We Are Not Good People (Ustari Cycle)

by Jeff Somers

  When we burst out on the other side, we passed the wall of tollbooths, empty and dark. There were a few other cars on the roads, but not many. Half the streetlights were out.

  Fallon had set up a new workshop in a massive former warehouse down by the rail tracks. It was a big brick building with broken plate glass all around the perimeter, the interior of the first floor completely and utterly ransacked. The walls and floors had even been stolen, everything stripped down to studs and joists. We had to balance on the joists as we crept in, arms stretched out. Except Mags, who bounded forward at nearly a run, making the old wooden beams bounce under us like living things.

  This time Fallon wasn’t relying on complex Glamours to hide his workshop from the world. An abandoned building and a freight elevator that worked only if he wanted it to: elegant. As Mags arrived, the elevator kicked into life, rattling and coughing its way up from below.

  The Old Man stood in the exact center of the carriage, wearing a pair of greasy yellow overalls that looked thick and hot enough to stop a bullet. A pair of blackened gloves hung out of one pocket. One of his too-long brown cigarettes dangled from one gray lip. Ev Fallon’s face had only gotten more deeply lined, more shadowed in the last two years. There were dark circles under his eyes but those eyes were still bright and sharp.

  “Mr. Mageshkumar,” he said, thin brown cigarette bobbing, smoke spitting out into the cool air. “Mr. Vonnegan. Ms. Billington.” His eyes landed on Remy and Roman standing silently behind us. “Assorted freaks. To what do I owe the pleasure?”

  “Consultation,” I said. “Regarding your area of expertise.”

  He nodded but didn’t move. “I thought you were traveling,” he said. “To bring justice to the world.”

  I didn’t know if Fallon had had previous dealings with Rithy Kal. It was a touchy subject. Fallon was our only ally of substance, the only enustari we counted on our side. As much as he was on our side. Because he was also the man who’d designed Renar’s murder machine. The man who’d left us to die there. When he’d wandered into the dinner later, possibly filled with shame and remorse—though no guarantees there—he’d been fucking lucky to find us alive.

  And, I reminded myself, for some reason hearing it in Hiram’s booming actor voice, he’d waited until we’d won. Or at least: not lost.

  “We did. What we came back with was kurre-nikas.”

  He studied me with a slight tightening of the eyes and reached up to pluck the cigarette from his mouth. He flicked it into the darkness and stepped aside, exhaling smoke. “Come, then.”

  We crowded into the elevator, and Fallon worked the doors and pressed the bottommost button. We lurched downward with just the screech of the old elevator around us.

  “Mr. Mageshkumar,” Fallon said without turning. “Say for me your Binding.”

  Mags choked and pushed his hands into his pockets, staring down at his surprisingly small feet. “Now?” he said shyly. “Wait—I made a spell. A mu. Make people bray like donkeys whenever they try to speak. I made it.”

  This was news, Mags making up a spell. Assuming it wasn’t riddled with grammatical errors that would instead summon several dogs into the room, or mysteriously do nothing at all, it was almost amazing. The Mags I knew—the Mags I’d known, before he’d been brought back—had never been able to remember a spell for more than a few days, much less write one from scratch.

  I studied the big bastard as the elevator rumbled down. Felt the strangeness again, like something had shifted in his face that was so subtle and minute, so tiny, that I couldn’t place it. But my underbrain knew.

  Fallon was not to be dissuaded. “That is well, Mr. Mageshkumar, but I did not ask if you had created a spell to make people bray like donkeys. At our last lesson, I asked you to memorize the Binding. Recite it now, please. Do not pause or start over even if you make your usual mistakes. Remember, a Binding is not your common spell. Mistakes do not warp its effects. Failure to complete will not release unfocused energy.”

  “Why is it different?” I asked. I’d taken it upon myself to be Mags’s advocate. He didn’t know what questions to ask.

  “Because Fabrication is about simplification through repetition. Mass production of the effect. When you create a Fabrication, you are freeing yourself from the time and blood constraint of casting—but much of that must be invested into the Fabrication during its creation. That is what the Binding does—but come, this is not theory, Lemuel. Mr. Mageshkumar, say for me your Binding. When you can make your Binding work, then perhaps you are ready to know why it does so.”

  Ritual. It felt good. Hiram and Mags were dead, Claire was silent, the world was broken, but I had little rituals to cling to.

  Hiram. Fallon’s teaching style was like Hiram’s, with the disdain, but without the profanity and sarcasm. It was comforting. I could close my eyes and imagine the slaps and insults, and it felt almost like old, fat, blackhearted Hiram was still with me.

  Mags began to speak the Binding that Fallon had been laboriously trying to teach him for months now. The Binding was the final spell in the creation of any Fabrication. It imbued the machine or contraption or rock or whatever with the energy that made it work. That was the limit of my comprehension of the art, and I suspected that despite months of work, Mags’s comprehension wasn’t much better.

  The Words were easy enough. Mags’s problem was a brain that was at least three sizes too small. My problem was that my usual skills—my ability to cut the Words down, to reduce spells to their basics—worked against me. Because the first rule of Fabrication, of creating an Artifact, was that more Words meant more powerful. Always. More Words, bigger Artifacts—mass. More Words, more power—density. These were, so far, my only takeaways from Fallon’s droning lectures.

  When Mags finished, Fallon sighed, conveying infinite sadness and disappointment. He left it to Mags—and me—to figure out why he was disappointed. He always did.

  The elevator ride, as usual, was disturbingly long. Hoboken was built on fucking sand. Though there wasn’t a basement deeper than five feet in the whole town, the freight elevator just kept going. We rode out the last minute in silence, then the carriage settled loudly with a rusty scraping sound that made me dread the return trip. Fallon worked the doors again, and with a sweep of his long, thin arm beckoned us to enter his new workshop.

  The place was a crowded machine shop. One big room, it wasn’t cavernous like the last one, but it was big enough. A simple metal workbench stretched along the length of one wall, littered with scrap metal, hand tools, and other debris. There was a smell of solder in the air. Big machines with obscure uses were bolted into the concrete floor, and the place had a hot, greasy feel. There was a hum, too, barely there but somehow deep and inside me, resonating with my bones. I figured there was probably a hundred, two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of equipment in the place: two hundred grand of the old money, when currency was worth something. But we ustari, we never paid for anything. Especially Archmages like Fallon.

  “You know that name,” I said, stepping through the thick air as Fallon crossed to the workbench and retrieved a pair of glasses that were so light and thin they were practically invisible. He slipped them on and turned, leaning back against the workbench and crossing his arms as his eyes landed on Pitr Mags, who was pulling on a long metal lever attached to something that looked like an overgrown coffee grinder and frowning in a way that signaled comedy or tragedy, coming soon.

  Keeping his eyes on Mags, Fallon nodded slightly. “Yes.”

  “What does it mean?”

  He looked at me for a long moment. “I do not know.”

  There was a sudden deep boom, and then Mags was scampering backwards from the machine, face red and alarmed. He slid to a halt and looked around at us, then pushed his hands deep into his pockets and hung his head.

  I looked back at the old man. He was making a show of removing and cleaning his glasses. “You don’t know?”

  He sighed. “I know the
term. I have heard it. But I cannot tell you what it is.” He put his glasses back on. “The kurre-nikas involves someone I used to know. A former acquaintance.”

  This was fucking fascinating. I’d begun to imagine that Fallon had emerged, fully formed, from the ground a few years ago, perhaps created by the power of my desperation. The idea that the man had a history made me vibrate with excitement.

  “Well,” I said, “let’s go have a chat with them.”

  Fallon hesitated, then nodded slowly, finally looking at me. “That will require some blood.”

  34. AS HE SCRUBBED HIS ARMS up past the elbows with a yellow soap that smelled like gasoline and foamed ridiculously, making a sizzling noise, Fallon said, “You told Cal Amir about my Fabrication,” in a flat voice that was somehow threatening.

  Ten feet behind us, Mags was practicing his Binding over and over. I didn’t know what Billington was up to.

  I shrugged, my own hands in my pockets. “At the time it was a tactical decision.” I remembered Cal Amir in the car. There’s a secret room in the basement. I will search for it.

  I looked at the sheaf of papers we’d taken from Kal’s place, getting wet on the bench beside the sink. “How bad is it?”

  He shrugged. “It is a mechanism for storing sacrificed energy, yes?”

  I stared dumbly at the sketches. Looked up. “Like your old place.”

  “Yes, but on a much greater scale. This Fabricator has great skill. But this.” He tapped a wet finger on the papers. “This component, if I am reading his notes correctly—they are in an unfamiliar cipher, so I may be misunderstanding, but I do not think so—allows the stored power to be broadcast. To be accessed long-distance.”

  I stared at his finger. The page under it was a folded-over blueprint, white markings and lines and numbers. I thought about the Little General telling us that the Man in the White Suit wanted executions; he and his men had been Charmed to the gills to keep doing it. “Could it be stored long-distance?”

  Fallon didn’t answer right away. When I looked up he was staring at me, his lined face blank, his body still. “Yes,” he said curtly. He shook himself and turned away. “Yes.”

  Fallon snorted and went back to scrubbing. He was still wiry, and his hands with their inhumanly long fingers were still strong, the tendons on his forearm ropy with power. “That was foolish, Lemuel. Yes, my Fabrication would scale. Even to this degree. A battery, you called it. Fabrication is an art of scale. This can be in either the Binding, the Words, or the size of the Fabrication. Or all.” He looked up into the mirror, his reflected eyes on me. “Yes, it could follow. Spur bloodshed and collect it all. Store it. It would require someone in the area, a point person. A trained mage who could direct the flow of energy. But in something based on my designs, it could be done.”

  A point person. I nodded. That would be Rithy Kal, contracted to direct the flow. One small piece in place.

  I heard Mags unleash a series of soft fucks under his breath. Ever since Fallon had taken on teaching him, Mags had treated the Fabricator with the same anxious deference he’d once reserved for Hiram. I could still picture the first time I’d braced Hiram in his apartment. I’d been young, impossibly young, and Hiram had seemed old, impossibly old, with his Santa beard and suspenders, his Earl Grey tea, and his fussy, crowded apartment. Mags had been sort of a servant or bodyguard, though as far as I could tell he’d made more messes than he’d cleaned up and had proved courageous only at unexpected moments.

  I remembered him standing behind Hiram as the old man interviewed me. His hands had been clenched, and he’d just glared at me, his unibrow a hard line of anger. I remembered being afraid of Mags for the first and only time in my life.

  “It’s not could be done,” I said. “It’s being done. I didn’t see it before, but I see it now. We haven’t heard a peep from Renar and Amir. Nothing. Nothing. Meanwhile, the world is fucking tearing itself apart: Every day, thousands, tens of thousands, dead. We assumed it was ripples from Renar’s biludha, but that’s not it. It’s a grift, Fallon. They’re bleeding the world in slow motion, so we wouldn’t be able to put it together. Bleeding it and storing it.”

  Fallon pushed the spigot closed with his elbow and stood with his arms up and dripping. “Ya, I said it follows, Mr. Vonnegan. You pointed them to my work, and they have extrapolated it, enlarged it. Made it global—an immense undertaking. But Mika’s expiration date approaches, yes? She has no reason to be reasonable, to be careful. She is all in. Come.”

  He turned, arms held up by his chest, and I followed him past Mags, who glanced up nervously at us, then back down at his shoes.

  “First let me state,” the old man said as he walked, “that I am not the designer of this Artifact. It was inherited.”

  He led me to the back wall of the workshop, where a bank of storage cabinets had been arranged in a long, neat row. The upper cabinets had no doors, and each exposed shelf had several neatly arranged objects of varying size and shape. Fallon walked along the edge, peering into each one, until he made a clucking noise with his tongue and reached in, emerging with what looked like a tiny golden box, like a jewelry box. His personal collection of Fabrications, I supposed.

  He turned and held it out to me. “Gulla,” he said.

  Gulla. To destroy, to overwhelm. A good word for the Griefers—exciting things happened when you gassed up the air and shouted, Gulla! I reached out, but the old man pulled it back away from me.

  “It is . . . invasive.”

  He turned it over, revealing that the underside of the little box was bristling with thin, delicate-looking needles.

  “You will have to bleed for it,” he continued. “And submit to its will.”

  I pulled my hand back. “What exactly does that mean?”

  He shrugged, turning the box over in his hand. “You bleed for it, it will lead you to what you wish. This takes as long as it takes, limited by the physical limitations of your body and the speed with which it can travel.” He looked back at me. “It will possess you. For some time, you will be . . . asleep, while the gulla accepts your sacrifice and does its work.” The faintest smile flickered on his face. “I went through a period where all my Fabrications were boxes.” He sobered suddenly, shaking his head once, curtly. “Our other choice would be to try to cast something to locate your Man in White—difficult, as he is certainly shielded from such spells—or locate him by more physical means, which may take a lot of time.” He nodded at the small golden box. “This is, as they say, under the radar.”

  I stared at the golden box. I imagined the tiny bristle-like needles were moving, squirming. I remembered the slimy feel of the Udug in my hand, the whisper in my brain. I had no desire to relive that, and I wanted nothing more than to hear that silent voice again. My hands twitched.

  “We don’t have time,” I said slowly. “This has been going on for two fucking years. Right under our noses. She’s been bleeding the world and made it look like we were tearing ourselves apart.” The world was broken. We had broken it. “Jesus Christ, it’s a con. She’s trying to fuel the Biludha-tah-namus again, just in slow motion this time.”

  Fallon squinted. “She cannot. The Biludha-tah-namus would require the Mannice girl. She is marked for the ritual but has not experienced the cadence. To complete it requires her, or her death.”

  I pictured Claire: shotgun in her hands, dry wind blowing her hair around. Skinny and fierce, telling me to go the fuck away and not look back. It was dangerous to even think about Claire, so I pushed her from my mind again.

  “How does it work?”

  Fallon shrugged and looked down contemplatively at the box. “Simply, from the perspective of the Client. You fix in your mind that which you seek. You take the gulla in your hand and bleed for it. You will awake sometime later where you need to be.” He looked up at me. “We will follow you.”

  I swallowed. Client. It was, as I’d learned from overhearing Fallon’s sessions with Mags, a term used by Fabricators to d
escribe the people who used their creations.

  “It is an old Fabrication,” he continued softly, sounding lost in thought. “Predating electricity. I cannot tell you what you will experience, as no one who has used it has ever described it.”

  I nodded. “Evelyn, is that because they all died?”

  He looked up sharply, fixing me in his piercing gray gaze for one terrible second, and I reminded myself that Fallon was enustari and capable of terrible, awful things. Then he threw his head back and burst into laughter.

  “There are easier ways to kill, Mr. Vonnegan,” he said, holding the gulla out to me, smiling. Ev Fallon smiling was attractive and disturbing. His face was and was not made for expressions of cheer. The smile made him look like a cheerful psychopath, the kind who made you laugh and then stabbed you with knitting needles. I didn’t know much about Fallon and his motivations, but I reminded myself that he’d had years to fuck me over and hadn’t.

  I reached out and took the gulla from his hand. It was dense. It felt heavy in my hand, heavier than should have been possible. It was warm to the touch, and I was reminded of the slick Udug. Both objects had felt alive in my hand. I studied the Artifact and realized the tiny golden wires were moving, waving slightly as if in some private breeze of invisible particles.

  I thought of Mika Renar. The dried-up old mummy in the wheelchair, her yellow eyes the only part of her still alive enough to move. I hesitated. Wherever she was, she would be protected. I’d blown her sky-high when I’d fucked up the Biludha-tah-namus, dropped a bomb on her fucking head, and she’d survived. If I showed up with Mags and Billington and some harsh words as ammunition, I didn’t think we’d get too far.

  I thought of Claire. After so many months of refusing to think of her, of blocking her out of my mind, it felt strange and foreign to actively think of her. I pictured her not as she’d been the last time I’d seen her, but an idealized version: beautiful, dirty, mocking. This was all about her, in some way. She was the key. And if the Negotiator didn’t work for Renar, than he worked for someone else who wanted to put hands on Claire.