by Jeff Somers
I rolled onto my side, my arm dead weight, disturbingly pale and cold. I sat up and worked at it, rubbing and kneading and willing it back to life, but after fifteen minutes or so I had to admit it wasn’t coming back. I got up and peeled back the plastic garbage bag taped over the window. The snow outside was so thick, it was hard to see the brick wall of the next building just a few feet away. Inches of the stuff had already collected on the sill. I could feel the cold pushing through the glass.
I got dressed with some difficulty, my arm flopping around uselessly as I threaded it through sleeves. A doctor, I thought. I should see a doctor. Or Trina Tee down at Rue’s, who knew healing spells. Someone. Before my arm turned black and fell off.
I stepped out into the hall and jumped.
“Hullo, Vonnegan,” Murray the Fell said.
He was leaning against the wall, cleaning his nails with a penknife. “Sorry to startle,” he said, pushing off and pocketing the knife. “Didn’t want to barge into your room even though there’s no lock on the door. You know, for a Trickster in the process of planning a bank job, you spend a lot of fucking time with a certain police officer.”
I tried to look natural as we walked toward the stairs. “Come on, Murray. You know James. We all know James. He’s always sticking his nose into things.”
Walking down the stairs with a dead arm was harder than it looked.
“Detective James is a thorn in everyone’s side, it’s true,” Murray conceded. “But you can see how the optics of the situation might be troubling to your partners in crime, eh?”
“I’ll mention that and see if he’ll stop picking on me,” I suggested. We were in the foyer of the old building. Outside, the storm was blowing, a whiteout. We stood awkwardly.
“You got our list of scripts?” Murray said gruffly. I guessed that I’d passed muster, at least for the moment. “Anything there you can’t handle?”
I shook my head. “Nothing fancy in there.”
I decided not to tell him that I could write his spells in a few minutes, on the spot even, most of it cobbled together from shorter little mu I’d scratched out years ago. Spells were easy. I was constantly amazed at how many ustari thought them difficult. It was just putting thoughts together in a pattern: verbs and objects, modifiers. Verbs and objects, modifiers.
Murray nodded and produced another horrifying cigar from his pocket. He shoved it into his mouth and began to chew, contemplatively, as if he had no interest in leaving. I realized I wasn’t going anywhere, either, not out into the storm.
I cocked my head. “You hear that?”
Murray looked around, then shook his head. “Don’t hear a thing. Thought you were the only idimustari flopping in this shithole.”
It was the singing, again. The same off-tune, flat warbling I’d heard before. It sounded nearby, as if it were just down the hall. There was no tune, no form to it, yet it was familiar, like it had been one of those songs they made you sing in public school, distantly remembered. The sound of it filled me with dread and horror. The aching in my arm swelled up, becoming intense and forcing a wince out of me, a sharp inhalation, a reaction. Tricksters were essentially criminals, grifters, desperate and often willing to sacrifice the weak. You never wanted to appear weak in front of people who made a living looking for it.
“Don’t go chasin’ will o’ wisps, kid,” Murray said, spitting brown tobacco juice onto the floor. “Stay on mission, yeah? You’re gettin’ paid to scribe for us. That means prepping the spells you’re asked for, but it also means bein’ ready to drum up a mu or even something bigger in the moment. You need to focus.”
I listened to the singing for another few seconds just to irritate him. My other major talent: I could irritate people.
“Come on,” Murray said, and spat on the floor.
WHEN I SAW HER, a panic seized me, and I wanted to run, to turn and run until I fell over. The terror was incredible, and inexplicable; I’d only ever seen Mika Renar a few times, and barely interacted with her. Seeing Bella Grace’s impersonation shouldn’t have bothered me, perfect as it was. Mika Renar’s Glamour was the best I’d ever seen, an astounding illusion that was only given away by one imperfection that was so obvious, I had to assume it was on purpose: it floated. The original Glamour’s feet never touched the ground.
Bella’s did, and as she got closer, the illusion of the illusion faded a little. She’d never seen Renar before, she only had my description to work with. She’d managed a beautiful, binary woman, tall and graceful, wearing a tight black dress. If you’d never actually seen Renar or you’d seen her only once and spent the entire experience absolutely terrified—which was about right—it might pass.
“It’s close,” I said, pulling myself together. “But it’s a risk. If anyone in there is close to Renar, they won’t be fooled.”
“No one’s close to Mika Renar,” Reggie said, exhaling smoke. “She’s a spider.”
“She associates,” I said, louder than I’d meant to. “She associates with her fellow Archmages, doesn’t she? I’m just saying it’s a risk.” I looked at Bella. “You’re talented. No denying it. It’s fine work. But if someone in that bank has met Renar, you’ll be dead.”
The beautiful, pale face flashed and for a second the illusion improved immeasurably, and she looked closer to Renar, the wrath in her face bridging the gap. “I can handle myself, you little pussy-shit Scribe, scribbling our spells on the fucking sidelines. This is what I do. I put on a face and I walk into a room and I get by on fucking confidence and talent. So spare me the lectures.”
Lorie laughed. It was a mean, teenage laugh, meant to hurt. Reggie whistled, low, and said “Damn,” drawing out the a sound.
I put up my hands. “Fine,” I said. “You want to get killed for a little money? Go on ahead.”
She nodded firmly and spun around, shimmering just like I remembered. “Besides, I won’t be in long. A few minutes, get in, pay attention, get the lay of the land.” She nodded again, and with no fanfare the Glamour dissolved, leaving just Bella, a big, unbeautiful girl in a baggy man’s suit. The sudden shift gave me a headache.
I looked around the apartment. Murray had found it for us, a tiny place with nice molding that probably rented for thousands a month, an empty white shell we were devaluing with our mere presence, our cigarette ash everywhere, our ruined toilet, our spit on the walnut floors. It was across the street from the bank, giving us easy access.
“You ready?” Reggie asked. “No time like the present.”
Bella nodded. Pulling a sheaf of paper from my pocket, I unfolded it and smoothed it out on the wall before offering it to her.
“What’s this?”
“A spell,” I said, feeling strangely nervous. “I wrote it up last night—it’s all in sounds, so we won’t have any disagreements about spelling or alphabets.”
I’d seen enustari argue fiercely about how to spell the fucking Words, or what were the correct glyphs to use when writing them out. The Words were inert on the page, so it didn’t matter—except when you needed to pass them on to another ustari. Phonetics were the way to go.
Bella took the paper hesitantly. “What does it do?”
Fucking Tricksters were like dealing with illiterates. They barely knew what the Words meant, and most of them relied on a small number of mu they’d memorized and barely understood in any deep way.
“It’ll make your memory perfect for a short period of time,” I said. “Everything you see, hear, smell, feel—you’ll have perfect recall of it. If we debrief you fast enough, you’ll be able to describe every single detail for us.”
Bella frowned. “It’s . . . short.”
I nodded, looking over at Redix. “Won’t take more than a shallow bleed,” I said.
Redix cocked her head, studying me. Then she nodded, once, pursing her lips thoughtfully. Not for the first time I thought we deser
ved the name Little Magician. Most of us thought small.
“All right,” Reggie said, standing up and seeming to fill the room with his bulk. “Let’s go.”
BELLA EFFECTED HER Glamour in the moment she passed through the tiny vestibule at the front of the bank, muttering her spell with the practiced ease of a Trickster who made her illicit living pretending to be other people. The rest of us gathered across the street again, watching helplessly. If Bella was caught, if her Glamour wasn’t good enough, if she made a mistake, we wouldn’t be able to help her.
We passed the time in different ways. Reggie smoked and paced, all restless physicality. Lorie sat with her sunglasses and headphones on, perfectly still, her mouth slightly open. Redix, her fresh scar ugly and ragged on her forearm, leaned against a wall reading a paperback book—the most surprising thing being the discovery that some idimustari could actually read. The big woman occasionally yawned. As someone who was serving as a blood bag for the rest of us, her commitment to the caper seemed slight, naturally enough.
Me, I listened to the singing.
I wanted to ask the rest of them if they could hear it, but wasn’t certain I wanted to know their answers. Instead I concentrated on trying to make out the words of the song, which was as tuneless and persistent as ever. But my thoughts kept drifting, kept wandering back to my strange interview with James.
Where the fuck is Mags? You need to find Mags.
The droning voice, always just around a corner, behind a wall, hidden somehow. Someone was following me, singing their awful tuneless ditty. Detective James was harassing me, not for a bribe but to warn me off the first paying gig I’d had in months, and to demand to know where Pitr was.
My arm was numb again, a deep-set throbbing pain the only sign that it hadn’t fallen off overnight and been replaced with a mannequin’s. I was sweating and shivering, and the singing seemed to be getting louder and louder, until I could almost make out the words, which seemed familiar, tantalizing, as if I was just a moment or two away from making them out and remembering where I’d heard the song before.
“Here she comes.”
I glanced up in time to see a flicker of Bella’s Renar Glamour just before it disappeared as she exited the bank. She crossed the street briskly and walked past us without a glance. One by one, we all moved to follow at a short distance, just in case anyone was watching. I lingered behind, listening, but the singing began to fade as if the singer was moving off.
As I walked back to the apartment for the debriefing, the sun beating down on me and filling my shoes with sweat, I sensed the car creeping along next to me. I refused to turn my head. When I heard the power windows cranking down, I smiled.
“I’m not getting in that car with you again,” I said.
“Fair enough,” James shouted. “But this investigation goes on with or without your cooperation, Vonnegan. You want me to leave you alone, you gotta find Mags. You gotta find Mags, man.”
I nodded. “Got it.”
I walked straight past the apartment, eyes on the sidewalk. The bastard kept rolling along next to me, silent, and I knew if I turned my head he would be grinning at me, not even watching the road, prepared to arrest anyone he hit, even if they were dead. He would cuff them to the bumper and drag them to the station house and write them up for resisting arrest.
Finally he hit the brakes and turned the wheel. “Where’s Mags, Vonnegan?!” he shouted as he steered the car into a violent U-turn.
“PRETTY STRAIGHTFORWARD,” LORIE SAID, studying the floorplan Bella had produced. She glanced over at me. “Does the Fell know the exact box we need?”
I blinked and looked up. “Huh?” I frowned. “How the fuck should I know?”
She shrugged, looking back at the floorplan. “Well, if he knows the exact box, this will be easy. In and out, maybe ten minutes.” She looked at Bella. “You’re sure about the Wards?”
Bella nodded, sipping from her glass of whiskey, donated from a bottle Reggie had brought. “I’m fucking sure. I can read a fucking Ward.”
Lorie shrugged. “Then we’re gold, Ponyboy.”
“All right,” Reggie said. “Give Vonnegan any spells you need. Give me anything else you think is necessary. I’ll check in with the Fell and make sure nothing’s changed. Two days?”
He looked around at us. Lorie nodded. Bella shrugged. Redix grunted. He looked at me.
I nodded, then paused. “Hey, you open to a side gig?”
Reggie cocked his head. The other three started collecting their shit. “What you need, big guy?”
I looked out the window. Detective James was idling in his Charger across the street. “To find someone.”
5.
I WOKE UP, twisted in the scratchy sheets. I stared up at the tin ceiling, rusted and old paint peeling, heart pounding. I’d been dreaming again. Of my father, as usual, inevitably. I’d been in the hospital room with Hilly, the last time I’d ever seen him. In real life I’d been there maybe half an hour, half listening to his doomsday ramblings about dying, about being judged, about what a shitty father he’d been. In the dream I was trapped. I’d been there for hours and there was no escape, no way to leave. The room had been Warded by Mika Renar, whose Glamour hovered in the corner, grinning at me.
“You hear ’em, Lemuel?” Dad asked, breathing with difficulty. “You hear them? The bands?”
I did, suddenly. Singing. Atonal, monotonous, coming from just outside the room.
I looked back at Dad, and he wasn’t in the hospital bed. He was suspended from the ceiling by a harness made of iron and leather, naked. His toes dangled a few inches from the floor, swinging gently this way and that. His right arm had a slow rivulet of blood flowing from a tiny, precise incision in the ulnar collateral, ending in a steady drip from his fingers that sizzled away. I was suddenly aware that the whole room was full of gas, just a roaring invisible cloud of blood.
I looked at Renar. “You hear it?”
Her smile widened. No, she widened; she swelled up and loomed over me, filling the room, spreading, suffocating. I was crushed against the wall, everything was a sweet smell, and the velvet of her dress, and none of it was real because it was just a Glamour, an illusion, and the singing, the singing—
I startled awake. I’d dozed off sitting up in bed. My arm was numb and throbbing, white and cold. Rain pelted against the window. Water dripped from the ceiling, ice cold, the whole room like a freezer. I sat for a moment, concentrating on breathing and trying to will life back into the arm. I felt tired and weak, shivering, achy.
There was a sound, a scrape of a shoe. Someone was in the next room.
I moved carefully. With one arm down, getting dressed quickly wasn’t an option, so I slid out of bed in my underwear, scars up and down my arms, on my belly, my thighs. I knelt and pulled my penknife from my pants pocket and crept toward the doorway, a blanket hung with thumbtacks for a tiny bit of privacy. Poised to cut, four Words ready to go, I pushed through into the room I was using as a makeshift kitchen.
Reggie looked up from his cup of coffee. “You sleep hard, Vonnegan.”
Sunlight poured in from the window, making the rusty, crumbling room seem almost cozy. You could feel the heat rising already, turning the space into a small oven, big enough to cook two moderately sized human beings. The fact that Reggie was drinking hot coffee in the heat inched up my respect for our Enforcer.
He looked at me and frowned. “You okay?”
I shrugged. “Arm’s wonky,” I said. “Any particular reason you’re here, scaring the shit out of me?”
He sipped his coffee, looking at me steadily, a man who didn’t rattle easily, the sort of guy who just stared at you when you tried to strong-arm him. “Found your boy.”
My heart skipped a beat in my chest. My arm still wasn’t waking up. “Pitr Mags? Where is he?”
Reggie frowned. “He’s r
ight here. Can’t you see him?”
Standing there in my underwear, I had that familiar sense of being made fun of. “Very fucking funny.”
Reggie frowned. “I’m being completely serious. He’s yelling at you. You can’t hear him? See him?”
I looked around carefully, aware that there was gas in the air, the same sort of roiling cloud of power I’d felt in my dream. An ocean of it, somehow. The moment I noticed it, I knew I could reach out and grab hold if I wanted to, cast anything I wanted. I had no idea where it was coming from, but the empty shell of a building was used by a lot of ustari as a flophouse and all-purpose gathering spot. Most of us were just Tricksters bleeding to survive one more day, but it wouldn’t be crazy to think some slightly higher-ranked mage might not be cooking up a hefty biludha one floor down.
I shook myself. Gas or not, Mags was definitely not in the room. “You’re fucking hilarious,” I said, turning to gather my clothes. “I’ll meet you outside.”
THE SNOW WAS up to my knees, and my feet were as numb as my arm in just a few minutes. When I got to the apartment, the heat felt like an oven, and I had that deep-down ache in my bones the cold sometimes gave you. I was being reduced. I’d lost my arm, which still hung at my side, alabaster white and unresponsive, and now I might lose my feet to some post-frostbite amputation.
Reggie trailed in after me, looking none the worse for wear. He breezed past me as if nothing had happened between us. As he passed me, I had a strange sensation of being pushed, as if I was floating, as if Reggie had his own outsize gravity well. I glanced down, and my feet were about six inches off the floor.
The door to the apartment opened and closed, both sounds echoing in the unfurnished space. Murray stormed in, walking, as usual, like a man who hunted and throttled his dinner every night, all coiled intensity and pure anger. He stopped suddenly and stared at me.
“What’s wrong with you?”