We Are Not Good People (Ustari Cycle)

by Jeff Somers

  The monkey sat on its haunches on the couch behind him, its hands folded on top of its belly. It appeared to be sleeping.

  “How did you know to come here?”

  Hiram shook his head, eyes still closed. We were seated on the floor of Elsa’s apartment. “I knew her. Towards the end, Elsa attempted to rally us against Renar. She sent word to every ustari of any rank she could track down and put out the alarm. This has been done many times. We have banded together against one of our own for the good of all of us. We were too late, of course. Too many had been tricked over to Renar’s side—promised eternal life—and we simply did not have the power, the skill, so we failed every attempt to stop her.” He sighed and opened his eyes. “I spent much time here, in those last days, as we worked.” He offered a muted smile. “Even I, the great Hiram Bosch, was valued. Very few of any skill made the attempt.”

  We sat in silence for some time. “Pitr’s dead,” I said finally.

  He nodded. “I assumed as much, Mr. Vonnegan. Although I was extremely amazed to arrive here and learn you were alive. When you convinced me to sever our bond—what was it, eight? Nine years ago?—I thought I would find you were dead soon enough. Yet, here you are. Of all people.”

  I looked closely at him, but there was no malice. None of the old Hiram venom, the insults and red-faced attacks. After a moment I smiled. “Of all fucking people,” I agreed. “It’s good to see you, Hiram.”

  “Mr. Vonnegan! Of course it is. Under the circumstances it is good to see anybody, yes?”

  We both laughed. It was ridiculous. The pent-up release of months of solitude for both of us. We laughed harder and longer than the tiny joke deserved, throwing our bodies around the dusty living room, hooting and bellowing, tears streaming down our faces.

  “You!” I gasped. “And me, at the end of the world!”

  Hiram, thinner but still with that round red face, put up his hands in mock surrender, unable to speak.

  I looked up, gasping. The monkey had opened its eyes and was staring at me, its tiny hands still folded on its belly. The hands reminded me of the gidim, and the eyes were . . . deep.

  We sat in silence for a bit, catching our breath. “If you were here with Elsa, where did you go?”

  Hiram sighed. “Elsa is dead?”

  I nodded.

  “Did she die as badly as I imagine?”

  Remembering Pitr and the fireball, I shook my head. “Worse.”

  He raised a snowy eyebrow but didn’t say anything for a moment. “I went . . . on a quest.” He rubbed his eyes with both hands, like a kid, and behind him the monkey did the same. “Towards the end, we knew we had failed. The Biludha-tah-namus was being cast, every ustari in the world could feel it. Most melted away to die as they saw fit. Elsa had a Fabrication to preserve a few people, and I was among them. We survived the tah-namus, and in the dawn of a dead world she sent me to try to locate and retrieve an Artifact. An Artifact she suspected had wriggled free from its master, as Artifacts often do.” He sighed. “She was half mad, of course. Watching her newest body wither under her assault, with no hope to replace it.” He sighed. I was reminded that Hiram was the sort who would feel sympathy for someone like Elsa, and not spend a single thought on the long list of poor assholes she’d preyed on like some sort of vampire.

  He looked at me. “And you? How in the world did you wind up here? Certainly you would not have been on Elsa’s contact list.”

  There was a brief stab of the old anger. Certainly. But it didn’t matter. I had been an asshole. I’d been an asshole for so long I’d gotten used to it. When I’d had an army and something worth doing, I’d still been an asshole and here we were.

  I told Hiram the story as best I could. While I went down each path, each time line that folded back on itself, he grew silent and attentive. Behind him, the monkey again mimicked him. Mouth open—mouth open. Eyes wide—eyes wide. Frown—frown. With a jolt, I realized the monkey’s face somewhat resembled Hiram’s, if his beard had been shaved. And I thought, So much for sleep tonight. And then I thought, Of course Hiram creates a companion for the apocalypse that looks and acts just like him.

  He chewed one lip. “Was she coherent when you arrived? Had she been working on anything? Did she tell you anything?”

  I nodded. “I’ll show you.”

  I didn’t tell Hiram about the Token or teleport us. Something made me want to keep secrets. Part of it, I thought, was because I didn’t know him. Not this version of him. In this time line, Hiram and I had never crossed paths again. We had merely drifted, and he had apparently thought me dead long before the tah-namus. Part of it was the fact that the Hiram I had known would have simply demanded the Token, insisting he had the superior knowledge and experience.

  So we walked down the stairs. The monkey rode on Hiram’s shoulder, holding on to his collar with one brown hand for balance. As we passed Bob and Boy, I had to resist the urge to wave and greet them as I normally did. It was strange to suddenly have to remember how to behave.

  “Did you see anyone else when you were out there?” I asked.

  Hiram didn’t answer right away. “Once I thought I had,” he finally answered. He sounded out of breath even though we were going down. “I followed shadows for some days. To this moment, I am unsure if there really was someone or not. It has been a long, long time. A long time.”

  His hand was pushed into his pocket, as if touching something.

  “It was terrible at the end,” he said. “So many in the world did not know what was coming for them. Business, as they say, went on as usual. And yet we knew. And we knew we would fail. And then afterwards . . . so few of us. So many things I would not have done. Would never have done.”

  He was talking to himself, I realized.

  “Evelyn Fallon,” he said slowly, sounding amazed. “I had been told he was long dead, after the war to remove Quyen Vinh in the 1960s. Had attained for himself a high command and used it to perform experiments, driving his battalions into the desert and killing them by the thousands. To his superiors, with a bit of Charm, he justified the executions and throat-slitting and torturous bleeding as fighting fire with fire. And the people at home wondered how the war became so brutal, so horrifying.” He shook his head and looked up at me. “I was told the war’s notoriety was what sent him underground, but that he’d been killed in Munich in the 1970s by his fellow enustari because he was considered uncontrollable. Obsessed with the storing of blood for future use and taking excessive chances to test his theories.” He took a deep breath. “It is . . . curiously exciting and unnerving to hear that name here, now.”

  I reflected on my lost educational chances with Hiram. I wondered if he might teach me again, if we failed to find a way back.

  We had reached the bottom landing, and I opened the squealing metal door that led to the parking garage. “This is what Elsa worked on after you left,” I said as he passed me, stepping through. I thought about telling him that Pitr had spoken the Binding, because it seemed right that Hiram should know that. But I didn’t say anything.

  “Jesus Christ,” Hiram breathed. “What is this?”

  I had to force back the urge to crow a bit, knowing more than my old gasam. “The kurre-nikas,” I said as dramatically as I could.

  “My God, the kurre-nikas,” Hiram whispered, stepping slowly into the space, looking around. The monkey did the same. “She was a genius.”

  I thought of Ev Fallon’s opinion of Elsa. Every mage I’d ever met was crazy and self-important, including me. Who knew who was smart or skilled or what. But Hiram’s awe seemed genuine. He turned to look at me, smiling, the monkey’s tiny face smiling behind him.

  “My God, Mr. Vonnegan! We can make adjustments! We can go back. Change the past. We can wipe the last few years away!”

  I stared at the monkey. “If we knew how to use it, Hiram. You got any ideas?”

  He shook his head, pushing his hands into his pockets. “No, Mr. Vonnegan,” he said, staring at the Fab
rication. “But this does.”

  Without turning around, he pulled a silver chain from his pocket and held it up for my inspection. It was long. Dangling from the bottom, shining with a skinlike gleam, was a small irregular hunk of green stone.

  The Udug.

  60. I WANTED TO TOUCH IT, and I wanted to burn it into ash.

  I could still feel the voice of the Udug, toneless, pitiless, constantly in motion, telling me amazing things. I knew it would be able to offer us perfect, exact instructions on how to operate the kurre-nikas. I had no doubt in my mind about that. It would also offer a lot of information we didn’t need to know. Or that I didn’t want to know.

  My hands twitched every time I thought of that toneless voice. I’d never imagined I’d see it again, and that had made it bearable.

  I watched Hiram as he stood there, hand clasped around the chip of green stone. He’d been holding it much longer than I’d ever dared, twenty minutes or more. His lips, delicate and pink as always, almost girlish, moved slightly as he took in the instructions. I kept picturing the sudden move: snatching the chain, yanking the Artifact free from his grasp. Could I cast something to slow him down simultaneously? Why not. He was old, and he wasn’t expecting it. Unless the Udug told him to expect it.

  I wanted that voice in my head again.

  I never wanted to hear that voice again.

  Pacing, I wanted a cigarette, but I was afraid to leave Hiram alone. Somehow it seemed to make sense that my presence was a necessary control. As if it mattered.

  Suddenly, Hiram produced his fussy little blade, a tiny thing you would normally use to open wine bottles, though sharpened to a razor’s edge, and cut himself on the forearm. The gas wasn’t much. I stopped pacing and watched him, excited. Maybe this was it. Maybe this was the beginning, the first step towards making that Fabrication lurch into motion and change the universe again, one final time if we were lucky.

  The Words were . . . I realized I couldn’t follow them because Hiram was . . . He was . . . The apartment began spinning, his words getting louder and slower and more elastic, like someone had taken hold of one end of the sentence and pulled, and then it all went black.

  IN THE DREAM, AS always, Pitr and Claire were waltzing. As they spun, I caught glimpses of each from the front and back. From the front they looked normal. From the back they had been torn to pieces, bloody hunks of flesh hanging, bone and muscles exposed and moving, blood oozing everywhere and forming a slime trail on the floor.

  “IT INSISTS.”

  Choking. I surged up, swinging my arms at the attacker, but there was no one there. I felt the hands on my throat, the aching pain of my windpipe being compressed. My eyes bugged and my dry tongue swelled, but there was no one there.

  I turned my head, making meaningless glottal noises as I tried to suck air into myself. Hiram sat next to me, hand still pushed into his pocket. He was shirtless, and stared at me with a tortured, horrified look. He still clutched the Udug in his hand, the knuckles white, the arm trembling. His eyes seemed to tremble, too, as if the involuntary muscle movement couldn’t be controlled. Our eyes locked.

  “It insists.”

  It, I knew, was the Udug. I remembered the Skinny Fuck who had come for Claire. I remembered casting on his dead body so I could experience his existence, because we needed information. I remembered him almost like it was me, his years of touching that thing, its slimy, almost living surface, squirming under his fingers, the voice in his head, helping. I had a flash of Hiram on the road alone with his fucking monkey, terrified, afraid, alone. And then that voice, whispering to him. At first a few minutes a day, then hours. Then all the time.

  Red dots appeared in my vision. Why in hell strangulation had become everyone’s favorite way of killing me, I didn’t know. Something to try and remember in the next time line, something to ponder. For the moment, I fell back to the floor and dug under the scratchy brown blanket until my hand clasped the handle of the gun, warm from my body heat, just like the Udug, squirming against my skin with its own sort of intelligence, bloodthirsty and mechanical. Hiram leaped on me, pinning my arms, his unblinking eyes foreign and alien. This wasn’t the man I’d known and disliked intensely. This wasn’t the reluctant but fundamentally good man who’d tried to help Claire and Pitr and me, who’d given his life so we might escape. This was a man who’d seen the end of the world, seen what men and women of power could do, and spent the last few years alone with a demon whispering in his ear. The Udug had broken him. As my chest began to burn again, the fucking unfortunately familiar sensation of being strangled to death, I was almost reluctant to shoot him in the face.

  “It insists, Mr. Vonnegan!” he hissed, breathing hard as I bucked and struggled beneath him. “I don’t wish to do this! But it must be done! You must trust me!”

  The monkey was screeching in the background.

  “Please, Mr. Vonnegan! Don’t be so selfish. Great things will come of this. Great things. You cannot be allowed to use the kurre-nikas. You will not know what to adjust, how to set things right. You do not . . . have . . . the knowledge.” He shook his head, shooting his white eyebrows up, his bloodshot eyes fixed on my face as I struggled. “You have never understood what it is we do! You have never done the work, Mr. Vonnegan! You have sought the easy answers. You only ever wanted to get by, to scam your living, and as soon as you had been taught the basics, you wished to break free, to betray the sacred trust of gasam and urtuku.” He bared his teeth, sweat pouring from his face and dripping onto mine. “You will interfere. It insists on this point. This must be done!”

  With my vision flashing red, I bucked with all my might and managed to roll out from under his weight. I got onto my hands and knees as my head swam, my chest heaving against an invisible plug in my throat, and leaped on top of him. There was less of him than I remembered. He was thin. Crazy thin, the sort of thin you got when you started spending your evenings listening to a demon whispering in your head instead of foraging for food.

  I got my hands around his throat and squeezed for all I was worth. My right hand was still weak, and it was an imperfect job, but it shut him up and made his eyes pop out. He thrashed under me, and then the fucking monkey jumped on my back and began tearing at my hair and scalp, screeching, and blood ran into my eyes, the gas light and sweet in the air.

  For one second, I thought: What if he’s right?

  What had I ever done to convince myself that I was the one to save everything? I’d done nothing but make things worse. I’d fumbled every chance and killed everyone. More than once, in some cases. For a moment, I eased my hands and stared down at him, my old teacher. What if the Udug was telling him the fucking truth?

  I started to get light-headed and thought: Fuck it.

  Staring down at the familiar face, I knew I didn’t want to kill him. My mind was getting foggy, a red pulse overlaying my vision with every heartbeat, but then Hiram’s thrashing slowed. He opened his mouth and his tongue lolled out, pale and liverish, and the light in his eyes changed. It was like watching someone swim to the surface. His eyes tightened, as if in sudden pain, and then closed as he went limp under me.

  The plug dissolved in my throat and I collapsed onto Hiram’s unconscious form, heaving and gasping. The monkey gave me one last tiny swipe with its claws and scampered back to the couch. When I eventually turned over, exhausted, it was sitting quietly, hands folded over its belly again, staring at me with those deep eyes.

  I used the blood leaking from my million monkey-inflicted wounds to wrap Hiram up in Binding Cantrip and weld him to the floor, then a Muting to take his voice away. Still shaking, every breath painful, I pushed my hands into his pockets until a glancing touch

  secret panel in ceiling

  brought the dry, affectless voice from the Udug into my brain. I cried out and threw myself backwards, goose bumps springing up all over my body. I wanted to hold it again so fucking badly, and my stomach turned at the thought.

  I turned my head. The
monkey was a few inches away. It regarded me calmly, flaring its black nostrils.

  Slowly, I crawled back to Hiram and put my hand in his pocket more carefully, finding the metal chain he’d attached to the Udug. I drew it out. All the light in the dim room seemed to leap for it, leaving everything else in shadow. I’d stopped breathing and had to force myself to resume.

  “Not tonight,” I whispered to myself. “Tomorrow. In the daylight.”

  The monkey made a little sighing grunt. I turned. It had closed its eyes and settled in to sleep, hands still folded over its belly.

  I DIDN’T SLEEP. I sat and stared at the Udug until the sun rose. Hiram’s eyes tracked me from the bedroom to the kitchen, where I ate my breakfast straight from some cans and lit a cigarette. The monkey leaped up on the counter and stared at me intently until I spooned some canned meat out for it. It took handfuls and nibbled, making tiny grunts of satisfaction.

  “Hiram, it appears I have stolen your asag.”

  Hiram did nothing, unable to move or speak. I felt bad for a second, then winced as my chest caught on something sharp, and I didn’t feel bad anymore. I took the Token, the gun, and the Udug and walked down to the lobby and out onto the street. As I stepped outside, the monkey streaked out and danced around my feet, making cute cooing noises.

  The sun felt good. I sat down in the street and smoked three more cigarettes. Then I went back in, down to the parking level, stood near the huge, ugly chair, pulled the Udug from my pocket, and dangled it in front of me. I thought back over my past experience with it, in another time line. You could control it, I thought. At least in the short term. My weak right arm trembled as I held it up, making it dance in the low light.

  Some warm-up exercises, I thought. Get into the swing of it.

  I closed my eyes and thought, are we the last people alive in the world, kept thinking it on repeat, over and over, and closed my left hand around the Udug.

  Without transition, the slithering voice was in my head.