Trickster

by Jeff Somers

  I looked up, tilting my head, more of that strange, damp crackling sound as I shifted. The women imprisoned in their niches, spiraling up and outward above us for what seemed like miles, were frozen in clear, brightly lit horror. A progression from Claire, untouched, unharmed, all the way up to the top, where the girls were charred, blackened, frozen in postures of agony. There were thirteen still alive, caught in mid-scream, eyes wide, staring down at us. The fourteenth was enveloped in the bluish flame that was the biludha feeding from her, tearing her open and absorbing her blood into the vast cloud of energy being prepared.

  Above her were only corpses. Charred and lifeless.

  As expected, I had saved none of them.

  I had to move. I hadn’t stopped time. I had slowed it down for everyone in the immediate area aside from me. Or, more accurately, I had sped up my movement through time. I didn’t know how long it would last, and no matter how slow time was moving, at some point Renar was going to finish casting the biludha and all fucking hell was going to break loose. I didn’t know what would happen when her spell, massive as it was, met mine, relatively tiny and delicate in comparison. Sitting there, it seemed pointless.

  I was so tired. I was seconds away from being dead. They were going to be the longest seconds of my life.

  I started climbing to my feet. The effort was monumental. My limbs were rubbery and my head spun. Everything felt slippery, like there was no traction. Standing up was like falling. When I was upright, it seemed like everything was subtly moving, like an earthquake had hit just as I cast, and the ground was shifting under my feet in tiny increments.

  That sound of pebbles on glass, hissing in my ears.

  I tried to do the math: How many seconds did I have to live, to remain conscious? And how long would that translate to in my subjective reality? Hiram had explained it to me, a decade ago. He’d given me tables of complex equations, demonstrating the time relationships. The spell had been Hiram’s life’s work. He’d probably refined and perfected it further since he’d taught it to me. I couldn’t remember any of the tables. The equations.

  With the ripping noise following me, I launched myself at Mags.

  He was just as heavy as he was in real time. Mags was made of three or four people stitched together and filled with sand. I toppled him onto his back and he stayed in the same position—slowly reacting, but too slow to really see. If I stared at him for an hour, I might start to see him react. I took hold of his arms. The wet tearing sound surged up in volume. At first Mags was impossible to move. I strained and pulled at him, feeling light and empty. Like I was made of balloons and he was made of iron weights.

  Then it started to get easier. Mags got lighter. And lighter. And lighter, until he was the balloon and I was pulling him toward the doorway easily. And then I wasn’t pulling him at all; he was pushing me. Faster and faster. I was riding Mags to the doorway. Momentum. I realized that in real time, first I’d had to fight Mags’s momentum, then when I’d overcome it I started him moving and now he was sailing across the chamber at high speed like being a cannonball was a property of his.

  It was like handling a parade float. If I shoved him to the left, nothing happened for what seemed like minutes, then he would slowly start to turn. Then not so slowly. Then he was soaring off in the new direction like he’d been shot out of a cannon. I slammed him into walls several times. I wanted to close my eyes and slump down. Every course correction required immense effort of will. I was cold and shaking. Bled white. I pushed and tugged Mags through the portal door in the study, down the fussy corridors of Renar’s mansion, where the fire looked like solid pillars of orange and the smoke like thick, black worms, and down the front steps to the driveway. I stepped around in front of him and spent some time slowing him to a stop, then pushed him slowly to the ground. Carefully.

  Then I went back.

  I didn’t know how much time I had, when Renar would finally finish the last tiny bit of the last word of the Rite. I made my way back into the chamber and nothing seemed to have changed. Though I had the strange feeling that things had changed. Ketterly’s eyes open wider. Claire’s position shifted somehow. The light dimmer.

  Claire was chained down to the stone. The chains heavy and black, charred-looking, secured by a padlock. Squat and silver. I searched Amir’s suit. His shirt was soaked in his own blood, bits of bone and yellow fat peeking out from the fabric. His face was still gorgeous, frozen in an expression of sad surprise, as if he’d seen this in a vision years ago and had forgotten right up until that moment. Or as if the udug had told him, just an hour ago, what was going to happen.

  The udug. The second I thought of it, it crawled under my skin again and I wanted it. I wanted to listen to it. The calm serenity of that affectless voice would be reassuring, like the stars—eternal, serene, unconcerned with my bullshit.

  I blinked my dry eyes. Focused on the task at hand. If I managed to accomplish anything here I might spend an eternal second or two searching for the artifact.

  I didn’t have to be careful with Amir. If he ended up soaring around the room, smashing into walls in real time, fuck it. He was probably dead anyway. And if he wasn’t dead, I didn’t like him. I found a set of keys in his jacket pocket. Took them over to Claire and searched. The sixteenth key worked on the padlock. I pulled her free from the chains. Bruises appeared on her skin where I touched her.

  I tugged and pushed her out of the chamber. My eyes were dry and dim. There was a persistent, shadowy ache in my neck, which I realized was slow-motion agony, the pain making its way along my nerves slowly, drip by drip. I pushed her, still frozen in a pose of combined terror and anger, until she sailed into Mags. I took one of my seconds to steady them both, slow them down, and stabilize them.

  Then I went back.

  This time there was a definite change in the chamber. Renar’s Glamour was faded, in the midst of disappearing—which meant the Glamour’s part of the Rite was finished. Which meant the Rite was finished. I was standing in the gap of half a second between the last breath of Renar’s casting and the Rite burning up the collected energy and stretching out its bony hand across the world.

  I looked up. The blue flames had stretched out to caress the next girl, chained up in her niche. Twelve left.

  My eyes felt like someone had poured a beach into them. I had become aware, dimly, of the sizzling agony of a knife embedded in my neck. The final seconds of my life were exhausting.

  Getting up to them wasn’t too hard. There was a narrow walkway. It wrapped around the chamber, rising on a steep angle. I struggled up to the twelfth one, the highest up. The cold blue inferno was just a foot away. The girl to my left was frozen in a pose of agony and terror. Hands up. Eyes wide. Mouth open in a scream. Flames on her everywhere. I couldn’t save her. Even if I freed her from her chains and carried her away, the Rite would consume her no matter what I did. Claire was out of position. I thought that might be sufficient to ruin things, but I couldn’t be entirely sure. Again, my lack of education—there was someone in the world who knew the answer, but he wasn’t me.

  As for the other girls, even if we were all going to die in a few moments, better for these last few to die instantly than to die burning, feeling it every inch of the way.

  I turned and concentrated on the next girl. A little older than Claire, but not much. Same type: tall, skinny. Dark, short hair. Skinnier and dirtier, gaunt and hanging limply from the rough black chains. Tried the keys from Amir’s ring. My hands felt like globs of soft clay on the ends of my heavy arms. Numb and useless. None of the keys fit.

  I glanced up at the burning girl. She was burning slightly more than she had been. Time was running out.

  I stood there for one of my moments. Swaying stupidly. My brain felt empty. I glanced up at the frozen firestorm above me. All that gas. Without even wondering if it was possible, I started to speak an old, simple Cantrip. Four syllables. I felt the rush of power sweep through me—intense, wonderful, then gone and good ri
ddance. I inspected the chains again and found the lock burst open by my spell. As if something tiny had broken free, peels of jagged metal sprung outward.

  Carrying her down, her face twisted in a scream that seemed to be aimed directly at me, I had the same momentum problems I’d had earlier. After a few steps she was pulling me after her. A few more steps and I put my back into slowing her down. Changing direction was an effort. By the time I had her coasting out onto the driveway to join Claire and Mags, I was sweating and stumbling. I watched her glide toward the ground. Tried to picture it sped up—a gruesome, rough landing. Then turned and staggered back. Eleven to go.

  Up and down. Sweat slicked my skin, normal until it sloughed off and then it hung in the air, slowly jiggling away. By the third girl I was pushing through curtains of my own suspended sweat. On my way back to get a fifth girl, I crawled. My hands in front of me were white with thick blue veins.

  Down and down. She got away from me. Halfway to the floor, with the fifth girl sailing slowly toward a concussion against the wall, I sat for a bit, shivering. Shut my eyes. Opened them and pushed myself up, fell forward and grabbed onto her. Hung off her for a while, feeling my whole body humming, buzzing. We sank toward the floor. I managed to get us oriented toward the door and pushed off again, hanging on for dear life. We floated. Everything started to shudder and shake. The floor kept skipping out from under me as I strained.

  One more, I thought. Just one more.

  We had just made it to the driveway when my spell shattered. The wet crackling noise snapped back, rewinding into a thunderous tearing. The fifth girl suddenly sailed away from me at full speed, smacking down hard into the gravel and sliding a few feet. Screaming, arms waving, synced up strangely with the other girls, also screaming, also waving their arms, beating off flames that weren’t there anymore. I stumbled and crashed to the ground and lay there. I managed a painful breath. Exhaled a huge red blood bubble.

  Then the night lit up as a sun rose behind us. I was lifted up from the ground and tossed onto my back. Something snapped and broke through the numb cold that had enveloped me, pain spiking from deep inside.

  The house had been turned into a fiery blue sun, an orb of energy that lit up the night. Power hummed around me, through me. Immense power, more than I’d ever felt in one place. At first I thought the new sun was stable, just sitting there, but it was slowly swelling. Expanding. As it touched first earth, then pavement, then tree, each burst into bright white flame for a second and then disappeared.

  You could see into the orb. There was nothing inside it at all.

  Everything else had gone deathly still. There was no wind, no sound. Nothing moved. I stared as the blue sun expanded, inch by inch. This wasn’t just unfocused power. This wasn’t what had happened to Mags back in Rue’s a few days ago. If Renar had simply bled all those people and let it go, it would have been an explosion. We would have all been vaporized. This was at least partially focused—she had completed the Rite. The spell was complete but underfueled. We’d stolen away the last crucial sacrifices. We’d stolen away Claire, the keystone.

  There was a spell. I just didn’t know what it was going to do.

  I took a breath. Breathing seemed optional. A lot of effort, too. When it leaked back out of me, bloody bubbles clogged my throat.

  The orb suddenly pulsed and then raced toward me, swelling at a tremendous rate. I felt the cold heat of it pushing against me, so I closed my eyes.

  29

  Every muscle jerked light everywhere and Mags melodious and rhythmic.

  I opened my eyes.

  It was cold. Freezing. I was not, however, dead. Mags and Claire were kneeling over me. Mags had his eyes shut. Was speaking a spell, his voice hoarse. I wondered when Mags had learned a new spell. And remembered it for more than two hours. I wanted to reach up and pat him on the head, give him a cookie.

  Claire was bleeding. Holding her arm up and watching the blood drip from a deep, ugly gash in the meat of her forearm. Tears dripped down her face. Her tattoos made her skin look like marble, icy white, her hair just a shadow against it.

  I had made Claire Mannice cry. This was my finest achievement.

  Now that I’d seen it, she was clearly the offspring of Mika Renar. The same nose, the same sleepy, deadly eyes, the same tiny frame. A dash of Cal Amir, too, I figured, just adding to her painful beauty. Or maybe not. Amir might have just been a vessel for Renar’s power. I didn’t know what kind of monstrous spells the two had cast to create the raw materials for their Rite of Death. I didn’t know. I didn’t want to know. But it was obvious now. All those girls, looking so similar. Ranging in age. Amir and Renar had been working on the biludha for decades. This was some old-school Greek tragedy shit.

  I reached out a shaking arm and flopped it against Mags. He startled. Opened his eyes. Kept speaking the spell, because we’d just seen firsthand what happened when you stopped mid-spell. Mags didn’t learn easy but when he learned something, it was the only thing he could think of until he learned something new. He tied the spell off nicely and I felt a slight surge of energy flow into me. Mags, bringing me back to life.

  “Lem! Fuck, fuck, fuck, Lem!” Mags hissed, leaning down. “You okay?”

  I wanted to say, Jesus, I was dead, but I needed my energy for more important things. “Cigarette,” I croaked.

  I heard Claire laugh as Mags dragged out a crushed and mangled pack. Slipped one between my lips. Lit it for me with a two-word Cantrip. I sucked blue smoke into my lungs and fought the urge to pass out.

  “Help me sit up,” I said.

  He pushed me into a sitting position and braced me from behind. I stared at where Renar’s mansion had once been. It was just a blackened hole in the ground. Fires burning everywhere. There was a window, miraculously unbroken and still in its frame, lodged in the branches of a tree. I sucked in smoke and felt a wave of dizziness pass through me.

  “The other women?” I asked.

  “The five you brought out,” I heard Claire say. “Gone. Ran for their lives.”

  I nodded. I didn’t blame them.

  “It didn’t work,” Mags said breathlessly. “But something happened. When the place went up, there was a spell. Something.”

  Coughs made me shake, my chest on fire. “Help me up.”

  Mags pulled me to my feet and held me there.

  “Walk me down.”

  We left Claire there, wrapping a strip of Mags’s dirty shirt around her wounds. The heat coming off the crater was incredible. But I made Mags walk me straight into it. My cigarette had burned to the filter but the ashes clung on anyway. We staggered around the perimeter and eventually found her wheelchair in the woods behind the house. Untouched. Just sitting there. As if someone had pushed it away from the house. Calmly. And then left it. It wasn’t even scorched.

  I stood there, hanging from Mags, for a moment, staring.

  When we got back to the driveway, Claire was gone. Mags started calling her name, wandering around, concerned, but I just stood there, smoking. I was used to people leaving. The only people who hadn’t left were Hiram and Mags, and Hiram had gotten killed for his trouble, and I wasn’t sure I wouldn’t end up killing Mags at some point, too. If it were possible, even, to kill Mageshkumar.

  I remembered Claire on the bus ride to Texas. Soft and dreamy, a normal girl who smelled like soap and cigarettes, who tucked her legs under herself, who stroked Mags’s hair gently as we whispered our life stories to each other. I felt a stab of pain that she’d just left without saying anything, without a note. I understood, I thought, why she’d left. I was grateful, I thought, that she’d stuck around long enough to bleed for Mags and save my life. I knew, on some level, that this should have been enough.

  I stared out at the charred trees around us. It wasn’t, wouldn’t ever be.

  • • •

  I’d never been so hungry in all my life. Or so happy to let Mags run the full con for us. He Charmed the hostess with a smile and flick of g
as. He Charmed our waitress. He Charmed the round family seated next to us. He made some napkins stuffed in his pocket look like twenty-dollar bills. He played every trick he knew and ordered us two heaping breakfasts: pancakes, eggs over easy, sausage, bacon, toast, and glorious, hot black coffee.

  I sat shivering as I ate. I was living on gas. I was living on the energy Mags had given me. I ate my breakfast and Mags silently slid his over to me. I didn’t even pause for breath.

  The news was leaking in. Small town, and the diner had no televisions, so it crept in the old-fashioned way, via people arriving, text message, and the Internet. Disasters everywhere. Bizarre things. Mass murders. Someone had set off a bomb at a military base, killing dozens. Hundreds of people visiting the Grand Canyon had suddenly gone mad and hurled themselves over the edge. People had jumped by the score from landmarks around the world, raining down from the Eiffel Tower, the Space Needle, the Golden Gate Bridge. The stories trickled in, and the diner got quiet. People hurriedly paid up and left.

  Someone finally set up a radio and we listened to report after report: Dozens dead here, thousands killed there. All isolated incidents. All inexplicable. A Day of Madness.

  Someone read aloud an incoherent post on the Internet about marines storming a base out in Colorado where the people with their thumbs on the launch buttons had lost it, but no one could find a confirming story, and then the Web site disappeared.

  I sat back and smoked another of Mags’s cigarettes. Didn’t say a word. No one would have believed me.

  The disasters came in spurts. People left, new people came in. I considered ordering a third breakfast. The radio spilled out more news. Mass drownings off the Florida coast. An entire old-age home committing suicide via sleeping pills doled out to residents in a carefully managed plan. A college fraternity leaping from the roof of their house en masse. A man with a semiautomatic hunting rifle killing thirty-four people at a mall in New Jersey.