by Jeff Somers
I took another swig.
It was time to go. It was time to make an excuse, put on my shoes, steal a towel from the bathroom, and walk out into the night and leave Mags behind. Pitr wasn’t bright, and I’d been kidding myself that I’d been taking care of him all these years. Here we were, broke again, on the run. We had nothing to show for anything, and it was all my fault. The worst part was how easy it would be. I could wait for Mags to fall asleep, or just tell him I was going out for a smoke. Step out, crack a scab and cast a quick Glamour, make everyone’s eye skip over me, and just walk away. He’d be better off without me.
I brought the bottle into the bathroom and closed the flimsy wooden door behind me. I was, as usual, wearing everything I owned. I set the bottle on the back rim of the sink and leaned forward, staring at myself. Sunken eyes, limp, greasy black hair, an uneven, sallow sort of face with a crust of beard. I looked like someone who’d lift your wallet and cry if you caught him. I was twenty-nine and I’d had Mags for eight years, and here we were. All the fucking power of the universe at my fingertips and nothing to do.
The bathroom was small and cramped, crowded with mildewed tiles that looked like they were sliding off the walls—salmon-colored in a way that was essentially not salmon but something else entirely—and a popcorn ceiling that would never, could never feel clean no matter what you did to it. People had died in the tub, I was sure of it. A layer of human grease left behind, invisible but detectable nonetheless. I picked up the bottle and watched myself take another swig. The Vonnegans had always been good drinkers. We took to it naturally.
I was about to turn and inspect the thin, scratchy towels for the best one to steal when I heard the hollow knock at the door.
A second later, the squeal of hinges and Mags framed in the bathroom doorway, silent in his socks. “Lem?” A squeaky whisper, Mags like a startled cat.
I took the bottle with me back out into the room and put a hand on Mags’s shoulder for a second, nodding, already feeling a little light-headed from the liquor; we’d last eaten in the morning, and I was starved. I felt strangely unconcerned and light as I crossed to the door. I had, after all, nothing much left to lose. I didn’t even have much blood left to lose. Another short Cantrip would put me in the hospital. A spell of any heft—of any use—would kill me. As I paused at the door of the room, I thought, Look around, take it in. This is Bottom. There is freedom in Bottom. Then I twisted the knob, and pulled the door inward, and stood blinking for a moment at Calvin Amir.
And there it was: the New Bottom.
“Mr. Vonnegan!” he boomed. “You are a hard man to find.”
I gave him an eyebrow. “Not hard enough.”
He smiled. His smile was sunshine. It appeared instantly and made me happier for having seen it. Cal Amir was the most handsome man I’d ever seen, with clear, smooth skin the color of creamed coffee, a pleasant, squarish face that was masculine yet finely etched, with just the right level of blue shadow on his cheeks. His hair was dark with a streak of gray on one side, the imperfection sanding him down to a smooth finish. His eyes were blue and seemed to reflect all the available light back at me. He was also, I thought conservatively, wearing more money on his back than I’d ever had in my hands in my entire life.
He spread his gloved hands. “May I come in?”
I took a deep breath. “Could I stop you?” I said, stepping aside.
He shrugged a little as he stepped in, tugging his gloves off. I glanced down and saw his hands. They were perfect. Smooth, manicured. Not a scratch on them.
“I’ve come alone,” he said, meaning no Bleeder. Meaning he hadn’t come ready to burn the place to the ground or make a fucking giant roach grow inside us that would eat its way out. It was a friendly call.
Which also let him avoid any attention, any publicity. An enustari could kill with a few words, could disappear, could make themselves fly—but it took time, and blood. It took a Bleeder producing a blade, opening a vein. It took a recitation, with perfect pronunciation and grammar. Even an enustari preferred not to have police, investigations, vendettas. We’d survived as a species because we were roaches. We stayed out of the light. Even an Archmage could be buried if enough cops came after them.
“Mr. Mageshkumar,” Amir said cheerfully. “Good to see you again.”
Mags was pressed up against the wall to the right of the bathroom door, his hands in his pockets as deep as he could push them. It was an old habit of his, from the orphanage, hiding the cuts. He went back to it whenever he was afraid.
Amir walked in easy, looking the place over like we were trying to sell it to him. He stopped at the dresser and examined the bottles for a moment, turning back to me with a grin.
“Celebrating?” He laughed. “Perhaps not.” He wagged a finger at me. “You know why I’m here?”
I nodded. The door was still hanging open, but moving felt impossible. I just stared at Amir. He was mesmerizing.
“Good. Come on, then. We’re already late.”
I nodded again, then frowned. “Late for what?”
He regarded me for an uncomfortable moment. “For your appointment with Ms. Renar.” He looked me up and down. “Do you have a shaving kit?”
• • •
The leather seats made my skin crawl. The moment he’d shut the door, the world had disappeared, and it was just the expensive hum of the engine and low music, something classical, all strings and timpani. It was so low I might have been imagining it. Amir had put his gloves back on to drive, which somehow made perfect sense.
Without Mags at my side, breathing in my ear, I felt exposed. And lonely.
“Are you afraid?” he asked.
I nodded immediately. Magicians were not good people. “Yes.”
“That is well. It will make the interview go more smoothly.” I saw him turn to look at me briefly. “Why hasn’t Bosch released you as his apprentice? Even a mediocrity like Bosch would have more self-respect, I think.”
I nodded, thinking of the girl again. Three girls, but I only really remembered one. All three of them standing there like limp rags, shivering, and Bosch’s voice, silk and razors, telling me I knew the spell, all I had to do was show him I could do it.
It took me three years to master this spell, I remembered him saying. And I’d been apprenticed to that fat bastard Gottschalk for five years before that. It is the limit of my abilities. Even today, Mr. Vonnegan, I find it a difficult and challenging spell to cast. But you, you I think have an ability greater than mine. You already know the tongue better than me.
This was true. I’d known it even back then. The words were a code. Obfuscated, but there were rules. Once you knew the rules, you could start playing with them. I would sit in the shared bathroom on my floor, thirteen feet away from the five-by-five room I rented for a hundred bucks a week, and bleed myself to try things. It was fascinating.
Hiram would teach me a spell to create light, a floating ball of soft yellow. A minor spell; light was easy. Everyone started with light. And I would poke at it. Try it over and over, leaving out one syllable, see what happened. Add in another syllable from another spell, see what happened. It was fun. By the time I got back to Hiram, I’d pared three syllables off the spell he’d taught me and had sixteen variations: different color light, a ball of light that followed you around, a version that eliminated the ball completely and just shone light around with no visible source.
Hiram disdained my process. Called it hacking. But I knew he was impressed.
The girls were whores. Bosch had paid them to bleed, a hundred bucks for a pint each. They were hollow-eyed, bird-boned shells and the first two didn’t bother me. The third was fourteen, maybe younger, so skinny it hurt to look at her. She stared down at her shoes, white Converse Chucks that she’d drawn on in pink marker, her name over and over again, stylized with flowers.
“He’s punishing me,” I said slowly, feeling tired and calm.
Amir seemed cheered by that. “For what?”
I didn’t answer.
Bleed them, Hiram had said, holding out his razor. You have potential, Mr. Vonnegan. You just need to get over your . . . phobia.
I was looking at the girl. Trying to imagine who looked at her and felt anything stirring inside them other than pity. I saw myself cutting her, draining off her blood into Hiram’s silver bowl—how long did it take for a pint to pour out of a person? How long would I have to stand there hearing her shiver, hearing her sniffle?
I said, No.
I had made a pledge, sealed with blood, a minor magic. I had sworn to obey my gasam in all things, to be a servant to him, in exchange for the knowledge he would pass on to me. Hiram’s expression was almost comical in its disbelief.
Bleed them, Mr. Vonnegan, he repeated, his voice softer, gentler. They will not die. They have been compensated. How much easier can you expect me to make it for you?
We were heading upstate. The world had turned into darkness and wind, the buildings melting away. I didn’t like it. Too much open space, too little light, too little noise. And I could feel Hiram back in the city, a worm made of razors between my shoulder blades. Our bond was passive, but Hiram could give it a charge anytime he wanted. I liked the streetlights bleeding through my windows, the garbage trucks waking me at 1 a.m., the drunken arguments seeping through the walls.
I didn’t look at Amir. I was too conscious of being in a car, far away from anyone who might care about me—well, the one person who might care about me.
“I have not searched you for a blade,” Amir said suddenly, his voice muffled and distant three feet away from me. “But I must warn you to refrain from attempting to cast any of your little tricks. There will be consequences.”
I shrugged, but ran through my repertoire of Cantrips and other mu, the little tricks I used to make my living. I knew only one spell of consequence. I could blind Amir with light and send us hurtling into the highway divider. I could make things look like something similar, an easy Glamour. I could Charm him, make him think well of me, desire to please me. I could hide myself in the light, make people’s eyes pass over me. I had a dozen other pranks, all useful, but I didn’t doubt Amir could brush them off easily enough. I imagined the price for trying and failing to full-on Charm Calvin Amir was not one I wished to pay.
I could lunge over and attack him. Cal Amir was only fearsome when there was blood in the air. But someone like Amir would be fast. He hadn’t survived this long without knowing how to cut himself quick and automatically spit out something devastating in under three seconds.
If you went for ustari physically, you went for the mouth.
“What kind of blade do you use?”
I frowned. “A switchblade.”
“Because of speed? Convenience?”
“Habit.”
“Teach me a spell.”
I blinked. “What?”
“Anything. Teach me something clever. I’ve heard you are clever.”
I didn’t say anything to that. If the saganustari wanted to have fun with me, he could go fuck himself. A few seconds dripped by, quiet and marked off by passing trees, and then he reached over and slapped me, hard, with the back of one gloved hand.
“I said teach me one of your clever spells, idimustari.”
I taught him how to gas up currency. Something quick and dirty he’d never encountered in his elite education—at first I worried I’d have to teach him what currency was, because Amir seemed like one of those rich assholes who’d never actually handled cash. He listened attentively, smiling, eyes bright. When I was done, he was excited.
“I see where you have substituted some unexpected words, and I like the way you rely on the greed of your subject to do the heavy work of the spell. It has interesting implications for more complex work.”
I stared at him. Didn’t know what to say to this. It was like being on a date. Almost exactly, I thought.
He poked questions and comments at me for a few more minutes, picking at the details, strangely curious. Finally he shut up and we drove a few minutes in peace.
Amir turned off the road and we were in the fucking woods, scratching our way up a dirt lane barely wide enough for his car. Somehow he managed to avoid the branches reaching for each side of his gleaming black coupe, making it seem like we were floating up the road. After a minute or so I made out squares of light up ahead, windows, and slowly the house resolved itself out of the darkness. It wasn’t what I’d expected.
Mika Renar was famous. There weren’t that many of us in the world, a few thousand, and for seventy years Renar had been the most powerful of us all, one of perhaps two dozen enustari in the world. There was no official classification. No test you could take and be proclaimed Archmage. You lived long enough and cast enough major spells, you got famous, even if it was only within our little world. She was ninety-four years old and I’d always imagined her a spider, fat and gleaming and round, hidden away in some spectacular mansion. The house was big, and nice enough. But it wasn’t epic. It was just a fucking house.
I started to feel better.
• • •
Amir walked me into a small, dry study and left. It was a square, windowless room lined with wooden bookshelves. The carpet was deep and swallowed the soles of my shoes when I stepped onto it. A huge ebony desk dominated the room, eating up the floor space. Two huge red leather chairs were arranged in front of the desk. After the heavy, studded door closed behind Amir, it was so silent in the room I thought I could hear the dust I was kicking up, slamming into everything like asteroids.
I spun around slowly. The room felt hermetically sealed, like I’d suffocate in it within a few hours. I stepped over to the nearest bookshelves and stared at them blindly for a moment, then frowned. The leather-bound books were hand-stitched, and the spines were hand-lettered in a rusty brown that looked exactly like dried blood.
Reaching for one, I paused with my hand in the air and turned. I wasn’t alone in the room.
There was a mummy behind the desk.
She was a skeleton with thin, papery skin stretched over her bones, wearing what looked like several blankets draped over her narrow shoulders. Her hair looked like a tight, heavy wig of yellowed white, braided thickly in the back. Her nose was still elegant, long and turned-up, the skin on it patchy and peeling. Stepping silently over the thick carpet, I leaned in and studied the figure: She was tiny and desiccated, and I would have thought she was dead except that her thin, liverish lips were moving. Whispering.
“You’re being quite rude, Mr. Vonnegan.”
I froze. The mummy had stopped moving its lips.
Straightening up, I hesitated for a ludicrous moment before turning around. Standing near the door, which was still shut, was a beautiful red-haired woman. She was tall, wearing a sleek black dress that hugged her convincingly. Her skin was bright white, almost like she was a photocopy—aside from her hair, she was black-and-white, a grayscale. She glowed peculiarly, and I found it easier to just leave my eyes on her, as if gravity just pulled them there.
I forced myself to look away and found the mummy again. Mika Renar.
I looked back at her Glamour. The most fantastic Glamour I’d ever seen. She looked real. Solid. I wondered if this was really what she was like fifty years ago, or if this was wishful thinking. I wanted to stare at her. The younger version was beautiful, that long nose with the arrogant turn at the end perfectly balancing a round, soft face, the sort of face you wanted to wake up next to. The sort of face you wanted to make express things. Like lust. Like pleasure. Like pain.
I felt like I’d seen her face before. Wondered if that was part of the Glamour. If it was, it was a nice touch.
The Glamour eyed me up and down, her face blank, and then she gestured at the chairs. “Please,” she said. “Have a seat.”
Her voice was delicious. It crawled into my ears and made a nest, and I felt blood rushing to my groin, my face getting flushed. I sank into the nearest red leather chair and l
et it envelop me. The leather was soft and fleshy, and kind of warm.
I wondered idly how many people had to bleed to manage a Glamour like this.
“You have been granted this meeting,” she said, gliding over toward me and sitting down in the other chair, a graceful dance move, “out of courtesy. Your Master, Bosch, is a minor member of our Order—and you are insignificant—but members you are.”
Our Order. Fancy. There was no order, no rules. No membership rolls, no elected officials. No organized set of laws. There were traditions, handed down from gasam to urtuku over the years, distorted each time. Almost everyone, including powerful mages like Renar, respected them. Because the rest of us did, on occasion, rise up and unite against an Archmage who presumed too much, went too far. It had happened. Renar was going to give me time because our Order would expect her to, and if she did not, they would see their own dark futures written in my corpse and might come after her, if only to save themselves from the future. Not even Renar and Amir could fight against the combined weight of every ustari in the world.
The main rule was you don’t interfere with other magicians. I’d interfered with Renar, sure, but that had been accidental. I had an excuse.
The other rule was you didn’t mess with the established order of the world. Power was one thing. You don’t shit where you eat, and we fed on the world itself.
Beyond that, there were no rules, only the single limitation: You could only cast what the blood allowed. If you didn’t have enough blood, it didn’t matter how clever you were with the Words, how you hacked the grammar.
A breeze of perfume washed over me, and I leaned toward her, eager. I’d never experienced a Glamour so real. At any moment I might actually reach out and touch her. She smiled, and I was in love. I pictured us married, sitting on a Sunday morning with newspapers, trading sections, sipping tea—fucking industriously, all sweat and pheromones.
Someone had died to fuel this spell, and I didn’t care.