by Jeff Somers
“Jesus fucked,” Hiram said, stepping back. “Jesus fucked, Mr. Vonnegan, what have you been up to?”
“What?”
“Do you know what that is?”
Panic lapped at the edges of my thoughts again. “No. My education was pretty shitty.”
The old man looked at me, and then panic broke through and swamped me, because he looked panicked. “You did not touch it, did you?”
I shook my head, and relief edged into his face.
“That’s not just any ‘Artifact,’ as your story had me believe. That is a very old, old Artifact, Mr. Vonnegan. Or a piece of it.” He stepped to the left to get a better angle and seemed careful to stay a certain distance from the green stone. “A very dangerous Artifact.” He looked at me again. “The mage in the parking lot—describe him again. Carefully.”
I did, trying to be detailed, and he started nodding when I was halfway through.
“Calvin Amir, I think,” he said. He sighed and sat down on the edge of the coffee table, letting his hands dangle between his legs. “Do you know who Cal Amir is?”
I shook my head. I hadn’t kept up on the gossip.
“You do know who Mika Renar is, though?”
The name made me jump, and Mags looked down at his hands and muttered, “Fuck,” a grace note of despair and terror.
I swallowed thickly. “Renar is . . . enustari.” Archmage. “Probably the most powerful mage on earth.”
“Not probably,” Hiram said softly. “She is. There are other enustari to fear. Elsa Brandt, be afraid of her, yes. Alfonse Alligherti, stay out of his way, certainly. Mika Renar? Worse than all of them. By an order of magnitude. Cal Amir,” he added almost gently, “is her apprentice.”
I put my head down in my hands. “Ah, shit.”
Mika Renar. Ancient, brittle old woman. Probably the worst living serial killer in the world. Able to reach around the globe and swat you off her ass without bleeding a drop of her own. Connected and rich, too, just for giggles. And I’d fucked with her apprentice.
“Lem?” Mags said, sounding like a lost kid.
I looked up and forced myself to put my hands on my knees and smile.
“It’s okay, Magsie,” I said as cheerfully as I could. “We’re with Hiram now.”
Mags smiled a little, relieved. I hated myself, but Mags could only understand four things at a time. We didn’t have time to teach him anything else. I looked at Hiram.
“What can I do?”
Hiram snorted, standing up and heading for the bar. “Do? Nothing, Mr. Vonnegan. You have a girl who has clearly been marked for ritual in my bathroom. You have a stolen car parked outside my house. You have a man wearing a three-thousand-year-old Artifact neither of us could create or control under any circumstances, which is the property of either the most powerful entity in the world or her apprentice, which makes very little difference.” He turned his head slightly as he worked the glass. “Mr. Vonnegan, I believe you have done enough.”
I swallowed. I had seen what powerful mages could do; magic required blood and, at their level, a lot of it. They were not a class of people concerned with ethics or morality, as a rule. I’d seen people hideously deformed, killed in spectacular ways, cursed for life with the cruelest of subtle geas spells. I’d heard stories of worse, of course: buildings blown up and planes crashed, just to get the supply of fresh blood a spell required. The bigger the spell, the more blood needed. Some of the worst local disasters in history had been engineered by saganustari seeking huge amounts of gas for their spells.
When you went up a level from there, to the Archmages, enustari, you could link some of the worst global disasters to them. Wars had been started, extermination policies enacted, all to fuel the biludha, the epic rituals such individuals could cast. Hiram’s lessons flashed through my mind. Saganustari kept it reasonable. Small-scale. Flight 19, 1945. The Mary Celeste, 1872. Roanoke, 1590. The Ninth Legion, 117. The enustari did shit like that just to get warmed up. Volcanoes had been induced to erupt, burying cities in ash and lava. Entire religions practicing human sacrifice had been established, fed by immense Charms that pushed everyone to believe, and to kill, and kill, and kill. And in the modern age they’d even gotten mechanized, setting up suicide armies, firing up ovens, herding whole populations to be grist for their spells. Dozens, hundreds, thousands dead, bled dry, burned up. Used by enustari like logs in a fire.
“I’m sorry, Hiram,” I choked, my body vibrating. “I didn’t—”
“Think, yes,” he said, turning back to me with a drink in one hand. “So, the die is cast. We have to get rid of it all—the car, the body, the girl, the Artifact. First, though, we need to know what we’re up against. Why does this man, who is not one of us, carry an Artifact? Why was a girl with ritual runes in the trunk of his car?” He shook his head. “Before we panic and try to clean up the mess as quickly as possible, we need more information. I have a spell we can use . . . on him.” He nodded at the gaunt body on the floor, then looked at me. “I can cast it on you, and you will know everything he knew.”
I blinked, revolted. “Jesus, Hiram, why me?”
“Because this is your fucking mess, Mr. Vonnegan!” Hiram shouted in the old disciplining voice I knew so well. “We need information. There is a price to be paid for it. I say that bill is on your tab.”
I looked down at my feet. “Yes. Fine.”
There was a second of silence. “I will need more blood than I can provide myself.”
I sighed. “I don’t have much left to spare.”
“I’ll do it.”
I looked up at Mags, who was already rolling up his sleeve. My whole body snapped back to alertness. “No!” I snarled.
“Mr. Vonnegan,” Hiram said in a more reasonable tone of voice, setting down his glass, “not all of us share your ridiculous moral certainty about using another’s blood in our work. Mr. Mageshkumar is a voluntary subject, and I need only a pint or so, mixed with my own. Sit down and rest while I prepare.”
Hiram once told me that magic was violence. That its very nature was destruction, and trying to civilize it with my petty moralizing—as he put it—was hopeless.
I looked at Mags. “You don’t have to do this.”
Mags shrugged happily. “I want to help, Lem,” he said, sounding like a panting puppy.
I dropped into one of the chairs, letting it envelop me. I closed my eyes, thinking I might catch a nap while Hiram gathered his shit and then bled Mags. My rule was you never used a Bleeder. You never used anyone’s blood but your own, even if they volunteered, and never if it was involuntary.
I thought of the kid in the dirty blue dress, all those years ago, sallow skin and sunken eyes. Hiram could fool himself that bleeding was a choice. It wasn’t. The powerful cast and the weak bled, and I had learned that the only way to win that game was to refuse to play it.
I told myself Mags was no child.
It didn’t help much.
“MR. VONNEGAN? WE’RE READY.”
I snapped awake. No time at all seemed to have passed, but Mags had a thick bandage wrapped around his forearm, and Hiram stood over the corpse with his little silver bowl. Feeling like I’d been chewed, I struggled to my feet. “Where do you want me?”
“Kneel with your hands on his head,” Hiram said immediately, his voice back to its usual smooth boom, commanding and ingratiating at the same time.
I tried to breathe in as deeply as I could. My head felt fuzzy, and I wanted to spike some oxygen into my brain. The room was too crowded. The bric-a-brac covered the walls like barnacles, clinging to every exposed surface, and even the floor was crowded with things, from the chairs to the table to the odd wooden boxes sitting between the furniture—one not a box but a foot, a huge round elephant’s foot. The rug on the floor was thick and dusty, blue and gold in a dizzying pattern. It felt hot under me as I took up my position. The Skinny Fuck’s skin felt cold and gummy, as if it would hold the imprint of my thumbs for hours after I let go.
The moment my hands were in place, Hiram began to whisper. He spoke rapidly, without any breaks between the syllables. I didn’t recognize anything; it wasn’t a spell he’d ever shown me. A phrase here and there leaped out, familiar as Hiram’s personal shorthand for things, little sub-spells he’d honed to a precise few sounds and passed down to me. I struggled not to doze as he spoke, and then he was done, sooner than I would have expected for a spell that required two pints. I felt the familiar cold radiation move past me, and for a second nothing happened.
Then I was the Skinny Fuck. And I knew everything.
5. HE HAD ALWAYS BEEN SMART. School had been easy, and he remembered laughing at the idiots who had to study, to work so hard when it was so easy. It was all just showing up. He didn’t get perfect grades, true, but he passed, and he thought it was a good trade, to skip all the hard work and have the same piece of paper as everyone else at the end.
He’d always been smart. So it had been a dismaying mystery that he was also so damned unlucky.
He remembered ducking into Keens on Thirty-Sixth Street after the blowout with Roger—the pompous ass who didn’t understand what he brought to the firm, the spark he contributed. His numbers were low, but so were everyone’s! It was a tough time, and Roger had been riding him harder than everyone else because they didn’t get along. If the Swanson swap had gone the way it was supposed to, Roger would have been forced to eat crow and suck up to him a little. Instead, bad luck had shot the deal to hell, and he was out of a job.
Bad luck. It followed him everywhere. He wandered into Keens—an odd choice, since he didn’t like steakhouses or their fussy wood-and-brass bars, and he was getting a little thick around the middle, a little jowly. It had been salads and diet soda for a week trying to trim down. But he felt drawn to this place and ordered a whiskey, thinking about all his bad luck. The deals that should have worked; the investments that had tanked.
Even letting Miranda answer the phone that night—sheer bad luck had killed his marriage.
And now the bad luck had doubled, because Mir was soaking him for every dime he didn’t have. He couldn’t get any traction. He couldn’t cook up a pot to work with, something to spread around and get going.
He considered the possibility of asking his mother for a loan. The humiliation of being supported by an old woman, a woman who had been so careful her whole life. He’d detested the caution she brought to every decision, the exhausting thought she put into everything. He remembered hating her every time she’d taken him out to eat as an adult, the way she sat there doing the math for a tip. A modest, low-end tip that she calculated to the penny. When he went out, he made a point of tossing money on the table, of signing the credit slip with “50%” on the tip line, not even bothering to figure out the amount. The idea of begging his mother for a loan made him queasy.
The good-looking black fellow started talking to him, and he should have been annoyed, but the guy had this voice like silk in oil, nice to listen to. They started trading rounds, and he thought maybe his luck was looking up, because this guy was talking about a job. He thought, That’s how it goes for me. Feeling confident, expansive. Some people panicked, worked like dogs, and all they got was stress. He got fired through bad fucking luck, but he got hired immediately by a man wearing a five-thousand-dollar suit—because the suit could smell talent.
The man asked him, What do you deserve? And the man answered for him: Everything.
The man asked him, Why don’t you get it? And the man answered for him: Jealousy.
He nodded, agreeable, working on his fifth drink and feeling good, optimistic. Here at last was someone who understood how things worked, who would be amenable. Here was someone who would give him the yardage to make a run for things, who would be happy to let him make his own way. Everything was finally working out. He accepted the position on the spot, despite having some misgivings about the vagueness of the job description. He asked when he should start, and his new employer waved him off, handing him a small box wrapped in raucous gift paper, a large black bow on top.
“You are a man of rare vintage,” his new boss said, and he would always remember these words, even though much of the rest of the conversation was blurry or simply vanished from his memory. “You are pliable but not breakable.”
He took the gift and held it wonderingly. What was it? He would find out.
The meeting was over. Had it been a meeting? An interview? He didn’t know and didn’t care. He went home filled with the certainty that everything was falling into place at last. He felt unrestrained. Smarter than everyone else. He rode the subway home, scanning owlishly around him, pitying these poor fools who worked so hard but didn’t have the presence of mind—the talent—to pick the right bar, at the right time, and overlook their prejudices to talk to the right person.
At home, his bare-bones studio, half filled with brown boxes, everything Miranda had left after her voracious picking over of his bones, he fixed himself another stiff drink and opened the box while sitting on the hard, uncomfortable sofa. It was a piece of jewelry, he saw. A piece of green stone on a leather string. He stared at it, frowning. He’d expected a watch or a tie pin, something classy. Valuable. Well, he thought, the stone might be valuable, though he didn’t find it attractive at all. It looked waxy, slick, and he hesitated to touch it. His head ached when he looked at it too long, and he considered just closing the box and forgetting about it, but he felt that he’d made a promise; he’d accepted the gift and did not wish to offend his new employer by disdaining it. So he lifted it by the loop and slipped it around his neck, letting the surprisingly heavy stone fall against his white shirt, which he suddenly noticed was stained red and brown in places.
The stone touched him through his shirt and spoke to him.
He remembered the first touch well, differently every time. It was revolting, like a snail moving across your belly. It was exhilarating, like an alcohol rub on a hot day. It was cold, freezing, like it had been locked in a refrigerator for days. It was hot and burning, and he was afraid his skin had blistered.
He always remembered the voice. It was a flat whisper in his head. No tone, no stress, just a monotone of quiet words. They began midstream, as if he were listening in on a conversation that had been going on forever before he arrived and would go on forever after he left.
He tore the stone off, tossed it to the floor, panting.
He was a man of varied experience. He’d seen things. He knew things. He understood things, not like the rubes he rubbed elbows with. He appreciated things because he’d taken pains to broaden himself. He’d left behind the wood-paneled bars of his father, the five-and-dime stores on Central Avenue, the family restaurants with the menu on the place mats. He’d left it behind and sought adventure, knowledge, experience.
This, however, was outside his experience, and he sat on the edge of the sofa staring at the stone, heart pounding, wondering if he’d really heard what he’d heard. He wanted to touch it again, see what it said. He wanted to throw it away and never see it again.
He got on his knees and crawled over to the necklace, reached out, and took the stone between his finger and thumb.
Instantly, the voice was back in his head. It was in the middle of a sentence again, as if it continued speaking whether he was listening or not. The stone seemed to squirm in his fingers, and eventually he realized that he’d been listening to it for some time, just sitting on the floor, eyes open but not seeing anything. He shook himself and was about to drop it, to go fix himself a real drink and think about it, when the voice in his head seemed to focus, suddenly become aware of him.
And the voice began to tell him wonderful things.
THE VOICE CHANGED HIS luck. It told him everything he’d always wanted to know. It told him which stocks were going up or down. It told him which horses were winners. It told him which corner to catch a cab on, which suit to wear, what to say to women. It told him who was plotting against him and how to deal with
them. It told him everything he’d ever wanted to know, and suddenly he was on a roll.
He didn’t enjoy his work. At first, with the stone whispering in his ear, he felt important. His employer had swagger; the people he dealt with now knew the name and shrank back from it, and he laughed at them. They were terrified of his boss, but hadn’t he sat in a bar with the man, an equal? Trading jokes and making conversation, being taken seriously? Like equals? He’d enjoyed walking into rooms and making them all squirm when he came for the girls.
The girls. At first he’d been outraged, alarmed, afraid. He’d imagined himself behind a big desk, making decisions, maybe with a nice wet bar. A big shot. Instead, it was . . . messy. And certainly illegal. And work. He didn’t like how they struggled, how they begged him to leave them alone, how they whimpered. The first few times he’d thought about driving to a police station, telling them everything. He dreamed about the girls at night and woke up sobbing out apologies.
Each time he thought of turning himself in, he would touch the stone. And the voice would tell him something wonderful, and he would forget all about it. And then the voice explained the rules to him. They were special, the girls. They had been prepared, and it was his solemn task to ensure that they made it to his employer in pristine condition. There were rules. He didn’t understand them all, but he followed them carefully, because the voice told him to. Some of the girls had to be disposed of, some he never saw again. There were certain streets to avoid. He could never speak to them—he could speak about them, in the third person, but not to them. She gets in the car and doesn’t speak. He was allowed to use physical force, if necessary—and sometimes they were not docile—but he could never draw blood or break the skin in any way. Never. The voice told him that if he ever cut a girl, even accidentally, his employer would be enraged. He sometimes put them in the trunk when they were less than enthusiastic. But he was always careful with them. Sometimes when he needed to get rid of one, he had a place he used for temporary storage until he could do the deed, but basically, he tried to get it all over with as quickly as possible.
