it was so perfectly tailored, but he looked comfortable in it, the sort of man who understood suits and their purpose and use. I always felt like I was headed to my high school graduation in a suit. This guy sent smiles around the room and shot his cuffs and looked like the only adult on hand.
Finally, Murray pointed out the Touch, who was a kid named Lorie, maybe fourteen, fifte
en years old, wearing earbuds and sunglasses and a black-and-white checkered shirt, tight jeans, and skater sneakers. Her face was broken out in a field of acne, and she offered us a sardonic salute as if acknowledging screaming fans. I was instantly jealous. When I’d been her age I’d been just as much of a fuckup, but I didn’t have the balls to go looking for magic. It was years later that I finally found Hiram and got him to teach me.
Things hadn’t gone so well since then.
All of us shared the puckered scars of our status and profession. While most idimustari, Little Magicians, bled themselves out of necessity—you needed some status and power (or money) to command Bleeders—most were happy to bleed anyone else willing to cut themselves. I had a rule, though. When I’d told Murray the Fell that I wouldn’t bleed anyone, that it was my gas or no deal, he hadn’t been happy. I figured I’d blown my one chance for a decent payout—but losing out because of my peculiar line in the sand wasn’t anything new. Everyone had the same question: If you weren’t going to bleed other people, how in the world did you expect to make a living on blood magic?
I’d never had an answer. Except that once you knew magic was there, how could you not use it? Even if it meant you were weak and tired all the time, even if it meant your whole life became this inverted equation that made you smaller and smaller every time.
We worked it out. Murray wanted my spells; he decided he didn’t care if I cast them or not. I would write them, spinning them out of the Words, short, compact, efficient, and powerful. Most people wrote spells like they were reciting poetry. It took years to get to the fucking point, the hungry Universe twiddling its thumbs the whole time, impatient to see if you knew what you were doing or if it was going to have to slap you down.
“Vonnegan,” Bella Grace said, studying me. “You’re out of Rue’s downtown, right? Always with the giant, the big idiot. Two of you, a package deal. Where’s your buddy?”
“Yeah, I heard about you,” Reggie added. “Where’s the Indian—what’s his name?”
“He’s not in this,” I snapped. Then I swallowed and took a deep breath. “He’s not made for shit like this.”
Bella nodded. “Like I heard: An idiot, right? You cut him loose?”
“Good idea,” Reggie said.
I wanted to hit them both. For talking about Mags. For calling him an idiot. Instead I shrugged. “He’s not in this,” I said. “And that’s it.” I looked at Murray. “You want to walk us through what it is?”
“The goal is simple,” Murray the Fell said as a pitcher of beer went around the tables. “We’re snatchin’ a powerful artifact. Old. Drenched in fucking gas for centuries. Sort of thing you shouldn’t even touch unless you’re an Archmage and you got that enustari glow about you.”
Murray, hunched over, looking at us all from under his bushy eyebrows, waved his fingers in the air to imply a shimmer, a shine.
My arm was aching again.
“It’s called the Gianna Usa, and we’re bein’ paid handsome to extract it and deliver it. To who, don’t fucking matter. Or why. Or whatever the fuck else. You got any questions that don’t relate to the fucking how of getting the Gianna Usa, the door’s right there. You each been brought in on this because you got a skill. Don’t mean you the only ustari in the world got that skill, capisce?”
Gianna Usa, I thought: black slumber. Sounded like the sort of thing I shouldn’t be getting involved with, but everyone had to eat. I sipped beer and said a silent prayer to whatever silent and paralyzed gods were paying attention that I didn’t end this adventure dead. Or worse.
“Where is this thing?” Reggie wanted to know, leaning back in his chair with a foamy beer like this had been his goal all along, since childhood.
Murray the Fell glanced at him, then looked around at each of us in turn. “In a bank,” he said. “In a safe-deposit box. Layered in Wards, spells. This ain’t an ordinary bank, see. This is an ustari bank. Mages only, in and out. Some shmuck walks in, wants a free toaster and a new checking account? Hit in the face with a Charm and comes out of it two hours later, somewhere far away. So there’s firepower. Three Archmages on the fuckin’ board. The people behind the desks? Each of them come with some heavy weight. Bleeders on tap.”
Bella Grace snorted. “So there’s no fucking plan.”
Murray gave every impression he might launch himself across the tables and attack us all. “Plan’s not my fucking job, follow? You’re here,” he said, pointing at Lorie, “to be our Touch. You study the place—physical and magical—and you figure out how we get in, how we neutralize mages. Bella’s our Face, and she works the room, Charms their pants off, distracts and misdirects. Reggie’s muscle, whether he’s castin’ a mu to smooth things out or throwin’ haymakers. Anyone needs gas to get somethin’ done, Redix here bleeds. And you need spells, get our Scribe here, Mr. Lemuel Vonnegan. His spells are mint, they’ll be faster, stronger, and easier than any shit you lot have in your heads, so use ’im.”
There was a moment of silence. “So what do you do, old man?” Lorie asked. Her voice had a raspy sizzle to it I instantly hated.
Murray the Fell sneered. “I just did it, doll.”
Reggie made a face. I liked Reggie. I imagined he was the guy who would look relaxed and unconcerned sitting in a police station, handcuffs and all. The sort of guy who would ask for a very specific soda. “Sounds like a suicide mission,” he said.
Murray shrugged. “You lot fuck it up and don’t come back, we get five more and try again.”
2.
I STEPPED OUT INTO THE RAIN, which was coming down as a wall of water, making the dark streets even darker. I pulled my thin, well-worn jacket close around my neck and put my head down against the chill. I’d been wet and cold before. The key to survival was to keep moving, keep your blood pressure high. Which complicated things because that was fucking exhausting. If you loitered in places, people chased you off, and being in constant motion lulled you into a trance after a while.
I had a lot to think about. Murray the Fell had given us the bank details, so I thought I’d take a walk past it, poke my head in. I wasn’t a bank robber. I was a Trickster; I bled a little and cast a spell and made people like me, borrowed money from them, and walked away. Or I bled a little and cast a spell and made a dollar look like fifty, and bought groceries. I bled a little and cast a dozen spells a day and staggered home broke and shivering, weak from blood loss. I didn’t bust into bank vaults and steal ancient artifacts.
But Murray had offered me five hundred dollars to be his Scribe, and that was easy money. Most idimustari you met had learned five spells somehow and that was it. They could blind you, Charm you, kite a dollar, and maybe do some tricks, but anything subtle—anything with real power—was beyond them. Some Tricksters had more ability, sure. My old gasam, Hiram Bosch, was technically ranked ustari, a full mage, but he was really one of us, grifting his way through life. But most talented Tricksters, even ones at Hiram’s level, were awful with the Words. Larding up on unnecessary verbiage, taking endless seconds to speak ten Words to accomplish what could be done in four. That’s why Murray wanted me. He wanted his little gang to get in and out as quickly as possible, and for that he needed spells that worked right the first time, could be spoken quickly, and used as little gas from Redix as possible—not because Murray the Fell gave two shits if the big woman bled out and died while we were doing his dirty work, but because chances for success were better if we were efficient, if we were organized.
I wasn’t bleeding anyone directly, I told myself. I was writing spells. I was composing. If someone took that spell and bled Redix or someone else with it, that wasn’t me.
I thought of Mags. I’d been hard on him. He’d bled people, and he’d come up with excuses why it was okay that weren’t so different from mine. A wave of dizziness hit me, and I stumbled, going down on my knees, hard, into a puddle. There was a sound, suddenly, booming all a
round me, something loud and painful, like a buzz saw an inch from my ears.
Headin’ out for the hills, where the boom bands play!
I shook my head and looked around. The street was empty. The rain poured down. I was shivering from the cold. Slowly, I got to my feet and started walking again. Five hundred dollars was a lot of motivation.
THE BANK WAS down by Wall Street on Pearl. From the outside it looked like a sagging, abandoned old brownstone, not much different from the shitholes I squatted in for shelter. A prick of my finger and I could see the Wards that had been layered on it, and it was the most complex set of runes and markings I’d ever seen. At a glance I could see hundreds of separate Wards, each one representing a flood of spilled blood to create and bind, some dating back a century or more. It was impossible to figure out each one’s purpose.
Hiram had taught me, in one of his rare chatty moods, that a Ward was like a spell, except it lingered. A Ward could never be as powerful as a spell cast in the moment with fresh gas in the air, but it could last much longer. Simple Wards that had a very specific, single action could be pretty powerful years, even decades, later. Wards that were complex combinations of actions were more subdued.
These were all single-purpose Wards, each one pulsing with old power like the shadow of a murder, ancient blood still burning after all these years. Singly they would be almost ineffectual, easy to miss. Packed together and layered on top of one another, they were a roar of power making the building look unimpressive, uninteresting, urging people to keep moving, to walk past. And guarding against intrusion—I could see at a glance that trying to get in when you weren’t expected would trigger a dozen alarms all over the city, and maybe beyond.
I let the city move around me for a while, studying. Somewhere not too far off someone was singing; an off-key, charmless gorm of a song, just words and notes in a monotonous ramble, high-pitched and irritating. It seemed like the whole city paused to listen, giving it carry and volume it wouldn’t have otherwise had.
