by Jeff Somers
On the subways in Manhattan, the Suicides always started off with Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention for a moment? Polite. Then they gave a nice speech about sin, or maybe a nihilistic inevitability, the sun exploding or space aliens calling us home to our forgotten world of origin. Whatever. It didn’t matter. At the end of the speech, they urged you to follow their example, and then they killed themselves. Straight. Direct. Linear progression.
When this speech was made on the platform, it usually ended with the Suicides jumping in front of a train. Sometimes this was timed perfectly, very dramatic. Sometimes there was work on the tracks and they had to stand there, looking grim and purposeful, until a train came rumbling in. Sometimes people actually did join them, tossing aside briefcases and newspapers and phones and jumping down a moment before the train cut them to pieces.
Sometimes when they had to wait, they changed their minds and left suddenly, walking fast for the stairs, heads down.
Mags was halfway to the Suicide when the second voice broke the tight silence of the car.
“Ladies and gentlemen!”
We all turned to look, even Mags, who paused awkwardly in the middle of the aisle to twist around cruelly in his overtight suit. There stood another Suicide, black hoodie, shaved head, a young girl with pink lips and no eyebrows, eyes swollen and red like she’d been crying for years, for decades.
“You may not see it,” she said quietly, “but we are all dead already. Join me, and quit fighting.”
This was a new one. The Futility of Existence. I liked it. Mags didn’t know what to do with the fury he’d been nursing. He stood there, making huge rocklike fists with his hands. Everyone else waited them out, knowing how this ended. When they made their speech on the actual subway car, the exact method of suicide varied depending on personal preference. No one looked ready to intervene. You got used to it. Six months ago, watching people kill themselves in front of you was upsetting. Now it was just annoying. They began speaking simultaneously and I shut my eyes, my only defense. It only made their actual babble more pronounced.
“We have been given a sign.”
“Can any of you doubt the world is in rapid decline?”
“We have all witnessed the Mad Day, when neighbors attacked each other, when children murdered their parents.”
Mad Day. A stupid name.
“It’s been said that not enough righteous people remained for the Rapture to be noticed.”
“We are all in hell, suffering, but there is a way out.”
I opened my eyes.
“But there is a way forward.”
The train lurched on, the lights flickering. I saw I’d made a bad assumption: These weren’t competing assholes, they were from the same club. They stood there, each holding up a small plastic bottle of lighter fluid. Immediately, everyone on either end of the car stood up and crowded into the center, swaying and staggering as the train began to pick up speed again.
“Motherfucker,” Mags groaned. I had to suppress a laugh. A wholly inappropriate, completely crazy laugh.
As they went on, the Suicides began pouring the thick, clear liquid over themselves. The sharp tangy smell of something flammable filled the tight air. And then, hidden beneath it, the heady scent of the gas: Mags had opened a shallow cut on his palm, a thin stream of blood but enough for something clever. Mags didn’t have anything clever, so I knew this was going to be interesting. I crossed my legs and leaned on my knee, watching him with affection. Mags was man’s best friend.
The two kids dropped their bottles onto the floor. Raised up shiny lighters, flicked them open. Snapped a flame into being. All of this in coordination, as if they’d practiced it.
Mags hissed five Words under his breath. I felt the brush of power passing near me, and both flames disappeared as if invisible urchins had crept up behind the Suicides and snuffed them. I decided not to chide Mags for his poor vocabulary. Five fucking Words for that.
The expressions on the Suicides’ faces was priceless. Three more times, they snapped their lighters into life, Mags muttered his little spell, and the lighters went out. Titters and snickers drifted through the car. The first guy got red in the face, planted his feet, and pushed out his chest.
“Fucking assholes!” he shouted.
Behind him, the 125th Street station rolled into view. A smattering of applause broke out and swelled into thunderous clapping. I fought back laughter as Mags and I stood up and made for the doors.
“This is our stop,” I said to the Suicide as we passed him, just for the expression on his face.
The second we stepped out of the station, we were pushed and crashed into, the Harlem crowd so thick we were almost carried along by the current. The noise was intense. Beneath the lowing of the crowd was the static buzz of the cars, inching along in an endless siege of traffic. Horns bled into the air so continuously, they became a single monotonous blur in the air, a bellow of discontentment.
Mel Billington was leaning against a signpost, smoking a cigar, one hand in the pocket of her suit trousers. Her suit matched mine, though it was a little newer and had been tailored for her. Sunglasses and long red hair pulled back into a tight bun.
As always, I was unsettled by Billington. She’d arrived on the heels of Mika Renar’s attempt to bleed the world dry and had announced “we” were “at war,” that I was the natural leader for this enterprise, and that she was my aide-de-camp or something like that. “We” being all the idimustari, the Tricksters and con artists who used a little gas and a few Words to ease our way in the world, that our “war” was with the Archmages and other swells who’d partnered with Renar for a chance at immortality on the bleeding backs of every man, woman, child, dog, and fucking mayfly in the world. I’d let her take the reins, and every asshole who volunteered for our army—and there were tons more assholes of that particular stripe than I ever would have imagined—she took in, issued them a black fucking suit, and organized them. I didn’t know what to feel about that.
Mel spoke without turning as we came near. “How’s the subway working out for you, Chief?”
Mel and her people, they all called me Chief. Mel’s people dressed like her, which I guess meant they dressed like me. It was a little creepy. The way Mel looked at me was a little creepy, too. So far she hadn’t been able to transfer that look to the losers, vagrants, and idiots who kept showing up, looking for me, having heard that I was some sort of savior. They remained Tricksters, grifters, and most of them had started to get that impatient look on their faces that suggested they were getting tired of waiting for me to do something amazing.
“Mags made a new friend,” I said as she turned to face us.
“Fuuuuck,” Mags muttered.
She smiled, but it was a sour half-smile. “You ought to have more security with you, Chief. Our little Confusion Project isn’t fucking foolproof, yes?”
Billington had organized about a dozen of the Tricksters who could do something worth doing into a team who split each day—one shift on, one off—casting Glamours over me, hiding me from prying eyes. A more powerful mage could have tied off a nifty spell for a full-time effect, or created a Fabrication. We needed twelve assholes working nonstop. It was like we couldn’t afford a car, so Billington had built one from cardboard and a garage door opener.
I shrugged. “I’m not enustari, Mel.”
She snorted. “You should start thinking like one. Because they’re the ones trying to fucking kill you, Chief. C’mon,” she added with a brief smile for Mags. “This way.”
She turned and started walking. We fell in beside her, and I was promptly exhausted. People wondered why I liked the subway. At least on the subways I could relax and let something else barrel its way through the earth. On the streets it was all effort, endless and sweaty.
“You have any trouble on the way?”
I shrugged. “Couple of Suicides, but we handled them.”
“Oh yeah? You got two dozen idimustari who’ll bleed f
or you, who’d float your ass down here. Who would at minimum ride the fucking subway with you to make sure nothing happens. But you’re riding the subway alone like a fucking asshole, whose fault is that?”
“Mine. And I wasn’t alone, I had Mags.” I shoved past an old lady pushing what looked like a pile of hair and a handgun in her cart. “At least down there we don’t have to worry about crazy cops who shoot pedestrians, or construction workers who topple cranes on crowds, or Griefers.”
She snorted. “Griefers. You’re worried about fucking monosyllabic kids.”
Griefers. Everything was breaking down, even us. Kids who’d figured out the most basic fact—that anyone could use magic if they knew the Words and were willing to bleed—and the most basic equation—blood plus a Word equals something—running in gangs and bleeding for single-word spells. Fire. Death. Light. Dark. Single Words didn’t do much. You couldn’t kill someone just by shouting the Word for die. And you couldn’t really direct it usefully. But you could cause some damage, make some trouble. That’s all the Griefers cared about. A few years ago they would have been dealt with by the ustari directly. A few years ago they never would have happened, because none of us would have taught them a single fucking Word until they were urtuku.
“Assassins,” Mags grunted. He was walking like he had some sort of wild animal stuffed into his shirt. “Three times, that old bitch has tried to kill Lem.”
A lie. An exaggeration. The last time had been kids. Two girls, maybe ten years old. Hiding under my bed, waiting for me to fall asleep so they could cast a nasty spell on me, one that had been written out phonetically for them on their arms. One of the girls had been there to cast it on me. The other was the Bleeder. But not there to kill me. To transport me. The spell had been written to zombie me out, make me compliant and silent while they took me wherever and I was told to do whatever.
I’d felt sorry for the girls. They were skinny and bruised, and after I caught them, I gave them a hard lesson in dirty pool with a three-Word spell that made them both feel like they were falling, always falling, down a deep hole. I managed to get it into the air before they’d spoken their second syllable, and after letting them feel it for a few minutes, I let them go. They were just kids.
Besides, I knew all I needed to know. Renar wanted me for some reason. Alive. To torture me personally? To question me? I didn’t know. But I’d let the lie stand. It was easier that way.
I didn’t want to talk about Mika Renar reaching out her bony hand across the world to try and kill me. “Mel, run it down for me.”
She laughed. “Fine. Carith Abdagnale. Saganustari, I think. Some might argue. She’s clean.”
“Clean?”
“Nothing to do with Renar. Nothing to do with the tah-namus. She wasn’t part of it. She can help us.”
“She know we’re coming?” I didn’t like giving any warning, considering the most powerful enustari in the world wanted me, if not dead, certainly not well.
Mel shook her head. “She knows I’m coming. Not you.”
I admired the way Mel swaggered through the crowd. She wasn’t much of a mage, I’d learned. Passable. She made sloppy mistakes and half the time her spells did things she didn’t expect. But she had a talent for organization. Every day a new group of shifty, untrustworthy idiots arrived to see the idimustari who’d fucked up Mika Renar’s shit and ask what they could offer me, and Mel was keeping them all straight.
She produced a candy bar from one of her suit’s pockets and held it out to Mags without a word or a glance. The big Indian’s face lit up into a delighted grin as he took it. Then he looked down shyly at his remarkably tiny shoes and stuffed the bar into his own pocket.
“Carith Abdagnale,” I said slowly, “is a pimp.”
Mel shrugged. “She can help us. We need every drop we can get.”
Mel was a True Believer. Figured me for a general, a savior. I wasn’t as sure as Mel was.
I considered Carith Abdagnale as we walked. Hiram had told me stories about her. Talented, he’d said. In the beginning of her career, she’d been one to watch—enustari for sure, given time. But she’d always been strange. Afraid of people. She’d come into possession of this church and hidden away in it. And thrived.
No one had laid eyes on her in thirty years.
Rumors, of course, abounded: She used Glamours to doll herself up and act as one of her own prostitutes, so odds were even that one of her regulars was giving it to a sixtyish woman who’d never been described as attractive. Or that she’d died long ago and her urtuku was trading on the name, which had precedent. We didn’t know much honor, after all, as a class of humans, whether idimustari or enustari.
The traffic was so thick, I figured people were living in their cars now, pulling out folding chairs and charcoal grills every night, hanging out in the cooling air drinking beer, swapping stories of the old days when you could drive three blocks in New York City in under three days. The bodies were so thick on the sidewalk and in the street, pushing between the cracks in the car like mortar between bricks, the heat was palpable, going up a degree for every person within a foot of you. So I was feeling about seven hundred degrees as we walked.
“Something happen downtown?”
Mel didn’t turn. “A bomb or something. What are you gonna do? It’s the new normal.”
She was right. Nothing had settled back into any sort of familiar pattern since Renar’s failed biludha. Every day was a fresh set of disasters, keeping us all on our toes. These sure were exciting times.
After two blocks of swimming upstream—every direction was upstream—Mel carved a path to an old, weathered church. The ancient gray stone looked melted, as if the original faithful who’d built it had been suckered on a quarry deal and built the place from soap instead of stone. It was desanctified, and there was a big brass doorbell wired into the wall on one side of the warped black wooden doors. Mel didn’t pause or ask what we thought. She just rang the bell and stepped back. A second later the door bellowed open and a woman with soft blond curls around her pink face stood framed there, squinting. She looked to be about thirty but had a mischievous grin that made her seem younger somehow.
“Golly,” she said. “He’s a big boy.”
“We’re here to meet with Carith,” Mel said bluntly.
The woman shrugged. She was wearing pajamas under a simple blue bathrobe, like we’d pulled her out of a slumber party. I could feel the cool interior air of the church rushing out at us, bringing with it the subtle scent of flowers, her perfume.
“Sure. Other door,” she said, and closed the big door on us with a definitive bang.
We stood for a moment in confusion, then all three of us turned our heads and found the “other” door, a diminutive wooden portal a few feet to the right. I would have to bend down to get through it. Mags, I thought, would have to either bleed a bit and shrink himself, or slather himself with grease and get some momentum going.
Carved in the stone above the tiny door was the name ABDAGNALE and then some runes, spelling out an-uraš gu. My head for the written forms of the Words was no good, and there were so many alphabets it got confusing. It meant something like my universe, but that was just a cheerful approximation. Writing the Words didn’t mean anything, only speaking them. It was simple lettering, nothing fancy. There didn’t appear to be any lock or latch on the door. For a moment we all just stood there studying it.
“The bad feeling is stipulated, right?” I said.
“She’s clean,” Mel repeated. “And she can help us.”
“Doesn’t mean she wants to. And there’s a lot of daylight between not wanting to murder the world and not wanting to murder me.”
Mags shrugged. “Fuck it. We’re here.”
Mel’s big plan was to recruit big and recruit little. Any time she found out about an ustari of any rank somewhere, she investigated. Most of the mages who’d helped Renar, or who’d joined her at the end to be part of the Immortal Club, were known personal
ities—and currently, by and large, were missing. But Mel scoped out every mage of power she found out about. If you hadn’t been part of the tah-namus, Mel wanted to recruit you for the War. Said War so far boiling down to Mika Renar trying to kill me and me doing absolutely fucking nothing. It was tiring, and I paid attention only when Mel made me. Which she was remarkably good at.
Mags pushed the door in, grunted as he strained through, and I followed. We were swallowed up in a moist darkness. Two shallow steps brought us up into the main part of the old church, where a new girl, also in pajamas and a blue bathrobe, waited for us. This girl was young, fresh-faced and delicate, her blond hair a cloud of golden curls, her eyes almost glowing blue, her skin delicious. Her pajamas were silk and shimmered iridescently as she moved. She was beautiful.
“Follow me,” she said, smiling.
The place was full of girls.
The inside was just a huge room now; all the benches and paintings and other religious artifacts had been removed, leaving just a big room that had been furnished as a series of large “rooms” defined by the borders of their furniture. There was a bar and lounge area where several girls, all wearing sleepwear ranging from prim pajamas to silky lingerie, lounged on plush couches while a skinny Asian fellow in a tuxedo polished highball glasses behind a huge, shiny oak bar. There was a dance floor complete with a tiny, empty stage for a band, and two other lounge-like areas, these filled with men and women. The women dressed like the others, in various versions of sleepwear. The men mostly dressed in suits, mostly expensive. The stained-glass windows gave the light an eerie blue quality, and the high ceiling soaring over us made everything sound distant and muted, like we were watching something on a screen. The furniture was expensive-looking. There was a smell of flowers in the air. I instantly felt warm and happy, swimming through an atmosphere of sex and relaxation, a safe place.
All the girls had their hair up, sometimes piled high in ridiculous mounds of curls. All of them had complex arrangements of things thrust into their hair—knitting needles, pens, chopsticks. They bristled with easy weapons as they glided about.
