by Jeff Somers
I was outclassed. Mute, I started to wheeze and gasp my way to my feet anyway.
I was used to being outclassed.
Pitr Mags stepped in front of me, slashing his blade down his arm without a wince. Black moonlit blood welled up in a heavy flow. In a clear, loud voice, he recited the fucking glowing bird dazzler so quickly, Amir had just turned towards the noise when the bird, huge and bright—bright like the fucking sun out in the nighttime—swooped in from nothing, coalescing into a blinding golden-red illusion and diving right for his face.
Amir hesitated just a second. Just one second to process the stupid cheap Glamour, to see around it. To ignore it as a harmless trick.
Waving it away in contempt, when his vision cleared, he found Claire in front of him again, bloody and shaking.
Amir hesitated, and I knew why: He couldn’t risk casting from her blood. He had to pick her thread out of the gas in the air and be certain, or else he’d fuck up his master’s biludha.
And in that second of hesitation, she took one quick shot of the nightstick and knocked him cold.
He spun like a dancer and collapsed onto the street gracefully. She turned and tucked the stick into her waistband, walking over to me.
Sirens, much nearer. Two blocks.
Blood had smeared itself over the top part of her face. She looked like she was wearing a mask. I watched her walk over to me and wondered what I looked like to her, my head bleeding, slumped on the street, Mags behind me like a trained bear.
She squatted down beside me. She was breathing hard, and she was beautiful. Her dark hair was sticking out in odd ways, but her eyes were bright and wide, excited.
“All right, Chief,” she said. “What do we do now?”
I smiled back at her. “We have to break the ritual. We have to get the glyphs off you.”
“I’m all for getting these fucking things off of me, and I know I’m no magician or whatever, but shouldn’t that be step fucking two? As in: Step one, get the fuck far away from here?”
I shrugged, feeling dreamy. Like I was falling into a hole. Gravity had disappeared, but the bottom wasn’t visible yet, so you could imagine it was just limbo, just falling and falling forever.
“You run, Renar will find you. Might take some time, but she’ll find you. As long as you’re marked, she can’t cast the biludha without you. She can’t mark anyone else for it, either. I don’t know why.” I recalled Hiram waving away questions of why. “That’s just how it is.”
I was fucking up. It was interesting to watch yourself fucking up in slow motion, like an out-of-body experience: Here was the safe way, the path to the light, and you watched yourself walk deliberately into the shadows, eager for oblivion. I knew I should just turn her over to Renar and walk away, leave the business of power to the enustari of the world and get back to eking out my life one day at a time.
“All right, Chief. Step one, get the magic tats removed. How do we do that?”
I sighed. “We find ourselves an Archmage and get them to do it.”
She studied me, her face intent. She was beautiful, and tall, and she’d just beat Calvin Amir unconscious after escaping from two detectives driving her to supposed safety. She nodded and stood up again, plucking the nightstick from her pants.
“All right,” she said. “We should make sure—”
She turned back towards Amir. He was gone.
From behind me: “Fuck.”
13. “TODAY IS THEORY,” HIRAM SAID. “Tomorrow you start learning spells.”
We were on the subway. It was late and the car was sparsely populated. Hiram was fat yet somehow solid and proportional—any thinner and he would look strange. Depleted. At this point I’d known him only a few days. He was wearing a blue pin-striped suit that had started off life as something expensive and tailored, well into its dotage. His white shirt was blindingly bright. His red suspenders, when they peeked from under the jacket, were wide and striking. He stood without holding on to anything, swaying this way and that as the train moved. We hadn’t paid the fare.
“Some spend their lives studying the theory. Truth is, you learn the spell, you bleed, you speak the Words. Nothing more is necessary.”
Like music, I thought. You could spend years learning how it all worked. Or you could learn five chords and a scale and start jamming. I didn’t say anything. I hadn’t known Hiram long, but I knew he was less than interested in my brilliant thoughts.
There were eight other people in the car with us, hurtling underground. No one else was talking. They all wobbled this way and that with the momentum of the car. Staring straight ahead or listening to music. One person reading. The car smelled like piss and was humid. Humid with piss. Every surface felt greasy, though it looked superficially clean. Unless you looked at the advertisements. The advertisements on the upper part of the walls were so shiny and bright they hurt to look at and made everything you looked at next seem dirty.
The day before, Hiram had Bonded me. Taken me as his apprentice. His urtuku. It was a simple ritual—a thimbleful of our mixed blood, fourteen words. I didn’t feel any different.
He held up two plump red fingers. “There are only two things you need to know, Mr. Vonnegan. The Rule of Perception and the Rule of Volume.”
I nodded, turning to look around. See if anyone was paying attention to us. I didn’t like having this talk out in public. Me and an old fat man talking about magic.
He reached out and slapped me. Hard enough to sting. Took hold of my nose between his thick thumb and forefinger, snapping my head back around.
“Mr. Vonnegan, when I am speaking to you, you will pay attention.”
I blinked. I remembered his words, just two days before. I’d finally gotten up the nerve to follow him home. Stood on his stairs for an hour, building up the courage. The door was opened by the big, glaring Indian, who didn’t speak, who just stared at me with his fists curled at his sides, then disappeared, replaced by Hiram in bare feet and his undershirt and suspenders. Think before you choose to be my urtuku, Mr. Vonnegan, he’d said. For every apprentice ends up wishing to kill their gasam in the end.
Standing on the subway, tears in my eyes from the slap, I was beginning to understand.
“The Rule of Perception,” he said, releasing my nose. The train swerved and I scrabbled to grab on to something. Hiram leaned his body, surfing, his balance perfect. “Perception is reality. If you convince someone something is there, it will be there. The eyes and ears are the easiest things to fool. If you require a gorilla to appear in the room, it is easier and more effective to make the mark see a gorilla and hear a gorilla than it is to actually transport a gorilla—or, God help you, create a gorilla. The blood cost to make someone perceive a gorilla can be minimal if you are skilled. The blood cost to transport a gorilla is enough to kill an adult person. The blood cost to create a gorilla is beyond you, Mr. Vonnegan.”
I nodded. It seemed the safest thing to do. Hiram had promised to feed me as part of my apprenticeship. So far he had forgotten to do so. I was having trouble concentrating.
“If you convince enough people that something is there, then it will be there, for all practical purposes. To create a gorilla would require numerous sacrifices. To make everyone in a small area believe there is a gorilla is more manageable. Affecting the mind is easy. Changing the physical structure of the universe is very, very difficult. Do you understand? It can be done. Anything can be done. But the moment you affect the molecules around you, you scale up the blood required by orders of magnitude.”
I nodded again.
“The Rule of Volume,” he continued quickly. I began to panic, realizing this was going to be all I would get from Hiram. All the background he had to offer. “The more blood, the more powerful the spell. It does not matter what words you speak or how cleverly you speak them, or how quickly. The intensity of the effect depends entirely on how much blood you use in the casting. A simple spell to create flame—use a pinprick of blood, you will get a cand
le flame. Use a pint, you will get a fireball the size of this train car. Use a Sacrifice, you will set the city on fire.
“Being clever with the Words, Mr. Vonnegan, is a tactic. It is a battle technique. You will find spells that take pages and pages of words to do simple things, tiny magicks, and you may discover you can edit those spells. Reduce the needed Words. You may discover you can be clever. This will improve your speed, but not the power of the spell. The volume will remain unchanged. The blood needed depends on the effect desired. The speed with which you cast means nothing in terms of the power of the spell. But if you need to cast quickly, it can be an advantage.”
I felt eyes on me. Everyone staring. Thinking we were crazy. Despite everything I’d seen over the last few days, following Hiram around, living with him. Despite the old man in the parking lot so many years ago, I thought, Maybe I am. Maybe I am crazy and always have been.
Sacrifice, I thought. That was what Hiram called bleeding someone dry for a spell. A Sacrifice.
“Some spells, by their very nature, require a certain volume of blood. It is the same principle in reverse—to move a pebble, you need a pinprick. To move a mountain, you need more. If you cast a spell to move a mountain with just a pinprick of blood, you will indeed expend force against the mountain, but it will be as if you walked up to its base and blew gently on it. It will not move.”
“This is,” a robotic voice announced, the dirty stone walls of the subway tunnel melting away to the dirty tiled walls of the subway station, “West Fourth Street.”
“Some have wasted time with single Words,” he added, staring past me as if lost in thought. “This has always failed. You can, of course, cast with a single Word. The Rule of Volume still applies: Speak the word for fire and fire will come, unformed, uncontrolled. Bleed enough people and speak fire and you can burn the world. But it will not be a spell, Mr. Vonnegan.” He looked back at me. “You are not controlling anything at that point. You are merely a gateway for energy, and that energy is almost always destructive. To do anything worth doing, you need form. Function. The Rule of Perception. Intelligence. This is why no ustari will teach the unbonded, and those who are clever and learn a Word are . . . suppressed.” Suddenly brisk and impatient, Hiram shot out one arm and began to roll up his sleeve. “Come. A demonstration. Give me a vein. This is the most powerful spell I know. This is the hun-kiuba.”
I fumbled with my own sleeve, my cheek still burning. I held out my arm, feeling blood rushing to my face in humiliation. He was going to cut us. Right there. In public.
Hiram worked with surgical efficiency. The straight razor came out. With a flick of his wrist, he extended it. Drew it across my arm so quickly, it seemed like he didn’t even touch me until the thick blood welled up, faster and more alarming than I was ready for.
Hiram had just killed me. He then killed himself, slicing his own arm and reciting some strange words.
The train was rolling to a stop. I felt the queasy draining. I got dizzy. A power moving through me, somehow, as if I were not supplying the gas to a fire but, rather, was the doorway through which energy passed.
It was a long spell. I tried to follow it, but I’d been studying the Words only a few days. He lost me. The Words twisted back on each other, slurred into each other. A charlatan’s tricks— Hiram did not want other magicians to steal his spell.
It took Hiram forty-three seconds to recite it. The train lurched. The doors split open. People stood to exit the car. People waited to enter the car. People stared at us. The warning bell sounded, the doors began to close.
And never did.
Hiram took a deep breath and opened his eyes, scanning the car. I stared dumbly at my arm. The cut had not healed but had closed. The bleeding had stopped even as the gash throbbed painfully. There were two other long slices on my arm, on their way to healing fully. Hiram had warned me to get used to being scarred, to start thinking now where I wanted those scars to be.
I looked around. Everything had stopped. The doors were still mostly open; they’d just begun to close. People were paused in the act of moving. Crouched over seats. In midspin. Legs up off the floor. Mouths open. Bags swung out from them in midair, gravity both excused and maintained all at the same time.
“The hun-kiuba,” Hiram said, his voice sounding a little more ragged, a little less polished, “alters time. To a crawl. This is a function of both Rules. Time is a perception. Time does not exist until it is observed. The effect of the spell is always the same; the variable is the area it affects. Its scale. The more blood used, the larger the area. We have each bled a pint, Mr. Vonnegan. And for our efforts, we have affected time within this subway car.”
I forced myself to move. To prove I could move. There was a strange crackling noise; at first I felt frozen, glued in place. Then, suddenly, I was free and able to move. I stared around. I looked through the half-open doors. The platform beyond was similarly frozen.
“Why is time stopped out there, too?”
Hiram scowled, unrolling his sleeve. “Time is not stopped, Mr. Vonnegan. It is relative. Either we are moving incredibly quickly through time, or everyone else on this train car is moving incredibly slowly. Since our perception is what determines reality, Mr. Vonnegan, it appears to us that the platform—the entire world—has been affected. It has not. If we cross outside the affected area of the spell, we will rejoin the normal flow of time. If we were standing on that platform right now, we would observe no change in the world—except perhaps that you and I have just disappeared. We are still here, but moving through time differently.”
I shook my head. “I’ll never fucking understand that.”
Hiram laughed, a booming, theatrical laugh. It was the first thing I’d liked about him.
“You do not have to, Mr. Vonnegan. Perception. Volume. That is all you need to remember. In time I will teach this spell to you. In time you will cast it and bleed another.”
I felt so tired. I recalled the terrible feeling of that power, being pulled through you like you were an opening that was slightly too small for a monstrous thing, being torn open and stretched to accommodate it. I thought of doing that to someone else, and kept imagining a monstrous mosquito, six feet tall, pinning you down and jabbing its stinger into your belly. That memory of smothering, that awful feeling of being drained—I couldn’t inflict that on someone else. It would be impossible. And what did you do with something like this? I wondered. To affect a useful space, like this, you needed a lot of blood. If I bled out two pints of my own, I doubted I’d be able to do anything afterwards.
But to slow down time . . . To be able to slip out of the moment and walk between moments . . . a man who could cast that kind of spell could do just about anything.
“Attend to me, Mr. Vonnegan,” Hiram said, stepping past me. “This will not last long, from our perspective.”
Moving was strange; I once again heard the strange crackling noise and felt at first like I’d been nailed to the floor. Then I seemed to snap free in a sense and was able to move. Everything around me was absolutely still but seemed to shimmer. The slightest, tiniest bit of movement, I thought. Almost imperceptible.
I followed Hiram, feeling drained. Exhausted. I watched dully as he went up to the nearest person, a man in a dark suit, carrying a briefcase, caught in the act of stumbling. As I watched, dumbly, Hiram began going through the man’s pockets.
We worked the entire car. I took one side, Hiram the other. We took cash, but Hiram was most intent on the jewelry, examining every watch, ring, bracelet, and chain briefly but with steady, practiced eyes. He left some of the pieces and took the others. By the end, he was humming happily. He looked tired, but was in the best mood I’d seen him in since coming to New York.
“Come, Mr. Vonnegan,” he said, holding up the wad of cash. “Time for some dinner. And a good bottle of Malbec.”
The car doors had, in fact, closed slightly farther in the time we’d spent robbing the car. Perhaps half an inch. We approached,
and Hiram put a hand on my chest, stopping us.
“Be prepared,” he said seriously. “The transition is sudden.”
He nodded, turned, and stepped through the doors. Vanished.
I stared. One second he’d been moving, right in front of me. Then he was gone. Swept forward into the normal stream of time.
I stepped forward and . . .
14. I STARTLED AWAKE. THE BUS had been our home for so long, I wasn’t sure how we’d adjust to life without it. Mags had gassed up twelve dollars and fifty cents into a small fortune, passing bloody bills with reckless abandon, buying tickets and hamburgers and bottles of water. Three days with nothing to do but sleep and eat and be horrified by the bathroom haunting the rear of the bus. I was starting to feel almost normal.
Across the aisle, Claire sat in the outer seat. Pitr Mags was folded up on his side, his head resting in her lap, sleeping soundly. She was stroking his hair absently as we rumbled through Hill Country. I was deeply in love with her for stroking Mags’s hair. She noticed I was awake and turned her head to look at me.
“So, your man Hiram,” she said drowsily. It was the continuation of one giant conversation we’d been having for days.
Outside, it was dark. Featureless, black. We might have been in some sort of experiment, a vehicle on casters, sound effects, paid extras in the seats around us.
“My gasam,” I said. “My Master, in the sense of having an apprentice.”
She nodded sleepily. I liked the blurry way she got when she was tired. We’d been talking for hours, on and off. Packets of words. I felt like I knew things about her that no one else knew, and I liked that, too. “How do you know he’s dead?”
