by Jeff Somers
Eyes shut, I listened, and made notes. It was a master class in creating something out of light and perception, something that really wasn’t there at all. I started cribbing lines from it, shedding some of the fancier stuff I wouldn’t need—facial animation, voice work, scent—and concentrated on stealing the visual framework of it, figuring out what Words to tweak or change to shift the image from Renar’s Bombshell Woman to my own Run-Down Asshole.
Luckily, Run-Down Asshole was a lot easier to achieve.
It took some time, listening, memorizing, arranging. My arm and back ached, my head throbbed, my mouth was dry as sandpaper. No one bothered us; I guessed Renar and Amir just let us hang in here until we quietly passed away, then swapped us out for new unfortunates. I ran my thick tongue over my dry lips and tried to work up some spit, because when I cast my first little mu to open up the binding on my arm and get a decent flow going, I was going to be on two clocks: one to cast my new Glamour before I bled to death, and one to cast my new Glamour before Cal Amir burst in. If I was lucky, they were both the same clock.
When I had the spell worked out, I opened my eyes and looked at the tourniquet. I found my slender feed of gas in the air and spoke three Words. The tourniquet wriggled as if alive for a second, and sagged on my arm. The incision a few inches below it began to pulse rich, red blood, and my own personal river of awful power doubled, then tripled.
A second later I heard a door open somewhere nearby, feet on the floorboards, distant. I pictured a stopwatch, ticking away. I started speaking my new spell. It wasn’t nearly as complex as Renar’s; I couldn’t bleed for a spell like that on my own—the bitch had a warehouse full of people bleeding for her spell—and I didn’t need most of it. My Glamour wasn’t going to move, or talk.
I spoke as quickly as I could. You had to be precise. Mispronunciations or marble-mouthed mumbling would just confuse the universe. Best case, the universe paused until you clarified yourself. Worst case, the whole spell blew up—literally—in your face. Thirty-one Words. Each one punctuated by the sound of Cal Amir coming closer, and I had to exert will on myself to keep my flow steady and clear.
When I finished, the shivery sensation of sour weakness passing through me, I took a deep breath and immediately started casting a third spell. Three more Words, and the harness twisted open and I tumbled to the floor. I landed on my right arm, cold and still numb, and could feel it bending under me in a way that didn’t feel right. There was no time to worry about it, though. I flipped myself over and wriggled free of the harness, my left arm stiff but functional. I reached over and found the wound, which had closed up, half-healed thanks to the cadence of the spell. I tore it back open with my fingers, and my thin line of gas bloomed again.
The door opened. I spoke five more Words, then froze in place as Cal Amir stepped in again.
9.
HE PAUSED JUST INCHES away from me. He was so close, I could see the hand stitching on his beautiful shoes, soft brown leather that radiated money. I could see his silk socks.
Thanks to my last spell, he couldn’t see me. Making yourself invisible isn’t easy, but on the streets as a Trickster you figured out a cheat: forget invisible. Make yourself unnoticeable. Make it so people’s eyes just slid off you. I crouched on the floor and Amir just skipped over me, his eyes glancing off me as if I were something horrifying he definitely didn’t want to see. What he did see was the Glamour I’d created, which looked exactly like me, hanging from the harness, milky right arm stretched out, tourniquet in place. And since Amir saw exactly what he expected to see, his brain didn’t insist on going back to figure out what he’d just skipped past. It didn’t matter how powerful you were. You had to know you were being tricked before you could see through the trick.
I held my breath. My right arm was burning with cold fire, a distant prickling that I knew would become torture soon enough—but at least I’d know for sure if I’d broken it.
“Another little bird is singing!” Amir said loudly, looking around. His cologne was exquisite, and his voice was rich and wonderful to listen to. “I was sitting with Ms. Grace having some tea and biscuits, apologizing for her inconvenience, and we both sensed it—someone else casting! A muscular spell, in fact. So here I am, compelled to apologize again!”
I tried to picture Cal Amir laughing ruefully over tea. The image did not come easy.
He started walking again—slow, deliberate steps away from me. I didn’t feel very good. My head throbbed and my arm sizzled, and I felt dizzy and hot.
“Perhaps we accidentally scooped up a murder of idimustari? You people are difficult to tell apart from common street trash. Come! Tea and cookies for all we’ve offended!”
His voice, I realized, was powerful in itself. I couldn’t tell if it had maybe a little blood dripped on it, a spell to make his voice more pleasant, everything he said more plausible and interesting, but it wouldn’t have surprised me. Shivering, shielded by a spell, and recently hung up to bleed like a side of beef, I wanted to struggle to my feet and limp after him to keep that warm voice in my ear. Soon, I knew, he would repeat his little spell and get me to shout my name. If I was still in the room when he got to the cadence, I was fucked.
Moving as slowly as I could, I turned my head. No windows. The space was huge, hangar-size. There was, as far as I could tell, just the one door. Which didn’t mean there weren’t other doors, windows, or modes of escape that were hidden by a spell. Mika Renar was a woman who didn’t mind bleeding a few hundred people to death for her fucking convenience.
Amir kept walking, slowly, talking, filling the air with words. He sounded cheerful and friendly, just a guy who wanted all the secret Tricksters in his secret murder factory to stop annoying him by casting spells and come have some tea and cookies, for fuck’s sake.
I judged the distance between him and the door, me and the door.
Carefully, I moved my hand down my sizzling right arm, an arm I was pretty certain would never be normal again, and found the wound, which had sealed up again. It was going to be one hell of a scar. Comparing scars with other Tricksters wasn’t too common, because we all had them and they were mostly anonymous little pink and white lines. But sometimes, when you had an epic story about one, you’d roll up your shirtsleeve and show it off. I had a feeling that if I survived this, I was going to be dining out on this scar for a long time.
“Little bird! Stop your singing and lay down your burdens. You are among friends!”
I waited. It was inconceivable that Amir wouldn’t cast again. Enustari were the worst; they cast for everything. When you had Bleeders following you around, ready to slash and sacrifice, it was easy to start using Words for everything. Amir would get bored teasing me, he’d get impatient trying to sweet-talk me. He’d tire of his little game and he’d just cast something, and I would be ready.
I closed my eyes and formed the spell in my head. The trick with teleportation is that there’s a hard way and an easy way. The hard way is to move yourself, to fight the laws of physics. The laws of physics fight back, and you pour gas and sweat into the spell and it gets bigger and hungrier and bigger and hungrier and before you know it you’re slaughtering a small village in the Amazon jungle just to teleport yourself a few feet.
The trick was, do it the easy way: just let the world move around you. Put a hold on yourself and let the planet spin under you.
One drawback was that over a large enough distance you wind up in the air, because the planet’s round. So if you teleport a mile, you’ve got a serious drop. Go five miles, you’re dead when you hit the ground.
I judged the distance to the other side of the door to be ten, twelve feet. I wouldn’t even notice the elevation. I would, however, need to open the door, or else I’d explode through it, so I added a few Words to snap it open and shut. When Amir sighed, the irritation obvious, I got ready to rip, cast, and move, my fingers poised on the delicate, tearable f
lesh of my own wound. For interminable seconds I held steady, waiting, the deep ache in my arm spreading like slow fire, connected somehow to the ache in my head.
Amir started to cast. I tore at my wound until it ripped open again, and blood welled up, a thicker flow than I’d intended. I started casting my own spell, teeth chattering with a sudden wave of cold sweeping through me. I closed my eyes and concentrated on the Words, pulling them from myself as my own blood was sucked up by the greedy universe.
I hit the cadence, there was a dizzy sense of nausea, and then everything was quiet.
I startled awake a moment later, feeling hot and shivery. My stomach rose and tried to climb up my throat. Taking deep breaths, I waited it out, sweat dripping from my forehead. My arm was on fire. Red splotches mottled the alabaster skin as it came back to life, and the ugly wound had sealed again, pink and rubbery and misshapen. The arm was waking up and like a time bomb attached to me, a wall of agony rushing down toward me, ready to crush.
I was leaning against the door that led into the warehouse area. If I strained, I could just hear the droning of Renar’s casting through the wall. I’d shifted myself twelve feet under cover of Cal Amir’s own spell. I had no idea how long I’d been unconscious, but the idea of standing up and moving suddenly seemed like a fantasy, the sort of thing other people did, but not me. A short hallway led to another door on my left.
Shifting my weight, I slowly got my knees under me. Amir might come back out at any moment, and when he did the door would smack right into me. My Invisible Trick would be ruined. As so often happened for a Trickster, all roads led to: fucked.
Taking a deep breath, I got my feet under me. Using the wall for support, I stood, a slow inch at a time. My vision went hazy for a moment, then cleared. I hobbled down the hall, my right arm just dangling from my torso like some prankish surgeon had attached a corpse’s arm, then somehow injected deep, vague pain into its core.
To my relief the door at the end of the hall was unlocked. I pulled it open and slipped through, pulling it shut behind me. I was breathing like I’d just run a marathon, and my respiration seemed incredibly loud to me, sure to attract attention. I dragged a hand over my sweat-stung eyes and looked around; I was in an office, windowless and comfortably appointed. There was a large oak desk, a big leather chair and matching leather couch. The walls were white and the floor was an expensive kind of hardwood, the air was scented with some kind of mint, and there was a light strain of music in the air, feathery strings dancing in rhythm.
There was an elevator, and Bella.
She was alive. She stood stiffly in the middle of the room, eyes wide and unblinking. Magicked, obviously, held still and probably in a lot of agony. I assumed the agony part because in my experience enustari like Cal Amir and his master included agony in everything they did, more or less out of habit.
I couldn’t leave her. I walked around her as briskly as I could, my right arm newly transformed into a pillar of fire, burning me alive. I couldn’t see any Wards or obvious threads to pull. A witchlight might help—my interrupted education had left me unable to see some things without a little assistance—but there wasn’t time for me to sit and ponder puzzles. Sweating and shaky, I slid my arm under her armpit and tipped her backward. She was stiff, a statue, and weighed more than I expected, and wound up on the floor. I got my good hand in the collar of her shirt and dragged her to the elevator.
“Come on, Bella,” I muttered, feeling giddy. “Help me out a little.”
The elevator, of course, had no buttons or other obvious ways of accessing it. Which was par for the course with Archmages—they had so little remorse or hesitation about bleeding people to death for their spells, they used a bit of gas for everything. I had no doubt that assholes like Cal Amir had little spells memorized for wiping their ass, assuming they didn’t just vaporize the shit from their bowels instead.
I set Bella down on the floor and wiped the sweat from my eyes. I studied the elevator. It was the only obvious way out of this terrible place. I either figured out how it worked or I joined Ms. Grace in the living statue business. Rubbing my eyes, I took a deep breath and shook myself, then blinked a few times and studied the doors. A few seconds was all it took for me to realize there was nothing for it: I was going to have to bleed again.
I felt like if I closed my eyes, I would slump over asleep. And my thoughts were slippery and twisted away from me. There was a very real chance that any spell I bled for would knock me out.
I’d start off easy. Digging my dirty fingers into the wound, I winced as the tender skin tore, a weak line of gas hitting the air. I spoke a single Word: pad.
I felt the dizzying drain, fought against a wave of light-headed doom, and squinted at the elevator. Ghostly blue runes flickered and danced over it as if superimposed; I’d gotten lucky. I even recognized the rune set being used—there were almost as many alphabets as there were ustari because there was no agreed-upon written form of the Words. It took me a thick-headed moment to piece the runes together into a coherent instruction.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” I breathed.
The runes read Speak friend and enter. Considering that mages had no fucking sense of humor, it was the oldest thing resembling a joke we had.
I cleared my throat. “Kuli,” I said.
The elevator dinged softly and the doors slid open, revealing a small cab, all white. Music was playing softly, strings and flute, a looping melody I hated on contact.
“Well, Ms. Grace,” I said quietly, grabbing her collar again and dragging her into the cab, “Mika Renar has a fucking sense of humor. A fucking terrible sense of humor, but still. A tiny human heart beats in there after all.”
Bella said nothing. She stared up at me. My sweat dripped down onto her.
“Exit stage left,” I said. “I hope.”
A loud banging noise brought my head up. At the end of the hall, Cal Amir stood, looking vaguely ruffled and surprised.
He shot his cuffs. “Little bird,” he said, striding confidently toward me. He moved like a ballet dancer, all grace and perfectly meshed moving parts. “I would advise you not to—”
The elevator doors slid shut. My last glimpse of Amir was of an angry, outraged face bearing down on me.
“Bella,” I said, feeling nauseous, “now would be a really good time to wake the fuck up.”
10.
THERE WAS NO SENSE of motion at all, and for a moment I was convinced the elevator doors would split open and Cal Amir would be there, grinning, ready to pull on a room full of cocooned bleeders to cast something devastating. Instead, nothing at all seemed to happen. I leaned against the back wall of the cab, woozy, the music spilling out around us. I sucked in deep breaths, trying to imagine every molecule of oxygen somehow bonding with a red blood cell, invigorating me.
I didn’t feel invigorated.
I thought the elevator likely wasn’t an elevator at all, but just a portal—you step in, magic happened, you stepped out somewhere else. The spell mechanics of such a thing weren’t complicated. As seconds ticked by, though, I lost faith and just as I became convinced that the elevator was a trap, a trick, the doors slid open again. Warm air that smelled like rosewood and coffee spilled into the cab. It was spa air, the sort of air that healed and soothed just through surface contact. It was rich air, wealthy air. My skin bubbled and blistered on contact. It was too rich for my weak, thinned blood.
I could move the fingers on my right hand a little. Pathetic, weak twitches that sent lances of pain shooting up the deep, buried core of my arm. I hooked my left hand into Bella’s collar and dragged her out of the elevator.
We were in a mansion.
For a moment, my head swam. I had the sense that I’d been here before, walked these halls, breathed this corrosively rich air. I would be able to trace my route through the place with my eyes closed, following the steps of a
dream. For some reason the whole place was engulfed in flames when I closed my eyes.
When I opened them again, I didn’t recognize anything. Not the luxe wood paneling on the walls, or the thick red drapes on the windows, or the velvet cushions on the chairs. The elevator spat us out into a library, the walls filled with books up to the ceiling. A thick rug with a pattern of roses covered ancient wide-plank floorboards. To our right was a huge stone fireplace, empty and cold. Several big leather chairs were arranged in a conversation circle right in front of it, spaced by round side tables. No one, I was convinced, had ever sat in those chairs. The whole room had the feel of a place no one ever entered, the sort of room where the air itself jellied over time, the molecules bonding together.
I set Bella down on the floor and dragged one of the small wooden tables over to the elevator, jamming it in between the doors to prevent them from closing. Cal Amir likely knew a dozen spells to just manifest himself anywhere in the house he wanted, but every second gained was worth it. I grabbed Bella again and began dragging her through the house. I had no idea where I was going. I was just fleeing. There was no better word for it: fleeing. There was nothing brave or smart or clever about what I was doing. I was fucking running away.
I dragged Bella down a short hallway and found us in another immense room, filled with the largest table I’d ever seen. It appeared to have been carved from a single block of black stone, and I could feel magical residue steaming off it; the table had been used for some serious rituals in its time, and magic and blood and suffering had soaked into it. There were no chairs. The walls were covered in portraits, and as I looked around, sweating and dragging Bella along the waxed floors, I saw nothing but silent screams. All the paintings were done in different styles, and all showed different people. But they were all screaming. Every one of them, locked in an expression of terror.
I dragged Bella out, my vision going gray a few times. The next room was equally huge, equally mysterious: it sported a glazed parquet floor that had been polished to a mirror finish. My head spun as we glided across, all our movements reflected back in a slightly blurry, off-kilter way. It was empty of furniture, though, and had two doors in each wall. By the time I got done counting them, I had spun around and didn’t know which way we’d come.