The Stringer

by Jeff Somers

  Suddenly, I was angry. I put a finger in Hiram’s chest. “You were only too fucking happy to get rid of Pitr, asshole,” I said. “You gave him to me like a puppy that soiled the fucking carpet. This while you were in the process of kicking me out of your fucking shithole of an apartment—”

  Hiram slapped my hand away and opened his mouth, but in that moment there was a cleared throat from behind him, and he stopped, closing his mouth and turning away gruffly.

  A man was sitting comfortably in one of Hiram’s deep leather chairs, a tumbler of something in his hand. He was thin and old, older than anyone else I knew. He wore a black suit that looked like he’d been born wearing it, perfectly cut. His hair was white and his hands had the swollen look of arthritis and hard use. He sat with an ease that belied confidence, absolute and settled. His face was deeply lined. For an old man, he looked spry. And because I’d come to have an eye for these things, I could tell immediately that I was in the presence of power. Saganustari at minimum. Enustari, maybe. An Archmage.

  I looked at Hiram, trying to see if I’d missed something. Hiram was a low-rent hustler. Not someone I would have expected to have high-powered mages lounging in his living room. But there was nothing new: He was still Hiram Bosch, fat old man who stole everything he happened to notice, a man who’d funded his whole life by bleeding and stealing, petty thefts and grifts. The man I was still apprenticed to.

  Hiram sighed, thrusting his hands in his trouser pockets. “Lem Vonnegan, my urtuku,” he said, gesturing at me. “Mr. Vonnegan, Evelyn Fallon.”

  The old man and I looked at each other. Fallon’s eyes were pale and faded but seemed to pin me where I stood. I had the impression that I wouldn’t be able to move as long as he was studying me. When he looked away, I sensed that Evelyn Fallon had just thought about me as much as he ever would.

  “You got an Udug, too, huh?” I said.

  Fallon glanced at me again and ran his eyes up and down. “This Word, you know what it means?”

  I forced a smile and nodded. “I got me an education.”

  He sniffed. “No, Mr. Vonnegan, I do not got an Udug. Neither do you. We have arad.”

  I blinked. I knew more than most: Arad meant slave or puppet.

  Fallon picked up his glass. “The crude and uneducated refer to them as Stringers. We haven’t seen any in a very long time.”

  I walked over to Hiram’s small bar, picked up a decanter of bourbon, and poured myself a drink, waiting for Hiram’s sudden howl of rage, but when I turned back, the fat man was just watching me. I put one hand in my pocket and tried to look smarter than I was.

  “How do you know, Mr. Fallon?” I asked.

  Fallon smirked. “I have been too much out of society,” he said, the barest hint of an angular accent in his words. “Too much time spent on custom orders. No one knows me anymore.”

  “Our Mr. Fallon is an accomplished Fabricator,” Hiram said, face impassive. “Enustari, soaked in the blood of innocents, far too smart to associate with the likes of us.”

  A Fabricator. Building devices imbued with magic or a demonic intelligence. They were rare enough. Finding one to apprentice with was like discovering an oil well in your backyard, and I started plotting. My gasam, the ever-angry and bitterly disappointed Hiram, was here. I might be able to negotiate a transfer of the bond if I could convince Fallon to take me on. Assuming he would be willing to feed and water Mags as a condition.

  “Your Master does not like me, Mr. Vonnegan,” Fallon said, not sounding even slightly concerned. “Tell me, has he taught you all his thieving tricks, the mu and Cantrips that bring a cascade of tarnished nickels and dimes into his bottomless pockets?”

  “If you ask nicely,” Hiram said heatedly, “Mr. Fallon will teach you about murdering people by the thousands for research.”

  This was new; Hiram had no compunction about bleeding people. It was true that he generally paid, cajoled, or bullied people into consent before bleeding them—I could still picture the sweaty twenty-dollar bill he’d given the girl, all of fourteen and shivering and terrified—but I wasn’t sure it made much difference when you were stealing something irreplaceable from idiots who didn’t know better. Because no one outside of our order understood it, there was no way they could give anything resembling consent. If Fallon had crossed some sort of line that Hiram regarded as sacred, we were in wild and unmapped territory.

  Mages at Fallon’s level were dangerous. Enustari bled the world for their spells, epic complex rituals that required dozens of people to bleed—or a few people to bleed to death. Enustari and the next level down, saganustari, engineered disasters and mass suicides, spawned death cults and started wars to harvest the blood. I eyed Fallon: He wore the hell out of the suit and he sat with immense confidence, his hands powerful and deft, a builder’s hands. A Fabricator. But he didn’t have any Bleeders, and a mage without Bleeders—well, it came down to the spells you had memorized, how good you were with the Words.

  I had a feeling Fallon was very good with them.

  “Why are you here, Mr. Vonnegan?” Fallon asked, putting those flat, pale eyes on me.

  I swallowed. “I need help.”

  He nodded. “Indeed. I am here because your gasam, as is his habit, has stolen something that is now required.”

  Hiram snorted. “Required,” he muttered, shaking his head.

  Fallon glanced at him, then back at me, and I wished fervently that he would look anywhere else. “Your stupid, boorish gasam, who trades in tricks and trivialities to fuel his base and unremarkable appetites—this ridiculous man you chose to be your teacher—does not grasp the severity of our situation. For you are correct, Mr. Vonnegan: Arad do not inhabit living things. They can inhabit only the dead, animating them as puppets. And this they can do only via assignment.”

  I stared at him. He sighed. “They must be placed within a vessel by ustari. Someone has done this. More than once. Is still doing this. Sowing chaos. Your man, what was he doing?”

  “Pushing people in front of a train.”

  Fallon nodded as if this fit some secret category of behavior. “Mine was stabbing people in the park with a screwdriver,” he said. “There are many more, and they are all engaged in random violence. There is no plan, no escape route, no elegance to it. They are rabid intelligences given form and let off their leash.”

  This was so far above my level of experience, I was going to get a nosebleed. It was time to bow out and get back to figuring out how to retire on one hundred dollars. Before I could vocalize my exit strategy and leave this mess to the enustari of the world, however, there was a sudden commotion from the direction of the bathroom.

  Fallon raised one eyebrow a precise amount that he must have practiced in a mirror, assigning a specific reaction to each millimeter. “Our guests have shrugged off their magical bonds,” he said. “Shall we ask them a few questions?”

  The old man was on his feet, taller than I’d expected, graceful and slender. His suit, I saw from up close, was worth more than every single piece of clothing I’d ever owned in my life combined. Fucking enustari. Nice work, if you weren’t bothered by the oceans of blood you had to shed to get there. Still, the fact that Fallon didn’t have any Bleeders was a confounding mystery.

  The thin man strode confidently from the room, and I followed, Hiram sauntering after me, hands still in the pockets of his shapeless trousers. The noise from the bathroom had risen to the level of pretty serious; they were both up and tearing the place apart. The sound of running water flowed under everything else like a silver thread. Hiram had a mess on his hands, and I was comforted by the fact that I wasn’t solely to blame.

  Fallon paused outside the door and turned to us. “We will—”

  The bathroom door exploded outward in a spray of splinters, the young black guy hurtling through and slamming into the wall beyond with bone-shattering force. He straigh
tened up and staggered, shaking his head, while Mr. Landry, looking really, really worse for the wear, leaped into the hallway behind him.

  Mags skidded into place next to me, grabbing hold of my arm. We looked at each other for a split second.

  “Balahul!” Landry shouted, sounding exultant.

  Fallon whirled, one hand diving into his jacket pocket as Hiram, Mags, and I produced our blades; Hiram was an old scrapper, and his left arm was crisscrossed with white and pink scars just like mine. Hiram had taught me how to hold the blade, how to gauge the necessary pressure, how to avoid tendons, and how to select the right vessel. As we slashed our forearms in sync, Fallon produced a small wooden box from his pocket that looked about as dangerous as a thumbtack. You didn’t meet many Fabricators, and now I knew why: They’d all been eaten by Udug while playing with their toys. I could sense gas in the air from the bleeds Hiram and I had going. I ran through the combat spells I knew, the fragments that might be combined into something weaponized, but before I could speak, Fallon held the box in his palm, reached with his other hand, and opened the lid.

  A soft, sweet note emanated from within, louder than should have been possible. It was a beautiful sound, a constant clear tone that made me pause in surprise and wonder. It burst forth without variation, perfect and steady. It was the most gorgeous noise I’d ever heard.

  Landry and the black kid began screaming.

  They collapsed to their knees and covered their ears, howling and squirming. The black kid moved his hands and appeared to be making an attempt to jam his fingers deep enough in his ears to burst an eardrum.

  I looked at Fallon, and he glanced at me. “Always prepared, yes?” he said, the hint of a smile kinking the deep lines of his face. “With preparation, Mr. Vonnegan, one does not need to bleed quite so often. This is a lesson your gasam can learn as well. Also, not to steal every fucking thing he lays eyes on.”

  I wasn’t used to bleeding and not casting, my wound left to sizzle and ooze, but I let it go. You never knew when a little gas would come in handy.

  “Thank you for the lesson, my lord,” Hiram groused. “See what happens when you leave your fortress and enter the world?”

  Fallon clucked his tongue. “My peers have made it clear they prefer me in my fortress, making trinkets.”

  The note made their voices sound beautiful, even angelic. Our prisoners, however, continued to screech and writhe on the floor. Without warning, the kid leaped up and launched himself forward, screaming. Mags moved immediately, leaping up to intercept him as I spoke the first spell that came to mind, three Words. The kid froze, his limbs going stiff in a comical pose in midair—and so did Mags, caught in the spell along with him. As Mags crashed into the far wall, the kid’s forward momentum carried him crashing into Fallon, and the box hit the floor hard, smashing into pieces, the note cutting off immediately.

  The silence was drab and disappointing, and, I realized, always would be from that moment forward.

  I turned just in time to see Mr. Landry, his yellowed skin loose and slack, charging toward me, shouting his one and only Word. Landry appeared to be made of balsa wood and tissue paper, but he smacked into me like a cannonball, knocking me backward. I landed on my back and slid a few inches while Landry grabbed hold of my shoulders, climbing on top of me and pinning me down with terrible, unexpected strength. If I could be so easily overpowered by an elderly man who was also recently dead, I figured it might be time to invest in a gym membership.

  My freeze mu wore off, and the black kid leaped to his feet, blood running from each ear, and rounded on Hiram just as he spat out a neat spell that sent the kid hurtling away as if an invisible missile had slammed into him.

  The kid, though, being demon-powered, bounced off the wall with a crack of shattered bone and came right back at Hiram, knocking the round man to the floor. Which was the last thing I saw before Mr. Landry, drooling cold, jellied spittle onto my face as he shouted his secret name, raised one fist and brought it down at my head.

  II.

  4.

  “HEY, BURRO, HEY!”

  Way above me there was a pocket of acidic boiling water, waiting to sear and singe me, to rake itself across my nerves. But down deep in the black water, it was cool and I was safe. Someone was trying to wake me, to drag me up. A sweet young voice, and I hated it. I hated anyone who wanted to pull me up through the acid and burn me.

  I tried to sink deeper, to swim away, to grow heavy.

  “Ah, fucking . . . Come on, burro, hey! Come on, not much time!”

  Whoever it was began shaking me. It was strange; I was aware of being shaken, aware that someone was trying to rouse me, but I was able to ignore them and remain unconscious, in a sense. If I could just ignore them long enough, they would go away.

  “They are coming!” she hissed, and my perfect cold black sea began to agitate and brighten. “Soon!”

  Something in her voice sank down like fishhooks and grabbed on to me, pulling me inexorably upward.

  “Ah, fuck,” I hissed, refusing to open my eyes. “Stop that.”

  The feeling of her hands disappeared, and a second later she slapped me across the face, hard enough to make stars pop up behind my eyelids. I sat up, opening my eyes and fighting the urge to vomit.

  “Ah, finally.”

  I felt tight and hot, like my skin was too small for my skeleton. The pain in my head slowly sank back to merely near-fatal levels, letting me think.

  I was in a basement—no, a crawl space. The floor was dirt, the walls were brick, and the joists of the floor above were not even an inch above my head; if I’d been a little taller, sitting up would have put me right back on my ass. The whole place had a damp smell, and it was freezing. The moment I realized how cold it was, I began to shiver.

  There was a small opening on the far wall right at my eye level, little more than a slit for ventilation. It let in just enough sunlight to see by, making it clear that I wasn’t alone. Aside from the Girl, there were at least a dozen other people with me, all prone—either unconscious or dead.

  I rolled over and scrambled to the nearest one. The Girl hissed in protest as I pushed her aside. I ignored her, inspecting the bodies around me, looking for Hiram, for Fallon, for Mags. I didn’t remember a thing after I’d taken my hit, and the battle in Hiram’s hallway hadn’t exactly been going well for my side.

  But none of the bodies were familiar. Sweating, head pounding, I turned back to look at my new friend. She was young, her long black hair hanging in her face, her jeans and T-shirt torn and dirty. Her face had the sunken look of someone who hadn’t eaten in a while. As I stared blearily at her, she held a finger to her lips.

  “Quieto,” she whispered. “They will be back.”

  I struggled to collect myself. My brain felt scrambled, and I had to swallow three times before I could remember how to make sounds. “Where?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. Can you move? You gotta move, man. They’re coming.”

  “Who?”

  She grimaced. “You wake up in a fucking basement after taking a beating, and you got questions.”

  She was right: The time for questions was later. Preferably years later, when I was sitting on a beach somewhere with Mags after we’d finally pulled some grift that paid.

  Mags. Forget my survival, I had to get out to make sure Pitr Mags didn’t starve to death hiding in Hiram’s closet, whimpering.

  “How long?” I croaked.

  “You? Couple of hours. Me—if maybe I can think you give a shit—three days.” She shoved me. “Come on, burro, they will come soon.”

  I nodded. I didn’t really need to know who they were. No matter what the answer was, I wanted to be somewhere else when it came. “Where’s out?”

  She gestured and started to crawl. I scurried after her, swallowing bile and trying to ignore the head-splitting flashes of
pain. Her clothes were loose on her, like she’d shrunk. She led me to a trapdoor set in the floor above. I gave it a tentative push, but it refused to budge.

  “Locks,” she whispered. “Lots of them.”

  I nodded again. I wanted to say that today was her lucky day, because the Intro 101 class of How to Be Idimustari was bleeding to open locks. I started searching the dirt, scooping through it with my hands. My lifestyle meant that my knowledge of basements, crawl spaces, and other dark places was extensive. Contractors tended to drop their garbage in them as they worked. In a matter of seconds, I had a nasty piece of green glass, the remnants of a long-ago beer enjoyed by a long-dead bricklayer, and used it to slice a deep cut on my forearm.

  The Girl recoiled. “Of course you’re crazy!”

  With some gas in the air, it would be easy to snap the locks, but I needed a light touch. Sending the trapdoor sailing into the air as though we’d lit a stick of dynamite under it might bring unwanted attention. I looked at the Girl.

  “What’s your name?” I whispered.

  She hesitated. “Larissa.”

  “Okay, Larissa,” I said, wasting gas—my own gas, which was pretty much the second hard lesson you learned when you bonded urtuku: Wasting your own gas was fucking suicide. “There isn’t time to have a conversation. Whatever happens, stick right next to me. We’re getting the fuck out of here.”

  A series of expressions passed over her face, one after the other. Then she frowned. Then she nodded. “All right, burro.”

  I nodded and spoke four Words. There was the slight snick of bolts being thrown.

  “What the man?”

  “Come on,” I whispered, squatting under the trap and slowly putting my shoulder to it, then lifting it up. I paused and glanced at her. “Be quiet.”