by Jeff Somers
I tried to raise an arm to pat Mags on the shoulder. My arms wouldn’t work. I was broken. Amir had broken me. With a fucking Cantrip three words long.
Mags untied my ankles and pulled away from me, grinning his stupid monkey grin. I didn’t move. He frowned, working through it, and muttered a quick bunch of words and I was free of the chair. The invisible threads that had laced through my skin dissolved and I slid off the chair to my right, hitting the floor hard. I convulsed, trying to cry out, but couldn’t get my lungs to cooperate. Smoke floated lazily up around me.
“Fuck,” Mags said, the word just drooling from his mouth like lazy air. A moment later my neck muscles screamed as he grasped my head in his immense hands and pointed it more or less up towards his troubled, grit-smeared face.
I wanted to say, Don’t worry. I’ll die here, but I’m okay with that because I am tired and it hurts to breathe. And we’re all going to die in a few moments anyway. And that I was glad to die with him, the only friend I’d ever had. That I was sad to have let Claire die. All the other girls, too, all the ones the Skinny Fuck had kidnapped. All I could do was frown at Mags’s shadowed face.
Abruptly, he let my head drop into his lap. Pulled his sleeve up to the elbow, revealing several fresh, weeping wounds. Tore one open with his fingers, a fresh stream of dark blood pouring down his arm. He started to recite, rocking a little as he did so. A concentration exercise. Like he was three years old, rhyming out the fucking times tables. As he spoke, my pain faded. Remained, lurking under a layer of gauze, but manageable. I could move again, and laboriously extracted myself from Mags’s lap.
I marveled at this. Being a Trickster had always meant being a parasite. You pushed your pincered head deep into someone’s flesh and sucked them dry. Even if they volunteered, even if they exposed their own bellies and invited you to live inside them, it was parasitic. It was taking something from someone.
This was different.
Mags, giving me his own energy. Just enough to get me back to exhausted and ruined instead of nearly dead. I still didn’t want to move. I wanted to remain curled up with my head in his lap and sleep until the world ended and released me. But he’d just bled to help me, and I owed him something. So I focused my eyes on him. Was surprised to find tears in them, an overwhelming feeling of affection pulsing in me. I loved this freak. My only friend, but when you had Pitr Mags, you didn’t need more than one. “Good to see you, Magsie.”
I thought, If these are the last ten minutes of my life, not a bad way to go. I wished Hiram had made it, too.
His ears perked forward like a puppy’s. “Good to see you, Lem.” He got to his feet, breathing hard.
I slipped an arm around him, wincing from the agony that remained in spite of his spell. We limped together out of the room. What had I said to Amir? What had I convinced him of? I couldn’t remember, but I suspected that in the end, I’d scribbled the Cantrip out for him. Somewhere inside, I knew I had, in shaky, big-looped letters, numb from pain and despair.
The blood in the air was immense. I’d heard of huge rituals in the past. Battles staged. Cults organized. Mass murders scripted. An enustari in India once engineered the capture and slow bleeding of more than a hundred British soldiers to launch a biludha into motion. Not so long ago, an enustari had caused an Airbus A320 to crash in são Paulo, killing 181 people to kick-start a ritual. This had happened over and over, history absorbing the tragedies and explaining them, investigating them, eschewing anything that didn’t make sense—because magic didn’t exist.
I’d never felt even a hint of the power I felt being drawn now.
Claire would be consumed, burned up, by the spell. She would die in pain. Suffering. Alone. Thinking maybe I hadn’t even tried for her.
We stepped out into the hall. I hadn’t been on the upper floors of the house before. It was a fussy-looking place. The walls were paneled in dark wood that looked like it had a hundred years’ worth of wax on it. The floors were old, wide planks. Thick, dusty-looking runners covered them, heavy things from a previous age. Right outside the door, a small piece of furniture and what had once been a white-and-blue vase had been smashed to pieces. Deep marks had been gouged into the walls. Pitr Mags, who was usually scared of his own shadow, airing it out for a change.
Down, I thought. Head down. Claire was down. Renar and Amir would be down.
The hallway was endless and dark. Doors on either side. Heavy black doors with silver handles. I did not want to know what was behind any of them. The staircase had seen some battle: It was a wide, curving number. The railing had been knocked out of place and hung useless, like a twig clinging to a branch. A hole about the size of Mags’s head had been punched in the drywall halfway up.
The silence was total. Every noise we made climbing down seemed to echo back at us extravagantly. As we cleared the landing, a sizzling, crackling noise filled the void. As we stepped onto the first floor, the crackling noise resolved into a wall of fire: All the curtains and some of the furniture were burning. A slow, black-smoke kind of fire. So slow I felt like it would be burning several years from now, moving from the walls to the rugs, to the floorboards, back to the walls.
We found Fallon in what must have been the formal dining room. The huge mahogany table in the middle was ablaze; the orange flames reached up towards a crystal chandelier, making it sway this way and that from the rising heat. Two Bleeders lay prone on the floor. One was on fire, the black material of his nice suit licked by bluish flames. Flames licked at one of Fallon’s sleeves, too, but he didn’t seem to notice. He looked like a ghost: gray and skinny and dry. Like tinder. Like he might just combust.
“We are too late,” he said in a dull tone. “The Rite is begun.” His voice sounded red with self-loathing. “I looked forward to my work. I woke up the other day, the day you visited with me, and my heart was light, because I had so much work to do. I was a fool. And now I am not a fool, I am merely useless.”
I staggered over and almost fell into him, taking him by the lapels of his jacket. I could smell the fabric burning. “We have to try,” I said, begging. I needed help. Fallon was enustari. He knew spells I’d never heard of. I thought of Claire, burned up, swelling like a deep-sea fish brought to the surface and exploding into power, then instantly vacuumed into Renar’s spell. I needed him.
He shook his head. “Mika Renar and Cal Amir, together, are too strong. If we could have disrupted the Rite before they began . . . Now it is too late.”
He was right, of course. Renar would be reciting the biludha, and Amir would be there to hurl death at anyone who might interfere.
I let go and stepped back. Mags was there to stop me from falling over. “Then fuck you. I’m going to see if I can’t stop the end of the world.”
Fallon sighed, then suddenly noticed he was on fire. With an almost amused-sounding Word, he snuffed the flames on his arm. He hadn’t bled again, but this time there was so much gas in the air, he didn’t need any fancy Fabrications. And the biludha wouldn’t notice a trickle of blood stolen away here and there. I wondered how big a spell you would have to cast on that gas to make a dent in the ritual. If I knew any big enough. “Those of us who know the art may survive, Mr. Vonnegan. I’ve deduced that the biludha does not, as your gasam proposed, kill everything.” He looked up and his smile was awful. “Just almost everything. We ustari may survive. To fight on.”
Anger swelled inside me and for a moment I was able to stand on my own, shaking. “Fuck you again, you cowardly cunt. A dead world filled with us? Are you fucking kidding?”
I wanted to strike him. I sensed he would let me, that he wouldn’t put up any magical defense or punishment. That he wanted to be hit.
Sirens in the air. Too close for the fire department all the way out here. Police. I thought of the unmarked cars outside Hiram’s. Two dead detectives and a serial killer, I supposed, got all the resources you needed to follow even a couple of ustari out into the woods.
Fallon suddenly clar
ified. He glanced in the general direction of the sirens and nodded to himself. “Go,” he said. “This I can do. Go, and I will deal with the police.” I still shook with fury, still wanted to slap him. Then I deflated, and the rage leaked out of me, replaced by exhaustion. As Fallon moved past me, trailing his own black smoke from his singed arm, I spun and almost fell over again.
“Wait! Where’s the entrance? How do I get in?”
“I do not know,” he called over his shoulder. He was moving with an agility I remembered from my youth, tearing off his jacket as he walked. “I designed the Artifact, Mr. Vonnegan. Its entrance has been obscured.”
He stepped out of the room, and was gone.
“Fuck,” Mags muttered. I thought of Ketterly. Nowhere to be seen. The place was going nuclear, and the smart play was to get going. The smart play was to be anywhere but here. Go and set your affairs in order, if there was time. If there wasn’t time, at least you might hope that every step you took would equal one more second of existence when the ritual paid off. I could feel the level of energy swelling around us already—a quarter, half, three-fourths of the way through?
I spun around, eyes searching. The smoke clung to everything like slime. The roaring of the fire and nothing else. No shouting, no screams. People were being used as spiritual batteries somewhere nearby, but the only proof was the buzzing of blood in the air.
I closed my eyes. Tried to imagine myself as Mika Renar. A century old. Paralyzed. A fucking red dragon in her lair, licking her eternal wound.
Paralyzed. The whole fucking house was stairs. You could cast a little and float around, sure, but what a fucking bother. Why not just be able to get wherever you wanted to go right from the room you did your business in?
Opening my eyes, I found myself alone in the burning room with Mags. “The study,” I said. “Has to be.”
We tore through the house. The fire was spreading. Mags sailed ahead of me even though he didn’t know where he was going. My lungs burned and my limbs were jelly. My muscles ached beneath Mags’s magical anesthetic. I sucked in smoke and coughed it back out, shambling along, trying to sync up the flaming, smoky house with my memory. We were coming from the opposite end of the house; Amir had walked me in through the front. We ran past the study door twice before I realized it. The door was as I remembered it: It looked like leather, black and studded. Not at all like a door except size and shape.
It had no handle. It was shut tight and didn’t move when Mags put his shoulder to it. Fucking ustari. Nothing was simple enough that it couldn’t be replaced by a fucking spell. Another rolled-up sleeve, another slice for Mags, and two words and a shoulder later the door burst inward, knocked off its hinges. Mags only had one way. Loud.
The study was empty. It was thick carpet and the huge ebony desk and the bookshelves. Exactly as I remembered it, without the dried-out mummy and the delectable illusion.
The bubble of energy was so huge, the hairs on my body were standing up, crackling. There was pressure in my ears, like I’d just taken an elevator on a fast ride.
The room had the same sealed feeling I’d experienced before. Like the walls were thick and soundproofed. Like the whole space had been poured from a molten state into a mold, the walls continuous. Like we were deep underground.
I paused. Deep underground.
I spun and looked at the door. Huge. Four feet wide, eight feet tall. Studded. Black. Not exactly wood.
“Give me a bit of gas, Mags,” I said. My voice was a croak. Every muscle in my body ached.
Mags started to do it without hesitation. Just flicked out his blade and raised his arm. At the last second, I turned and grabbed his wrist.
“Wait,” I said.
I closed my eyes. The whole place was a fucking generator. There was so much gas in the air, I could cast anything. I felt it, grabbed on to it. Took some of the excess that was spilling out, muttered four syllables. Felt the warm breeze of power trickle through me. Not enough to be noticed by Renar under the circumstances. Behind that trickle, Jesus fucking Christ, a fucking ocean. I could feel it trying to roar in, fill me with light and rot, energy and death.
I opened my eyes. Could see the runes on the door, glowing clearly. I ran my eyes over them, knowing what I’d find. A portal. You stepped in on the first floor of the house, you stepped out somewhere else entirely. Teleported. Could take you anywhere in the world as long as the creator of the portal could physically travel to the other location to lay down the runes.
Renar was in a wheelchair. She wouldn’t want to bother with stairs, or a ramp, or an elevator, if she could create a portal and instantly be a few hundred feet below. You walked through a doorway on the first floor, you stepped into a study deep underground. It was elegant.
I turned around again. The room looked the same. I stepped over to the nearest bookshelf. Reached up for one of the leather-bound books. Titles in faded rusty blood. My hand came up against what felt like a glass partition.
There were no books. No shelves. It was all an illusion.
I felt for the cloud of power surrounding us, like a nearby star blowing a solar wind against us. Spoke a few words, felt the resistance of a really strong, well-crafted Glamour, something beyond what I normally encountered in my Trickster life, beating idiots like Ketterly at their game. I tried again. Eight Words. Ten. Fifteen. I kept probing it, piling on more, drawing more and more gas in a thick, invisible thread. Siphoning Renar’s biludha for myself.
It was glorious. The power was incredible. Like sunshine flowing through you. Life itself—literally. The lives of people being crushed like bugs nearby, squeezed dry, fed right into me. It was nauseating. I retched, my whole body shuddering. It was wonderful. Like the purest drug in the world poured directly into me, lighting me up. I wanted to puke. I wanted to dance. I was a parasite living in the universe’s bowels, and I was getting fat on death.
Twenty-two Words, and I felt the Glamour break apart.
I opened my eyes and we weren’t in a study anymore. The huge ebony desk and red chairs were still there, but the bookshelves were gone. We were in a small cave. The walls were rough rock, sharp and jagged. A single flickering lightbulb hanging from the ceiling gave us the only light.
In front of me was another door. Steel. Not fancy. It looked charred and blasted, as if created by applying lightning bolts to something primeval, a lump of metal from the ground. It had a simple mechanism. There was no magic keeping it locked. It was just a door that had been hidden by simple magic.
I reached out and found the handle was warm under my skin.
I pulled it open, and the room filled with shrieking.
27. THE SHORT, ROUGH TUNNEL HAD been just tall enough for me to crouch in, so narrow I thought Mags might not be able to squeeze himself through it. It was dark, but plenty of light bled from the other end to make it navigable. After a dozen feet, I’d ducked under a rough sort of lintel and into a tiny space with no roof.
The floor was polished black stone. It glowed with a dim bluish light.
It was a small space, and it was crowded.
Mika Renar was in her ancient wheelchair, slumped to one side as if someone had dropped her into it carelessly, then not bothered to right her. Cal Amir stood across from her. They were both chanting, speaking the Biludha-tah-namus rapidly.
Between them, lying on a narrow platform made of the same stone as the floor, was Claire.
She was conscious and terrified. Her eyes were locked on me. She lay stiff and still, as if kept there by an invisible force beyond the chains around her. She didn’t look like she’d been tortured or beaten in any way. She didn’t look good, either.
The screams were a wall of sound pushing down on us. I looked up, almost expecting a black disc of solid noise. From the tiny compartment I was standing in, Fallon’s hellish architecture spiraled upwards, widening as it went. Women, all of them blurred copies of Claire in height, hair, shape, and general palette, were chained to the walls of the corkscrew and ha
d been for some time—by all appearances decades, centuries, approaching forever.
They were maddened, spectral things, formerly women.
The ones nearest were just dirty and terrified, but as I looked up, they got worse and worse. By the time I’d scanned the third level, they were ghosts, jibbering and raving. Screaming, I had the feeling, because they’d been screaming for so long, they knew little else anymore.
Seeing them all together in one place, in uniform physical condition, I realized they not only looked alike, they all looked like Mika Renar. A Mika Renar with dark hair, a Mika Renar from eighty years ago, but Mika Renar nonetheless.
With a passing resemblance to Cal Amir, too. With magic on your side, anything was possible, and I thought of Renar’s spectacular, erotic Glamour, and decided maybe I’d figured out why it was so good, so practiced.
I looked higher. The Fabrication stretched up and up. Widening and wrapping around. About halfway up to the darkened canopy of bedrock above us, the girls were on fire.
It was a blue-green fire. The Fabrication twisted up and away, wrapping around itself, each circle of the thing reaching higher up into the rock. The girls were chained in place, the ones near the top dark. Dead. Burned away by the ritual, every bit of them used to fuel it. As each one began to burn, she fueled the next step. As each one caught fire, the one next to her began to scream and kick even harder. Uselessly.
It leaped to the next one in line every few seconds. When it did, the girl would stop screaming for just a moment and tense up as the universe closed its grip around her and started to squeeze. Then she would flare up, too bright to look at, and I would feel the invisible sun of power swell.
A dry wind whipped at me, swirling through my clothes and tugging at me in different directions every moment. A crazy, impossible wind. The noise wasn’t so bad, I realized—but everything sounded muted, like cotton had been stuffed deep into my ears. The screams, the wind, all of it far away but right there next to me. And Renar’s and Amir’s voices clear and loud, like they were standing next to me.
