Trickster

by Jeff Somers

  “Have a seat, Mr. Vonnegan.”

  I shut my mouth with a click. Reminded myself that the old man was power. I didn’t see any Bleeders, but it wouldn’t hurt to play it careful. I stepped up and pulled an old metal rolling chair toward me. Flipped it around, sat with my arms draped across the back. “Call me Lem.”

  He didn’t look at me. “I know why you’re here, Mr. Vonnegan. I was sorry to hear of Hiram Bosch’s death. That was unfortunate.”

  “You knew Hiram?”

  “I knew him,” he said flatly, and ticked his head toward me. His eyes stayed on the delicate workings laid out on the desk in front of him. They looked like little golden watch gears. “Foolish of him, to challenge Calvin Amir. There was only one outcome of that battle.”

  I held myself in check. “You did some work for Amir.”

  He paused. He was thin, and his arms were covered in the typical pink scars, most of them quite old. He didn’t have any Bleeders in the place that I could see, but he wasn’t cutting himself, either. At least, not recently.

  “I did work for his gasam, yes,” he finally said. “Has no one killed Mika Renar yet? Pity.”

  “You built a house,” I pressed.

  He sat back with a sigh. Lifted his hands from the table. Turned to look at me. “I did not build a house, boy. I created a very large and complex Fabrication. Per custom order. The house was built around my work.”

  “What does it do?”

  He turned, glanced at Mags and Ketterly and Daryl in turn, and his mouth moved, like he found them unpleasant somehow. I considered the desk: It was neat. Incredibly neat, orderly, and clean. The man’s fingers were smudged with ink as he worked on plans, intricate drawings with millions of tiny notes in something that I assumed was cursive writing, but his desk was perfect. He bent back to his work. “My contracts are confidential, Mr. Vonnegan. Have you come to contract my services? There must be some trinket or trick I can fashion for you. I make no judgments. I do not sneer at modest projects.”

  I nodded. “My guess is it’s involved in the Biludha-tah-namus.”

  He paused. It was subtle. It wasn’t like he’d been waving his arms, jumping around. He’d been picking at the tiny gears, staring down at them intently. But then he froze. Surprised. Maybe horrified; it was hard to tell. Fallon’s face was etched out of stone, all deep lines and geometric patterns.

  “I’m guessing you weren’t invited into the conspiracy,” I said, struggling to keep my voice level. “The conspiracy of assholes who are going to come out of this biludha immortal. I don’t know how many. Enustari, every one. Maybe a couple of their apprentices to boot.”

  He still hadn’t moved.

  “No invite? Guess they have all the trinkets they’re gonna need.”

  He moved suddenly. I was stupid, and slow, and feeling too fucking clever. And he didn’t cut himself. Even as I heard him speaking the Words—even as something invisible seized me and squeezed, pulling me several feet up into the air—I stared down at him, searching for a fresh bleed. There wasn’t one.

  Mags twitched, yanking up his sleeve. Before I could tell him not to, his knife flashed in his hand. Fallon’s eyes flicked over to him, but the old man didn’t move. Mags rose up into the air with a squawk and slammed into the far wall. His blade shook free and fell to the floor.

  Fear spiked inside me. He hadn’t bled.

  “You shouldn’t go around saying the name of that ritual, boy,” Fallon spat. “Just the name has power. I know you are not a mage of consequence—”

  “Thanks,” I gasped. My lungs felt like they were being held in clamps.

  “An idimustari, yes? Bleeding for nickels in dive bars and playing pranks. I build, Mr. Vonnegan. What do you do? Destroy, like so many of us. You take energy and waste it. Dissipate it into the ether for your own lusts and needs. I build. I do not worry over what my creations might be employed in—it is all the same. People like you—or your betters—commission work from me. I create. They use it to destroy, to waste. It is all the same.” He paused and squinted at me. “Where did you hear that name?”

  “I heard it from Mika Renar,” I said. A lie, but close enough.

  Fallon cursed. “That biludha would require the murder of thousands. It—”

  He paused. Just stopped talking, stared down at the floor. I was wrapped tightly, hot and not breathing easy. A spike of anxiety threaded in around the fear. I had the feeling I’d just convinced Fallon. It didn’t make me feel any better.

  He turned, and Mags and I dropped back to the floor. I stumbled, staggered backward a few steps, and found my balance again.

  “Follow me,” Fallon said without looking at any of us.

  He started walking toward the back of the cathedral. As he walked, it melted away. The buttresses, the windows, everything just faded, leaving just the tables and desks and an empty warehouse: crumbling, water-damaged brick walls and a concrete floor.

  Daryl whistled, low and foreboding. “Daryl Houy, you ain’t in Texas anymore.”

  I gestured Mags after me and followed. After a moment’s hesitation, Ketterly fell in with Mags. Daryl just stood where he was, looking confused, which was fine by me.

  Fallon’s work area was a maze of desks and tables, chairs and filing cabinets, bookshelves and boxes filled with junk. We passed through it without touching a thing. At a heavy metal door, finally Fallon stopped, pausing to work a padlock looped through an old rusted chain. He let both drop to the floor and pulled the door open. It led to a stairway. He waited a second for me to catch up.

  “Renar contracted me six years ago,” Fallon said as he led me down the stairs. At the bottom was pure, untouched darkness, perfectly black. As he sank into it, he whispered a single word and a pale blue ball of light appeared in his palm. I raked my eyes over him. He still hadn’t bled. His scars were old, ancient, healed. “To build for her a . . . mechanism.”

  I wanted to ask him how he was casting without bleeding. But I thought it might be better if I made myself look smart before I started begging for answers. “A mechanism for biludha, right? To set off a controlled chain reaction. Bleedouts in a specific pattern, concentrating and focusing the energy.”

  He slowed and looked back over his shoulder at me for a second. Score one for Lem Vonnegan, Genius, I thought.

  “Yes,” he said. He was leading us through a tunnel made of perfect darkness. His blue light illuminated only the floor beneath us and a foot or two around. Deep and damp, by the feel. We were in the basement. I fought the urge to hurry and snuggle up close to the old man. “That is my specialty. I create Fabrications that work as enhancers. Amplifiers. Capable of combining the energies of multiple sacrifices, of storing energy sacrificed now for use in the future.”

  The idea started to come clear in my head. Before I could be brilliant again, Mags beat me to it.

  “Like a battery?” he asked, in the tone of an excited kid making a breakthrough. Mags was Frosty the Snowman, though. He woke up every day singing “Happy Birthday” and forgot everything that had happened to him the day before.

  “Yes!” Fallon barked, turning to face us. There was the faintest hint of an accent there, just in that one excited bark. Something European, maybe Slavic. It was just a speck. “Like a battery. Stored.”

  “That’s how you cast without bleeding,” I offered hastily before Mags could make me look dumb again.

  “I have bled, Mr. Vonnegan,” Fallon said, his voice harsh and ragged and suddenly distant. “I have bled more than you. More than you ever will. You have no idea how I have bled.”

  We fell into silence. I imagined offending him, and being abandoned down in this pitch-black basement. Wandering forever. The distant sound of that door being chained shut again—where, hard to tell: just an echo far off, maybe. Then you pick a direction and figure you’ll walk until you find a wall. Except in the dark the human mind is wobbly and you end up walking in circles without realizing it. The uniformly gritty floor seemed to be created seco
nds before the blue light crept up to it, and destroyed behind us, silently.

  Finally, there was another door. Another padlock. Another chain. He worked it, the blue ball of light hovering over his shoulder like an attentive pet. He pulled the door open. Stepped aside.

  “Enter, please.”

  I stepped into a dim, small room. There wasn’t much light, but I was grateful for it, a dull green glow that was everywhere and nowhere. A simple spell. In my mind I formulated a two-word spell that would replicate it, just for fun.

  It was a storage room, each wall lined with the sort of wide, oversized filing cabinets you saw in architectural firms. In the center of the room was a bare metal table, covered in dust.

  “I apologize for the security measures,” Fallon said, sounding the opposite of apologetic. “Many would steal my work, if they could.”

  He moved immediately to one of the cabinets, opened a drawer, and extracted a thick file folder. Mages resisted computers. I had no idea why, but even I hated them on instinct. I didn’t even wear a digital watch, and hated cell phones. Mags and I would pick up a burner when the need arose, or stole one. But I didn’t like having them. Didn’t like touching them. Someone knew why, but it wasn’t me.

  Fallon could have scanned all this shit in, had a neat stack of DVDs or flash drives. Instead, he opened the file and began spreading out huge schematic drawings, sheets upon sheets of spells. I’d seen the Words written out. There were a variety of alphabets for it. It didn’t matter how you wrote them; they were inert on the page. All that mattered was how you voiced them. The pronunciation. The order. The grammar.

  I looked at the schematic and froze. It was fucking horrifying.

  “You built this?” I asked without taking my eyes from the plans.

  “Yes,” Fallon breathed. “It is my finest Fabrication.”

  He was proud of it.

  It was clearly designed to be underground. It was a single corridor, really. It resembled a corkscrew, starting off as a wide square, running along right angles until it suddenly ducked down under itself, descending ten feet at an angle and then spinning around the four corners again at a reduced footprint. It spiraled down to a single small chamber at the bottom.

  The outer wall of the corridor was lined with recessed areas. Equipped with restraints. Spring-loaded blades. Sized and shaped for human beings. Its purpose was obvious. You started at the top. Slit a throat. The energy released by that sacrifice triggered the pod next to it. A blade snapped out, slit another throat. And on and on, spiraling down through what had to be hundreds of pods, murdering people as it spun. I didn’t know what the number actually was. I didn’t count it; that would be too scary. But the machine would be precise. It would be exactly what the Biludha-tah-namus required in order to begin its own domino effect. This Fabrication was designed as a spark plug. Mika Renar would murder a couple dozen, a couple hundred people in three minutes, and the collected energy would be funneled into the biludha, which would then begin an unstoppable chain reaction of death. It had been done on smaller scales. Kill fifty people to cause an earthquake that kills tens of thousands, soak up that bloodshed for an even bigger spell. It had been done on monumental, nightmarish scales in the past. This was different. This was mechanized. Efficient. Bigger than anything I’d ever heard of.

  I tore my eyes away and stared at Fallon. He was looking down at his own plans rapturously. In love with his own genius.

  “I knew it would be used,” he said without looking at me. “I knew it would be used for something big, and I knew, since it was Renar, that it would be terrible. But I didn’t suspect it would be used to cast the Tah-namus.”

  My hands were fists at my sides. It was okay to murder all these people. As long as it didn’t murder the world entire. As long as it didn’t murder you.

  We were not good people.

  I reminded myself that Fallon had a connection to a reserve of blood somewhere that I couldn’t feel, couldn’t touch. This whole place, I realized, was a Fabrication. Huge. Complex. This warehouse, designed to make him a godling in his own space. He’d shielded it. Others couldn’t touch it, somehow. Anyone acts up, a word or two from his thin, old lips and we were doomed.

  “I have been in this place for a long time,” Fallon whispered, apparently to himself. “Too long. Too long out of the world.”

  “You have to show me how to get in there,” I said slowly. “And how to get out.”

  And how to destroy it, I thought. Time to leave a mark.

  He didn’t say anything for a few seconds. Just loomed over his own plans and spells and stared down at them. Maybe a flicker of conscience making him momentarily unhappy. “You must enter from below,” he said finally, his voice like sand pouring from him. “There is an entrance. It is located in the center of the house.”

  I nodded. “You have plans of the house itself?”

  He sighed. “I do. But they are the official plans filed with the city, and no doubt only vaguely match the reality. I keep complete records, Mr. Vonnegan.” He rummaged in the file and tossed some folded-up blueprints at me. He planted his fists on the tabletop and leaned forward. I thought he was remarkably fit for an old codger. Toned. Muscular.

  “I will—” he said, and then shut his mouth as the soft glow of the light turned red. There was a palpable shudder in the ground beneath our feet, and a moment later a fine dust rained down on us.

  I swallowed sudden fear. “Trouble?”

  A second shudder, more dust. His yellowed eyes swiveled toward me.

  “Intruders,” he said. A third shudder, heavier than the first two, brought chunks of mortar out of the walls. Fallon’s dry eyes swiveled upwards. “Large ones.”

  20

  Fallon barked a single syllable and the little room was flooded with blank white light, blinding me. He barked another syllable and the door burst open. A second later the old man was flying through the basement, now lit up like noontime. I grabbed the files from the table and followed after him. It was a cramped space of support columns and cinder blocks. The joists were right above us, just an inch above Mags’s head. It was nowhere as vast as I had imagined it in the dark.

  As we ran after Fallon, the whole building shook at irregular intervals, dust raining down on us.

  “Mags!” I shouted as we reached the stairs.

  “Ready, Lem! I’m ready!”

  “Ketterly!”

  I meant it to mean Be ready to defend yourself.

  “I’ll bleed on this one, Vonnegan!” he wheezed from behind me. “You’re better with the Words!” I took the stairs two by two. I had a second to reflect on the fact that for the first time in . . . in as long as I could remember, I didn’t feel like hell. Because I hadn’t bled myself in a while. I was topped-up, running with a full tank. Fallon had already disappeared around the landing. I wondered what, exactly, I was running into. The first time Cal Amir had come after me, Hiram Bosch had died hurling fireballs at him. The second time, I’d almost bought the farm buried under an entire fucking house.

  I didn’t like the progression.

  I sailed through the open doorway onto the main floor. Fallon was at his work area, staring down at a set of security monitors. As we crossed to him, the floor leaped and rocked beneath me again. Fallon looked up at us, his face blank.

  “Dimma,” he said.

  There was a word for everything. I rolled this one around in my mind. Monster. Golem. There were a variety of translations. It meant a being constructed as opposed to created or summoned. Beyond that, specifics were up to the creativity of the mage. They could come in all shapes and sizes.

  The ground shuddered. I assumed this guy would lean toward the deep end of the size pool.

  “How many?” I asked. I started to add, How big? but felt the floor shudder again and decided not to waste my breath. The answer was: Fucking huge.

  “Six,” Fallon said, and then stood up straight, closed his eyes, and began reciting. Casting.

  I didn’
t know how much juice he had in that battery of his, but I had no way of accessing it. When there was blood in the air I could feel it, sense it, and take hold and draw on it. With Fallon I felt nothing. I turned and found Mags and Ketterly both standing at the ready behind me, sleeves rolled up, blades in hand. Daryl floated a few feet behind them, eyes wide.

  I spun back, and the wall directly across from us crumbled inward.

  Standing amid the sudden rubble was a . . . thing.

  It was humanoid. It had arms and legs. A torso. A neck like a stubbed-out cigarette and a head like a gruesome gray potato. It appeared to be made out of stone. A solid, single block of stone.

  As I stared it casually flicked the remains of the wall aside and hunched down to step into the interior.

  My mind raced. Trying to think of something I could cast that would help against a . . . thing. Dimma. The word was hard and dark in my mind. I felt soft and weak. The thing’s hands were permanent fists, spheres of rock the size of barrels. I imagined getting hit by one at speed.

  Six, I thought.

  The dimma moved suddenly. Faster than should have been possible. In a swirl of bricks and dust it leaped into the building, landing a few feet to our left. The whole floor jumped under me. A second dimma pushed its way into the hole in the wall.

  Fallon threw out his arms and shouted the final word of his spell. The first dimma raised one barrel fist into the air over us.

  Then Fallon turned into a giant.

  He stretched, every part of him simultaneously elongated, like an animation. Fallon screamed like it hurt like hell. Pops like gunshots reverberated through the air as each of his limbs suddenly expanded outward, fast and messy. He doubled, then tripled, then quadrupled in size, crowding the roof, twitching and roaring. Sweat rolled off him, crashing to the floor and spraying all of us as the floor shook.

  “Jesus!” Ketterly shouted.

  “I seen pictures of Jesus, guy,” Daryl shouted. “That ain’t him!”

  I turned to look back. Both Mags and Ketterly were cut, fresh gas welling up from their wounds. My eyes met Daryl’s. The poor guy stared at me, unblinking.