We Are Not Good People (Ustari Cycle)

by Jeff Somers

I kept murmuring the spell, draining myself to keep our air pocket intact. Sweat poured down my face. I was shivering.

  I remembered the girl in Hiram’s study. Her doodled-on sneakers. She’d been shivering, too. In the span of time between me meeting her and me trapped in the air pocket, we were linked by uncontrollable shivering. And what had I done?

  I’d done nothing.

  I’d left no mark on her. I’d refused to bleed her like a fucking vampire, I’d told Hiram to fuck himself, and he’d spent the better part of a decade punishing me in tiny vindictive ways. Keeping our bond intact so I couldn’t leave the city. Reminding me, whenever I needed help, that he owed me nothing and I owed him everything. Insults and sneers.

  And he’d bled the girl anyway. To spite me. To teach me that last lesson, that it didn’t matter what I approved of or disapproved of. That the universe bled us all. It was a lesson I was just starting to grasp.

  I didn’t know what had happened to that girl. She’d vanished from my life. But I knew. I knew she’d been bled, over and over again, probably. Paid sometimes, by magicians like Hiram who imagined they were civilized because they dished out a few twenty-dollar bills each time. Or not paid sometimes, by any number of saganustari or even idimustari who came across her. She was dead by now. Used up, buried in some basement. Or not. Dead all the same. Maybe covered in runes. Left in a bathtub in an abandoned apartment to rot.

  I’d never touched her, and she was dead anyway.

  I saw Claire, folded in half, hurtling through the window.

  My speech was getting slurry, my tongue thick and numb. The rubble above us shifted, raining dust down onto us. Mags sat up with a grunt, smacked his head on a gnarled old header, and flattened again.

  “Fuck,” he said, mildly. Like he was whispering good morning to you.

  I kept slurring the spell. My mouth hurt. My throat burned. I thought it was a great time for Mags to take over again, but instead of jumping in and resting me, he convulsed, throwing his arms and legs up and punching at the ceiling of the air pocket with his fists.

  “Fuck!” he shouted, hoarse. “FUCK!”

  I shut my eyes and forced myself to speak the spell again. A wave of dizzy exhaustion swept me clean.

  “FUCK!”

  I concentrated. Moved my burning lips. The end of each syllable fit perfectly into the beginning of the next, clicking into place. Some people never saw it, the invisible way the syllables fit together. Once you saw it, it was obvious. It was invigorating. Once you saw it, you could do anything with the Words. Anything. Some of us just repeated spells. Drew some blood and recited, and they would always be whatever they were. But if you saw, then it all made sense, and making up a spell was as easy as ordering coffee. I could do it in my sleep, pluck sounds from the air and feed them to the universe with a bit of gas. My mind went smooth and glassy, and I slumped there moving my lips moving my lips moving my—

  I thought about just stopping.

  Relief swept through me at just the thought. I imagined stopping. The building crushing us, a second or two of pain, maybe less. Maybe none. Just letting go, going to sleep.

  I spoke the spell again.

  I saw Claire’s expression as she folded in half and flew through the window.

  My tongue was swollen and dry. I kept moving my lips. The universe kept accepting my sacrifice. An endless hole with no bottom or purpose, absorbing everything. I thought of the black relief of giving up, just stopping, and I thought that Claire would be alone. Truly, completely alone. Abandoned. I spoke the spell again. A gray wave of dizziness filled my brain, and I knew I had one, maybe two more passes in me before it was over. The cold black relief rose up, and I started sinking, and I wanted to sink. To be numb, to be blind, to stop moving my lips.

  I took a breath, intending to hold it. To wait the unpredictable beat of the universe as it judged whether I had paused or stopped. That final, endless moment.

  And then I kicked for the surface.

  I opened my eyes and there was Mags, panting next to me. I could feel his warmth, his physical presence. I reached out and took hold of his arm weakly, pulling him ineffectually towards me. I could feel him in the air, his blood everywhere around me.

  I kicked for the surface. I sucked in air with a painful convulsive twitch of my chest, and grabbed hold of Mags’s gas and spoke the Words, louder. My stomach flipped as I felt his strength flow through me, glorious, awful.

  Our air pocket shuddered, inched outward.

  Mags turned sharply to look at me, then nodded. He reached over and took hold of me in turn.

  I spoke the spell again, hoarse, pulling more gas from Mags, and the air pocket creaked, swelling. I repeated the spell a second later, vibrating with impatience, feeling Mags like he was hooked up to me with wires.

  And then, muffled, distant, I heard someone shouting back at us.

  “Hello?”

  I kept casting. My heart lurched in my cavernous, empty chest, boomeranging around. Mags fell silent. The air pocket suddenly doubled in size, debris raining down around its invisible surface. Mags gasped and his hands tightened painfully on my arm.

  “Holy fuck,” he said quietly. “Is that Daryl fucking Houy?” He took a deep breath. “Hey! Hey, Daryl!”

  When Daryl shouted back, he was nearer. “I can hear ya! Keep makin’ noise!”

  Mags let out a stream of uninterrupted profanity that must have startled nearby birds into frenzied flight. I kept reciting. Instead of the waves of exhaustion, I felt stronger and stronger, pulling from Mags.

  Mags kept shouting. For a moment, it seemed like this was how I was going to die: buried alive, Mags screaming at me. Which seemed appropriate.

  The house above us was a toy in my hands. I closed my eyes and added three words to the spell, slipping them in perfectly. I felt Mags sag against me, felt him move through me, a golden wave of nausea, and the air pocket exploded outward, timber and drywall and stone flying up into the air, sunshine flowing in.

  I spoke again, and it froze in the air. Dust sprinkled down on us. I could hear Mags breathing hard, his breath hot against me.

  Then someone was dragging me. I let him. From my back, I watched the frozen geyser of debris as I slid backwards from it, Mags staggering after me. When we were near the truck, I spoke a single word and it all crashed down, like it had wanted. I lay in the dirt for a few minutes, gasping. Then Mags was leaning over me. Then Daryl was there, looking like he’d slept in his truck.

  “Why the fuck,” I croaked, swallowing painfully, “are you still here?”

  He blinked. “Waiting for Claire,” he said simply.

  The suggestible type, easily pushed. Easier when it involved a girl, certainly.

  Head swimming, I pushed myself up onto my elbows. The house was gone. It was a shallow mountain of debris, burning in places. The surrounding gardens and structures were intact. The house had just imploded. A few people in white robes wandered aimlessly out in the fields. Some of them appeared to be running.

  I squinted up at Daryl. He looked back at me with a dopey, innocent expression. A moron.

  “She’s been taken. To New York.”

  He frowned. “Well, shit. Let’s go get her, then.”

  I nodded. Reached out for Mags. He was there, pulling me up, slipping under my shoulder. Holding me up. I leaned in close to whisper.

  “Will you bleed for me, Mags?” I said slowly. It hurt to speak. “I don’t have much left in the tank.”

  He nodded. No hesitation. “Yes, Lem,” he said, serious. Calm. His voice a shredded croak, too. “Of course.”

  I nodded. Looked at Daryl and nodded at him. “Let’s go.”

  It was time to leave a mark.

  19. I BLEW THE DOOR INWARD with a Word. The plate glass cracked with a grinding noise but stayed in place. I walked in with Daryl and Mags behind me, Daryl still in his shitkicker costume, smelling pretty ripe, and Mags bleeding from a shallow wound on his arm. I stood for a moment to let my eyes adju
st, then spoke a few soft syllables, and my eyes brightened, bringing everything into sharp contrast. I could feel Mags tethered to me, feeding me. I couldn’t feel Daryl, but I could smell him.

  Using someone else’s blood was terrible. It made me feel like the universe’s asshole. But it felt good, too. All that power, all that strength, and you just pulled on it and you didn’t feel it. It rushed through you. But it didn’t drain you.

  The gloom was the same as always. Ketterly was sitting behind his little desk. Stiff and shocked. I muttered four more Words and burned a bit of Mags’s gas, pointing at Ketterly and then dragging him with my index finger. He popped out of his chair like he’d been attached to wire. I flicked my wrist and he slammed into the bookshelves behind him. He winced and gasped in pain. I kept my finger on him as I walked, and he squirmed there as if a battering ram had been planted in his chest.

  “Jesus, Lem,” he said with difficulty. Hard to breathe with a ton of invisible energy pushing into your chest. “That was fucking fast. Jesus. Hiram always said you hadda touch with the Words.”

  I stopped in front of him, my finger now physically on his chest and pinning him to the bookcase. His glasses had gone askew but clung to his face. A light film of perspiration covered his exposed skin.

  “Digs, you sold us out, huh? Gottschalk was all set to save his skin by going against Renar, calling in the troops, and then somehow the old bitch finds us at his little Ranch of Horrors, and Gottschalk changes his tune, cuts a deal. I asked myself: How’d that happen? Who might have been keeping tabs on me? Who had I been stupid enough to trust?”

  His eyes flicked from me to Daryl. Lingered there a moment in perplexity. Then he looked at Mags. Didn’t recognize him, because Mags wasn’t giggling. Then recognized him and became terrified, looking back at me.

  “I had a choice? C’mon, Lem—Amir came in here with his fucking Bleeders, and you know how that works. Do this thing and we’ll pay you off, don’t do it and we’ll cut your head off.” He tried to shrug. Managed just a strange sort of spasm. “C’mon, Lem, what was I supposed to do?”

  I leaned in. “You tip us off, Digs. You give us the high sign, and we play along.” I pressed my finger deeper into his chest. The bookshelf groaned and splintered behind him. He gasped in discomfort. “Now we aren’t friends anymore.”

  “Listen, Lem, listen—I gave her to them, sure, they hired me and I found her. I didn’t know she was anything to you. She’s marked, she’s property, for God’s sake. They told me you would be okay, they weren’t there for you,” he hissed.

  “That’s good. Because if I had a fucking house dropped on me and you knew it was coming, I’d be irritated. As it is, Digs, we can talk about reparations.”

  He licked his lips, looked past me at Mags. Still didn’t like what he saw there. In truth, I’d told Mags to look mean—his mean face was startlingly terrifying. Like he was going to eat your face while you were still alive. It had something to do with the unibrow.

  “This isn’t you, Vonnegan,” Ketterly said, his face screwed up in a mask of discomfort. “You don’t come heavy. You’re idimustari—”

  I jabbed my finger and his voice cut off, his face turning red as his tongue and eyes tried to bulge out of his head. “A friend of mine is going to be ground up into dust so some freak can live forever, because you put the finger on us. I am coming heavy, Digs. And I can fucking come heavier. As in: Right now, right here in this stinking pit of an office, I will fucking crush you to death.”

  I had his eyes locked in. They were wide and crazy, terrified. I felt a godlike exhilaration. I wasn’t going to kill D. A. Ketterly. I wasn’t going to kill anyone if I could help it. But he didn’t need to know that. And that fear in his eyes felt good. I could see how people got addicted to it. To it all: bleeding someone else for your spells, terrifying everyone around you.

  All it took was a precise application of will, and you were a Monster God. Like Amir, like Renar. It was easy. I could see that now. It was easier than restraining yourself.

  Still, I pulled back. Ketterly sucked in air, nodding. “Sure . . . sure, Lem, whatever you need. Sure.” He smiled. Scraping whatever dignity he had left off the floor.

  I spun away and he dropped with a grunt. Stayed down for a few seconds on his hands and knees, coughing and spitting. I sat in his chair. It was warm. I looked at Daryl. I’d told him to look mean and, no matter what I said to him, to nod. He didn’t look very mean, but he was trying.

  “He tries to cast, break his jaw.”

  Daryl hesitated for one slow-witted moment, then managed a serviceable curt jerk of his head. Ketterly looked from him to me and back, sweat dripping off of him onto the floor.

  I considered Ketterly. Decided my little show had him appropriately terrified. You could take the Trickster out of the gutter, but it was always smoke and mirrors, tricks.

  “You’re still working for Renar?” I asked.

  He nodded at the floor. “Freelance shit. They need someone found, someone kept tabs on, they call me. What, am I supposed to tell the goddamn enustari to fuck off?”

  “You been to the mansion?”

  He nodded, pushing himself to sit back on his knees. “I know the place.”

  “You’re going to get us inside without being noticed.”

  He looked at me. The red was gone from his face. “You don’t want to go back there, Lem.”

  “But I have to.”

  “Don’t make me go back there, then,” he said. “That place will fucking kill your sleep.”

  “But you have to, Digs. I need a guide, and I don’t trust you out of my sight. And if you say no, I’m going to crush you to death.” I shrugged. “You see my position?”

  I’d run enough cons. I knew how to play a role.

  He spun himself around on his knees, an awkward, panting procedure. “I can do better than that. Can I?” He mimed standing up, and I nodded. Marveling. Violence was like a different kind of magic. You pointed it at the things you wished to command. Things happened.

  “Listen, you don’t need me. I’ve been there just three times, Lem. In . . . in the basement just once. I’m no fucking good, I can’t help you. But I can take you to the guy who designed the place. The Fabricator.”

  I looked at Mags. He was still practicing his Angry Face and wasn’t really paying attention. I’d never met a Fabricator. Hadn’t known any real ones still existed. I looked back at Ketterly.

  “You’re telling me, Digs, that a Fabricator built Renar’s mansion. That a saganustari or enustari who can make Artifacts made one the size of a house.”

  Ketterly shook his sweaty head. “Just the basement.”

  DARYL DROVE. HE DIDN’T like driving in the city. Drove with his hands white-knuckled on the wheel, stiff and bent in the seat. Traffic was light, but I was worried he would either have a stroke or wear out the Charm, suddenly realizing he’d effectively been kidnapped. We could reinforce the spell, but without Claire’s physical presence, we’d have to use one of us as the focus, which might have some unexpected consequences.

  As he drove, Daryl talked. And talked. He told us about growing up in the Hill Country, football, and German, and how everybody’s parents were alcoholics, secretly. All his friends had left. They’d graduated high school and gone to college, and he’d waited for them to come back, but then they didn’t. He got a job at the meatpacking place. It was a good job. He didn’t mind it. He was bothered how time just slipped past him, though. Waiting for everyone to come home, and then one day he’d realized it had been six years, and Jesus, they weren’t ever coming back.

  And then he’d thought maybe it was time for him to go away, too, but where? To do what? He figured he could drop a line on some old friends and go for a visit, but then that six years had crept between him and the idea, and all of a sudden it seemed impossible. Besides, his mother was out at the Knopp Assisted Living Facility, and who would visit her if he left?

  That summed up the first fifty chapters of Dar
yl’s life, and then he’d taken those fifty chapters and set them on fire, because he’d met Claire and suddenly he knew why he’d hung around the Hill Country so long. Because he’d been waiting for Claire, he just hadn’t known it yet.

  Mags and I glanced at each other. Mags practically had the word Mother printed on his furrowed brow, but I shrugged. Daryl would go home soon enough. I’d see to it.

  We crossed the bridge. Into the wilderness. Onto the maze of highways, heading south and west. Ketterly, wedged with Mags in the backseat, gave us steady directions. We ended up outside an old warehouse on a block of old warehouses. They were redbrick buildings with ruined windows of broken glass. There was a lot of untreated graffiti. No cars parked on the street.

  I climbed out of Daryl’s shitbox and stood stretching my back, looking up at it. “This is where a real live Fabricator lives?”

  Ketterly dragged something up out of himself and spat it into the street. “This is where I’ve met him. Running errands. Picking things up for people. Dropping things off.”

  It was clearly abandoned, at least in the official sense. Squatters, maybe. Drug users. Not a Fabricator, who was basically a saganustari or enustari who worked with objects instead of spells. Or, more accurately, who embedded spells into objects. Most commonly machines nowadays. The mechanical nature amplified the effects, somehow. I’d never understood that part, but then, Hiram hadn’t been a Fabricator, and even if he had he wouldn’t have taught me.

  “All right, Digs,” I said. “Lead on.”

  As we followed Ketterly over the cracked pavement, I considered that I would have to knock him around again if this turned out to be bullshit, which seemed likely. He led us to a spot where a sheet of one-inch plywood replaced a window, leaned down, and pulled it up from the bottom. It was on hinges. From a distance, it looked for all the world like it had been screwed into place. Ketterly held it open as we ducked under, and we were in a cold room of concrete, dusty and unfinished. Another sheet of plywood, this one shaped more or less like a door and oriented with the hinges on the left. It had been spray-painted with a big red X.