by Jeff Somers
I wondered idly how many people had to bleed to manage a Glamour like this.
“You have been granted this meeting,” she said, gliding towards 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 didn’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 cast only 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 towards 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.
“You have interfered with my work,” she said, arching a strawberry eyebrow. “You have lost my property.”
I nodded stupidly. Yes, whatever she was saying. If I kept nodding, she might touch me. Just a glance of her hand on my cheek. Worth it.
“You must restore my property to me.”
I nodded again but slid my eyes to the right and looked at the mummy. The mummy’s eyes were dry and yellow and fixed on me. A sliver of dread inserted itself between my vertebrae, and I looked back at Renar’s Glamour and blinked rapidly, scraping her out of my eyes.
“What?”
“The girl, Mr. Vonnegan. She is mine. You misplaced her. You must bring her back to me.”
She is mine. I suspected Renar regarded everything she saw uniformly as her property.
I shook my head, alarm burning through me. Her property, like she was referring to a prize cow I’d let out of a pen. A girl marked for ritual, marked to be bled to death, so that others might be bled to death, so that others might be bled to death. My stomach rolled, and suddenly the perfume in the air, for all its fake magical perfection, smelled like rotting fish. I didn’t bleed people. Giving Claire over to Renar would be the same as bleeding her myself.
“No.”
I had a three-second out-of-body experience, standing next to myself and marveling at what I’d just said. What I’d just done to myself. Suicide, some would call it.
She studied me for a moment with her bright, glowing green eyes. “Mr. Vonnegan, this is the price of your continued existence. Do you understand me? Refuse me, and I will take you as compensation.” She leaned back in her seat and placed one hand against her temple. “You cannot replace my property. You are not suitable. Suitable candidates are in limited supply and difficult to produce. Therefore, if you do not restore my property to me, Mr. Vonnegan, you will suffer for it.”
The word suffer seemed to emerge from her in a cloud of poison, and I had trouble breathing.
I stared at her illusion of herself, and the illusion stared back, power beating against me like a hurricane. I frowned. “I am not a—”
“I know precisely what you are, boy,” she snapped, her voice drowning me. “Idimustari, Trickster. Grifter. A small man of small talents worming his way through life with childish gibberish. Cantrips and other mu, dust in the eyes of those who cannot see.”
I forced myself to swallow the rock-hard bump of alarm that had been collecting in my throat. Why was I here? If she wanted Claire, she was enustari, she could just get her.
She snorted. “The marks . . . resist other spells,” she said, and I jumped in my skin, not sure she couldn’t read my mind.
“Deflect them,” she continued, as if bored with my thoughts. “Corrupt them. Else I would have snatched her back easily with a Word. You are a man who worms. You and your small magicks are ideal for this work.” She nodded her perfect head once. “Restore her to me or suffer.”
This time I barely noticed the threat, the word suffer. I was chewing on this bit of information about the runes. Even terrified, my brain spat out a theory: Cast near them, use your own kind of misdirection and fool the universe into thinking you were casting on something else, see if that compensated for their effect on spells. A nasty hack, but if it worked, who cared? I tucked the thought away, something to chew on if I ever had time.
The Glamour stood up and turned away. I kept staring at the empty chair. “Wait a fucking second,” I said, hands tightening on the arms of the chair. “You dragged me out here to fucking tell me that?”
“I desired to see you,” she said, and the Glamour disappeared. To my right, I heard the mummy hiss something, the Words inaudible. A second later, I went stiff, snapping my legs and arms out straight at my sides, paralyzed while an excruciating pain burned into me. I rolled off the chair and hit the floor, drooling. Shaking.
“If I desire to see you, you will be seen,” her Glamour’s voice whispered in my ear. “If I desire to hear you, you will speak. If I desire to bleed you, you will bleed. The world will bleed on my command, idimustari. So it has ever been, since I killed my mother in childbirth, since I cast my first mu to choke my father at the dinner table. So it has ever been, so it will ever be.”
Jesus fucking Christ, I managed to think. She must have Bleeders dripping all the time.
“You are known to me now, Vonnegan, and have no marks to bend the Words. If I desire to see you again, do you doubt I will see you? And if I see you again, idimustari, do you doubt I will be the last person to do so? You are dissipated. But tall. You would fuel a handsome moment’s entertainment.”
The pain was as if a larger man had stepped inside me and was splitting me at the seams. A stupid spell. A mu. Imaginary pain, nothing more. But if I’d been able to work my mouth, I would have bitten off my tongue for the relief. Abruptly, it stopped. I buckled on the floor, spasming my legs up to my chest as I called out, sucking in air. The pain was gone. I was soaked in sweat, shivering. But whole. I sat up. The Glamour was gone.
My stomach clenched into a fist, I stood partway and turned to look at the mummy.
It had shut its eyes.
8. I WATCHED THE ATM VESTIBULE from across the street, feeling tired and scratchy. I was worried about the timing, because timing wasn’t Pitr Mags’s strong suit.
It was getting dark, and I was feeling tired and scratchy. I wanted to get this over with while it was still twilight, before interior lights clarified things. I could see Mags through the glass across the street, trying to look busy and struggling not to look back at me every three minutes.
I raked my eyes along Hudson Street, watching the suits coming and going. The wind cut through my jacket and made me shiver; I looked up at the sky for a second and contemplated the winter: It was coming, and we had nowhere to stay, nothing between us and the snow.
When I looked back, someone had joined Mags. Cursing, I ran out into traffic and dodged three cars, leaving a wail of horns behind me. I slowed to a walk just as I pulled open the door and stepped into the vestibule. It was a tiny space, and the three of us were crowde
d. Mags was pretending to finish up with one of the machines while our mark punched buttons on the other.
He was a doughy-looking guy in a decent suit, briefcase set on the floor next to him. He had a thick head of graying hair and a round pink face with delicate lips. He looked like he’d been tortured by bullies at school and got his revenge on others in little ways every day.
I tried to control my breathing and pretended to fuss with the deposit slips and pens, waiting for the high sign from Mags. When Mags coughed twice, indicating the Mark had inserted his debit card and punched in his PIN, I muttered the spell and sliced open my arm, letting the warm blood run down to my hand.
The pain was sharp and hot, and this was one of those moments I enjoyed it a little, savoring the bright red way it ate into me. Nothing dripped onto the floor; I recited the spell fast enough to burn it off as it flowed out of me, disappearing, swallowed whole by the hungry universe.
My vision swam and I felt dizzy as the spell finished, and I had to lean against the little table for a bit, breathing. I turned towards the Mark, who was staring at the ATM screen in dreamy confusion. I swayed, digging in my pocket for my crusty handkerchief.
“Hey!” I said, feeling light and shivery. “How are you?”
The Mark turned to look at me and smiled. It was a slow smile and looked completely out of place on his face. It twitched and shimmered as if the muscles of his face were not used to holding the expression. “Hello!” he sighed. “How are you? Good to see you.”
He trailed off into more mutterings, impossible to translate. I held out my hand and he took it, slowly but enthusiastically. Began pumping it. Up and down, up and down.
The ATM machine began beeping, impatient.
“Let’s get a drink, old buddy, it’s so good to see you,” I said cheerfully, slipping an arm around him and pushing him gently towards the door. “You can tell me what your PIN number is and we could have a conversation about that. What do you say?”
On the security cameras, it would look like two old friends meeting by chance.
“Oh, yes,” he said as I pushed the door open for him. “That sounds nice.”
He recited his PIN and I glanced at Mags to get the nod. Then I walked him around the block, and he talked to me, a steady hissing escape of breath formed into words. He wasn’t such a bad guy. He told me how disappointing his life had been since he’d left the band, taken the money and the desk job, and started eating candy bars all day, just unwrapping and chewing and unwrapping and chewing, no thought. He would glance in his trash bin before leaving the office and be amazed to find ten or twelve wrappers in there. He kept his arm around me, and I could smell him, and it wasn’t so great: sour deodorant. By the time I got him to the Radio Bar, he was telling me a story about his vacation, a trip on a cruise line to the warmer parts of the world, and he wished I’d been there to hang out with him.
I suggested he go in, get us some drinks, and I’d be right in to join him. He gave me a look of damp joy at the thought, nodded. I watched him step inside and settle onto a stool at the bar like a zeppelin docking with a tall building, and turned away.
I was feeling better physically, steadier, though my hand was throbbing again just when the other wounds had calmed down. A heavy depression was pushing down on me. I didn’t know what this guy was like in reality, but under my heavy dose of Charm he was a sad panda, and I felt guilty.
Mags was on the corner, wide-eyed, looking in the wrong direction, his body language like a poodle who’d been tied to a street sign a little too long. He jumped when I appeared and then smiled, his big body going soft.
“Two thousand!” he said. “In the account. But five hundred was the limit here!”
I nodded. “We’ve got at least fifteen minutes. Let’s see what we can do.”
We are not good people.
WE SIPHONED THE OTHER fifteen hundred before the card went dead, and we just walked away, the ATM still beeping. It was enough, I thought. Nothing to get excited about, and I’d bled a little too much on the Charm, leaving me gray and staggered, but it was a decent pile to have riding on your hip. Mags yapped around me, happy and energetic. He’d already forgotten we were in trouble. I decided not to remind him.
He started to recognize the neighborhood we’d wandered into and got even more excited, this week turning out to be one of the best of Mags’s entire fucking life so far, at least for the moment. We’d pulled a grift normally too ambitious for us in terms of bloodletting and dangerous publicity, worked it perfectly, and now we were going to Digory Ketterly’s office.
KETTERLY USUALLY WENT BY “D.A.” because he disliked the singsongy sound of “Digory Ketterly.” He thought it made him seem weak and poofy. He was right. I didn’t trust most other mages. We were all grifters of one sort or another, and we were all parasites—of others or ourselves. Ketterly I trusted less than most. I’d never heard of Ketterly actively cheating one of his own, but I thought it entirely possible that he would. But I was the walking wounded, exhausted, literally drained. Finding spells wasn’t my specialty in the first place, but when you added in the complication of the runes and their effect on magic, I needed help. I’d surveyed my vast circle of friends and acquaintances and decided I would have to risk putting a little faith in Ketterly, or else I was going to risk bleeding myself into a coma.
His office was a basement affair in Chelsea, six steps down. Instantly you felt damp, imagining the sewage seeping up from below. A glass storefront still read OLYPHANT BOOKS | USED | NEW | ESTATE SALES. The door had a yellowed piece of copy paper taped to the glass that read D. A. KETTERLY, INVESTIGATIONS: MIRACLES ACHIEVED.
We pushed our way into the dark, dense interior, the rusty bell attached to the door ringing as we did so, and were immediately enveloped by gloom. A cave. The bookshelves and books were exactly where they’d been decades before, covered in dust, the hand-lettered section signs clinging to the wood: FICTION, REFERENCE, MUSIC. It smelled like paper and dust and cigar smoke.
The whole place was just one room with a tiny washroom in the back that beat at us with the heat of its smell, a terrible green odor that had heft and mass and grabbed on to you as you moved, insistent. The center of the room had been cleared out and a large green metal desk installed. There was one chair, a huge cracked leather one on wheels that creaked and sighed with every move Ketterly made. He leaped up in a cloud of cigarette smoke and threw his arms out.
“Is that Pitr fucking Mags?” he shouted. “Hey, watch this.”
He waved his hands in the air theatrically, and I caught the barest glint of light on his tiny blade. Ketterly liked to use a sharpened penknife for his Cantrips—it was unobtrusive. He liked to astound and amaze the rubes; an obvious knife and a bleeding hand ruined the effect. I didn’t notice his lips moving as he spat out the syllables. Ketterly worked public, so he’d taught himself to almost throw his voice, a barely audible whisper, without moving his lips. When he was finished he barked out a nonsense word enthusiastically, making Mags jump as a fiery, glowing bird appeared in the air between us.
“Aw, shit, that’s fucking cool,” Mags hissed, his eyes locked on the bird as it swooped around the room lazily. “You’ll teach it to me?”
I snorted. Every time Mags learned a new spell, he forgot an old one.
“Sure, sure, if you concentrate this time and not blow up my shop, huh?” Ketterly pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and held it in his hand. His suit was an old, well-cared-for one. Up close, I knew, it would show a million repairs, all done with careful stitches and good thread. From three feet away, all the work was invisible. Ketterly was a miser. He wasn’t making a mint with his detective business, but he salted away every dime he screwed out of idiots who’d never heard of a Seeking Rite. I’d never seen D. A. Ketterly on the street with more than pennies in his pockets.
He sat down in his squeaky chair and crossed his short little legs, fussing with his overlong black and gray hair. He looked at me as he leaned back, dim
light glinting on his glasses. He laced his fingers behind his head. “Your boy Mags here is adorable, and I like having him pant around my office. You’re ugly as hell and boring to boot. So to what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?”
I smiled. Mags was already trying to guess at the Words of Ketterly’s stupid Cantrip, mouthing them in a hushed voice. This was a doomed effort, but Mags’s face was a mask of somber effort, and I didn’t have the heart to mock him. “I need you to find someone for me.”
“Ah,” Ketterly said, nodding. “My specialty.”
I hesitated.
“I’m told spells won’t work well on this one.”
He squinted at me. “Why not?”
I pulled out a wad of cash, already damp from my own sweaty pocket, and tossed it onto his desk. “That’s three zeros. A retainer.”
He looked down his short torso at the money, wrapped up in a rubber band, and then looked back at me. I willed him to take it, to pick it up and accept the job, but he kept his eyes on me.
“You’re pretty eager to grease me off, Vonnegan,” he said. “And I can’t use a spell, huh?”
I shrugged, failure burning my shoulders. “You can use a spell,” I said. “It just probably won’t work.”
He squinted at me, then glanced down at the wad of money and back at me. “All right,” he said. “I’ll ask: Have you been shitting in some other mage’s sandbox?”
I nodded. “Shit everywhere.”
He looked back at the money. “I don’t like getting into fucking ustari politics, kid. Always messy.”
Our rules—you didn’t get involved in another magician’s business; you didn’t cast anything big enough to mess with the fundamental underpinnings of the fucking universe—were mostly to keep us from tearing the world apart.
Throughout history, there’d been a number of attempts to break the second rule, and other magicians around the world had gathered in coalitions to defeat them. It hadn’t been pretty. Half the stories in the Old Testament were foggy histories of enustari wars, oceans of blood shed to destroy one of their own declared dangerous to the whole world. Chances were if you scratched any old legend of bloodshed on a monumental scale, you found enustari either spinning bloody webs or waging war to stop one another from spinning theirs. It hadn’t been that long ago that four enustari had engineered a world war just to settle their own accounts. And every war since had seen a cast of horrifying characters bending it to their own ends.