by Jeff Somers
Out of here. I thought, He bled someone to get here. He would bleed someone to leave. Abdagnale would have to relax her rules a little. Give him a window.
I started reviewing spells I had on tap. Things I’d memorized. Stringing them together like puzzle pieces. There was going to be some gas in the air, and if I could touch it, I would be ready.
“I have a list of requirements prepared!” Abdagnale pushed her big hands through the endless piles of paper on her desk. She seized upon a long pink sheet of paper and held it out to the Thin Man. He stood for a moment, sighed, and stepped forward to take it. He stood there, reading.
“You’re not shy,” he said. “This third item may not be possible.”
Abdagnale sank back into her seat with a sigh like a deflating tire. “The terms are non-negotiable.”
“Nonsense.” He looked up at her. “I am the Negotiator.”
“He does not leave this place unless I have an agreement.”
The Negotiator spun and stared down at me. I stared back. “I must have a positive ID. No offense, Carith. Let him speak, so I may validate his identity.”
Abdagnale made a soft noise in protest. “That is not wise,” she sang. “He does not look like much, but he is clever.”
“So I have heard.” The Negotiator stepped closer to the cage and leaned down, his face near mine. I stared back at him. His skin was flawless, and it didn’t look like a Glamour. It looked like perfect, pink-tinged white skin. He smelled like pipe smoke. His eyes were the giveaway. They were deep and had no light in them; they looked raw. “Let him speak, Carith. I must determine if this is the one and only, if I am to bring your outrageous terms to my employer.”
Abdagnale sighed heavily, her body shifting like a mountain. “Very well.”
She did nothing. No Words, no gas. I didn’t feel a thing.
The Negotiator just kept smiling at me for a few moments. The expression on his face was difficult to categorize. I just kept thinking, Give me the gas to make someone bleed. He had to leave, and he wasn’t going to walk out the door and take the subway.
“Tell me, Mr. Vonnegan,” the Negotiator finally said, squinting at me, “tell me anything.”
I blinked. It could be a coincidence, that phrase, that precise piece of old Trickster patter designed to be one of a dozen rapid-fire questions to keep you spinning. Every idimustari in the world had used the phrase tell me anything when Charming or Compelling someone. It was almost a secret handshake. Except this was no Trickster, in his red shoes and with his goddamn teleportation spell. I couldn’t sense any Charm or Compulsion on me, but Abdagnale’s bloodless casting meant anything was possible.
“You look like an asshole in that suit, Colonel,” I said. My voice sounded rusted, and my throat hurt pushing out the words, my tongue swollen and chewed up. But I could speak.
He nodded and stood up. “Very well. I accept this is Lemuel Vonnegan. As to your terms, number three on your list is impossible. It clashes with my employer’s intentions. The rest are acceptable.” He tossed the paper onto her desk. “Do you agree?”
Abdagnale struggled up from her chair again. “This is not negotiation! This is—”
“You are free to reject our terms,” the Negotiator said. “You will regret it. You know her.”
I ran through the spell in my head. I was ready.
Abdagnale stood quivering behind the desk, her tiny hands moving in tight circular patterns. Finally, she waved them in the air and sighed heavily.
“Oh, very well! We are being abused, but what is different about that? We agree. We are being abused, but we agree.”
The Negotiator smiled, throwing his arms out. “Then it is so. I will take possession.”
She hadn’t used his employer’s name. Someone at his level, I might have heard it. I remembered Hiram, in the early days, running down names for me. Him telling me ustari were dangerous, and I needed to know them when they entered my airspace. Me not listening too well. But I remembered some of them. And I’d been hearing new ones for the last six months as Melanie organized things, did the research: Aragaki. Rithy Kal. Tobin Anastole. Alfonse Alligherti. Mycroft Pell. But she hadn’t used his name.
Still smiling, he pivoted and gestured at the grinning black kid lounging stupidly on Abdagnale’s desk.
“May I bleed him? For my return?”
Abdagnale looked at her companion. It would be fast, I realized. The second I opened my mouth, Abdagnale would move to shut me off again. Fast. My heart pounded as I ran through the spells in my head. Too fast. Anything worth casting would take too long.
Anything longer than a Word. I had no time for finesse. I backtracked, cleared my head. Selected a Word.
The kid, for his part, had suddenly realized that Abdagnale and the Negotiator were looking at him like he was a side of beef and they were starving. He slid off the desk as the Negotiator pulled his blade from his pocket, and held up his hands in supplication. “Hey, now—”
The Negotiator simply took two steps forward on the balls of his feet, like a dancer, and slashed his blade across the kid’s neck, then bobbed back, gracefully evading the spray of blood with supple twists of his body. We cast simultaneously.
His first Word was superfluous. Completely unnecessary. The kind of extra syllable you put in because it helped the meter, because it sounded good in the mouth and you wore a fucking white suit for some fancy reason. But it did nothing. The universe noted it and watched it float past, awaiting other instructions. Not the sort of Word an ustari with any training would bother with. He cast like a fucking asshole.
My Word was hum. I felt the flood of gas pouring out of the poor black kid, oily and vital, seized it and barked it out. One syllable. I filled with an intense, rotten sense of power and then it burst out of me in all directions, unstructured, unfocused. Chaos.
Hiram Bosch, my old gasam, once told me that magic was violence. He was right. It had taken me a while to understand.
The cage exploded like a bomb had gone off. Shards of broken metal flew everywhere, a sizzling noise like rain filling the air for one second as a million metal splinters flew through the air at a thousand miles an hour. A gentle blowback from the Negotiator’s collapsed spell washed through the room like a soft breeze.
Suddenly there was gas just pouring into the world, just ready for the taking.
I glanced at Abdagnale. Felt the gas pulsing around me and shouted one word: Sig.
She rocketed backwards, crashing into her chair and falling awkwardly against the wall as I stood up, joints popping. I had to hope she was unconscious. Speed was of the essence. I had to move. I had to keep moving, and keep moving, and keep moving. Whoever the Negotiator was, I had a pretty good idea he worked for Mika Renar, and if they took me, I doubted I’d ever be seen again. A martyr for the cause.
If she wasn’t unconscious, she would shut me up in a second anyway. I hadn’t seen her do anything when altering the rules of her personal universe a moment ago; she would alter them again with no more than a whisper.
There was lots of gas in the air, a torrent. I didn’t pause to consider the volume—this was battle, and there was going to be collateral damage. I’d gotten a feel for it anyway, a bit of practice, and I knew how far you could pull without killing a person. Could identify that thinning moment when it changed from a moving flood to a stagnant pool, and then you had to ease off if you didn’t want to kill him.
I didn’t want to kill anyone just yet.
I kept throwing Words around, single syllables, Griefing my way through it. A screen of destruction to keep everyone off-balance. Kept raining single Words at the Negotiator as he scrambled on his hands and knees behind the desk. It was like throwing boulders at people. There was no science to it, no craft, and I understood why ustari throughout the centuries had punished proto-Griefers, destroyed them on sight. Give everyone one Word and the fucking world would end in a week.
I sucked at the gas in the air and hissed, “Tak!” at his red s
neakers as they disappeared behind the big desk, flinging my arm out as if throwing something underhand. The arm: I still had enough Trickster in me to be unable to resist the theater of it. There was a deafening boom, and a large hunk of the desk shattered into splinters.
An old song ran through my head: I point at the things I wish to command.
Moving as fast as I could, I circled around the desk after him, pulling in more gas and shouting the Word again. My voice sounded walled off, insulated. The floor exploded a half second behind him. He was a nimble bastard. He was moving too fast, but there was no time to stop and think, reconsider, recite something pretty. Keep moving, keep moving. With ten seconds I could have come up with something sneaky, something clever. It was what I did. But in ten seconds this freak in the white suit would be gone or slitting my throat.
I could hear him reciting something, hot and breathless. I shouted, hoarse already, and thrust my arm out. Again. Again. Splinters from the floor pelting me as I chased the slippery fucker out through a back hallway. The space was a dusty, paper-filled concrete box linking the office with the middle of the main church hall. It was piled up in towering, yellowing stacks, bursting out of five ancient wooden filing cabinets, fluttering in the breeze of the door as it slammed against the wall.
The Negotiator skittered backwards from me on his ass, pushing with his feet and hands on the dirty floor. His nice white suit was stained and torn. He was still whispering his spell, which was discipline, I had to admit.
I shouted the Word and pushed out my hand, and he rolled to the left as the floor exploded where his groin had been a moment before.
A second later, I sensed rather than heard his cadence, and I was in the air.
The thin figure emerged from behind one of the dust-layered filing cabinets with his index finger extended towards me. He flicked his finger to the left and I jigged with it, tethered by an invisible line.
I sucked in breath. Pulled back my arm. He jerked his hand to the right and smacked me into the wall, cracking the plaster and rattling my teeth, making my vision go red for a moment. He jerked his hand back, and I popped free from the hole I’d just created and went sailing into the opposite wall.
I came to a second later, head pounding, shoulder aching, staring up at the ceiling’s dark wood tiles, which had been fitted together God knew when and had ornate patterns of spirals and crosses carved into them. I coughed something thick out of my throat and breathed in plaster dust. I felt the force of his spell tugging at me violently, but I was stuck, snagged on some piece of lathing that refused to break free. My voice like jelly, I gurgled my Word and pushed my free arm weakly at him. I still had a pool of gas in reach—dimly, I thought it should have faded a great deal by now—and it tore up the old polished floorboards directly in front of him, tipping over two filing cabinets and sending a big hunk of lucky floor directly into the Negotiator’s face. He flipped backwards with a cry, and I tore free from my perch, first sailing up to hit the ceiling nice and hard, then free-falling back to the floor. I twisted around and landed on my injured arm, pain searing through me like a few bones had broken loose and jabbed directly into my lungs.
One breath, two. Two seconds of quiet.
Dredging up useful Cantrips from the dark corners of my brain, I rolled away, muttering. A Glamour version of me remained in place, facedown on the floor, one arm bent unfortunately beneath it. I rolled to the wall, grimacing, then started crawling along the perimeter. Worming my way inch by inch, I got behind the Negotiator in the narrow hallway. I had a good angle on him. Just as he finished his spell and realized he’d cast on a Glamour, I sucked in breath, feeling for the shrinking pond of gas, which was still out there but now felt more like a wildfire somewhere over the horizon. I got more dust than air and broke into a spasm of wet, painful coughs.
He whirled and, stealing a page from my book, snapped a single Word at me. I threw my arm up in front of my face, but felt nothing. No explosion, no mist of splinters. I stumbled to my feet and pulled my arm away, but I was blind. Perfect, inky blackness everywhere.
Smarter than me.
Keep moving.
I ran forward, blind, hands out in front of me, shouting my Word and feeling the impact of it through my feet. Trying to create chaos, to keep him spinning. One hand tracing the wall, I followed the hall back into the cavernous main part of the old church where we’d entered. I could feel the air opening up around me, the whispers ongoing, Abdagnale’s people unaware that their tiny godling was unconscious in her office. I sidestepped and pressed my back against the wall and stopped, gulping air and running through the hundreds of Cantrips in my head, linking some together, splicing them. Pulled on the shrinking pool of gas and muttered out a ragged, raw spell, sixteen syllables. If I’d heard exactly how he’d blinded me I could have shaved that down, but I had to cover all the possibilities: that he’d cast on my eyes, that he’d cast on the area around me, that he’d used a subtle Glamour to fool me into thinking I’m blind.
My vision snapped back.
The Negotiator, bleeding from a deep cut over one eye, was right in front of me.
He opened his mouth. I put my fist into it. Sometimes the best tricks were the old ones.
Pain shimmered up my arm as he staggered back, fresh blood bubbling over his lips. I seized it from him, fresh and hot, slick like poison in my mental grasp, and spat the Word at him. Again, sending him reeling backwards, off-balance. Then I launched myself at him, knocking him to the floor, sending a group of whores scattering and screaming, suddenly aware that something in paradise had gone terribly wrong.
None of them had left. They all stood there with expressions of terror, scattering like birds in formation. But not leaving. Abdagnale’s universe—I wondered if any of them had ever left. Could ever leave.
The Negotiator groaned, wet and bubbly. I crawled over him, planting myself on his chest. He spasmed and coughed a spray of warm blood onto my face. I sucked in breath, lungs burning. Poked around for that swamp of gas. It had dried up, gone stale. For a split second I thought I should feel something about that. I’d spent so many years avoiding bleeding anyone. So many years exhausted, asleep on my feet, perpetually a few pints low. And now I’d gone months living off other people’s gas. And now I’d bled someone. Bled them dry. I focused on the Negotiator. He was gurgling blood, trying to speak. To recite. I put my palm over his mouth and pressed. His eyes widened proportionately to the pressure I exerted. Then they closed again, and I had a brief sense of him relaxing, letting it happen. Letting me kill him.
“Tell me,” I said in gasping jerks, “what I’m missing. Why do Mika Renar and Cal Amir want to kidnap me? Why not just kill me?”
His eyes popped open. He squinted at me, coughing blood onto my palm. I grabbed hold of his jacket with my free hand, tight, and pulled my hand away from his mouth, prepared for him to try something—a Cantrip, a single Word. It was what I would do. Except I would have had it ready, spitting it out in a spray of blood the second some idiot let me. Instead, he stared at me. There was something in his eyes, a burnt light, something broken and horrible. “Mika Renar and Cal Amir,” he said, “did not contract for you, idimustari.”
I froze. I was shivering, shock and reaction, adrenaline curdling inside me. For months now those two names had haunted my every move. Mika Renar. Cal Amir. An Archmage and her apprentice who had tried to murder the world, irritated at me for spoiling their plans.
“Then who—”
With a snarl he rolled me, pushing me off to the side, and was up and running, reciting as he went. I felt the old familiar yellow drain of someone casting off of you, pulling your lifeblood out. My vision went blurry as I pushed myself up, ready to give chase, and then I stumbled to my knees as he completed his spell, and I could sense he was gone. There was an eerie quiet in the old church then, except for a low buzz of weeping somewhere.
At least he hadn’t bled me to death. I assumed he’d just gotten clear of the church, just cast some
thing fast to get over to the street.
I staggered back to the office, trying to pull myself together in case Carith Abdagnale had come to, ready to spit out some shrill spells. As I limped through the dusty corridor, the weeping got louder.
It didn’t matter; Abdagnale was gone. Whether she’d fled or been taken, I didn’t know. The office was a mess. The desk had been flipped over at some point. My shattered cage was a pile of metal shards, the other two cages intact. I shuffled over to Mel’s and knelt with a wince as something caught in my back like a piano wire hooked in to my nerves. She was sitting with her knees up at her chest, her arms wrapped tightly around her legs. Staring at the floor of her cage.
She looked up at me, and her face froze the Words I’d been about to speak.
I turned my head. Sitting on the floor with his back to the overturned desk was the skinny black kid. He was a mess of dried stale blood and bruises. But he was alive and pretty healthy all things considered, one hand clamped over his own throat like he was keeping himself alive with direct pressure. Staring at us with a mean look, like he was trying to figure out the best way to kill us. Which I forgave. If I’d been abandoned after all that, I would probably be a little surly, too.
I looked back at Mel. Her eyes were wide, the dark makeup running down her face. We stared at each other for a few seconds as everything seemed to drain into my feet, bolting me to the floor.
I stood up again, back exploding, and turned around.
Mags was curled up on the floor of his cage. A shard of metal the size of my hand had clipped him in the throat. His hands were curled around the bars of the cage as if he’d tried to bend them, tried to break free. He was pale and inert, dirty and wild-looking.
He was dead.
I was on my knees. I didn’t remember getting there. I stared at his hands.
I’d bled him. It hit me and then was obvious. His throat had been torn open by my brilliant, clever bit of Griefing, and I’d been too busy chasing down the Negotiator to realize I was casting off of Mags. I felt melted to the floor and became deadweight formed into something vaguely human. Then, with a lurch, my heart went into overdrive. I realized I’d been holding my breath, and emptied my lungs with a single forceful explosion of air. My brain activated: I ran through every trick I knew. Every Cantrip, every mu, I’d ever learned. Every bigger spell I’d ever heard, that Hiram had mentioned or written down in his notes. I reached out desperately for the trickle of gas leaking from the injured kid, a seeping head wound. Not enough. Not enough for anything useful.
