We Are Not Good People (Ustari Cycle)

by Jeff Somers

  There was a Word for everything. I rolled this one around in my mind. Monster. Golem. There were a variety of translations. It meant a being constructed, as opposed to created or summoned. Beyond that, specifics were up to the creativity of the mage. They could come in all shapes and sizes.

  The ground shuddered. I assumed this guy would lean towards the deep end of the size pool.

  “How many?” I asked. I started to add, How big? but felt the floor shudder again and decided not to waste my breath. The answer was: Fucking huge.

  “Six,” Fallon said, and then stood up straight, closed his eyes, and began reciting. Casting.

  I didn’t know how much juice he had in that battery of his, but I had no way of accessing it. When there was blood in the air, I could feel it, sense it, take hold, and draw on it. With Fallon, I felt nothing. I turned and found Mags and Ketterly standing at the ready behind me, sleeves rolled up, blades in hand. Daryl floated a few feet behind them, eyes wide.

  I spun back, and the wall directly across from us crumbled inward.

  Standing amid the sudden rubble was a . . . thing.

  It was humanoid. It had arms and legs. A torso. A neck like a stubbed-out cigarette and a head like a gruesome gray potato. It appeared to be made out of stone. A solid single block of stone.

  As I stared, it casually flicked aside the remains of the wall and hunched down to step into the interior.

  My mind raced. Trying to think of something I could cast that would help against a . . . thing. Dimma. The word was hard and dark in my mind. I felt soft and weak. The thing’s hands were permanent fists, spheres of rock the size of barrels. I imagined getting hit by one at speed.

  Six, I thought.

  The dimma moved suddenly. Faster than should have been possible. In a swirl of bricks and dust, it leaped into the building, landing a few feet to our left. The whole floor jumped under me. A second dimma pushed its way into the hole in the wall.

  Fallon threw out his arms and shouted the final word of his spell. The first dimma raised one barrel fist into the air over us.

  Then Fallon turned into a giant.

  He stretched, every part of him simultaneously elongated, like an animation. Fallon screamed as if it hurt like hell. Pops like gunshots reverberated through the air as each of his limbs expanded outward, fast and messy. He doubled, then tripled, then quadrupled in size, crowding the roof, twitching and roaring. Sweat rolled off him, crashing to the floor and spraying all of us as the floor shook.

  “Jesus!” Ketterly shouted.

  “I seen pictures of Jesus, guy,” Daryl shouted. “That ain’t him!”

  I turned to look back. Both Mags and Ketterly were cut, fresh gas welling up from their wounds. My eyes met Daryl’s. The poor guy stared at me, unblinking.

  “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.

  A 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 on to 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 towards 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 upwards, 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 towards 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 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 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 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 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, is there?”

  “Lem,” Mags said quietly. “Lem, what do we do now?”

  I turned to look forward. “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 in the 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, 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, and then I remembered the two cops who had died: Marichal. Holloway. The rest of the city might burn 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 cast only what they’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 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 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 back 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 towards 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 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 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 the appearance of 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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 roa
med. We’d slept on the streets, in cars, wherever we could squat, surrounded by Normals and always on our toes not to tip our hands, not to reveal ourselves. You couldn’t rest like that. At Hiram’s house you didn’t have to pretend, and it 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 shopwindow. 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 untouched. 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, like the necklace 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 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.”