by Jeff Somers
I blinked. I glanced down at my arm; my right hand poked out from my jacket sleeve like a hunk of marble, white and blue. A wave of dizziness swept through me, and I realized I could hear the singing again, loud, clear, like it was right there in the room. And I could hear the words—the Words, because it was a spell.
I looked at my feet again. I was still floating.
The spell was a Glamour, that much was obvious just from the choice of vocabulary; I’d cast enough Glamours to recognize the general shape. This was one of the most complex and complicated Glamour spells I’d ever heard. Each sentence could have been a Trickster’s Glamour, something quick and dirty to make you look different, to dress up a dollar as a fifty, to create a duplicate that would lead the police on a chase while you hid somewhere. But each sentence of this spell was just a small facet of the overall illusion.
I looked up again. Rain smacked against the windowpanes.
Everyone was floating. Six inches off the floor.
There was gas in the air, a swirling, buzzing supply of it.
The singing. The casting.
And there she was, in the corner of the room, black and white and red, red lips: Renar. Mika Renar’s Glamour, eyes closed, also floating just off the floor, her perfect lips moving as she whispered. She was casting. It was her voice I’d been hearing, a throaty, sexy whisper that made you sweat and twist, wanting her touch. Her voice like singing, all the time, because that was how Renar had Worded the Glamour spell. It wasn’t real; nothing about her was. The real Mika Renar was ancient and wheelchair-bound, paralyzed.
Everything shimmered.
“You need to find Mags,” Murray the Fell said, looking me up and down fiercely. “Where’s Mags, kid?”
It was like waking up underwater. You wake up, and for a while it’s strange and confusing, because you’re just floating. Everything is muffled and serene. And then, slowly, you realize you can’t breathe, and you try to surface, and then you realize someone is holding you under.
I kicked for the surface, and something pushed me back down. A spell. I could sense it suddenly. I was under a spell, something smothering, something keeping me half-asleep, dreaming.
I looked down. I was floating.
I looked around. Everyone stared at me, and seemed to flicker, as if flitting in and out of sight every split second, faulty projections.
I looked at Renar’s Glamour. Eyes closed, lips moving. But it wasn’t casting the spell keeping me under, it was casting a Glamour—her own Glamour. The Glamour that she presented to the world, the most detailed, most convincing Glamour I’d ever seen, right down to the scent of cherries as she walked past you.
the sun streaming through the window, bright and sharp
the rain crashing against the glass
the snow blowing in a continuous field
my arm, cold and white and aching
the leather harness under my arms, strapped across my chest
the tourniquet on my arm, twisted tight
the rotten, wide-planked floor under me, six inches or so down
the whispered Words of the spell, like someone singing softly, the Glamour’s voice a beautiful chime, a soft tinkling series of perfect notes, lilting, gorgeous
I blinked and startled, and woke up.
II.
6.
PANIC SEIZED ME, and I thrashed and twisted, trying to break free. I was bound up tight, hanging from a steel bar running the length of the room, the leather harness immobilizing my left arm while my right hung free, but limp and unresponsive. A deep cut, surgical and precise, had been carved into the arm, and a tourniquet made from surgical tubing and a metal rod had been applied to my upper arm. The end result was a steady drip of blood from the wound, slow, not a bleed-out. I would bleed for months at this pace, shriveling.
The blood sizzled away midair before hitting the floor, sucked up by the spell being cast by Renar’s Glamour.
I have purchased your debt from that simpleton Pell, I heard her say, the voice like silk, worming into my pleasure centers, a voice I wanted to hear over and over again, forever. A voice I wanted to please so it would whisper to me.
The Glamour was just hovering there, a few feet away, a bored, disinterested expression on its face as it whispered the spell. I twisted around to get my bearings, grunting with the effort and the sudden pain. I was in a large, warehouse-like place, a huge room that had been fitted with steel bars along the ceiling. Dozens—fifty, sixty people—hung alongside me in similar harnesses, their right arms cut and bound, leaking gas into the air at a steady, careful rate.
My fellow prisoners were all unconscious, though a few were moving their lips, twitching gently—trapped in their own dreams. The Gianna Usa, I suspected—an artifact that induced a sort of waking dream, ensuring no one woke up screaming in the middle of being bled to death.
They all swayed gently when they moved. I recognized, with a moment of shock, everyone from the last few days of my life: Lorie, three rows away from me; Redix a few rows behind her; Reggie next to her. I turned my head and found Bella right next to me, her eyes open, staring at me.
My whole body ached, making me wonder how long I’d been here, how long I’d bled.
I stared back at Bella. She was the same heavyset woman from my dream, my vision, whatever had been magicked on me. “Hey!” I whispered. I knew Bella, or knew of her. She wasn’t a regular, but she’d been in Rue’s Morgue, trolling for opportunities, for information. “Hey!” I repeated lamely.
She looked at me, then looked away, squeezing her eyes shut.
I looked around again, straining my neck to try to see as many of my fellow prisoners as I could. I looked back at Renar’s Glamour, whispering away. This was some serious fucking science here; she’d created an avatar of herself, a Glamour made of light and gas and Words, and contrived to have it cast its own spell, feeding off all the assholes hung here like cuts of meat and keeping a second Glamour, the one most people saw, running smooth as glass wherever she was.
I’d met Mika Renar only once. I’d heard about Mika Renar a lot. She was one of those Archmages who had been around for as long as anyone could remember, an old, ancient woman in a wheelchair, attended by her apprentice, the preternaturally smooth Cal Amir, himself an Archmage-class ustari, as dangerous as they came. Renar, I’d heard, was a mass murderer, a spider living in her mansion, one of the most powerful mages ever and not shy about bleeding anyone who happened to come too close to her web.
In real life, she was an old woman who couldn’t move, being wheeled about, and she conducted all her business through the best Glamour I’d ever seen.
I looked at it again. Her avatar was a tall, beautiful woman in black, her skin alabaster, the binary effect broken only by her red lips and hair. Everything about the Glamour was perfect—from the sway of her hips to the subtle sound of her dress shifting against her skin. Her voice was music, and even hanging like beef in a murder warehouse, bleeding against my will, I found myself half-hard for her, sniffing the air for her scent. The short list of ustari who could create a Glamour this good was definitely single digits. You could tie off a Glamour spell and it would linger without an active bleed, slowly fading, but this was an active, responsive animation she controlled with her own thoughts, in real time. I remembered wondering how she managed it without an army of Bleeders following her around.
And now I knew. She had an army of Bleeders. And I’d been sold into that service.
I closed my eyes. I remembered Murray the Fell.
WE WERE, AS USUAL, hungry. Things had been thin on the street; we’d had a pretty good run for a few weeks working a simple ATM ambush, Charming people late at night into handing over their cards and PIN numbers—a phrase that Mags compulsively informed me was unnecessary and redundant because PIN meant personal identification number already. But then someone posted a security camera screengrab of Mags an
d me and one of our smiling victims along with a warning message; we had to put our heads down and come up with something else. So we headed to Rue’s, where, surprisingly, I still had a tab in good standing.
Rue’s Morgue was our bar, an ustari bar—but more specifically, a Trickster bar. Few of us had real power. We all got by hatching little scams assisted by a bleed and a few Words. The place was owned by a Normal, and there was an unspoken agreement that you didn’t cast at Rue’s. Of course, fucking idimustari broke that agreement all the time, because we were unreliable scum, but in general anyone walking into Rue’s would think it was just a disreputable bar where a bunch of sketchy grifters hung out.
If they could get past the Wards we’d set up outside. Just because we tried not to cast in Rue’s didn’t mean we wanted to rub shoulders with all the Normals.
The end result was, if you wanted to find a New York idimustari, your best bet was to go to Rue’s, order a bourbon, and wait. Eventually every Trickster in the city made their way to the dive, looking for an honest drink and a field of talent to pitch a scheme to. So when I walked in with Mags, Murray was there waiting for me. He was polite, letting me settle in with my humongous pet Pitr Mags, six and a half feet of tan, and order a Michter’s neat before he peeled off the bar and stalked over to us, chewing his cigar.
“You Vonnegan?” he shouted over the din.
Since manners weren’t generally required of ustari, a class of people who paid people to bleed, I sized up the rooster and nodded, gratefully accepting my whiskey and a soda for Mags, who regarded alcohol’s appeal as mysterious.
Murray sat down across from us, then leaned forward aggressively. “I got a job offer for ya. I asked around for someone who can write spells, good ones, and your name keeps coming up.”
I remembered being flattered. It was the only thing I was any good at, the Words, and so far I’d failed at making them pay my rent. Of course, when you had a stupid, massive pet like Pitr Mags following you everywhere and eating almost literally everything, it was hard to make any sort of profit.
I asked Murray what the job was. Most Tricksters just needed to hear the phrase I’ll pay you, but I had certain requirements for my jobs: I didn’t bleed anyone but myself. Writing spells that other people cast was fine, but I had to be sure.
He looked around as if worried someone might be listening. “We’re snatchin’ a powerful artifact,” he said. “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.” He leaned back, suddenly expansive. “I got a team together. Gonna have to be a group effort.” He pointed at me. “You’d be the Scribe. Write out some spells for us. You don’t haveta be on the scene, nothing dangerous,” he said as if the idea of avoiding danger was cute. He rolled the cigar around in his mouth and stared at me. “For that—for writing a few spells—we’ll pay you five hundred bucks.”
That had my attention. I struggled to keep the naked greed off my face. “I’m interested,” I said.
Murray was already standing up. “Come on, meet the boss, we’ll seal the deal. Half up front for signing on, half when we have the artifact.”
I hesitated. Next to me, Mags grunted; it was the equivalent of a dog’s whine. You couldn’t trust mages. Men and women who were used to getting things done with a drop of blood and a few Words weren’t normally big believers in fair play and honest dealing. And I’d had my own run-ins with enustari, and was pretty sure I was on a few pretty scary shit lists as a result.
But two hundred and fifty bucks each . . . I looked at Mags. The man was all stomach, and he was expensive to water and feed. It might take us a few days to figure out another scheme, and if Mags got hungry, I’d be hearing that whining noise a lot.
“All right,” I said, standing up. “Lead the way.”
Murray nodded, brusquely. He paused to spit a stream of brown juice onto the floor and then stalked toward the rear of the bar. I followed. Mags followed me. Murray strode past the horrifying, dangerously filthy bathrooms and out the back door to the alley behind the bar, where literally thousands of handshake deals had been made over the years.
Murray kept walking as I emerged, and I had the sense of someone behind me a second before two pairs of powerful arms grabbed hold of me.
A split second later, a piece of tape was slapped over my mouth. And then, the hood over my head. Me and the hood were getting to be entirely too familiar.
Gas in the air, and then I heard Murray spitting some Words, a spell designed to keep Mags from expressing his opinion on the situation, physically or otherwise. And then I was being carried, my feet dragging behind me, and then I was in a car, the sudden sealed feeling and instant silence telling me it was an expensive car.
“I have purchased your debt from that simpleton Pell,” said the most beautiful voice I’d ever heard, a familiar woman’s voice I was instantly eager to hear again. “Since you are without a gasam, no one to protest or protect you, there is no difficulty. And I do not fear your patron, Fallon. Please do not cause me any difficulties, or you will cease to have value to me.”
And I remembered being dragged into the warehouse. And I remembered being hung up on the track. And I remembered my arm being tied off and slashed by a mealy little man with big plastic glasses, working very precisely. And I remembered Cal Amir, apprentice to Mika Renar, a slick, handsome, dark-skinned man in a beautiful suit, wearing black gloves and carrying an artifact, a small statue of a sleeping fat man, like a Buddha in recline, made of a shiny ebony material that shimmered and danced.
I remembered someone murmuring the Words: Gianna Usa. And Cal Amir touched it to me, and I slept.
I OPENED MY EYES, and was momentarily disappointed to find I was still hanging, one arm dripping out gas steadily. Renar’s Glamour was still casting its own spell, which continued to amaze me—it would never have occurred to me that the link between an ustari and an illusion would be so strong and primal, that the universe would recognize the illusion’s voice as legitimate. But then, I was just idimustari. What I didn’t know would fill every goddamn book in the world.
“Hey!” I tried to shout, managing a rusted, hoarse wheeze. “Anyone here?”
Anyone conscious? I thought. I got no answer. I was the only one who’d shrugged off whatever spell had put us all into a vivid dream. It was easier to do that, I figured, than to monitor us actively. I twisted around to look at Bella again, but she hung limp, eyes closed.
I was alone. I considered my situation. I was pretty professionally bound, and my glance at the bar and harness told me it was Warded against any physical or magical escape, so I wasn’t going to Houdini my way out; breaking the Wards would require a lot of gas and some well-chosen Words. There was a substantial amount of gas flowing; although most of it was gobbled up by Renar’s hungry spell almost as soon as it hit the air, there was enough to work with. Except I would need to sift through the haze of wonderful, horrible energy, mouth watering and stomach flipping, until I could pick out the thin line that was just me, just my blood. That would take time, and it reduced the gas I had to work with to something tiny. A trickle.
I didn’t think it would be enough to free myself. I would have to use that trickle to do the only thing I could, to try to find the only help I’d ever had. I’d have to find Mags.
7.
AS A KID, I never had any friends. My house was always the Forbidden Zone, because of the screaming, and the police cars, and my mother’s winning personality. Other kids were ordered not to play with me, and I had nothing with which to tempt them into disobedience, because my parents regarded me as a finished product from the moment of my birth, a perfect entity in need of no improvement.
That made leaving pretty easy. I didn’t quite wait for my eighteenth birthday; I waited until I was pretty sure no one would think it worth their time to chase me down. I packed a backpack,
stole fifty dollars from the coffee can Mom had hidden in her bedroom, and walked out the door and never looked back. I had no one to miss.
After all these years in New York, nothing much had changed. I had exactly one friend, one real friend: a six-foot-five Indian man-child who regarded hot dogs as the only truly acceptable food and who was terrified of actual dogs of any kind, who occasionally tore doors out of their frames by accident, who only seemed capable of memorizing useless spells. I’d rarely been apart from Mags for more than a few minutes in years. I woke up and there was Mags, all optimism that I would feed him breakfast. I went to bed at night and there was Mags, all optimism that I would do a better job of feeding him breakfast tomorrow.
I’d come to worry over Mags Without Me. Whenever I imagined him alone, without me, I grew sad and angry, and a little panicked. He would starve. He would be abused. Worse, he would crawl back to my old master (when I’d had a gasam), Hiram Bosch, who would possibly feed and water him and yet Mags would wither and die anyway, endlessly scrubbing Hiram’s bathroom tiles.
And now, hanging in Mika Renar’s charming involuntary blood donation center, there was literally only one person in the whole fucking city I could count on for help. Whatever that said about me would have to wait for a future unpacking, a moment of self-examination when I’d somehow gotten through the day without being bled to death in the service of Mika Renar’s ultimate vanity project.
I looked at the Glamour again. It was beautiful. I wondered if it was what Renar had actually looked like as a young woman, if she’d really been that stunning. If so, she must have been unstoppable. The Glamour’s eyes were closed, her full lips moving. I imagined the chain of it all: Renar shed some blood—based on stories about her, probably bled someone to death—to create this Glamour, which then began using the blood slowly being drained from all of us to recite the spell that created the Glamour Renar traveled with. It was headache-inducing.
