by Jeff Somers
“If I die,” he shouted, backing away, “tell Claire I was all brave and shit, okay?”
The dimma swung its arm down. Fallon leaned in and intercepted it, taking the blow on his shoulder and launching himself into what would be its stomach. Just as he crashed into it and knocked it down, the second dimma shouldered its way through the hole. A third appeared behind it.
Mind racing, I spat out the first spell I could remember: Thirteen syllables dredged from the inky end of my brain.
There was a flash next to me, and a copy of me appeared. Just light and shadows. Three more flashes behind me, then four more. And four more. That made three copies of each of us. I barked another word, and the illusions scattered, running around the place randomly. The second dimma swung laboriously at them as they passed close by, its stone fists passing through without effect. The third one joined in, slamming both fists down onto the floor as the ghosts of Mags and Daryl scampered past. There was a snapping noise. The concrete floor shattered beneath its blow, cracks shooting out in all directions.
The fourth dimma appeared. Widened the hole in the wall with an almost casual twitch of its arms. The noise was unbelievable. Every move the dimma made was a thunderous scrape of stone against stone. Fallon was screaming, thrown across the warehouse and crashing into a concrete column. It shattered behind him and he sprawled on top of the stub left on the floor as the ceiling above sagged with a stretched-out, unhappy groan.
“Vonnegan!” Ketterly shouted. “Time to go!”
I hesitated. Felt a certain responsibility to Fallon. I’d brought this on him. Braced him in his nifty little Fabricated hideaway, six fucking monsters on my trail. The old man had rolled off the wreckage of the column and gotten back on his feet just as a pair of dimma reached him, swinging their cudgel hands in fast, crisscross arcs. He danced back, the floor vibrating, and managed to grab onto the nearest one of the creatures. Both hands on its irregular head. Howling, the giant Fallon twisted, and with a report like a gunshot the head snapped off.
The dimma disintegrated. Turned into a few lumps of stone and some dust, falling into a heap on the floor.
Immediately, the second dimma on Fallon swung both arms, connecting with Fallon’s chest and sending him sailing again. He smashed into the wall and the whole building shook around us. I thought about the odds of getting buried in a collapsed building twice.
“Lem!” Mags shouted.
I looked up. Two of our doubles were racing right at us, two dimma in pursuit. The frozen expressions on the illusions were awful to look at. Like someone wearing a lifelike mask of me and my idiot sidekick. For a second I couldn’t move. I stared at the huge stone bodies loping toward me, my vision jumping and shaking with each impact of their flat, granite feet.
Then Mags crashed into me, knocking me to the floor. I felt the breeze as one of the stone monstrosities barreled past us, skidding to a halt in a rain of concrete chips. We both rolled onto our backs and a scream escaped me, my vision filled with the cracked, veined torso of one of the dimma.
Praying that one of them was still bleeding, I shouted the first spell that came to mind. Felt the power surge through me, and the huge stone man shot upward, smashing against the rafters far above us and shattering into dust.
Ketterly and Daryl were there as stone rained down on us. “Time to fucking go,” Ketterly hissed, pulling me up by the armpit and dragging me toward the door. I caught a glimpse of Fallon, beset by three of the things, swinging a hunk of concrete in front of him like a club. Even supersized, he looked old. Tired. Already beaten. Not my problem. At the last second I stopped just short of the exit and spun around.
“Fallon!” I shouted. “Cut and run! Come with us!”
He jerked his head halfway in my direction, then shook it.
“This,” he boomed, his voice as huge as he’d become, deep and painful and audible over the noise of the dimma, “is my house!”
He renewed his attack on the nearest dimma. I watched for another heartbeat and turned and ran.
They were all already in Daryl’s truck. Our pet hick was shaking, eyes all white and wide as he fumbled with his keys, dropping them on the floor of the cab. As I crashed up into the seat, practically in Mags’s bloody lap, I snarled two words and the engine roared into life.
“Go!”
The ease of just throwing the Words around—of being able to cast without feeling the drain, without paying the price—was intoxicating. I imagined a life without the minor annoyances. Everything solvable with a few words. I pictured Gottschalk swathed in sheets, a man who hadn’t gotten out of bed in years.
Daryl slammed the truck into gear and it leaped forward, throwing us back into the seats. Behind us, I heard something almost like an explosion. A rain of pebbles scattered across the roof and windshield.
Then, suddenly, it was just the inky, silent night and the buzz of the engine. I could hear all of us panting. I could hear the grit of the tires on the pavement. I could hear the tap of Daryl’s ring on the steering wheel as his hands shook while he drove.
“Jesus fucked,” Ketterly finally whispered. “What in hell is going on?”
I swallowed dust. “They’re going to fucking end the world,” I said. “I told you.” I turned to look at him. “If you’re going to murder everyone, there’s no point in subtlety now, is there?”
“Lem,” Mags said quietly. “Lem, what do we do now?”
I turned to look forward again. “I don’t know,” I said. “But I know how to find out.”
21
The yellow and black police tape barring Hiram’s front door wasn’t a problem. The unmarked police cars right out in front of the building and sitting in the ink-dark back alley were.
I was surprised to see them, and stood for a moment in the shadows, nonplussed. I wasn’t used to cops giving two shits about me or mine. People like Hiram and me, to the rest of the world we were seedy assholes. They could smell it on us, the short cons, the desperation. The cops hassled me plenty, but that was it. The idea that they might take an interest in Hiram’s death amazed me for a second, and then I remembered the two cops who had died, too: Marichal. Holloway. The rest of the city might be burning to the ground, but the cops were gonna keep a team sitting here, just in case.
I didn’t worry about it. There wasn’t a problem that couldn’t be solved with the application of enough blood. I didn’t have to hesitate, to take stock of my physical condition. I didn’t have to worry about the last time I ate, or whether I was going to pass out before completing the spell, causing an explosion.
A glance at Mags and he was bleeding.
I made up a spell on the spot. It was easy. Some of us had to memorize spells, could only cast what we’d committed to memory. The real trick was to memorize small things, then link them together. If you knew one Cantrip that bent the light, and another Cantrip that fooled the ears, you could put together any sort of illusion fast, on the fly, just by changing a few words. Quick and dirty. Hacking, Hiram had called it. But it could be complex and elegant, too, if you worked at it.
I cast, and felt Mags’s life passing through me, gloriously repellent.
“Come on,” I said, and started walking.
We passed right in front of the car. The two cops inside stared through us.
At the crime scene tape, I nicked my own thumb and gave it fourteen syllables, and Mags and I stepped through it without breaking it. Fourteen syllables but the spell didn’t cost much, and I barely felt the drain. I was high-energy anyway, topped-up. I thought maybe my body had created too much blood, running on overdrive because it was used to being in a state of emergency all the time. We could have just torn them down, because what did I care if the police returned, sniffing around endlessly because two of their detectives were dead? But I was getting back into the swing of longer spells. More complex spells. I was remembering bits and pieces of things I’d learned along the way. Things from Hiram. Things from other people. It was like flexing muscles.
The door fell inward when I pushed on it. Just leaned backward and sent up a cloud of soot when it landed. I was glad I’d told Daryl and Ketterly to go back to Ketterly’s office and wait it out. I didn’t want strangers in Hiram’s home.
The apartment had burned for a long time. The windows were all shattered, and the weather had been getting in. The floors were a sticky mess of black mud. Wallpaper still clung to the walls, peeling slowly like dying leaves, drooping down toward gravity. The whole place smelled like smoke. It was choking. Almost like a syrup diffused into the air.
“Fuck,” Mags breathed, then spasmed into coughing.
We walked through the place slowly. The kitchen was the least destroyed. The table and chairs were still there. The wall shared with the living room was blackened and bubbled, but the wall shared with the hallway outside and the exterior walls were all intact. The cabinets and appliances still sat in their usual places. The room felt dead. There was no power. It was dark. Freezing. All of Hiram’s forks still in his drawers. His dish towels folded on a shelf. Microscopic layers of Hiram himself smeared onto the walls, the floors. Microbes of him, carbonized, in the air. A film of grit lay on top of everything, damp and muddy. The chairs and table were still in the positions we’d left them in, chaotic and . . . out of place. It felt like we were walking into some sort of spell, frozen time, everything held in place. Like if I gave a chair a shove, it would remain stubbornly in place or sail off without gravity, in slow motion.
“Fuck,” Mags hissed.
We made for the study. Everything else had burned. There were charred fragments of things everywhere, melted globs of things. Some of the shelves still clung to the walls, unfamiliar shapes bumped along their wobbly, heat-warped lines. I stopped for a moment and looked around. All of Hiram’s shit. Every bauble he’d stolen, every carving he’d gotten in payment for some tiny scam, every small artifact he’d commissioned had been destroyed. Eaten up by Cal Amir.
Who certainly had not considered for even a moment what it was he might be burning.
On the floor I found the hard black sphere Hiram used as a worry stone. Unscathed, gleaming with the same polish, perfect and eternal. I picked it up and held it in my hand, feeling its perfection, its weight. Then I set it back on the floor carefully, in the same spot.
I stepped into the small closet office. It had been burned to ash as well, a damp mess. The carpet still clung to the floor like some sort of stubborn life-form. I knelt down and tore at it, getting the soaked, sticky weave stuck to my hands, under my fingernails. My freshly cut thumb sizzled with irritation. After a few minutes I’d revealed the top of the floor safe embedded there. No physical lock, but several layers of magical Wards were laid on it, including a Glamour that made anyone not aware of its exact location simply not see it.
Even as I squatted there, if I turned my head it disappeared from my peripheral vision.
Amir hadn’t come back. I imagined after suddenly finding Claire right in front of him, the adventure with the cops, and then the hurried trip south to deal with us, his original mission at Hiram’s had slid down the list of priorities.
“Mags,” I said, my voice tight and scratchy. “You ready?”
“Fuck it.”
I closed my eyes, gave him a second, and recited twenty-four more syllables. Six to deal with the Glamour, just because it was irritating me, bending the light back into its normal path; in effect, two spells existing at once, which was the oldest trick in the book. It took more blood and more Words and more trouble to remove a spell than it did to just negate a spell. Four syllables for the first Ward, six for the second, and four more for the last, each group of words appended to the ends of Hiram’s spells—which was the other trick, altering the existing spells instead of trying to undo them outright. Like a virus. I opened my eyes and yanked the lid off the safe. It was fire rated, and looked to have survived in good shape. It was deep. It looked like Hiram had simply dumped things into it, without any attempt at organization. There were packets of papers with spells scrawled on them in that skinny, unreadable handwriting of his, his personal cipher. Unmarked boxes that were heavy and warm as I pulled them out. Dozens of trinkets—charms and other Fabrications. Two thick wads of cash in rubber bands. And then, buried under the rest of the trash, the sliver of oily green stone attached to a leather strap.
“Hiram,” I muttered, “you thieving bastard.”
I lifted the udug from the safe by the strap and leaned back on my feet, holding it up in front of me. It had the same wet look. My skin crawled as I looked at it. Years ago, maybe centuries ago, some Fabricator had spent a lot of blood to create it. That kind of energy was never good energy, and it somehow got stronger as time went on, amplified. Hiram had discussed the phenomenon with me, back when he was still trying to teach me. He had no explanation for it. But I’d understood immediately. There was suffering tied in to everything we did. And suffering lingered.
I looked around, tears suddenly stinging my eyes. There had been moments over the previous years when I’d wished for nothing more than to be free of Hiram and his stupid, claustrophobic apartment, his ridiculous stolen trinkets, his endless condescension, and his violent temper. But now, I had lost it all.
I stared down at the floor. I’d lost this place. It had been my home. Even after I’d left it, Mags and I had never had anywhere permanent to live. We’d roamed. We’d slept on the streets, in cars, wherever we could squat. But Hiram’s house had never stopped being my home.
I’d lost Hiram.
I’d never expected to miss the fat old asshole, but I was suddenly filled with an aching, yawning chasm of regret. I would never hear his booming, actor’s voice again. I would never watch him steal a glass figurine from a shop window. I would never get to tell him what a prick he could be.
I would never get to apologize to him. I would never get to show him what I was finally able to do.
I looked down at the udug. And I thought I was about to lose even more.
“Mags?”
“Yeah, Lem?”
I swallowed hard. “Let’s go get a drink.”
• • •
It was a dingy place. Filled with old men. Serious about their drinking. Mags and I found a table in the back, in the shadows. I had a double, then got another, which I let sit on the table. I dropped the udug on the table between us and stared at it. It seemed to absorb all the light. It seemed to be sinking into the wood of the table, like it was the heaviest thing in the universe. Like it was bending light around it.
I didn’t feel the first drink at all. I took the second one and held it up. “To Hiram. A fucking asshole, but our fucking asshole.”
Mags looked miserable. He lifted his own glass. “To Hiram,” he said.
I swallowed the second drink. Felt nothing. I stared down at the udug. Remembered its slithery voice in the Skinny Fuck’s mind. Whispering. Maybe the worst thing I’d ever heard in my life, and that had been an echo, a memory from a dead man.
“Don’t do it, Lem,” Mags said.
I shook my head. “I have to. They could be starting the ritual at any moment. Might have already started it.” I didn’t think so, though. I thought when a spell of that magnitude started cranking, every mage in the fucking world would feel it. Hundreds of us, spread thin across the globe, stopping in our tracks and looking up. Feeling it. Feeling the world being murdered. “All those women. In that . . . thing Fallon built. Going to be killed. And we can’t even know where she is in the fucking queue, even if we were willing to just let a few dozen people die.”
“We have the plans to the place. We don’t need that fucking thing to tell us.”
I snorted. “What, you, me, and Daryl are going to just drive up there, sneak in, and . . . what? Just fucking imagineer our way through?” I shook my head again. “If we had time, Mags, sure. If we knew when they were going to start the biludha, we could take our fucking time. But we don’t. We need to know what to do right now.”
> I wanted another drink. It wouldn’t do me any good. I had a feeling I could drink a whole bottle and still sit there rock-steady sober.
I couldn’t do it alone. Alone I had Mags and Daryl and a truck and maybe D. A. Ketterly. And maybe not Daryl and his truck, if the Charm he’d been operating under faded away. That had turned out to be the record-setting Charm of all time. I suspected it had something to do with the glyphs on Claire’s body, which Renar had said affected spells, bent them, deflected them. Poor Daryl was the recipient of an unintentionally aggressive Charm, and I was starting to wonder how much work—how much blood—it was going to take to set him free.
That was low on my to-do list, though. I wasn’t going to drive up to Mika Renar’s house and take on her and Cal Amir, two enustari, without some kind of game plan.
I thought of Claire. Her legs pressed against me. The smell of soap on her skin. Pictured the cops in their car, strangled.
I thought of Renar. Her mummy body. Her beautiful Glamour. The smell of rot and time in her study.
I swept my eyes around the bar. All of these people. Me and Mags. Dead.
I thought, They killed Hiram.
I thought, They will kill me.
I reached for the udug. Mags snapped out his arm and grabbed my wrist. Held it there, an inch above the table.
“Let me,” he said. “Lem, I’ll do it. Tell you what it says.”
For a second, I wanted to hug the stupid bastard. I wanted to bundle him up in my coat like a shivering puppy and put him on a fucking bus to somewhere else with a note pinned to his coat asking someone to take him in and feed him. I pictured a Pitr Mags with the stone’s dry, toneless voice burrowing inside his brain, and wanted to burst into tears. And panic.
I snaked my other hand around. “Can’t let you do that, hoss,” I said, and picked up the udug. Wrapped my hands around it and closed my eyes.
The voice started whispering in my head. Mid-sentence, as if it had never stopped.
