by Jeff Somers
I stared at him. And then I burst into laughter.
Melanie’s voice, behind us, breathless and hoarse. “Evelyn Fallon! You can’t fucking trust Evelyn fucking Fallon!”
I ignored her. It fit. It fucking fit. This was the way the world ends. It ends with Pitr Mags trying to remember how to speak a spell.
“Lem,” he said as the flames from the ceiling began licking down the wall behind him, “I can do it. I just . . . I can’t do it myself . . . I need . . .”
I sobered, and another wave of pure affection for the big idiot flooded me, carrying away everything else, all the doubt and anger. It was me and Pitr, like always, and no matter what else happened, it was enough. It was plenty.
I pulled the Token from my pocket, the roar of awful, beautiful gas buzzing up my arm, and held it out to him. “All the gas you need, buddy,” I said. He took it, slowly, eyes widening as he made contact. He held it out from his face, staring in pure wonder. I put my hands on his shoulders, looking up at that uncomplicated face, the closest thing to an absolute good I’d ever met in the whole damn world. “I’ll keep her busy, Pitr,” I said over the roar of flames. “I’ll give you as much time as I can.”
He swallowed, staring at the tiny green statue, and nodded.
The wind outside became a sudden, earsplitting roar, and then I felt invisible fingers take hold of me. My eyes locked with Pitr’s, and when I was pulled through the air, he lunged for me, his fingers brushing mine as I sailed backwards, smashing through the starred glass of the windows, into the air fifty stories up.
54. FOR A MOMENT IT WAS peaceful. There was no gravity, no friction. The glass dissolved around me, slicing me in a million places, but there was no pain at first. Shock and adrenaline masked everything, made it okay. It felt good to be out of the heat of the burning apartment, the cool air taking me in as I spread out, unfolding my legs and arms and feeling the wind take me, like a sail.
And then the gidim came.
There were thousands of them. I didn’t know how that was possible. Renar had killed practically everyone in the world to fuel her biludha. I had seen Renar’s gidim reproducing—this many of them should not have been possible. But then, what the fuck did I know.
In the instant I realized I was being suspended in the air against the wishes of gravity, the gidim all noticed me. The fluttering of their glassy wings stopped as one, and for a single fraction of a second it was silent, almost peaceful. I found the thin, ragged lines of my own blood in the air, vibrant but in short supply, my wounds not nearly mortal enough for this. It didn’t matter; I could open up an artery and bleed out in five minutes and it wouldn’t be enough, not nearly enough, to take on Mika Renar. Even the Big Spells I did know weren’t particularly weaponized. I could slow down time, as I’d done once before, but fueling it on the blood I could spare would kill me, and not even create a bubble of Slow Time large enough to make a difference.
I could teleport. Maybe twice before I had bled myself white, depending on range.
Tricks, I thought. It would have to be tricks.
And I remembered the rats, ten, twelve years ago. The goddamn rats.
“HOW MANY OF THEM do you think there are?”
I sighed, feeling woozy. I hadn’t eaten in two days. We’d left Hiram’s with thirteen dollars in our pocket. Or I’d left Hiram’s with thirteen dollars in my pocket, and Mags had followed me out the door without asking permission or saying a word. I’d spent thirteen dollars on hamburgers since then, all of them going to him. He ate them in one bite and then looked sad. Having Mags as a friend was like having a huge dog that just stared at you whenever you weren’t actively feeding it.
The alley was behind a row of restaurants and sported a line of rusting, filth-caked garbage Dumpsters, each one a thriving condominium for the biggest rats I’d ever seen.
“I dunno, Magsie. Hundreds.”
“How many do we need?”
I shrugged. “All of them.”
Hiram’s tutelage had been harsh and grinding and had centered more on how much I could steal on his behalf than anything else. It was almost an equation; for every package of fucking socks we stole for Hiram, for every jeweled paperweight we Charmed out of a shop on Forty-Seventh Street, he would go ahead and teach me something. Mags had started off pretending to pay attention, but he got bored so easy, so now he watched TV while Hiram slapped me in the face every time I fucked up a Word or let a spell collapse with a rush of wind and heat.
But somehow, one thing I’d definitely learned was that there was a link, mysterious and unexplored, between the intelligence and genetic complexity of a creature and the power its blood gave to a spell. A human being was the top of the pyramid. A single pint of human blood could fuel some pretty amazing spells. A dog’s blood was weaker; you needed more of it to get the same Volume. A spider barely registered.
So I did the math: One pint of human blood was what, twenty or thirty rats? I watched them wiggling around, looking for their dinner in the rotting recesses of the Dumpsters. They were fucking monstrous, so maybe we would get away with fifteen, eighteen. But what was the point of going through this and coming up short? They were rats. I was doing the city a fucking service.
Mags didn’t see it that way. He hadn’t minded the idea of bleeding the girl. Or anyone. He wasn’t bloodthirsty, but he didn’t cry about it. It had taken me a long time to get him to understand that if he was going to follow me around like a goddamn puppy, he couldn’t do things like that. He couldn’t bleed me, not some street trash Hiram paid twenty bucks to, no one. Mags finally got it, his face ashen, his eyes wide, because he thought I was mad at him. I wasn’t. I was just mad.
But animals, even the fucking rats, Mags shed tears for. Fat, hot tears of mourning for the rats and possums and raccoons of the world, of which there were more in New York City than you might imagine. I’d suggested we give it a try because I’d been casting off my own gas for a week and was tired and fuzzy around the edges. I couldn’t keep it up much longer.
“We can’t kill all those rats,” Mags said, his voice shocked and horrified. He cleared his throat and put on a manly tone. “I mean, you kill one, the rest are gonna run.”
I shook my head. Hiram wasn’t a great teacher, but he got into a bottle now and then, and when he did he liked to lecture as long as I kept my mouth shut. One of his favorite topics was the enustari, the really fucking evil people of the world. Powerful, bloodthirsty, the people who had a way with the Words and no compunction about bleeding out a football team or a stadium or half a fucking country to do what they wanted. He liked to tell stories about Fujan, who engineered the deaths of over a hundred thousand soldiers two thousand years ago in order to cast a biludha. He always sounded half impressed, half admiring, and half disgusted by the idea.
Hiram had no scruples when it came to individuals, though he was careful not to kill anyone. He took what his small spells needed and no more, and felt good about himself. Proud.
“What the enustari do,” I told Mags, who didn’t remember anything for long, “is they set up a chain reaction.”
He nodded, very serious. “A chain reaction.”
“Like dominoes. You kill one sacrifice and the spell you cast kills two more, and so on, and so you kill them all in one moment, and then you use that gas to cast the big spell.”
He nodded, pursing his lips wisely. “Right. Okay. How?”
I didn’t know, but I knew the Words. Spells were just putting the Words together and pushing some gas through them as you spoke. You start with the Word for death, not the static Word, ug, but the dynamic word, the fucking infinitive, to die, namus. You started there, and you figured out the rest.
With no gas in the air, I went through it, building it syllable by syllable. I cribbed some of it from spells I’d heard Hiram recite, dropping the bullshit he insisted on adding for “color.” I cut myself, wincing and sucking in my breath at the burning, sizzling pain I didn’t think I’d ever get used to, and spo
ke fifteen Words, eighteen syllables. And the rats began to die.
THE GIDIM CAME AT me. I knew I would have to time it. I forgot that I was suspended in midair. I forgot that nothing mattered anymore anyway. I forgot about Claire, dead and erased, about everything. I had the faintest sliver of my own blood feeding out into the air from a million scratches and cuts. I spoke seven Words, eight syllables. And the gidim began to die.
I kept reciting.
The feeling of exhausting energy being pulled from me, draining me, while the gidim combined into a decent amount of gas in the air, was confusing; the Words were like cement in my mouth. I slowed down and sped up as the gidim burst, dissolving into greasy pink clouds that were immediately consumed by my spell, and I hit my cadence just as the last of the bloated things were destroyed. And I was somewhere else.
I hadn’t had a lot of time to choose a destination for the Teleport spell; I’d cut it down to something halfway elegant, which had allowed me to time it exactly. I ended up three or four feet over the roof of the building I’d chosen, and I fell, arms and legs in the air, head bouncing off the spongy black surface. I lay there a second, staring up at the almost transparent sky that still had demons exploding all over it. Then I dug into my pocket and pulled out the switchblade, sliced about halfway down my forearm, blood welling up nice and thick and healthy.
When I tried to move, I found myself pinned by the familiar old invisible fist. My whole body frozen. Except I could breathe, and move my eyes, and swallow, and move my tongue. I lay there bugging my eyes and probing my mouth, my hand frozen on the blade, the blade stuck in my skin, burning.
I closed my eyes and felt Pitr’s heartbeat, dim and far but steady. When I opened my eyes, there was just the wind and the sky and my old friend the invisible fist.
And then Mika Renar floated up over the edge of the roof. The Glamour, absurdly decked out in a long black coat that billowed realistically in the wind as she floated up and over, her usual red dress underneath and everything perfect.
She floated near, settling in slow motion into a believable pose of kneeling over me, like someone had taken the time to motion-capture her every move. The scent of cherries, thick and too sweet, made my stomach churn even as goose bumps raised up all over my skin, even as my mouth watered. The illusory face leaned down close, the eyes flicking around me. Mika was able to see and hear through the Glamour, and even inches away I was amazed at the artistry. This was someone who was good with the Words. I was just a scratcher. A Trickster. A Trickster who was out of tricks.
“Who,” she said with the barest hint of doubt in her voice, “are you?”
I took a deep breath and thought about Words with the right consonants and vowels. If I could have moved my lips, I would have smiled. I drew on the heavy cloud of gas I was bleeding into the air and, without moving my lips, managed to hiss out those two Griefer-friendly syllables: gulla.
To destroy, to overwhelm.
Not enough gas behind it to do much, but it tore the Glamour to shreds. Her beautiful face puffed up and her expression changed in minute increments from blank curiosity to surprise and shock to anger, feral and terrible. Her whole body swelled like a hundred gidim had taken root inside her all at once, and then she burst into fragments that were caught in some solar wind, scattered everywhere, flickering and extinguishing like multicolored sparks.
The invisible fist vanished.
I sat up. It hadn’t accomplished much, but it had felt good, which was true of most tricks. You got away with pennies, loose change, but you’d fooled people and proved you were smarter than they were. I didn’t know where she was getting the gas in this dead world, but she’d been made a fool, and that felt good.
I tore the blade free from my arm; the wound had sealed around it and the fresh cut hurt like hell. I knew Renar would regroup quickly and come roaring back, so I needed to stay one step ahead of her. Blood flowing down my arm, heart pounding in my chest, I thought, Two can play this game. Glamours were a dime a dozen. I put it together in seconds, snatches of old mu fit together like a puzzle: a piece of an old duplication spell, a few syllables to mimic and mirror the wind on my hair, my clothes, two Words to link it to me. I spoke it and felt the drain, heavier than before because the Glamour was going to be half decent and thus was expensive. And then there was a decent version of me standing right there. I didn’t pause to think about how bad it looked, how thin and gaunt, how gray the hair was getting. I didn’t study the way the hair moved realistically in the wind. It was a nice job, but I instantly regretted the blood it cost. I’d gotten lazy, with the Asshole Army following me around, waiting for more miracles. I’d gotten used to casting off other people.
As I stumbled for the green door and the slim cover offered by the stub of the stairwell, feeling giddy with blood loss I’d almost forgotten how to operate under, the Glamour stayed behind, dumb. I scrambled behind the wall and leaned against it, panting, cold sweat all over me, and watched as her Glamour reappeared, just winking into existence right where it had been. With a wince I hated myself for, I slashed my arm again, hoping I would be able to get to the streets without killing myself.
A sixth sense made me spin. Melanie Billington grabbed me by the shoulders.
“Shut the fuck up,” she hissed, “and follow me.”
55. WE HIT THE GROUND LIKE feathers, settling down to our weight by increments. I could feel the cartilage in my joints compressing by degrees as the world took us back. I glanced up at the building, hundreds of feet up, and then looked at Billington. The whole front of her suit had been singed, the buttons melted and the fabric charred.
“Come on,” she said. “I know where the bitch is.”
She strode off, and I hesitated. What were we going to do? Cast, sure. Bleed, and cast, and that would burn up a few minutes of her time and then we’d be anemic and half dead and exhausted and the old mummy would whisper at us and that would be that. Then I trotted off after Melanie. What else was there? I couldn’t help Pitr with the Binding. Neither could Melanie. And there was literally no one else. All we could do was be a distraction as long as we could manage, give Pitr every chance we could to get it right. No matter how unlikely that seemed.
Billington led me down the street, our heels making thunderous, echoing noise in the empty air, then pressed herself against the polished stone of a skyscraper and waved me to do the same. I leaned over and peered around the corner. Renar was alone, slumped in the familiar pose in her wheelchair. It was suddenly incredible, this ancient woman, so feeble and so completely abandoned, sitting alone after destroying the world so that she might live forever . . . as an ancient old crone in a metal contraption.
I reminded myself she was the most dangerous enustari in history, and could not quite believe it. Then thought, what did she have to fear? Whoever she had brought with her into this empty world, whoever had helped her to cast the tah-namus and become immortal—she had turned on them. She had betrayed them. How could she not? She was Mika Renar.
“We can’t let her speak,” Billington whispered.
We did nothing. I knew our window was closing; my Glamour wouldn’t fool hers for long. I pushed myself back against the wall and closed my eyes. You could do a lot with two relatively healthy people a pint or so down between them. You could do plenty. But it had to be right. It had to work the first time.
I pushed my hands into my pockets and found the tiny jeweled box I’d taken from Elsa.
I didn’t have a name for it. It was warm and heavy in my hand, and when she’d tried to use it on me there had been no spell, no Words at all. A Fabrication, built and bound. A tap to the forehead. Fucking magic.
Reaching across myself, I gently tugged Melanie until she turned to me. Her face was deeply lined. I’d never noticed before, or maybe she’d aged in this weird time line I’d never experienced. She said she’d woken up in Alabama. I’d never asked her where she was from, what she’d been through, and hadn’t wondered. And she hadn’t asked me.
“Keep her distracted,” I said. Her eyes flicked to the box, then back to me. She nodded and started to turn away, but I caught her. “Distracted,” I repeated.
She smiled. “We’re fucking Tricksters, Chief,” she whispered. “That’s all we do.”
She lifted her blade with one hand and her thick, heavy braid with the other, revealing a bloody mess behind her ear. “Head wounds,” she said simply. I nodded.
As the gas filled the air, she began to whisper the Words. Again, I was struck by how much more skilled she was than she had been. When she hit the cadence, twenty or thirty of her blinked into existence. It was clever—each one moved in a way that was a half inch towards wonky, making them all seem like individual versions, acting independently.
“Wish me luck,” she said, then let out a whoop at the top of her lungs and ran around the corner. A second later, her army of Glamours followed, whooping in concert.
I cut myself. I spoke ten Words, fifteen syllables. Fucking with the physical universe was hard as hell, but fooling people’s perceptions was easy. That had always been the rule. I turned the corner and started walking, slow.
Melanie was making a real effort. Her two dozen Glamours were racing around Renar, who looked already dead, frail and motionless in her wheelchair. I glanced up and over my shoulder, and there was Renar’s Glamour—her eyes and ears, I realized, the only way she could see or hear—terrible in its beauty, floating down to the street, the beautiful face locked in a frown, the black coat fluttering in realistic detail. She looked like she couldn’t quite believe what she was seeing. I didn’t blame her. Who came at Mika fucking Renar like this?
I kept walking. Slow and steady. I could feel Pitr’s heart out of sync with mine, five beats of mine to one of his. I clung to it. I felt like that connection was the only thing real; everything else was bullshit.
I stared at Renar, the dozens of Billingtons racing between us. I avoided them as best I could; illusions were easy to ruin with a quick physics lesson, and Renar hadn’t lived to be forever and a day (and counting up to eternity) by being unobservant. I kept walking. I sidestepped the Melanies. When Renar’s Glamour passed over me, there was no shadow, and I was momentarily pleased to note one fucking mistake in that spell. One fucking mistake.
