by Jim Butcher
Behind each of them appear their Bleeders. I have always disdained such cultism. These mages make promises to their Bleeders. Riches. Luxury. All their desires met. In return they must stay fleshy, they must sacrifice on command and be prepared for the certainty that someday the sacrifice required will be too much and their bodies will be consumed. They accept these risks because of their slavish devotion to their masters—sometimes urged along by a Charm, sometimes by a simple human devotion to their own appetites. I prefer to be honest. I prefer to hunt. I take sacrifice as my due, because all these people—all people—are here to be bled.
They will come for my body.
It is the obvious tactic. I am in bed, unable to move without assistance. I normally rely on Calvin for all my needs, but now he is a beautiful corpse and they imagine me helpless. They imagine old grudges made well—Archmages are like old washerwomen when it comes to gossip and grudges; both are eternal, nurtured and suckled like their own children. But I have blood enough to destroy them. They will not devour me today.
I begin casting. Three spells.
The universe is a mouth. Eternally open, eternally hungry. If you feed it, it dances, twitching, an automatic response, like a frog split open, an electrode introduced to its muscles. When the dance is done, there is nothing left, and no sign the universe has even noticed you.
The mouth does not care where the sacrifice comes from, or who forms the Words that shape its intent. The mouth is dumb and does not judge. If there is blood, fresh and pulsing, still alive in some mysterious sense for a few seconds, still part of the person it is drawn from, if there are Words to give it shape and intent, the mouth drinks and the universe twitches and the spell is cast.
Few know that a Glamour, an illusion, can cast. Few have spent so much time living through their illusions, few have studied the mechanics of the Glamour spell as minutely as I have. The voice is an illusion, a projection. I whisper a spell in my bedroom, unable to turn my head. My Glamour outside speaks a spell. My Glamour in the library speaks a spell. The universe, the hungry maw, does not differentiate—it does not care. It accepts the sacrifice poured into it. It shimmies and shakes according to the Words it hears.
My enemies reach the house and find they cannot enter.
Fat, sweaty Alfonse—who ruins his expensive suits the moment he puts them on, sweating through the cloth and turning them swampy—races for the front door, because Alfonse is all aggression, all artless force. His spells are brutal, simple fists of power he draws from his Bleeders in sudden bursts, sometimes draining them in seconds for a decisive blow. Alfonse is dangerous, but he is a blunt instrument.
Alfonse bounces away from the door and stumbles backward. His red face twists in rage.
Faber Gottschalk is even fatter and does not run. I have never seen him walk under his own power, in fact, and thus am momentarily distracted by an anthropological interest in seeing the huge man move utilizing his gargantuan limbs. His Bleeders are anomalies; they are thin, gray things in burlap clothes. Where other enustari feed their Bleeders lavishly, Faber starves them on his little ranch. He makes up for this with numbers and has brought a gang of his skinnies to fuel his spells.
Faber does not approach the house. He has seen Alfonse bounce off my first line of defense and is smart enough to pause, to hesitate, to reassess. Faber appears to be a fat simpleton whose mind has softened from years of easy living in his Texas compound, tended by his magically Charmed followers, but his mind is as sharp as ever. He closes his eyes and speaks, casting. Behind him, several of his thin Bleeders stiffen and jerk, scrambling to cut themselves, their lifeblood pulled rudely from them, gulped and boiled off. It is an inelegant, wasteful way to gain Sacrifice, but then Faber is a man of appetites.
He vanishes. He has teleported himself.
Teleportation is not a difficult spell; rank amateurs can often imagine clever ways to move themselves. The direct approach runs against the physical laws of the universe, but there are cheats. Any ustari of experience knows at least one. To move yourself fifty feet so that you are inside a building instead of outside a building, thus avoiding all security, is not difficult.
It is so obvious a move that I have, of course, prepared for it.
One of my Glamours smiles slightly as I imagine Gottschalk being funneled into the tiny room I have prepared. He will have to crouch, hot and unable to breathe. He will seek threads of sacrifice in the air and find none. He will sweat and his enlarged, weakened heart will pound, and he will wonder how he was so easily trapped. And then he will slowly realize that to escape he will have to bleed himself. A man of Gottschalk’s stature has not bled himself in decades. His skin is milky and smooth and untouched.
He will realize he must bleed himself to escape, and then he will realize he does not have a blade. Because a man of Gottschalk’s stature does not cut himself.
I wonder what he will sacrifice of himself. His tongue? A vein, chewed through? It is amusing to picture him gnawing at himself.
Alfonse is smarter. A brute who prefers the frontal assault, yes, but he appreciates a good trap and stands there, irresolute. Many people assume hesitation in battle is a weakness, but the opposite is true. Those who do not pause to contemplate their surroundings, to consider new data, wind up in tiny boxes, like Gottschalk. Alfonse stands and grinds his teeth, hands balled into fists, considering how he will gain entry without being entrapped himself.
I do nothing. Sacrifice is not to be wasted.
When Alfonse decides, he is clever. He sees that teleportation is a trap, so he assumes all such subtleties are traps, and he gestures, his people Bleed, and he quickly casts a brute-force spell that sends an explosive blow against the front door. When the door cracks, he scans the destruction, seeking obvious Wards or other markings that would indicate another trap; then he gestures again, and one of his Bleeders steps forward to test the entry. The Bleeder is older, graying, lucky to have lived this long in Alfonse’s employ; yet he’s also so typically fleshy because he’s lived well in Alfonse’s employ. We all feed off each other. Those who condemn our order as parasitic need to see more Bleeders like this plump fellow, his innards awash in fine food and liquor, his memories filled with pleasant afternoons and elegant entertainments, his family left a handsome legacy in cash.
As the Bleeder crosses what’s left of my threshold, he catches fire, a green flame, impossible to extinguish. Alfonse studies the entryway as the man dies screaming, leaving quite a mess just when I no longer have an apprentice to clean it up. The fat man isn’t eager to join him, and I let him do his sums. If he decides the cost is too dear, that perhaps I am not as defenseless as he hoped, he will be allowed to leave. I can hunt him down and extract my revenge anytime.
Then Alfonse purses his chubby lips and gestures. Behind him, all four of his remaining Bleeders immediately cut, and cut deeply.
The greedy bastard.
I wait. I listen through three sets of ears.
You can always learn something from a man who has lived so well for so long as Alligherti. And, indeed, as I listen to the spell he is casting, peppered with nonsense syllables in order to confuse and obfuscate, I am impressed. Before I can compose a suitable retaliation, he sinks, the pavement and dirt beneath him cracking open and swallowing him.
A moment later, his Bleeders follow, sinking down into the dirt and disappearing.
With a thunderous explosion of expensive marble tiles, they emerge in the foyer, just beyond the fallen Bleeder. Instead of wasting time and effort unraveling my spells and traps, Alfonse has gone under them. Covered in dirt and dust, he wastes no time. He marches off, his tiny feet surprisingly nimble, his bedraggled, weakened Bleeders swanning after him, marching, they now suspect, to their doom.
Alfonse plans to take everything from me. He moves purposefully for the stairs. I feel a drip of anxiety, of worry; it is unfamiliar and exciting, my buried heart lurching in my chest as my body remains still, my eyes closed, my lips in motion. I had not
imagined my defenses to be impenetrable, especially against someone of Alligherti’s caliber, but I expected them to last a bit longer than this. I do my sums without passion, and the result is clear; it is time to retreat. Using my supply of sacrifice to slow Alfonse’s progress is foolish, when I can use it instead to destroy him, no matter the cost.
I begin reciting a new biludha, two of my Glamours singing the ritual, the erin gilleem. It isn’t the most powerful or intricate ritual, but it is elegant. My two voices circle each other, a symphony, and as they recite the whole house begins to tremble. Cracks burst the walls. The floors shift, and Alfonse and his Bleeders stagger on the stairs, stopping, holding on to the banister, hesitant. Alfonse is not worried; his confirmation bias tells him that since he has so far escaped the traps and blades of his enemies, he will always manage to do so. But Alfonse makes the mistake of all greedy, fat boys who believe that things are only valuable when you hoard them. Alfonse has worked very hard to collect his possessions, and he cannot imagine that anyone would purposefully destroy theirs. He believes he is safe because he is inside my home, my cherished manse.
My third Glamour begins a second spell. As she speaks, I rise from the bed.
The building is shaking. The grounds outside are shaking. A great sizzling noise fills the air, like endless sand falling on glass. Alfonse continues to advance, certain this is all noise and light, intended to blind him, to frighten him off. He is a veteran of our wars, ustari hurling fireballs and Stringers and hunks of granite at each other with a few Words, and he knows how expensive spells are. So much sacrifice, so much blood. Easier to trick and dissemble. Easier to spend on a Glamour of the building crashing down around you than to actually destroy the whole structure.
My body floats. The windows open, and I am outside. My Glamour floats after me, speaking the spell. The house continues to shake and shudder. My Glamour inside, still speaking the erin gilleem, changes position, blinking out of view in one place and appearing on the shaking stairs, directly in front of Alfonse. So I can see his face as he realizes he has been trapped.
My Glamour appears, smiling down at him, speaking the spell, and he stops short, sweating, hanging on to the railing. He stares at my Glamour, my beautiful face, my terrible expression, and then the lovely moment comes; he blanches. His face twists. Roaring, he spins and snaps a command to his Bleeders, hissing out a new spell as he races down.
It will not avail him. The same Wards and spells that prevented him from entering the house will prevent him from leaving it. He will attempt to tunnel out in the same manner by which he tunneled in, but as my Glamour completes the biludha, the house—my house, built from blood I personally shed, from Words I personally spoke—implodes. Chunks of stone and plaster and wood rain down on Alfonse and his Bleeders, and the taste of new sacrifice tells me the Bleeders are crushed, ground down by my will.
But not Alfonse. Alfonse has used this new sacrifice to protect himself. A piece of marble falls from the upper floors and skitters off an invisible shield he has created.
I choose different Words, and the erin gilleem shifts and alters. Debris rains down on Alfonse. He doggedly makes for the exit—any exit—as the physical walls crumble. His progress is slow, and every time his spell protects him from the chunks of stone and wood he must reinforce it, using more and more of the sacrifice in the air. And my Glamour speaks the spell and rains more destruction down onto him, this man who dared to invade my home.
I tear that home down. I bury him in it.
The ritual digs a deep trough in the earth as the building collapses, and Alfonse, still inside his protective shell, still speaking his own spell, using the bountiful sacrifice in the air to fuel it, sinks down. Stone and metal and wood rain down over him, and while they do not touch him, his progress slows and then stops, and still the building comes down. My body floats far above now, accompanied by my two Glamours, one speaking the spell that transports me while the other crushes Alligherti. The noise is punishing, buffeting us, making my brittle bones shake. I watch as everything crumbles, my home, my Blood Farm, the glorious Fabrication Evelyn Fallon designed for me, for my immortality spell.
I watch as everything I have is devoured by the erin gilleem, crushing Alfonse beneath its weight. I sense the blood in the air, the sacrifice, fading as my prisoners in the farm are killed and all the spells working simultaneously absorb their suffering. I imagine Alfonse, eyes wide, face red and sweaty, sensing that he will soon be unable to maintain his shell and the weight of my wrath will crush him like an ant under a car wheel. Will he bleed himself? Will he tear at his own wrist in terror, to gain a few more seconds of his spell, a few more seconds of life?
I am not paralyzed, though I appear to be to most. My lips, dry and cracked, thin and old, stretch into a grin. I will have to begin again, but that is no matter.
The world is populous. The herd is eager to be bled.
SIXTY-SIX SECONDS
CRAIG SCHAEFER
Craig Schaefer’s interconnected series depict a world mired in crime, black magic, and infernal intrigue. Fontaine (from the Harmony Black series) is a demonic bounty hunter, sworn to uphold hell’s cruel laws and drag his targets to eternal damnation. The Redemption Choir (from the Daniel Faust series) is a sect of terrorists determined to tear down the gates of hell at any cost. In “Sixty-Six Seconds,” when their paths inevitably cross, it makes for one long and blood-soaked night.
10:42 p.m.
Waking up inside a body bag was nothing new.
Fontaine groaned, shifting strange limbs, squirming like a caterpillar in a black vinyl cocoon. The formaldehyde in his veins, burning sludge, rippled and pulsed. He had sawdust behind his eyes, like the hangover after an all-weekend bender, and his fingers traced the Y-shaped stitches of an autopsy incision along his chest. They’d scooped out his organs, stuffed them in a cold plastic bag, and shoved them back behind his broken ribs before sewing him up again.
Just enough wiggle room at the top of the zipper to slip a finger through. He worked the zipper all the way down, but the darkness remained. Fontaine sighed, clenched his fist, and punched the roof of the stainless-steel mortuary drawer.
“Swear to the abyss, I don’t know what I pay that boy for,” he muttered. “Irving!”
Casters rattled as the drawer slid open. Blinding fluorescent overheads banished the dark. Still lying on the slab, nestled in the half-open body bag, Fontaine cupped a hand over his aching eyes. Irving shifted from foot to foot anxiously, light glare bouncing off his chunky Buddy Holly glasses. His hair was mussed like a California surfer’s, and a splatter of acne marred his greasy forehead.
“Sorry, boss. Wasn’t sure which body you were going to wake up in.”
Fontaine groaned as he swung his legs over the slab, bare feet touching down on the icy morgue floor. Red candles burned all around the room, propped up on empty gurneys and tables, and the scent of frankincense hung in the stagnant air. Irving had splashed his glyph of evocation across the grimy tile, the sigils drawn in rusty scarlet, not far from the corpse of a pale and throat-cut rabbit. Fontaine took a step forward, testing his new legs, and nearly slipped in a smear of blood.
“Did you have to use the entire bunny? Moderation is a virtue, son.” His words had a smooth, fluid drawl, half from waking up, and half from accent and habit. He paused. “Still, your summoning technique is getting better.”
Fontaine eyed himself in a mirror on the far side of the morgue. His new host looked about forty, reasonably fit, adequate for the job. His hairline had receded like the polar ice caps, though, for which he’d absurdly compensated by growing what was left of his stringy blond hair out past his shoulders.
“Business in the front, party in the back,” Fontaine muttered. “Fuck me running. Where are we, anyway?”
Irving rummaged through a pair of bulky suitcases, looking Fontaine up and down, tugging out rumpled clothes to fit his stolen body. A twill button-down shirt, a pair of stone-washed jeans. A shoulder h
olster of soft calfskin and a battered old overcoat to hide it under.
“Detroit,” Irving said with a wince. “Sorry. On the plus side, I got exactly what you asked for. It’s a Green Letter contract, just came through. Top priority, and straight from Prince Malphas. You pull this off, it’s a huge payday. And, um, your new apprentice just got here.”
Fontaine slapped his forehead. “Is that today? I thought that was next week. Can you get me out of it? Make up a story, tell ’em the hunt’s been canceled?”
“She’s right outside . . .” Irving paused as the mortuary door swung open. The new arrival looked like someone’s nightmare of a twelve-year-old girl, with a flat pale face and huge dead-fish eyes. Her long black hair draped down the back of her frilled dress, a dirty white frock with pearl buttons, straight out of a Dickens novel.
“Gotta be kidding me,” Fontaine said. “You look like Wednesday Addams on the back of a milk carton. And the milk’s gone sour.”
“You look like you fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down,” she chirped. “Nice hair, fucko.”
“You kiss your mother with that mouth?”
“I ate my mother,” the little girl said. “Probably ate yours, too. She probably liked it.”
Irving coughed into his hand, looking like he wanted to be anywhere else in the world. “Um, Mr. Fontaine, meet Rache. Rache, Mr. Fontaine will be conducting your evaluation of fitness for formal investment in the Revered Order of Chainmen, hallowed be their—”
“Get to the good part.” Rache propped a hand on her hip and stared him down.
“Right. The briefing. Okay, it’s a Green Letter bounty. High risk, high reward. The Redemption Choir is operating in Detroit, and Prince Malphas wants an example made.”