We Are Not Good People (Ustari Cycle)

by Jeff Somers

  He sighed again and looked about the kitchen. I imagined he felt less secure here, without his knickknacks surrounding him. “Although I suppose I am dead in either scenario, aren’t I? The great Hiram Bosch.” He snorted and went on, his tone changing to the softer, thoughtful one that told me he was lost in his own thoughts. “The question is whether this girl is irreplaceable . . . Difficult to replace and irreplaceable are two different things. If we remove the girl from the equation, do we defeat Renar? Or do we simply delay her as she prepares another girl . . . ? I wonder,” he said, his voice lowering in volume as he sank into himself, “I wonder, I wonder if all of them resembling each other so strongly is essential or just a grace note . . .”

  He trailed off, staring into the middle distance. I opened my mouth to speak but was interrupted by the deep tone of Hiram’s doorbell. We looked at each other, and then I looked at Mags. He had fallen asleep, his head on his crossed arms on the table.

  I followed Hiram, noting his familiar portly strut, the uneven way his suspenders had been clipped to his pants. When he opened the door, I was standing behind him with a clear view of the doorway over his shoulder.

  Claire Mannice was standing on his stoop. She looked clean and fresh and young and beautiful. Black jeans. Black T-shirt.

  She stepped back when the door opened, then regarded us uncertainly for a second or two.

  “Listen,” she finally said. “These markings . . . on me.” She bit her lip, gesturing at her neck. “Can you get them off?”

  11. I LIKED THE NERVOUS WAY she chain-smoked, lighting each new cigarette from the burning coal of the previous one. I was sitting with her at the kitchen table while Hiram ransacked the apartment behind us, making a lot of noise and muttering to himself. Mags sat at the end of the table, staring at her with wide eyes, and I was on alert in case he tried to leap across the table and start licking her face and barking.

  She was skinny as hell, but a nice skinny. Toned, not starved. Her hair was black and short and curled a little right over her eyes. Her nose was a little long and turned up, which I liked, and her skin was a perfect, creamy tone except for a single tattoo—a real, normal one, blurry and blue, on her left shoulder, peeking out from under a bra strap and the T-shirt.

  I’d let her sit closest to the doorway so she felt like she had an escape route.

  She sucked in smoke from a fresh cigarette and leaned back, one arm wrapped around her belly. She stared at me. “Magic,” she said at last.

  I nodded. “You can see the runes?”

  She stretched her free arm out in front of her. As far as I could see without the aid of a spell, her skin was unblemished, clear and covered in soft, downy hair. It was skin I wanted to touch.

  “I can’t not see them. But yeah, no one else can see ’em. I went to . . . a friend of mine to see about having them removed. I couldn’t tell if they were tats or just surface or what. He thought I was crazy. So did everyone else.” She retracted her arm and looked at me again. “So I got desperate and remembered you and that crazy night. And I thought, hell, you did save my life. In the most horrifying way possible, but still.”

  I nodded, encouraging that train of thought. I wanted to ask her how old she was.

  Smoke leaked from her nostrils. She had a steady stare, a thousand-yard kind of thing. Most kids her age just eyed their shoes. She locked on you. “You know what it’s like to look in the mirror and see fucking hieroglyphics on your fucking face?”

  A number of heavy things fell from a high shelf off in the distance, and Hiram cursed in his round, professorial tones.

  “What is he doing?” she asked.

  “Getting ready to leave,” I said. “You’re a hot commodity. He doesn’t want you here, attracting interested parties.”

  I decided not to mention there were even odds that Hiram would decide to kill her himself. Or that if killing her meant stopping Renar from killing us, from killing everyone, I might have to sit back and let him do it. I hadn’t worked that out in my head yet. Saw no reason to bring it up.

  She squinted at me. “Okay. So . . . magic.”

  I nodded again, looked at Mags. He looked like he could have been convinced to commit murder in exchange for a lock of her hair. “Show her your new toy, Magsie.”

  Mags was up in a flash, grinning and rolling up his sleeve. Moving with practiced speed, he had his knife out in a second. Just as Claire leaned back stiffly in her chair, shocked, he slashed a shallow cut down his scarred arm, bringing up a trickle of blood.

  “Oh, God,” she whispered.

  Mags ran through it fast, excited, and with a flash of brilliant light, the golden bird appeared, two or three times larger than Ketterly had made it in his office. This one was the size of a small child. It sailed gloriously around Hiram’s kitchen on silent, bejeweled wings.

  I looked at Claire Mannice. She was staring at the bird with her mouth slightly open.

  “It’s called a Glamour,” I said helpfully. “There’s a lot of different ways to use it. This is just for fun.”

  She moved her eyes to me again. They were big and round and green, and in the fake glow of the bird’s golden light, they sparkled. I marveled at them. I had seen something like that green with golden flecks. In a painting, maybe.

  Mags was still standing, grinning as he watched his creation move elegantly around the room. His arm had stopped bleeding and was just another shallow wound on an arm that had borne plenty of them, and for a second I was jealous of his apparent health and energy. He was brimming with blood and fire, and I felt ready to fall asleep.

  “Magic,” she said. “Well, okay—”

  The doorbell chimed.

  The whole place went quiet; the sudden absence of Hiram’s muttered cursing and floor-shaking rampage made me jump out of my seat, waving down Claire and Mags. Mags killed the bird and we all just hovered there, listening. From the kitchen I could see down the corridor, past the front door and into the bedroom, but there was no sign of Hiram at all.

  The lights went off. I heard Claire grunt, but she didn’t scream or panic or move.

  Soft, nonthreatening, I heard the sound of the tumblers in the lock moving, easing their way open, falling into line.

  I thought fast. I was about to fall over from blood loss and was more or less effectively blind. My switchblade was in my hand out of deep habit, but I knew if I tried to cast anything meaty, anything requiring a lot of gas, I’d pass out before I got halfway through.

  One second, two seconds, the handle of the front door turning all the way. I sliced my palm, a flicker of the blade, a kiss. Weak, thin blood seeped out, and I whispered a short Cantrip. Nothing. A child’s trick.

  A wave of manageable weariness swept through me, dragging me down, and I could see. The dark took on sharp white edges, all color bled out of the world. I looked around; Mags was still standing, his own knife in hand, unmoving. Claire sat rigidly, eyes moving everywhere, blind and not liking it.

  I looked up in time to see the front door drifting open, like an ancient, grainy black-and-white movie.

  “Mags!” I whispered, sharp and urgent. “What’ve you got?”

  “Fuck,” he hissed back. “I don’t know! You!”

  I shook my head, watching the door. It remained pushed open, obscuring anything behind it. The silence was complete. “I don’t have the gas, Mags. It’s on you.”

  “I’ll bleed!”

  Revulsion and excitement rose up in my throat and I choked it back. I wanted to feel that power, Mags’s life, pouring into me. The thought made me gag. “No!” I struggled to keep my voice on mute. “Mags, now!”

  Just as I remembered my interview with Renar, and I remembered how magic bounced off of Claire, I heard him whispering, running through a spell. I recognized it and thought it was probably safe, focused not on us or Claire but on those looking at us. I spun, pulling Claire out of her chair and onto the floor, dragging her back towards the wall. She let me—and I was conscious of the permission
, conscious that if she hadn’t approved things would have gone very differently—stiffening but keeping her mouth shut. Mags dropped down beside me as he finished.

  “Be still,” I whispered to her. She smelled like cigarettes and autumn leaves. “Still.”

  I stared down the corridor. The door slowly closed, revealing Cal Amir and two plump Bleeders standing in Hiram’s entryway, looking around. They were photocopies, all white edges and black fields.

  “Hello, Tricksters!” Amir shouted. “You naughty boys, you have something of ours, don’t you?”

  I glanced at Claire, panic surging. But it couldn’t be. If Amir knew Claire was here with us, he’d have come heavy. He’d have come breathing fire, with an army of Bleeders. He’d have come to punish us, not make cheerful jokes. Jesus, I thought. He doesn’t know she’s here. I saw again the flash of green as Hiram pocketed the Udug. Steal from enustari and you suffered for it, eventually, for all of Hiram’s speechifying about my recklessness and stupidity.

  I moved my mouth near Claire’s ear without taking my eyes from the trio. “We are furniture,” I said as quietly as I could. Her hair smelled sweet. “Do not move. We are furniture.”

  She didn’t say anything, which was encouraging.

  Amir looked exactly as he had a few days before: groomed, polished, expensive. Cheerful. He was wearing a heavy-looking overcoat and a pair of black gloves. His two Bleeders were typical: fat, tall men, older than some. Fattened was a better word. One was bald and appeared to have no facial hair, or perhaps he was blond and it just looked that way, the bloated folds of his face hanging off his skull like heavy drapes. The other was dark and taller and hairier, his salt-and-pepper mop damp against his forehead. His head was squared off, somehow, on top, and his arms looked too long, hands hanging down by his hips. They both looked unhealthy, their skin slack, their scent stale and sour. They were paid to be meaty. Old hands, trusted. Men who’d been selling their blood for years now, living well in exchange for blood. Men who probably thought, by this point, that they’d won their bet. They’d lived good lives from Cal Amir’s generosity and hadn’t been bled to death yet.

  Amir spun around, searching the dark. His eyes swept over us without pause. It was a simple trick, but it worked: People saw what they expected to see. Even saganustari. Even enustari. We were all human, and frail.

  I could feel Claire pressed against me, simultaneously soft and rigid. She was perfectly still.

  Amir said something to his Bleeders, and they followed him into the kitchen. He came slowly, peeling off his gloves, looking around. Casual. As if he hunted down assholes like us every day for his gasam. Which he probably did.

  His two Bleeders wheezed their way into the room, moving around him to stand on either side. They were panting after the small effort of climbing Hiram’s stoop. They wore decent suits and might have passed for normal obese men unless you knew what they were, or saw the network of fine scars on their faces, their hands. Bleeders couldn’t be choosy; they were paid to bleed on command, as much or as little as their master demanded, and if their face was the only convenient place to draw blood, they slashed it. The black one looked like a sad dog, his cheeks heavy and jiggling as he moved, his eyes turned down at the corners.

  The floor creaked under them.

  “I hope you have not been listening to our tiny friend,” Amir said lightly, spinning in place. “Many small minds have imagined they will master that particular Artifact and become great. They are always mistaken. Believe me, Tricksters, I am here to do you a favor.”

  Amir gestured at the dark-skinned Bleeder, who went through a tiny ritual: taking off his fine overcoat and laying it on Hiram’s little-used stove with great care, undoing the buttons on his cuff with a dainty touch that seemed incompatible with such thick fingers, and rolling his sleeve up to the elbow. His forearm was the expected maze of tiny puckers and scars, just like mine but worse. More methodical, precise. Like he’d mapped out the skin of his arm and was tracing some grand design on it.

  “Of course,” Amir said with a shiny grin, “you will still have to be disciplined.”

  Primly, the Bleeder produced a tiny blade, ornate, custom-made. It was small enough to hide in your palm. With no fanfare, he dragged it along the top of his arm from the elbow to the wrist, deep enough to bleed, shallow enough to avoid veins and arteries and ligaments. He’d live to play the piano again. This time.

  The blood looked black to my magicked eyes, and my whole body went tense as Amir began whispering the Words. Singing them, really, a lilting, rhythmic recitation, the way real mages did it. Saganustari. Real power.

  The kitchen suddenly seemed hot.

  As the blood hit the air, reacting with the atmosphere, I could feel it. Literally. An electric, sizzling, untapped power. Someone else’s power. I’d felt it in Hiram’s study all those years ago with the shivering girl in her doodle sneakers, and I felt it every time Mags or anyone cut themselves. Blood was blood. And it made you want it.

  I wasn’t familiar with the spell Amir was casting, but I picked out words and phrases, sounds that I’d run into, and I put together the vague idea—simple enough: remove Glamours, clear the air. Turn that odd set of chairs against the far wall back into a girl and her idiotic protectors. Much simpler than searching around, especially when you had people to supply your gas for you.

  I looked around. I had nothing. I didn’t think I’d be able to bleed enough to light a cigarette before passing out.

  I thought about giving them Claire. Wondered for one awful moment if that would buy our lives. But Amir had come to discipline us because we had stolen an Artifact, and I had no doubt we would barely survive that discipline. When he found out we had Claire, there would be no negotiation, no bargaining.

  And it wouldn’t matter, because this was the end of everything, everyone dying in thirty seconds of unbelievable, incomprehensible carnage. An invisible engine tearing every living thing in the world to pieces. Soaking them for blood to feed the biludha, to make the old bat immortal. People. Kids. Kittens. Fucking lice—everything—dead.

  And I saw Claire bleeding out, twisting and screaming, the mummy in the office getting younger, coming to life as Claire died. When I imagined it, I kept confusing Claire with the kid in the sneakers, Hiram’s hired whore, all those years ago. Most likely dead. They kept switching back and forth, bleeding out as one, mixed together. She would be Claire’s age now.

  Or dead. Dead. I hadn’t touched her. Hadn’t bled her. I hadn’t done—

  Anything.

  When I thought of that long-past girl dead, a leaden sadness filled me. Weighed me down. I couldn’t imagine what had driven her to that point in her life. And I didn’t want to imagine what wild hopes she might have held deep inside. That someone would save her. That someone would help her. I’d done nothing to her. I’d left no mark. She was exactly the same after having met me, and for a while I’d been proud of that.

  But I wasn’t proud anymore. I’d left no mark. I’d done nothing. I was not good people. But what was my option now? To kill Claire? Save the world, make Renar howl in rage, be a fucking hero by killing her? A girl who’d done nothing besides look a certain way and get herself snatched by the Skinny Fuck.

  I thought, There have to be more options.

  Slowly, I moved my arm away from Claire, preparing to make my move. Blood flowed from the Bleeder’s arm in a slow, steady stream, disappearing into the air as Amir spoke. I balanced myself on the balls of my feet. I gathered myself for a charge. There was the window in the kitchen; if I could barrel into them, my partner coming after me with the automatic loyalty that only someone as stupid as Pitr Mags could manage, we might buy Claire enough time to make an escape, shimmy down the fire escape, hit the street.

  The Bleeder convulsed.

  He staggered a little, recovered, and then went down to his knees. Convulsed again, and blood shot out of his mouth while Amir continued to recite, the syllables rolling out of him with practiced e
ase as he watched his Bleeder hemorrhage in front of him. I was frozen, watching. The fat man on the floor was panting wetly, struggling to breathe, and lifted one heavy arm up to Amir, reaching for his master. One glance at Amir told me this wasn’t his doing. He looked appalled. Surprised. But not scared.

  The mage took a single step backwards, staying out of reach, not skipping a single Word. The second Bleeder stared on with popped-out, unhappy eyes but didn’t make a move to save his friend. They’d both made their deal: They bled for an easy life, everything a powerful saganustari like Amir could offer them, and there was always the chance they’d be consumed entirely.

  Amir was startled, spinning around and trying to figure things out, when Hiram stepped into the hall. I could see straight down the line to the older man. He’d rolled up his sleeves and was speaking a spell, too, using the Bleeder’s blood to cast—an old, dirty trick. Frowned upon, using someone else’s gas. Under normal circumstances, it earned you censure, it got you sneered at. But Hiram knew Amir would be justified in killing us, as thieves. He was saving our lives. Or, more likely, he was saving his own life in a way I hadn’t figured out yet.

  As he walked down the hall, Hiram’s voice got louder while he recited something quick and nasty. He had always had a talent for hacking spells down to the bare necessities, getting rid of any decoration. It was a War Talent, really—if you had nothing but time, you could devise a wicked spell; in the heat of battle, it wasn’t always the most elegant spell that won the day. It was usually the fastest one that still had some punch. Hiram cast battle spells better than anyone I knew.

  Tricksters, we fought dirty. For all their power, enustari didn’t understand that.

  Hiram finished his spell before he’d even hit the living room, before Amir had finished his, and as the Bleeder finally passed out cold, slumping to the floor, Hiram’s hands erupted into flames.

  “Fuck!” Mags whispered next to me.

  “Get. The. Fuck,” Hiram shouted, holding his hands up in front of him like a boxer, “out of my house!” A ball of flame, liquid and roiling, began to bloat between his hands.