by Jeff Somers
Seated in a thronelike padded white chair, a strip of black tape covering his mouth—and wrapped all the way around his head—was a plump, balding man, his brown skin shining with sweat. He’d let his limp black hair grow long, which gave him an astonishingly large forehead. He glanced at me with furtive intensity, then looked down at his bare lap, his hands having been taped to the arms of the chair.
My cigarette was being stubborn in the damp air. I placed it between my lips and knelt in front of the man.
“Rithy Kal,” Mel said, sounding tired. Bored. “Enustari, one of the original conspirators. Supplied Renar and Amir with blood sacrifice in the building of the Renar Fabrication. Known to have purchased human beings through Slovenian slavers for the purpose of sacrifice. Known to—”
I held up my hand and she stopped talking. I didn’t know how she decided the line between her purview and my authority. It was entirely up to her; I’d never asked her to pay attention to me. Some things she arranged on her own, without asking. Some things she waited for me. I couldn’t read the system. It was a machine built by someone else.
I stared down at Kal. “I’m going to take the tape off,” I said, cigarette bobbing up and down. “If you try to cast something, I will have my friend Pitr break every tooth in your mouth. Nod if you understand.”
Even ustari had reason to worry about broken teeth. Kal’s dancing eyes drifted to Mags, lingered for a stunned moment, traveling up from waist to chest, then jumped back to me. He nodded. I reached forward and tore the tape free.
“You are all fucking dead,” Rithy Kal hissed.
“And so are you!” I replied, throwing out my arms. “Guess you’re not getting on the Immortal Bus with your friends.” I shot my cuff and started rolling up my sleeve. “You ever been Charmed, Mr. Kal?”
Rithy Kal stared at my arm with a pop-eyed sneer. “You bleed for your own spells,” he said softly. “Like a common thief.”
“Jesus,” Mel said. “We got volunteers for that, Chief.”
I waved her away. Here was a true enustari, and there was a difference between him and me. I’d been losing sight of it. I thought of the black kid six months ago, thought of how I’d torn him up and crushed him under Words to squeeze him dry. I’d gotten used to bleeding people, but I was no Rithy Kal. It was time, I thought, to mark out the difference. To make it up, a little bit, with some sacrifice.
It was easy to steal things these days, and my switchblade was new. It had a glossy black shell that felt like skin as it warmed in my hand, with a set of dice showing snake eyes engraved on one side. Expensive, but the world was broken and everything was free.
I flicked it open and placed it against the skin of my forearm. Only a few of the scars there were recent. The rest had faded into pink, puckered memory, a skein of ancient roads I’d traveled down. The most recent ones were wide and thick, one on each arm, darker and wet-looking. The cold metal against my skin was familiar and comforting. I pushed and pulled, and the old searing pain released a thick flow of gas into the air. I felt Mags and Billington react, subtle shifts in weight as they sensed it and instinctively reached for it.
I spoke seven words. A mouthful for me. But I wanted the spell to have some subtlety. Kal was enustari; he was a man who knew what a Charm was. I had to be tricky, but there were more tricks than magical ones: I’d used the word Charm, but I’d actually cast a Compulsion to answer my questions. Misdirection. If he’d been paying attention, he’d have heard the corresponding Words. But I still had my Trickster rat’s nose for people, and it was telling me that Rithy Kal had just survived an assault, had his Bleeders and Security team slaughtered by a bunch of schlubs one slice above Griefers, and had just seen the largest, angriest man in existence. So he might not be at his sharpest. Plus, Rithy Kal hadn’t had enough interaction with idimustari to know that we lied for a living.
You worked grifts the same way; there was a method. Step one was to start nonthreatening and establish a rapport. If you could establish a rapport with a sweating man who was taped to a chair and pretty sure you were going to kill him.
I glanced at Billington. I wasn’t going to kill him. Mel had turned out to be something of a hands-on fanatic on that point. The guilty had to be punished, and execution had the extra benefit of taking resources away from Renar.
I looked back at Kal. “You know who I am?”
He nodded. Wary. “The Trickster.”
I’d never been known as the anything before.
“Tell me where Mika Renar is.”
There hadn’t been any signs of Mika Renar or her pet in the two years since Mad Day. Two years of hunting. We didn’t even know for sure whether Renar had survived, as old and frail as she was. Amir, I was almost certain, had died—I’d seen him up close, in slow motion. But Renar—she had an army of Bleeders and more money than some small countries. Anything was possible. I didn’t doubt that in the absence of her fucking Biludha-tah-namus, she would just organize an endless Bleed, would find open veins to fuel some looped spell that would keep her alive one more second, then one more second, then one more.
Mel had found plenty of conspirators. Mel had killed plenty of conspirators. Enustari who had somehow helped Renar—helped her build her murder machine, helped her phrase the Rite of Death. Helped her in any way.
“I do not know,” Kal said after a moment’s hesitation as he struggled against my Compulsion. It was a subtle spell. It didn’t make him want to answer me. It didn’t make him want to tell the truth. It made him not want to lie. Kal would steel himself against being forced to say things. He wouldn’t be ready for being forced to not say things.
It was like any grift: Keep them off-balance.
Of course, Kal was enustari. I had to accept the possibility that he might be fucking with me.
I didn’t hesitate. You had to pepper them with questions, keep them from thinking. “Why is your house out here in the middle of fucking nowhere?”
He shrugged. “Before the—” He hesitated again. “Before, it was very difficult to acquire blood in the cities. This was . . . private.”
I had never heard the word spoken with so much oily menace.
“Do you have an urtuku?”
The questions didn’t matter. I was just training him to answer.
He shook his head. “I have learned this never goes well.”
“Why is everything white?”
“So you can see the dirt.”
“Who was your gasam?”
“You would not know her.”
Not a lie. I let it pass. “How do you pronounce your name?”
“Ri-thee Kaal.”
“Tell me where Mika Renar is.”
“I don’t know.”
“Tell me where Cal Amir is.”
“He is dead.”
I hesitated for one second. Hearing it was somehow troubling. “Tell me what Renar is planning.”
“I . . . don’t wish to.”
“Tell me what Renar is planning.”
“No.”
Not a lie. I pushed. “Tell me what Renar is planning.”
“No!”
“Tell me anything.” It was an old trap. Set up a pattern. Then abandon it, suddenly.
Kal answered before he could think. “The kurre-nikas.”
The horrified look that immediately spread over his face told me I’d struck oil somehow. I paused, then let my cigarette drop to the floor. It was mostly ash anyway. Kurre-nikas. I’d never heard of anything like that, though a dirty translation would be difference engine. I rolled the phrase around in my head. Didn’t like it.
“What is the kurre-nikas?”
He opened his mouth. The struggle was clear on his face, and then his expression clarified into anger. He’d caught on to my little trick. I stood up; the Compulsion was too weak to work against an active resistance. I began rolling my sleeve down over the clean, dry wound.
“We’re going to kill you now, you know that?” I said.
He nodd
ed. “Yes.”
I looked down, then reached up and carefully put the tape back over his mouth. He watched the whole time, studying me.
“We found something,” I heard Mel say behind me.
I put a fresh cigarette between my lips and let it dangle. Pushing my hands into my pockets as I looked at her over my shoulder. “Was it inside someone in the other room? Because that would explain a few things.”
She grimaced and stepped forward, a thick bundle of papers in her hands. I took them and turned.
“So what is it?” I asked, walking past Kal to the immaculate bed, the largest one I’d ever seen. The bed was crisp and white, had a thick column at each corner, and was big enough to fit an entire normal-person bedroom on top of it. I dropped the stack of paper on it and spread it on the sheet with one hand, like a pack of cards.
“Plans,” Mel said.
They were. Sheet after sheet of careful line drawings, equations in the margins, and runes. I didn’t recognize the alphabet, but there were dozens—the written form of the Words didn’t matter, and different ustari used different ones. I flipped through the pages more slowly. The drawings were layers, each page representing a level of an overall design. Lines, spidery and silvery, drawn by hand. Dozens of oversize pages, chalky blue, folded and scuffed, notes written haphazardly everywhere. None of it made any sense.
I paused, suddenly aware of a trembling in the room, the tiniest shiver under my feet, like a small earthquake. I realized the s in her saying plans had lingered, seemed to stretch out gritty and rubbery. I looked quickly over at Billington, but she was staring intently at Kal, deciding how she would execute him for his crimes. I looked at Kal, who appeared to be vibrating along with the room, his edges indistinct.
I looked at Mags. Mags looked back at me, his dark, flat face a mask of alarm. I watched to make sure he wasn’t fading away.
A second, no longer, and then with a physical shock that left me swaying on my feet it was over. Everything was back to normal. I looked at Mags and held up my hand before he could say anything. It was clear from their body language that Billington and Kal hadn’t noticed a thing.
I folded up the straight razor into its pearl handle and slipped it back into my pocket. Then I folded the sheaf of papers in half lengthwise and slipped it into my coat pocket. Getting up, I started for the door and felt rather than saw Mags fall into step behind me.
“That was fucking useful,” Billington said, sounding bored. “You want to keep him around awhile, Chief? Try again?”
I shook my head. “No. He’ll be on his toes,” I said, “and I can’t go body blows with an Archmage.”
As we passed through into the white living room, stepping over the bodies with care, I felt the sharp flood of gas that was Rithy Kal’s final gift to the universe. Billington liked the idea of that final humiliation: just wasting their blood, these enustari.
A second later, she was there behind me again. I took a deep breath as we stepped outside, all the Bleeders turning to look at us, quiet. The air in my lungs was damp and awful. “Kurre-nikas.” I rolled the words around in my mouth. A literal translation was something like change maker. “That mean anything to you?”
“No, Chief,” Billington said. Which wasn’t surprising. If I was uneducated, relatively speaking, then Melanie Billington was fucking illiterate.
I didn’t even look at Mags.
The crowd of Bleeders parted in front of me, swirling behind as I walked. It took me a moment to realize there were soldiers crowding the driveway, sweating, unhappy men and women in ill-fitting dun yellow uniforms, caps on their heads, automatic rifles in their hands. A short older man with a thin mustache and a huge, overpowering nose stood in front of them all, relaxed. No rifle for him, just a leather holster on his hip and knee-high boots that gleamed with a fresh shine and provincial authority.
“Fuck,” Mags spat. I paused to analyze him: his hair, his face, the way he’d spat the word. Was that Mags? Was that how he spoke, how he moved? Or had I been seeing an illusion for so long it seemed real?
Billington was in my ear. “We do not have time for this.”
I turned my head slightly, keeping my eyes on the Little General. “Mel, you want to take on an army?” I shook my head. “I don’t. I’m not enustari.”
She grunted. “Look behind you, Chief. You sure?”
I turned a bit more. Three dozen men and women, sporting similar black suits in varying states of repair, cleanliness, and bloodsoakedness, were following us at a loose distance. My Army of Assholes.
My Bleeders. Each and every one of them convinced that I’d graduated to enustari six months ago, when I’d brought Mags back from the dead.
Except I hadn’t. I couldn’t have.
32. IN MY DREAM, CLAIRE MANNICE stood on a porch with the pre-storm wind whipping her hair, holding a shotgun on me.
I STARTLED AWAKE WITH Mags’s elbow in my ribs. The two of us were in the Little General’s office, a plain room with pressed wood walls, a concrete floor, and four pieces of furniture: a metal desk that had seen better days, a wooden rolling chair, two stiff, uncomfortable guest chairs, and a filing cabinet. There were zero windows and one door. We’d been driven in the back of a truck for about an hour; I had no idea where we were.
Billington, typically, had suggested we shed a bit of gas and murder our way out. Me, I wondered about the coincidence of the Little General showing up in the middle of the jungle, and I decided to spend some time finding out. Time, I had. Two years and all we’d seen was death and tragedy, nary a hair on Renar’s mummy head. We had gotten nowhere.
The troops had hovered, ready to leap into action, while Melanie debated my proposal. Finally, she’d nodded, made a waving gesture with her hand, and our people relaxed as one and let themselves be arrested and taken . . . somewhere.
It all felt surreal. A few hours ago I’d been in fucking New Jersey, for God’s sake.
“Lem,” Mags whispered. “I’m starving.”
I considered my pockets: some cash. Bandages. I shook my head.
He shifted his massive frame in the chair. “Fuck,” he said. “It’s hot.”
I’d been listening to Mags complain my whole life, it seemed, but I’d stopped being annoyed by it. I liked listening to Mags complain. I had caught some strain of Stockholm syndrome, I figured.
“Cast something,” I said without looking at him, “and be not hungry.”
Mags grunted in frustrated annoyance. I thought about the bodies back at Kal’s, the black suits on the floor. Six or seven, I thought I’d counted. I didn’t know anything about them—I’d lost track of all the idimustari who’d come to New York and taken service with Lem Vonnegan’s Traveling Shadow Show. They were Billington’s people, not mine.
Still, I saw myself stepping over them, careful not to get blood on my shoes.
The door opened, and the Little General entered with two slovenly soldiers. Up close, his army looked about as ragtag as mine. They were unshaved, smelled pretty ripe, and their boots were more tape than leather. The Little General was in better shape, but not by much.
He sat down behind his desk and smiled at us. He leaned back and laced his fingers over his immense belly. It was as if someone else’s stomach had been grafted on to his skinny little body.
“Gentlemen,” he said in a thick accent. “I have a difficulty.”
We stared back at him. They’d taken my razor, and I didn’t have my old collection of aching wounds to split open for a bit of gas. I’d gotten soft. There was nothing on the desk that was useful, nothing in sight at all. I could always bite my tongue for a little trickle. A little Charm. A Little General on my side. I wasn’t worried.
“Señor Kal, he paid for protection, yes? I kept . . . elements away from him. Made him safe out in the middle of nowhere? I take my obligations very seriously.”
I ran my hands over the sides of the chair. A ragged screw caught at my skin, a half-assed repair. I imagined pushing my palm against it
and jerking my hand back and up. The ragged tear through my skin, the shock of warm pain, the gas in the air. Pure and unsullied. Just energy for the taking.
“So, you have invaded his privacy, and I am honor-bound to punish you.” He leaned forward. “But, of course, Señor Kal, he is dead.”
I knew a con when I smelled one. Colombia wasn’t a country anymore; Bogotá was a ghost town, according to the news sites, half burned to the ground, claimed by dozens of gangs picking over the bones. Outside the cities were the remnants of the army and the police, formed up into militias. The bigger countries were holding it together. If you had dollars or euros or yuan, you could make things happen. I thought I could almost see the Little General’s nose twitch.
I pinched the jagged piece of metal, jutting an eighth of an inch from the chair, between my thumb and forefinger. Waited for his pitch.
The Little General seemed nonplussed when we didn’t respond, and glanced down at his hands. “You understand? There is . . . what is . . . there is overhead. There is the cleaning up of the house. The disposal of the . . . the disposal. There is the issue of the dead man. The fact that none of you are in Colombia legally.”
I nodded, wondering what affable looked like and if I had the necessary facial muscles to project it. Wondered exactly who the Little General thought was going to give a shit about Colombia’s border enforcement. I took a deep breath and slashed my hand against the nub of screw and tore my palm open. The pain was sudden, severe, and familiar. The gas filled the air like heavy syrup as I bled. I gave it three words. Felt the draining moment of exhaustion, but I was so flush and healthy these days, it didn’t phase me in the least.