We Are Not Good People (Ustari Cycle)

by Jeff Somers

  Threading my way through the lobby, I had to wait for a stream of uniformed officers to walk through the door behind the front desk. I swayed on my feet as each one stepped through, looked right at me, and with a slight wincing expression, looked away. I tried to time it so the final one had passed me by and the door was still hanging open, then followed at the last second.

  A fat, sweating officer was trailing the others, talking cheerfully over his shoulder in a booming voice you could hear in the next fucking state, and I rammed into him, hard. He stumbled back and I stumbled with him like I was caught in his fat-man gravity. We danced, me forward, him backwards, and he spun around to see what the hell had just rocketed into him. His eyes skittered off me like everyone else’s, and then he did a double take and saw me.

  And didn’t like what he saw.

  I pushed back from him and we both found our feet. I felt hot and stood in the middle of the crowded lobby sweating and breathing hard, my heart a dried-up marbled rattling around in my chest. Sticky donut jelly bleeding through the fabric of my pockets. The fat cop stared at me, his face twisting into a mask of hatred as the spell worked on him, and around us the room went quiet as everyone else saw me. And everyone else didn’t like what they saw, either.

  Only problem with an anti-Charm spell: If you fucked up and got noticed, you got noticed in a bad way.

  The fat cop’s pudgy hands curled into fists.

  I willed myself to move, but nothing happened. I stood there vibrating, watching him bring his hands up, and behind him, behind me—all around us—I had a sense of movement. I ordered my limbs to move and my limbs just hung at my sides. I had exactly one trick left, and when he swung at me, I used it: I gave in to gravity and dropped. His fist sailed through the air and he stumbled forward, tripping over me and crashing to the floor.

  I sat up on my elbows and looked around. The whole room, cops, criminals, lawyers, civilians—they all stared at me with restrained hate, horrified at the sight of me and deeply confused as to why. I had seconds before they broke through the hesitation, the latent socialization, and succumbed to the spell. Dived for me as a mob. Beat the tar out of me. Worse.

  I took a deep breath, the crowd seemed to bulge outward for a second, and then . . . and then Pitr Mags swept into the room, a fucking tank. He crashed through the swinging front doors with a snarl and was on top of me instantly. Stood over me with his fists by his waist, crouched down low. Someone charged him and he tossed them aside almost casually, effortlessly. Another body crashed into him from behind, but Mags just grunted. Twisted his torso around, flipped the newcomer up and over so she landed on her back. It was a cop in uniform, a woman who stared up at the ceiling in a dreamy way that hinted at concussion.

  Time to go, I thought slowly, stupidly.

  This, I then thought, is our motto. Mags and I should have T-shirts made that read TIME TO GO on the front and wear them everywhere.

  As if he heard me, Mags leaped aside and clawed one hand into my shirt collar. Dragged me along the floor.

  I watched the fluorescent lights flick by as my vision got blurry and soft: one, two, three, daylight.

  10. I WOKE TO HIRAM’S FACE, upside down, his smile a scowl. You couldn’t trust Hiram’s smiles anyway. He smiled a lot. It didn’t mean anything.

  “Mr. Vonnegan,” he said, shaking his head. “You’ve got to take better care of yourself.”

  I pushed myself up onto my elbows, sinking down into the couch cushions. My head throbbed and my arms trembled. I was back in Hiram’s study, with Hiram standing over me in a pair of shabby khakis, a crisp white shirt that strained to contain his belly, and a pair of black suspenders. He wasn’t wearing any shoes. In one hand he carried a large black sphere that gleamed in the room’s soft light, a heavy marble I knew he sometimes used as a worry stone. He breathed like he had to think about each individual breath and brace himself for it.

  Strangely, this made me feel better. I’d spent a year of my life, more or less, in this study. I wouldn’t do it again, but it was familiar, and sleep had done me good. I knew this room better than any other physical location in the world. I knew the weight and feel of everything on the tightly packed shelves. The tiny chess pieces carved from jade, the size of your fingernails. The windup dolls that would march from one end of the shelf to the other, knocking off everything in their path. The books, dry and yellowed and smelling like libraries. And snow globes. Hiram had not met a snow globe he could resist. They appeared in his pockets on a regular basis as he moved through the city. Large globes with brass bases, containing St. Patrick’s Cathedral; small globes made of plastic, tiny plastic children laughing as they sledded down a generic country scene. They dotted all the shelves, glinting at me in patterns so familiar I noticed whenever Hiram got paranoid and hid things from me, which he usually did after each visit. Hiram was a thief, and so he assumed everyone else was a thief, and fully expected me to rob him blind. So he did things like hiding the tiny white box with the beetle on it that had been on the shelves last time.

  My list of useless superpowers got longer every year.

  I swung my feet onto the floor and sat up. “How long?” My voice was deep and clogged, rusty.

  “Eleven hours. Mr. Mageshkumar brought you.” He winced. “He has been casting a Glamour of a glowing . . . bird. Constantly.”

  I smiled a little. My pulse was fast and wobbly, but I felt okay. “Sorry, Hiram,” I said. “Thank you.”

  He shrugged, turning towards his mobile bar, stuffing his worry stone into his pocket. “I didn’t do anything except admit you. And for that you can thank the puppylike charm of Mr. Mageshkumar.”

  I scrubbed my stiff hair. “Has D. A. Ketterly called or stopped by?”

  Hiram paused, a decanter of something rust-colored in one hand. He turned his head slightly towards me. “Ketterly? What in the world is that charlatan doing for you?”

  I shrugged. “Looking for somebody. What else does Ketterly do?”

  Hiram went back to mixing his drink. “Not that girl, I trust. You are a confused boy, Mr. Vonnegan, but I never took you for stupid.”

  Stretching, I shrugged and told him the short version of the story since I’d left him. He turned and leaned against the bar, holding a tall glass with a wedge of orange jammed onto the rim. His white beard was perfectly trimmed and looked exactly as it always did, as if he’d contrived to stop it from growing permanently.

  Which he might have.

  For a few seconds, he just stared at me. Then he set the glass down behind him and strode for the door, dry-washing his hands as he walked. “Mr. Vonnegan, we should have a discussion.”

  I watched him leave the room with his usual strut, but I didn’t follow him immediately. I knew where his office was, and that was a less comfortable memory. I wasn’t interested in entering that tiny, clogged space with Hiram’s colognes and strange brown cigarettes thick in the air. Feeling leaden, I thought it a much better idea to just sit on the couch and breathe until Hiram decided to tell me his news out here.

  A moment later Bosch’s head reappeared, peering around the door at me. “Mr. Vonnegan? I think perhaps time is a concern here.”

  Reminding myself that Hiram was maybe my only friend aside from Mags, I hurried after him.

  Hiram’s office. Four feet by eight feet—a closet, technically, with no windows. Hiram did not use his apartment as intended; the living room he’d made his study, the bedroom he’d made into a museum of stolen artifacts, magical and otherwise. The closet off the bedroom/museum was his office. The only rooms that retained their original purpose were the kitchen and bathroom.

  Mags had followed us in, his hand a bloody mess from nicking himself to cast his new favorite toy, and—seeming to fill fully half the space in the little cove—leaned against a towering pile of books and papers that might have grown over a bookshelf or two, like fungus. The books had no titles, handwritten and hand-bound in an age before computers and photocopiers, but they were sadly fa
miliar from my unhappy time studying under Hiram’s terse tutelage. I’d retitled each in my head. There was Far Too Many Words to Create Simple Illusions and Endless Repetitions Written by Assholes. A few were even useful, like Ancient Tome of Useful Three-Word Cantrips and An Explanation of Everything That Can Go Wrong When Casting a Spell Which Is Everything, subtitled All Elderly Tricksters Are Maimed.

  Fond memories.

  Mags hummed, studying his hand, happy with the universe. I was jammed in behind Hiram’s plump torso as my gasam sat at the tiny child’s desk he’d installed in the room. Everything in Hiram’s world burst with things, endless piles and rows of things, trinkets, pebbles, toys, jewelry, books, shoes, tie pins, hats, statues, boxes inside boxes inside boxes, maps, paintings, pens—the universe of nonliving things was fully represented in miniature in Hiram’s apartment, like an anti-zoo.

  He’d spread several sheets of white paper on the desk before him. They were covered in sketches of runes, the ancient glyphs used in conjunction with the Tongue to cast and bind the more complicated spells, as well as copious bursts of his own thin, shaky handwriting.

  “Because I am curious,” he said, his voice back to its rich schoolteacher timbre, “I made some notes from memory about the marks on Ms. Mannice. It is not often you can study even the slightest work of an enustari. I transcribed what I could remember of the small patch of, um, skin we were able to observe, and began researching what I could about the specific combinations.”

  I nodded. Hiram liked to lecture.

  “She appeared to be marked all over her body.”

  I nodded again. “Inside her ears, between her fingers—everywhere.”

  “Yes. Difficult to replicate, and a serious investment of time and blood, so they naturally want her back. And there are no repetitions, none that I could find in the small sample I had. Which is—”

  “Unusual,” I finished, leaning over his shoulder to study the glyphs he’d copied. Most markings were terse, designed simply to tie magical energy to a specific person or object—rarely more than a few runes, often repeated ad infinitum. Even the small sampling Hiram had copied from memory contained more glyphs than I’d seen in one place in my small experience.

  He leaned back. “Yes. Mr. Vonnegan, this is a major, major piece of work. This is no Cantrip. This is not even a normal, everyday epic ritual.” He paused, and I could see him looking at me in my peripheral vision, his white-ringed face pink and round. “You said there were more women? Marked like Ms. Mannice?”

  I nodded. The glyphs sketched on the paper seemed to be unhappy; I imagined I could feel them radiating energy at me, pulsing. “Dozens,” I said. I thought of the police photographs. “Maybe more. His memories were jumbled.”

  Hiram sighed. “I would imagine there were. Perhaps hundreds.”

  I frowned. “Hundreds? Hiram, that’s crazy. There hasn’t been a biludha cast at that scale in seventy years.”

  “Nineteen forty-five, to be exact,” he said absently. A thin line of anxiety formed like sediment between my spine and my skin. “This piqued my interest. I am no Archmage, but I have studied this art my entire life. Mr. Vonnegan, I have seen these glyphs before, briefly.”

  I glanced down at the bald spot on his round head. Hiram had not changed since I’d met him. He was simultaneously old and fragile, and filled with energy and life. “Where?”

  “My own gasam was a powerful enustari. More skilled than you or I. More deeply read, less afraid of . . . consequences. Faber Gottschalk pursued such knowledge—forbidden and dangerous spells. Not for his own casting; he was no fool. Simply for knowledge. He kept old grimoires of ancient spells, spells not cast in a thousand years. One of which I remember well, one that required linked sacrifices, marked with runes similar to this.” He sighed, leaning back. “An old, old spell.”

  “What was it?”

  He paused for a moment before responding. “The Biludha-tah-namus,” he said simply, sounding old. “The Ritual of Death.”

  Behind me, I heard Mags suck in breath. “Fuck,” he whispered. I turned to agree, but he was just frowning at a spot of blood on his shirt. He rubbed it absently with his thumb.

  Mags: the perfect organism.

  I STARED DOWN INTO my glass. It was filled with whiskey, more than was wise for someone who was still anemic and weak; even the thick smell was making me woozy. I let it warm in my hands.

  We were in Hiram’s seldom-used kitchen—a bright white box of a room with gleaming white cabinets, spotless white appliances, and a small Formica table with matching white plastic chairs. The only item in the room used with any regularity was the teakettle, which steamed cheerfully on the stove as the three of us sat glumly at the table.

  Pitr Mags sipped his drink gingerly, scowling. He was unhappy because we’d finally ordered him to stop making the fucking glowing bird appear.

  “Madness, in this day and age,” Hiram muttered, staring past me at the wall.

  Hundreds of sacrifices just to get the burn started. A huge piece of magic to begin with, something beyond my experience, certainly. But that was the beginning. Spells with linked sacrifices as fulcrums started off with the small bit, like kindling to a fire. Cults had been popular in recent decades for this reason. Like the Movement for the Restoration in Africa, a few hundred Charmed people left behind like husks. Small bits of easy magic—Cantrips, even—to get people in the right frame of mind. Get them to kill themselves or each other. It didn’t matter which. The bonus was that the news was usually so sensational, no one noticed what happened next. The small bit set the big bit in motion, and the big bit was where the fireworks really happened. If the Biludha-tah-namus started off with hundreds of sacrifices as the small bit, I didn’t like imagining what the big bit was.

  “What does it do?” I asked, forcing myself to sip some whiskey.

  Hiram looked at me. For the first time that I could remember, he looked old.

  “Do? It breeds disaster, courts destruction. It is one of a very few spells that once carried a sentence of death to any ustari found to know it. But those were different times . . .” He sighed. “It depends on how you look at it. If you are the caster, also the object of the spell, it . . . bends the laws of nature very close to their breaking point. It grants you immortality. Safety from death. Perhaps not permanently, but near enough not to matter.”

  Immortality. I pushed the word around. For a moment or two it was just a word. I forced myself to reply through my thick thoughts.

  “That’s a lot of heavy lifting.”

  Hiram nodded hollowly. “I knew Mika Renar had a death fetish,” he said slowly. “She fears death. We all do, but for her it is a mania. She could never quite believe that the universe, after giving her such power, such immense power and luxury, would then play this cruel joke on her—that she might die like everyone else.” He sighed. “What is the use of being a god if you are also mortal?”

  I stared at him, my brain moving slowly. “It’s impossible. You can’t break the natural order like that.”

  “Of course you can, boy,” Hiram said fiercely, his face flushing red. “Of course you can. It is not easy, it is not allowed, but you can always try. Would we have taboos against breaking the ‘natural order’ if it couldn’t be done?”

  I considered the big bit again. I wasn’t enustari, I hadn’t even finished my primary education under Hiram, but I knew what it took to cast spells. “It would take . . . thousands—tens of thousands—to do something like that.”

  Hiram smiled. I didn’t like it. He sat for a moment blowing on his tea. “You’ve never bled more than a trickle, Lemuel,” he said in a quiet voice I didn’t recognize. This was not Hiram Bosch. This was an old, tired man. The transformation scared the shit out of me.

  “Not tens of thousands, Mr. Vonnegan. Not hundreds of thousands. It would take everyone, Mr. Vonnegan. All of us. Everything.”

  He sipped tea like we weren’t discussing the end of the world. “Or near enough. A handful might es
cape.” He smiled a little. “I imagine she might ensure the survival of her apprentice. In a scenario I find mystifying, she seems to actually like her apprentice.” He looked at me and frowned again. “Or fear him.”

  I pictured Cal Amir: older than me already and still laboring under a gasam who was literally determined to live forever. How happy could an ambitious man be? No doubt Mika Renar was withholding the final fruits of her superior knowledge—every gasam played that game, because once your apprentice knew everything you did, there was little reason for them to stick around, carrying your water. Except the binding, the urtuku. It gave your gasam a certain amount of limited control over you. It forced plenty of apprentices to hang on long after they’d learned all they could. It was a risk you took. You could break the binding between a gasam and an urtuku. If it was not voluntary, it simply required one of you to die. I swallowed a little more whiskey, even though the first dollop had made a home in my belly and set up a small business manufacturing vomit.

  “The Biludha-tah-namus is an expensive item,” Hiram said softly. “Forever for one person requires more blood than has existed collectively up until this point. Every living thing, billions and billions—not just humans, Mr. Vonnegan, but by my calculations, all living things—will be burned away once the linked ritual is set in motion. She will live forever in a dead world.” He pursed his lips. “I assume she has considered this and accepted it.”

  “Hiram,” I said slowly. “I know you don’t—”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Mr. Vonnegan,” he snapped. “Of course we have to oppose her. Every living mage in the world will oppose her. There is no question of opposing her. There is only the question of whether we—whether I—survive the experience.”