by Jeff Somers
Something heavy slammed into me from behind. I was in the air again, for a moment. Then I hit the polished floor and slid a few more feet. Saw stars. Sucking in breath, I flipped over onto my back. I muttered a quick Cantrip, six syllables, and I went numb. The pain didn’t end or go away. I just didn’t feel it anymore. Pushed myself to my feet.
Mags and Amir were still locked together. Gun still pointed up in the air. Mags too dim to cast something, anything. D.A. Ketterly stood in the entrance of the chamber. Stared at me with a steady, angry expression. Lips moving.
The shrieking, if anything, had gotten louder. I imagined them all, trapped here for weeks. Probably held in some sort of magical sleep, unconscious. Then suddenly waking up to this. To the Biludha-tah-namus. To mass murder.
I shook myself. Started toward Ketterly—no time for anything fancy; I just needed to stop the son of a bitch from casting, and the easiest way to get that done was to acquaint Mr. Ketterly with the ancient magic of the fist.
I took a step toward him, then stopped. Renar. I looked at her. She looked like a doll, folded up and left sitting in the wheelchair. The easiest thing in the world, I thought suddenly, to stop her from casting. A hand over her dried, papery lips. Apply pressure. Wait. I saw myself doing that. Imagined the feel of her dry tongue against my palm. The pressure of her yellow eyes on me. Then I saw the Rite bursting into fire and violence, the whole place consumed, me and Claire and Mags dead. Or I saw Amir, nothing left to lose, breaking off his own casting and turning on me, directing more energy than I’d ever imagined at my head.
Tearing my eyes from the old crone, I threw myself back at Ketterly.
He startled and backed away from me, still casting. Slow with the Words. A lazy mage, he’d never really understood the grammar, the patterns. His hair was wild, sticking up from his head in sudden, sharp moves, like water disturbed by an earthquake and flash-frozen. The flecks of white and gray made him look crazy instead of wise. I forced myself into a shambling run; with so much fucking gas in the air, whatever Ketterly was going to cast was going to hurt.
I was a step away from him when he finished. And it did hurt.
A cannonball of air slammed into my chest. Lifted me up off my feet and sent me sailing back the way I’d come. Into the wall. Onto the floor. A good offensive spell, though it took him long enough.
I rolled away, closed my eyes, and hit the lights: two syllables, a wave of warm, sickening power coursing through me, and the sun rose. Blinding white light. I heard Ketterly hiss a curse and I cracked my eyelids into a squint. The light burned my retinas immediately. I could just make out the edges of the world around me. I’d used the Cantrip before to startle and confuse, but I’d never had so much power in the air. A slow seeping wound gave you a flash that faded quickly. People being sucked dry at a rate of ten every minute gave you a fucking supernova in a cave.
Nearly blind, I felt my way toward Ketterly. Where he’d been, at least. When he spoke, I realized he was on the move.
“I made my deal, Vonnegan,” he said. “I thought maybe I could just get you out of here. I made my deal. The biludha doesn’t kill everyone. Leaves that one percent. I’m gonna be that one percent.”
The voice sounded like it was moving. Like he was circling around me, slipping in between the silky whisperings of Renar and Amir—Cal Amir’s voice distinct because of a stray line of stress in it as he struggled with my pet bear Mags. Skipping over the jagged edges of the screaming.
You stupid fuck, I wanted to say. What do you think’s gonna happen when it’s you and a bunch of shitheel Tricksters in an empty world teed off against every fucking enustari in the world? They just wanted Bleeders. Servants. Slaves.
Instead, I tried to quietly drift away from his voice, hands out in front of me. I started whispering Hiram’s spell. The hun-kiuba. Slow time down to a crawl, except for you.
“Oh no you don’t,” Ketterly said.
The invisible cannonball clipped me, taking my feet out from under me. My teeth clicked together as I hit the floor again, the spell interrupted, and I felt the tiny bit of gas I’d siphoned off exploding around me, a firecracker.
“Stupid bastard,” Ketterly hissed. He was right behind me. A second later his hand slapped over my mouth and his arm wrapped around my neck, choking me pretty efficiently.
For a second, I was crushed under Ketterly’s heavy, flabby knees. His hot breath in my ear. His greasy coat sleeve under my chin, his callous, scarred hand pressed against my lips. He smelled bad.
Then the gun went off. Loud enough to cut through the cacophony.
And Amir stopped speaking.
There was a moment, fleeting, where I thought it would be okay. The screaming didn’t stop, but I could feel the flow of power around us change. It had been roiling and twisting in the air around us, pent up by invisible barriers. The barriers fell away, and for a second it was just raw energy hanging in the air, unstructured. Chaos. And I thought, Shit, maybe it just dissipates. Maybe it just collapses and disappears. I’d never been around so much fucking power. I didn’t know anything about it and maybe it was different on this scale—
And then it all went to hell.
The screams suddenly leaped in volume, like some of the girls above us had been asleep and were now awake. There were three more gunshots in quick succession and Ketterly dived backward from me, his arm disappearing, his hand tearing away from my face. The energy in the air began to recoil, to collapse inward, like a star forming in an alternate dimension. I could see it clearly; I’d always been good at my calling. I could see it would collapse inward until it reached a mysterious inner pressure, and then it would burst outward, entropic and violent. Without any spell to guide it, without the will of the practitioner to form it, it would just burn. Consume. Destroy.
Still blind, I stood up. I thought of Claire. Of all the dozens of Claires chained up, screaming their heads off. Waiting for someone to save them.
“Mags!” I shouted. “Time for you to go!”
I didn’t wait to see if Mags obeyed me. There was no time. I started struggling forward. I didn’t know how much time there was before the blow. The universe was unpredictable. Seconds? A minute? Could I get to Claire and out—could I do anything—before we were vaporized?
Then it changed. I heard voices. Casting. Reciting. The Biludha-tah-namus, picking up the threads, backtracking a few lines and pulling it back into motion. And I felt the immense volcano of power all around us stop its collapse, hang still for a moment, and then, incredibly, impossibly, it started to sort itself out again.
Two voices. Renar and someone picking up where Amir had left off. I crawled through the sun-bright cloud of light I’d created and realized the voices sounded similar. One youthful and clear, like a bell ringing. A voice that made my cock twitch and my breathing stutter. The other a dry piece of ancient sandpaper. Irritating and horrifying. But both voices the same.
Renar and her Glamour.
For a second, I was stunned. This was balls. This was brilliance. Creating an artificial version of yourself to cast a two-person Rite. Nothing I’d ever learned had hinted this was possible, but then, my teacher had been a low-level confidence man and I’d been a shitty student.
And I thought about Renar’s Other. It was the most realistic Glamour I’d ever encountered. Pitch-perfect. With so many of her descendants chained up above us, it had to be. Perfected over years, perfected to make life easier for her apprentice. I’d half expected to feel something if I touched it, and derided myself as an asshole for thinking it, but suddenly I wondered if it was true. To fool the universe, it had to be. This wasn’t a Glamour. This was something more. Something better.
I squinted, and there they were. Renar like a sack of potatoes. Her Glamour, fully binary at this point, staring at me with hatred. Perfect posture. Perfect tone. So real I wanted to reach out and strangle her.
“Mags!” I screamed over the roar and wail, over the boiling power that floated like a cloud o
f vaporized magma, everywhere, searing, distracting. “Pitr!”
I heard him scream something back. I couldn’t tell where he was. I couldn’t see him.
All I could think to do was buy time, stretch out Renar’s resources. Throw wrenches like crazy and hope for the best. I thought about my flash spell, that if a tiny Cantrip like that soaks up enough gas to go fucking supernova, a dozen Cantrips, fifty, would maybe soak up enough power to fuck up the biludha.
Why not? It was the only play I could see: steal her gas. Steal every bit of it, and starve her ritual.
“Cast!” I shouted. “Cast everything! Every fucking spell you have!”
I was a fucking hero.
And then I thought, Fuck, if a Cantrip’s going to soak her, Bosch’s spell will fucking ruin it for everyone, and I started once again to speak the Words to Hiram’s hun-kiuba.
Don’t stop, I said to myself. Don’t stop reciting. For anything.
I crawled around as I breathed out words. It was a small space, and I just kept crawling and crawling, blind and deafened by the silent explosion around us, but never hit a wall. Or Mags. Or Renar. When Ketterly jumped on my back, I was almost glad to know I hadn’t been dropped into a void made of bright white light and the sound of my own strangled voice.
He tried to get a choke hold on me, but I managed to shove my hand in place over my windpipe, and kept casting. Kept speaking the Words Hiram had wanted me to speak for a decade. Felt the power flowing into me again. Craved it. All those people dying above me, bursting as they were being squashed, all their energy flowing down into me, spilling over me. It felt wonderful. I threw up at the thought, through my own words all over Ketterly’s arms.
Ketterly panted into my ear and squeezed as hard as he could. It got hard to breathe. I kept spitting out the syllables, filling up with power. It roared into me with every word. An impossible amount. Enough to burn me to ashes from the inside, yet just a trickle of what Renar was going to unleash.
We fell backward, my weight on his chest. I heard him grunt in my ear. I wondered why he didn’t cast again but figured he’d been warned to keep it to a minimum, to use only his own gas. So as not to queer Renar’s casting, like I was trying to do. I felt him shift underneath me. Saw his free hand in my peripheral vision a moment before it lunged toward my neck, sinking the tiny blade of his penknife into me.
With a grunt that I heard perfectly, he yanked the blade with a jerk of his arm and I felt it tear through skin and muscle and veins and nerves. A flash of the worst burning pain I’d ever felt on the side of my neck under my ear. Worse than the pain Amir had visited on me earlier. Worse than anything.
Jesus, Ketterly, you fucking murdered me.
Blood poured out of me. I barely felt the loss. As blood flowed out, power was flowing in. I kept whispering Bosch’s spell.
And then Ketterly started casting. Using my blood.
It was an incredible sensation. Power flowing in, a torrent, a river. Power being leached out of me. I was exhausted. I was immensely strong. I was giddy. I was tethered to D. A. Ketterly as intimately as I’d ever been tethered to anyone. I could feel his heart beating, his exhalations. His panic. His dread. His desperation. I was dizzy. It was a race. I was casting the longest spell I knew and I was trying to get it down before I fucking bled out, every ragged beat of my heart.
The light was starting to fade. Or I was dying and it was just my soul bursting through the cracks. My soul wouldn’t be some bright, silvery thing. It wouldn’t float and soar. It would be a humming black cube, heavy. Heavier than it should be. Affected by dark gravity no one else had experienced.
I could see Mags. He was kneeling over Claire. Hunched over, elbows moving. Trying to pull her loose. It wasn’t going to work. The Rite was holding her in place.
Renar was getting close. I didn’t know the Rite, but I could sense the cadence coming. Twenty words? Fifteen?
I didn’t feel any pain. I’d gone numb and weak. I was breathing the Words of Hiram’s spell, just exhaling them gently.
I looked up.
Above us, the flaming line of dying women was just a few dozen away from the bottom. Away from Claire. I’d let most of them die. This surprised no one. I wondered if Claire was lost to hysterics or if she knew I was still here. If she knew how badly I’d fucked everything up. How badly I’d failed to save her. Or Mags. Or, fuck, me, bleeding to death like a fucking sucker.
Ten words? Twelve?
I felt my strength sagging. Leaking out of me. The power around me continued to flow into me, a golden river of shit. Physically, I fell back against Ketterly. I was numb. My heartbeat felt light and random, like an afterthought. My vision got cloudy, darkness edging in from the sides. I let my hands fall away from Ketterly’s arms. I lay back against him, exhausted.
I kept whispering the hun-kiuba.
Renar kept casting both ends of the biludha. Five words? Three? Three. I decided. I looked up. Smiled as I cast.
The girl in the sneakers
I had saved her I had saved her
I had saved her by doing nothing
I had saved her by doing nothing
nothing nothing at all.
Two words.
I shut my eyes.
One.
The last word of Hiram’s spell slurred out of me.
28
Come
I remembered watching cartoons in a dull-brown room off Route 46. Hours and hours. My back hurt, and I was hungry. Dad had been gone all day.
back
On the TV, there was a creepy scientist chasing a bunny. There was gas in the air so they were all slow and stretchy, floating. Like the gas made them light and weightless.
here
I wished I had that gas. I felt heavy. I kept imagining I couldn’t move my arms and would sit and imagine myself trying to move and being unable to. I am wearing my blue footie pajamas, which Dad inexplicably allowed me to bring. Usually there was no time to pack.
you
Then I imagined myself moving really slowly instead. Not paralyzed, but out of sync. The world moving around me faster than I could. I had to go to the bathroom. So I raised my arm really slowly and took hold of the knob on the dresser drawer. Pulled myself up centimeter by centimeter, rising up from the floor.
rabbit.
It took me five minutes to make it to the bathroom door. By which time I was starting to doubt the entertainment value of the game. But I was committed now. You can’t invest ten minutes into something, then decide it’s daft. I wondered how I was going to slow down my pee stream.
Nighty
When I got out of the bathroom, triumphantly slow, slow, slow, I could tell Dad had been back and left again. A burning cigarette in the ashtray. A new set of wrinkles on the bed where he’d sat, making a phone call. The smell of cigarettes and boozy aftershave. I stood there and wanted to cry. I’d been screwing around in the bathroom, playing a stupid game, and he’d come back. And I’d missed him.
night.
I opened my eyes. I wasn’t dead.
• • •
I felt dead. I felt light and empty. My heart wasn’t beating—or it was, but it was beating really slowly. Boom. Pause pause pause. Bam.
The light was still painfully bright in the chamber, but had dimmed enough to allow actual vision. It hung in the air like smoke. Like each individual photon was visible. I was lying on top of the recently erected statue of D. A. Ketterly. I was covered in my own blood. I had a knife sticking out of my neck. Three fat globules of blood hung next to it, irregular spheres.
I sat up. I moved at normal speed. There was that strange, wet kind of crackling sound as I moved. Like I’d been wrapped up in a spider’s web, but I didn’t feel anything else. Mags was crouched over Claire, frozen, hands eternally wrapped around the chains that held her to the stone. He was straining with all his massive, terrible might and Claire was staring up at him with an expression of terror—tinged with real, feral anger.
Ren
ar looked exactly the same: slumped over in her wheelchair. Eyes slitted. Dry and yellow. Her Glamour was blurred and dimmed by the bright light of my previous Cantrip. Beautiful. Mouth open. Teeth and lips glistening.
Everything was still in a strange, 3-D way. Moving at an incredibly slow speed. When you stared at something it looked rock still. If you looked away and back again a few heartbeats later, it was subtly different. It had shifted. There was a noise in the air, persistent, like pebbles raining down on glass. It had no beginning or end. It just was.
I was so tired.
I felt like heavy weights had been affixed to my arms. My head was stuffed with something heavy and poisoned. My eyes bulged out of their sockets as if internal pressure was pushing them outward. This was my last conscious moment, stretched out nearly endlessly. In real time I was seconds from passing out. With Hiram’s spell working, it would seem like hours.
Hiram’s spell. I’d memorized it so long ago, and I’d edited it down over the years. Obsessed. Grinding on it. I’d clipped a syllable here, a syllable there. Substituted shorter words. Honed it down. On the subway all those years ago, it had taken Hiram forty-three seconds to recite it. At the time the Words had seemed elaborate, mysterious. Impossible to ever understand. I’d just cast the same spell in less than half the time, using every Trickster shortcut I’d ever learned. And I’d learned plenty.
I’d always been good with the Words.
I looked around again. With a pint or two of blood, Hiram’s spell was designed to work in a single room, for a few minutes. I’d just cast it with a river of gas, a flood of fucking power. I didn’t know how big the affected area was, or how long it would last. I turned my head lazily to look at Renar. Both her and the Glamour were trapped with their mouths open, lips slightly pursed. I’d beaten her by half a second. One syllable left in the biludha. Half a second.
Renar’s Other was staring right at me. Her beautiful eyes looked clear and focused, like she was seeing me in real time, like she was aware of everything. I could feel those eyes on me, like they were shooting light particles at me instead of collecting them.