We Are Not Good People (Ustari Cycle)

by Jeff Somers

  The air was full of whispers.

  I felt warm. I glanced at Mags and blinked in surprise. He’d pulled out the candy Mel had given him, and his mouth was smeared with chocolate as he chewed, staring over at the bar area. I tasted the air for gas but didn’t find any. Which was strange, because I would have bet money the place was heavy with spells.

  Suddenly, there was a tall black kid standing next to me. He was good-looking, well built and filling a sober blue suit nicely. He smiled at us with white teeth and spread his hands.

  “Ms. Abdagnale will see you now,” he said.

  “Who are you?”

  He bowed his head a little. “Ms. Abdagnale is my gasam.”

  I smirked. Someone had laid some serious gas on this kid. “Sure she is.”

  He led us to the back, where the altar used to be, and through a huge black door on the left, massive and carved in a thick, meandering pattern. As we got there, a silver-haired man in a natty suit emerged from the door across the way, two of the girls on his arms, like they were being escorted to a ball. The girls were wearing satiny costume-like lingerie, like a cabaret act. Every hair in place. Complex hooks and buttons done perfectly.

  “I take it back,” I said to Mel’s back as we followed the kid. “She’s not a pimp. She’s a very, very good thief.”

  All the girls suddenly seemed knowing and ruined. Suddenly seemed rotten instead of lost. Nothing wrong with a bit of gas getting you into someone’s pocket. I’d done it myself a million times. It beat starving to death. It wasn’t that—it was the charade, the complex layer of bullshit. It was unseemly. It was wasteful. Why in fuck would she put this much effort, this much blood and frill, into what was basically a grift—a grift that would have worked just as well with half the bullshit. And would have cost some poor Bleeder less of their life.

  We stepped into a small office, suddenly crowded. It was done up in velvet hangings and delicate wooden furniture with ornate scrollwork. It felt hot and tiny, dry and woolly, like the air itself was furred.

  Carith Abdagnale was a giantess, tall and statuesque, with an hourglass figure poured into an expensive dress that shimmered. She smoked a cigarette using a long glittering holder that caught the light, trailing streaks of color as she moved it around. She was sixtyish but youthful, her makeup careful and perfect, her hair an unnatural shade of red, her face round and cheerful. She breathed very loudly through her nose.

  I paused to marvel. This was history, seeing the infamous Abdagnale in the flesh. I had no idea how close to real life she looked, how much or little Glamour was poured on her. Mages usually stuck close to reality, only improving, blurring, and adjusting. It could have been blood economics, or it could have been the fact that every mage I’d ever met thought pretty well of themselves—so why would they mess with perfection? But we all used Glamours that were close to reality.

  “Group rates?” Abdagnale said in a shrill voice, all nose and twitter. “We offer them! You will be made very comfortable. Your tastes will be learned, memorized. Your drink order, your preferences.” She looked at Mags and affected shock. “You are a burly one! We will have to treat you as two normal men when it comes to invoicing.”

  “Can it,” I said. “We’re here to—”

  “Recruit me,” she said. “Into your Suicide Cult! More stylish than those on the subways, yes, but no less doomed!”

  The way she half-shouted everything was unnerving. Her office was closed off from the rest of the church but had a heavy feeling, like the air had been filled with a scentless incense. Like it was fractionally harder to breathe inside than it had been on the street.

  I glanced at Mel, but she just shrugged. I considered my options. On one hand, I was tired of the fucking ranked ustari and their assumption that because they knew the Words and how to use them well, they could be as balls-out insane as they wanted and the rest of us had to eat it. Carith Abdagnale hadn’t stepped foot outside her little whorehouse in decades and was burning oceans of blood to spruce the place up and look like a big shot. The pretense was exhausting.

  On the other hand, as Mel kept reminding me, we needed firepower. And if Abdagnale had enough skill to cook up this Glamour, she might be useful.

  I cleared my throat. “I’m not here to insult you, Ms. Abdagnale. You’re right, we’re probably going to be killed before this is over. But you’re probably going to get killed, too, even if you don’t do anything. You think Mika Renar is going to leave you be? She’ll soak you, just like everyone else. Bleed you dry. You gotta stand up, be counted. Do something about it.”

  The boxy woman looked at me, leaning back a bit in a stiff posture, her hands clasped in front of her. She pursed her lips. “Don’t presume to teach me about that dried-up old devil Renar. And don’t presume to tell me to do something about it, as if I am not. Not in this place. I will not allow it.”

  Something felt off, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

  “You were not invited here, Mr. Vonnegan,” Abdagnale continued. “You were lured. Because you are not the only person working to bring Renar and her traitors to justice—our justice, true justice—you are merely the most incompetent.”

  Mel raised a hand. “Wait a second—”

  Abdagnale surged to her feet and made a sharp cutting motion with her hand, and Billington went silent. She kept moving her mouth for a few seconds and then brought her hands up to her throat, eyes popping.

  The black kid jumped to Abdagnale’s side, offering his arm, a thick, invisible haze of Cantrip around him like a cloud. She leaned on him heavily as they made their way around the desk. “This is my world, Ms. Billington. You will speak when I allow it.”

  My eyes met Mel’s. I thought of the runes over the door. Alarm, vague and distant, flowed into me like a jelly.

  “I have labored, Mr. Vonnegan,” Abdignale said breathlessly, pushing past us and waddling towards the exit. Mags shot a look at me as she elbowed him aside, but I felt like everything was happening too quickly to keep up with. “I know the gossip! I know what is said of me! Pimp! Cheat! Coward! What I have achieved here, Mr. Vonnegan, will be legendary in our order. And you, idimustari with wonderful timing, you presume to recruit me? You perceive the illusion we exist under in this establishment!” She tittered, breathing heavily as she hefted herself back into the huge open area of the former church. “You have the sight, you can see through the illusion. But I assure you, for not being real, your experience, your memories, will be just as satisfying.”

  I didn’t like the wet way she pronounced satisfying. I looked at Billington again, and she made a helpless gesture, her face a mask of deepening horror. I felt tired. I hated it when Tricksters hitchhiked their way to New York expecting me to be some sort of savior, some sort of hero. I hated it when they expected to be given a uniform, given orders, taught something. When they looked at me after being rendered speechless without a drop of blood in the air and demanded I explain to them how. No one had taught me anything.

  Early in my apprenticeship, I had planned to scan all of Hiram’s notes into my phone, only to discover that the idea of reading his notes on a screen made my skin crawl. Like technology added a filter to the Words that the universe disapproved of. I spent my free time studying the notes instead. In code, of course, but I knew Hiram’s codes. All his spells, his thoughts on spells, his study of old Artifacts, most of it was over my head. I was good with the Words, but when I thought about Hiram’s notes I felt sad, because when he had been alive, when he’d been here with me, I hadn’t bothered to ask him anything. And now he was gone, and idimustari who didn’t have a pair of shoes to their name came tramping in expecting me to outfit them.

  Not for the first time, I wished I could see Hiram again. He had died protecting us, died trying to help—and that had changed how I thought of him. I was glad for that, in a weird way, glad Hiram was no longer the son of a bitch who’d kept me on a leash for ten years, teaching me some awful lesson I didn’t want to learn. And I wished I co
uld tell him so.

  I trailed the big woman as she led us towards the middle lounge area, where half a dozen girls sat with half a dozen men, their skinny legs draped over laps, shimmering arms looped around shoulders. I smelled perfume and stink. The sour odor of unbathed bodies. I looked at the men, seeing them for the first time. They were vagrants. They lolled with the same slit-eyed air of ecstasy as the swells who populated the rest of the place, but they were ragged, and dirty, and—

  Expendable.

  I looked at Mags, but he was already pushing the sleeve of his jacket up, already had his small penknife in hand. I clicked through the spells I had—fast and dirty work, all of them; memorizing some endless saga would do you no good in a fight. The Griefers had the right idea, even if they took it too far: Pare it down. If you could make something happen in three syllables, that was the way to go.

  Mags slashed his arm. I opened my mouth to speak.

  Mags didn’t bleed. I didn’t speak. We looked at each other. Then back at his arm. Where there was no mark. He slashed again, fiercely, hard enough to open an artery and kill himself, and the blade rubbed against the skin dully, without effect.

  “As I said,” Carith Abdagnale tittered, “this is my universe.”

  The whole room seemed to be shrinking, a blanket of thick blackness descending on us. As it closed up around Mags, Mel, and me, I thought, That’s a new one.

  I NEVER LOST CONSCIOUSNESS. At first I thought I was, but then I realized I was just wrapped up in a suffocating, total blackness. A thick fabric piled on top of me. But I could feel my hands, my feet. I could even move. I could hear my breathing. I could hear everything. I could hear my heart beating. Blood flowing through my veins. My tongue scraping the inside of my mouth. When I moved my hand, I heard the creak and snap of ligaments. Distant, like they’d been buried.

  I reached out and felt around for the gas, the large amount of shedding blood that should have been required for this, this Glamour, this Binding—whatever it was. I felt nothing. There was no blood in the air.

  It was disorienting. And also impossible.

  I kicked and struggled. I could feel myself moving, but there was no commensurate sense of movement or reaction. I was in a void. There was no momentum, no resistance. My joints rolled noisily in their sockets, but nothing happened.

  I forced myself to be still. I braced myself and bit down on my tongue, hard. It was a useful skill, easy enough to cultivate as long as you could get over the creepiness factor. And the pain. If you were idimustari—as I still thought of myself—you couldn’t mind the taste.

  There was the expected pain—sharp, fundamental, your body warning you that there were major vessels in the tongue, that you could bleed to death if you severed one—but the flood of hot blood never came. I couldn’t bleed. It was like I’d found myself in an alternate universe—

  Fucking hell. The sign: An-uraš gu.

  My universe.

  This was some serious deep magic.

  I promoted Abdagnale in my head to a full enustari. A building full of johns getting bled continuously, fooled by Glamours into believing they were having the time of their lives, fueling a tiny personal universe where the old lady could make the rules. And we’d walked right in. The fucking blonde had said, “Other door,” and we’d bowed and scraped and walked into her universe like a bunch of obedient idiots.

  I couldn’t stop myself from working out the layers. At the bottom, Abdagnale casting her spell off the gas in the air. Creating a bubble where she set the rules of perception. We’d walked into that bubble, and so she had complete control over us. If she decided we couldn’t feel the gas in the air, then we couldn’t feel the gas in the air. Ugh, fucking magic—

  A voice echoed from far away, rushing at me, firming up.

  “. . . zalag . . .”

  —and the darkness disappeared. And I was in a cage.

  It was in Abdagnale’s office. Except it was larger than it had been before, twice as large. I kept thinking I would get used to the disorienting way saganustari and enustari used magic just for effect, but it never ceased to fuck me up. She’d hidden half her office just for some vague psychological advantage.

  The cage was made of gold, and there was no door or other obvious way to open it. I was on my knees with my hands tied behind me, and there was just enough room for me to shift my weight from knee to knee. I turned my head, and there was Mags, in a second cage, a few feet away. He filled it to bursting, his head pushed down into his chest, his shoulders straining against the metal. I could hear him breathing in short, angry gasps.

  I turned my head the other way, and there was Mel Billington in her own cage. She had her eyes closed, but I could tell she was awake. She was just kneeling there. Either accepting everything that was happening or patiently awaiting her moment for action.

  I opened my mouth to speak. Made no sound. I could feel air moving through my throat, my tongue shifting in my mouth, but it produced no sound. I turned my head laboriously to look at Mags again. His lips were working, but he wasn’t managing any noise, either. I could tell by watching his mouth that he was whispering fuck over and over.

  Carith Abdagnale sat behind her florid desk. The thin black fellow lounged, half sitting on its surface, to her left.

  “How soon—” he started to ask.

  “How should I know?” she tittered, fluttering her hands.

  I bit my tongue again. I didn’t have anything better to do. Might as well chew my tongue off, pass the time. Again, there was pain but no blood. A neat trick, creating a tiny universe where you could do anything, where your rule was absolute. Where you could decide who was allowed to bleed and who wasn’t. Outside the old church, Carith Abdagnale was powerful, probably dangerous. But inside her old church, she was god. And god had decided Mags and I could not bleed or speak.

  While I was chewing my tongue off, I thought about what went into achieving that. She had her girls, siphoning the gas from the guys. She had the guys, getting hooked in via hostesses out in the streets, in the tony bars and restaurants and hotels, a steady supply. She’d tied the spell off, which was impressive. You could set a loop in a spell to keep replicating itself as long as there was gas in the air. It wasn’t easy, and no one had ever taught me how to do it, but I knew it could be done. So years ago Carith Abdagnale had set the spell in motion, and her girls had been bleeding the men of New York to keep it going ever since. A precise bleed, careful not to kill anyone, careful not to ruin the illusion.

  The illusion: There was that, too. The setup, the overhead. Someone was casting that Glamour on us, and it was good.

  The whole thing was fucking complicated. I got tired just thinking about the planning that went into this little operation. Though if it were up to me, I’d prefer taking more naps over being a tiny god.

  The kid and Abdagnale were sitting in tight, awkward silence. Just waiting.

  I forced myself to calm down. Closed my eyes. Imagined myself in a calm, empty room. White walls. No sound. Just me, no worries, no problems.

  I opened my eyes again. There was a sixth person in the room.

  He was young, a very blond, very thin man wearing a white suit and a black tie, white vest, and red shoes. Sneakers. Running shoes. The suit was very tight and narrowly cut, outlining his limbs and accentuating their fragility.

  One of his long, delicate hands was grasping the hair of an older man. A vagrant, by his clothing and general level of cleanliness. The blond’s other hand held a very long, very thin blade, which he’d recently used to slit the vagrant’s throat. He released the older man and stepped back as the corpse collapsed to the floor, dry and inert. Whatever he’d cast to . . . teleport into the room, it had taken all the blood of a grown man to do it.

  The Thin Man looked down at the old man. “I apologize. We are working on a more elegant solution,” he said. He looked up, sliding his blade into this jacket pocket. “Carith, your taste in home decor remains . . . horrific.”

 
; “Welcome!” Abdagnale honked, standing up and waving her flabby arms. “Welcome! Do you crave refreshment? Such a long journey. Such a harrowing way to travel, with that . . . man. Come, take tea with me! Or perhaps you would like a meal in private with one of my associates?”

  The Thin Man’s face was a collection of sharp lines and angles. His lips were bright red and twisted into an expression of distaste. There was something awful about his eyes. They were empty and distant, miserable. “I would sooner fuck this fellow here than one of your diseased employees, Carith. To business! My employer expects me back immediately to confirm the relevant facts.” There was something overly excited about his booming cheer. It felt fake. Forced. And it felt like he was exhausted keeping up the front. As I watched, he turned gracefully and gestured at the cages. “Which one is he . . . No, it’s obvious. He isn’t some sort of mutant, and he isn’t a woman. So this”—he stepped forward and gestured at me—“is the famous Lem Vonnegan.”

  “The very same!” Abdagnale tittered. “The one and only! And now we must only negotiate my compensation for letting your gasam have him.”

  The Thin Man frowned, kneeling down and shooting his cuffs as he peered at me. “She is not my gasam, you dotty old bitch. I am currently in her service.” He blinked slowly, languorously. “He doesn’t look like anyone dangerous.”

  “In here he is not!” Abdagnale shouted, struggling to her feet. “I assure you of that. In here no one is dangerous, except me!”

  The Thin Man’s face collapsed into an expression of impatience. He stood and spun on his heel, throwing out his arms.

  “Carith, Carith, Carith, you and my employer have not been on good terms, yes, but you know she is a woman of honor, and she has given you assurances. And sent me in good faith into your little Honey Trap, where I am defenseless. So let us dispense with the bullshit and cut our deal so I can get out of here.”