Trickster

by Jeff Somers

  Thomas froze. Just stopped moving, even his eyes.

  It would last just a few minutes. Gottschalk had overcast it, slamming Claire with more power than it needed—Claire would have been frozen for years in his bedroom. Mags and I stepped over him and levered ourselves up onto the steps, launching into a run. Claire was already out of sight. Running for freedom. I’d noticed she turned into Action Girl anytime someone tried to pen her in. Kind of liked it.

  I burst onto the first floor and skidded to a halt. Mags crashed into me a second later and sent me careening into the wall. I pushed off, settled myself. Claire was already halfway down the length of the hall, still tripping along like she was riding a bubble of air. Two more of Gottschalk’s robed freaks appeared in front of her. Mags and I hurled ourselves after her. I raised my bleeding arm, ready to shout another Cantrip, but she leaned down and hit the first one with her shoulder, sending him flying backward into the second, both of them crumpling down into a chaos of limbs and robes.

  She leaped over them in perfect form, one leg extended forward like a spear, the other tucked under her. Landed. Kept running.

  I wondered how in the world she’d ever been caught in the first place. How the Skinny Fuck had managed the coordination and stamina to even get close enough to touch her. How she’d been held down long enough for Renar to mark her up for the ritual. It didn’t seem possible. I imagined Claire casually destroying property as she walked the streets, scowling.

  We raced after her. Wasting gas as we ran, blood running in a thin trickle down my arm. I had three or four quick, dirty spells in my head, a second or two to mutter them in a pinch. Dirty tricks, the best kind. As we passed into the living room, heading toward the front of the house, there was an explosion, the floor shaking under me. A bright flash, and then Claire was running toward us, sprinting. As she crashed through us, she turned her head toward me.

  “The scary fuck,” she shouted. “Amir!”

  Mags and I looked at each other. Stumbled to a halt. Spun and ran after her again.

  The whole house was waking up to chaos now. Gottschalk’s little morons in their robes were crowding the hall. Claire had stopped halfway down it, cursing and clawing at them. I checked my arm, soaked in my own glossy blood. Raised my arm over my head. Planted myself at the entrance to the hallway. Shouted three words and brought my hand down, palm flat to the floor. Felt the dizzy, light-headed flow of energy from me to the greedy universe and they all went down, even Claire. Every person in the hall just dropped like a heavy weight had smacked them from above.

  “Claire!” I shouted. “Go!”

  She was up immediately, shrugging off my invisible fist and running over the freaks, and I grinned after her. Mags and I started to follow, but the spell was minor and the freaks were already struggling to stand, clogging the hallway again. I raised my arm again, massaging the wound to reopen it, squeeze a little more blood from it.

  I heard Amir’s voice behind us. Smooth. Educated. Speaking six words rapidly. He pronounced them differently than Hiram Bosch had taught me, but I recognized them all the same. I clamped my hand on Mags’s shoulder and threw myself down, pulling him along with me.

  There was a white flash. A second later, a noise that was so high-pitched it was almost not even a noise but almost just the idea of a noise. And then an invisible blade sawed through the air above us, cutting the walls. Like someone had thrown a huge circular saw blade like a Frisbee.

  Two of Gottschalk’s chosen had regained their feet. Their heads were cut off cleanly, popping up into the air and hitting the writhing floor before their bodies.

  I flipped myself around and pushed up on my elbows. Amir and his Bleeders were there in the living room. Amir was sparkling, like an animated character. He was wearing a black suit stained with white Hill Country dust, his fancy shoes dulled and muddy. But he had that shine, still. His suit was cut so perfectly to his slim frame, and his haircut was so expensive, no amount of dust and grime could scuff him up. One of the fat Bleeders was a gory mess, blood streaming down from his forehead. Amir must have needed a good gush fast. I brought my arm up again and flicked my hand at them, hissing out three syllables.

  Amir had raised his gloved hands, ready to counter me, but he was expecting something big. Fireballs. Lightning. A compulsion so hard it would make his ears bleed—the sort of attack an enustari would launch.

  But he didn’t know my spells. My spells were too small for the great Cal Amir to have heard before. Instead of something big, the floor under their feet suddenly and temporarily turned into glassy ice. All four just went up ass over tits and hit the floor hard.

  Mags was already on his feet. He was muttering, too, but his was just “Fuck fuck fuck” under his breath. He reached down and pulled me up bodily, just yanking me up into the air and letting me get my feet under me. He growled and crashed forward into the blood-splattered mess of assholes in the hall and started pushing, throwing them around. Mags was a big boy. Well fed, despite my poor parenting, and Gottschalk’s people were reedy and easy to move. He made a tunnel and I followed as fast as I could. The back door was there, leading to the deck sagging on the rear of the house like a barnacle.

  I heard Amir behind us again. He didn’t seem to have an Inside Voice.

  I picked out the Words again, adrenaline dumping into my system.

  “Mags!” I shouted. “Down!”

  We hit the floor just outside Gottschalk’s bedroom. There was a groaning, rending noise. The back door tore into splinters that shot inward, a million wooden missiles. Gottschalk’s freaks screamed. The whole house groaned, and I felt the floor vibrating beneath me.

  Amir started speaking again.

  I scrabbled to my feet and pulled Mags to our right, crashing through the door into the bedroom.

  Gottschalk jiggled in his bed. He was as papery and yellow as before. He was sitting up, his torso naked, the sweaty-looking covers hiding the rest of him, and thank fucking goodness. Mags and I both froze for a second. He stared at us with wide eyes, his tiny hands in loose fists, held up by his shoulders.

  His skin was clear and healthy. He was a fucking enustari who hadn’t cut himself in decades, if he ever had. Two of his followers—his slaves, whatever—stood on either side of the bed, knives in their hands.

  “I do regret this,” he said. “I did not intend for this. But circumstances beyond my control have changed my position. When Mika Renar knocks on your door, even I must answer.”

  I stepped partway around Mags toward the window. Slow. Hiding my bleeding arm behind my large, stupid friend. “Fuck you. Bosch was your apprentice. Renar is going to kill everyone.”

  He smiled thinly. “But not me. Not us, I should say, as I am not the only member of our order who has entered into this agreement.” Behind us, there was another explosion. Amir clearing the hall in the most efficient manner possible. “Ms. Renar and Mr. Amir have brought us into the biludha. We will also benefit.”

  The house shook again. A fine dust settled from above. We all paused and stared around dumbly. The groaning didn’t stop. The whole place was shaking. Cal Amir hadn’t bargained for termites and dry rot and decades of deferred maintenance when he’d started hurling the Words around like boulders.

  Claire crashed into the room, stopping short and windmilling her arms.

  “Fuck,” she hissed, “this isn’t out?”

  I looked back at Gottschalk. My teeth were clenched tightly shut.

  “Lem,” Mags said, staring at Gottschalk. “What does he mean?”

  I made a fist with my bloody arm, then snapped it back toward the bedroom door and barked a single word. The door slammed shut. “It means this son of a bitch just traded every living thing on the fucking planet for his own sad shitsack of a little life.”

  Gottschalk’s eyes went to the door and back to me. Opened his mouth.

  “Mags,” I said. “Don’t let this fat piece of shit speak.”

  Anger pulsed inside me. Gottschalk, wit
hout a scar on his body, fat and useless and running his little freak show, squeezing out a few more years in bed and letting everyone else, all the rest of us, die in his place. Without even a peep of protest over Hiram. Over me.

  We were not good people. But this was fucking above and beyond.

  Mags leaped forward, vaulting onto the bed and clamping his hands around Gottschalk’s jowly throat. The old man’s tongue popped out like in those old cartoons, a pink ribbon writhing around. His two robed freaks just stood there, dreamy, so fucking Charmed they couldn’t even think straight.

  There were two noises. A shattering noise coming from the door as something pounded against it. And a wet noise coming from Gottschalk.

  I went to the window and tore the curtains down. Pushed up at the sash. It was painted shut, years and years and layers and layers of cheap paint and grime. I stepped back, flicked some blood at it, whispering two more words, and the window exploded outward.

  There was another explosion outside, a flash of clear light under the door, and the house slewed to the left, a ragged crack erupting in the wall. The whole house crashing down. I opened my mouth to tell Mags to let the old man linger and move.

  The door burst inward. Claire suddenly rose up in the air. I made a futile grab at her, but a second later she was sucked toward the window, pulled through without hesitation, screaming all the way.

  The air was filled with a terrible moaning sound, old wood held in a complex pattern for decades bending and stretching, yawing and snapping free.

  Entropy rushing in, delighted to be home.

  “Mags!” I yelled, and the house collapsed. There was a roar and dust and a rafter the size of a fucking redwood smacked down onto the floor next to me, smashing down through the planks into the basement, the floor tilting under me. Up above, a cracking noise, and I looked up in time to see the roof plummeting down toward me.

  18

  I came to in a rush. I blinked on, all systems go.

  My head was pounding, a sharp, stabbing pain in my skull with every pulse. It was hot, and I breathed in more dust than air.

  I opened my eyes. I was blind.

  Not blind. As I listened to Mags, who was chanting something very close to me, I realized it was very, very dark, but as I lay there with my eyes open the subtle, smudged edges of things slowly coalesced. A panic seized me; I was in an air pocket. Above me was a mass of wood and metal and stone, the remains of the house. I turned my head slowly. Mags was pushed up next to me. He was muttering. The spell was keeping the air pocket from collapsing. It was holding the debris of the house above us, maintaining a tiny bubble of space for us.

  Mags was bleeding from the head, a steady trickle. He was burning himself up to keep the air pocket going. As I watched, a thick drop of blood detached from his scalp, and disappeared an inch from the dusty floor of our little cave, sizzling away like it had never existed. It was immediately followed by another.

  I was bleeding, too. I started murmuring along with him, and a second later he stopped. Sucked in air. Shuddered next to me, exhausted. As I cast I could feel the weight of the rubble above us. Tons and tons. I realized that only a constant push of magic could stop it from crushing us—if we paused for a second, it would overwhelm us. The weight burned away every syllable as I spat it out, and the sense of being drained, of deflating, never stopped.

  We were going to die. It was only a matter of time.

  I listened to Mags’s breathing. I pictured Claire, the expression on her face as she was sucked backward out the window. She was dead, too. Also only a matter of time, depending on when Mika Renar was ready to put the Biludha-tah-namus into motion. I wondered if I’d be crushed in this air pocket first, or if I’d still be muttering spells desperately when the biludha swept through, all of us swelling up and exploding into red mist so our blood could be burned off, smashing the laws of the universe itself and making Renar and her conspirators immortal. I wondered if I could time it so we died before the ritual claimed us, so I wouldn’t have to contribute to that mummy’s immortality.

  “I’m sorry,” Mags said, panting like a dog. “I’m sorry, Lem.”

  I couldn’t stop casting. If I broke off to say something to Mags, we’d be crushed a second later.

  I raised my head a little. Something caught and complained in my back, a sharp pain. I pushed through it and tried to get a good look at our little cave of disaster. There was some light, because I could see, so there had to be air getting in, gaps in the wreckage. It was insane to think we might tunnel out, but I didn’t have any sane possibilities presenting themselves. Maybe I’d let Mags catch his breath, and maybe he could cast something on top of what I was spinning, create a tunnel that way, or shift it all away from us. Something. There had to be something. I was not going to die in fucking Texas.

  I couldn’t think how to communicate this with Mags, though, without stopping the spell. I thought about the chances he’d think it through on his own. I wasn’t encouraged.

  I turned my head. Mags had passed out.

  I heard Claire on the bus as we talked through the endless Texas night.

  “So if you’re not going to be some master magician or whatever,” she’d asked, quiet and lit by the soft orange glow of the reading lights, “why are you still out there, doing this? Why not do something else? Something you wouldn’t have to bleed for?”

  “What would I do? Work? This is work. This is harder work than most.”

  She’d shrugged, unimpressed. “What’s the point? Do something that matters. Bleed people, but for a reason. Leave a mark.”

  And I’d replied, feeling smug in my fucking original philosophy of life.

  “First, do no harm. I’ve seen what ambition looks like with mages. It looks like genocides and human hearts torn out of people’s chests on the tops of pyramids and concentration camps and cults. It looks like wars set off just to feed some fucking ritual. That’s what leaving your mark means for people like Renar and Amir, and even Hiram, with his short cons that cost so much fucking blood.” I’d stretched and wiggled my toes inside my shoes. “That’s leaving your mark, with us. So I’m not going to leave a mark. My goal is to get through without anyone knowing I was here.”

  I’d been good at it, too. Do no harm. Leave no mark.

  I hadn’t hurt anyone but myself, and there was no fucking sign that I’d ever existed, anywhere. I had seven dollars in my pocket and a single suit of sweaty, crusty clothes. I had holes in my shoes. I had Pitr Mags. I’d never had a lease, or a mortgage. I’d never had a credit card or a bank account. I had a birth certificate, somewhere, so there was some portion of the world’s forests on my account, but that was it. I’d stolen things. Money, mostly, conned out of Charmed people. Trinkets here and there when survival absolutely demanded it.

  I kept murmuring the spell, draining myself to keep our air pocket intact. Sweat poured down my face. I was shivering.

  I remembered the girl in Hiram’s study. Her doodled-on sneakers. She’d been shivering, too. In the span of time between me meeting her and me trapped in the air pocket, we were linked by uncontrollable shivering. And what had I done.

  I’d done nothing.

  I’d left no mark on her. I’d refused to bleed her like a fucking vampire, I’d told Hiram to fuck himself, and he’d spent the better part of a decade punishing me in little ways, tiny vindictive ways. Keeping our bond intact so I couldn’t leave the city. Reminding me, whenever I needed help, that he owed me nothing and I owed him everything. Insults and sneers.

  And he’d bled the girl anyway. To spite me. To teach me that last lesson, that it didn’t matter what I approved of or disapproved of. That the universe bled us all. It was a lesson I was just starting to grasp.

  I didn’t know what had happened to that girl. She’d vanished from my life. But I knew. I knew she’d been bled, over and over again, probably. Paid sometimes, by magicians like Hiram who imagined they were civilized because they dished out a few twenty-dollar bills ea
ch time. Or not paid, sometimes, by any number of saganustari or even idimustari who came across her. She was dead by now. Used up, buried in some basement. Or not. Dead all the same. Maybe covered in runes. Left in a bathtub in an abandoned apartment to rot.

  I’d never touched her and she was dead anyway.

  I saw Claire, folded in half, hurtling through the window.

  My speech was getting slurry, my tongue thick and numb. The rubble above us shifted, raining dust down onto us. Mags sat up with a grunt, smacked his head on a gnarled old header, and flattened again.

  “Fuck,” he said, mildly. Like he was whispering good morning to you.

  I kept slurring the spell. My mouth hurt. My throat burned. I thought it was a great time for Mags to take over again, but instead of jumping in and resting me, he convulsed, throwing his arms and legs up and punching at the ceiling of the air pocket with his fists.

  “Fuck!” he shouted, hoarse. “FUCK!”

  I shut my eyes and forced myself to loop through the spell again. A wave of dizzy exhaustion swept me clean.

  “FUCK!”

  I concentrated. Moved my burning lips. The end of each syllable fit into the beginning of the next perfectly, clicking into place. Some people never saw it, the invisible way the syllables fit together. Once you saw it, it was obvious. It was invigorating. Once you saw it, you could do anything with the Words. Anything. Some of us just repeated spells. Just drew some blood and recited, and they would always be whatever they were. But if you saw, then it all made sense, and making up a spell was as easy as ordering coffee. I could do it in my sleep, just plucking sounds from the air and feeding them to the universe with a bit of gas. My mind went smooth and glassy and I slumped there moving my lips moving my lips moving my—

  I thought about just stopping.