by Jeff Somers
The Little General started to smile.
Your standard Charm was the tiny engine of the universe I was familiar with. Easy to cast, not very expensive in terms of blood, and infinitely pliable. A Word here, a Word not there, and the Charm became something completely different and wonderful. Assholes always hit the Charms hard, bleeding out a tub of gas and frying brains, but that was stupid. A light touch. Get in their heads and whisper.
I thought of the Udug. A fragment of rock that became a whispering voice in your head when you touched it. A shiver of combined fear and lust went through me.
Back at the house, there’d been too much chaos and too many guns. You started casting spells en masse it was hard to hide, hard to keep people from becoming alarmed. Hard for soldiers who looked like their training had involved identifying the boom end of a rifle and a hearty slap on the back to resist squeezing their triggers just because they didn’t know what the fuck was going on. You saw it every day in the papers, what papers were left, or on the blogs, what blogs were left. Half the massacres that happened in the world, this world that we had broken, involved soldiers. I didn’t want my people in the news, so I’d passed the word to stand fast until we had more advantageous circumstances. Idimustari worked better close up, one on one.
“You work for Rithy Kal?” I asked, keeping my voice neutral.
The Little General had recently fallen in love with me and his expression implied he was super curious as to what color underwear I had on.
“No, no,” the Little General said, eyes bugging out. “Señor Kal is a client. Colonel Luis Suarez does not work for anyone.” He frowned slightly, something poisoning my nice Charm. “Yes. But. No. Yes.”
I resisted the urge to look at Mags. “What is it?”
The Little General’s grin came and went like someone was sitting on a keyboard somewhere, hitting the ENTER key over and over. “Del Traje Blanco,” he muttered, and looked apologetic.
My Spanish . . . I had no Spanish aside from insults. But I knew enough. I thought of him. The Man in the White Suit.
I remembered his voice, nasal and flat. Nonsense. I am the Negotiator.
I struggled not to lean forward and slap the Little General. The poor sap had been Charmed so hard, his brain was half fried. “White suit?”
He nodded, happy again now that we were in agreement. “Sí! Yes. It is fair to say I work for him.” His face darkened again. “Between you and me, amigo, I wish I did not. I will not be welcome in heaven, I will never see my poor mama again, this I know, but this . . . work . . . this is evil work.”
I nodded. “Show me.”
The Little General’s smile returned, wide and exultant. He sat back and clapped his hands. “An excellent idea, señor! Come! I will show you everything.”
The Charm. I told some of the young ones sometimes: If you could only manage to learn one fucking Cantrip, learn a fucking Charm.
“Is there anything to eat?” Mags wanted to know. He stood up, but the metal chair was too small for him and remained clamped on his ass. For a full twenty seconds the Little General and I stood there watching him spin around like a dog trying to chase its tail. When Mags finally got a hand on it and yanked himself free, he let it drop and stood there grinning shamefacedly.
As if nothing had happened, the Little General beckoned us, grinning. Outside his office, the two guards looked momentarily confused but managed an approximation of attention. Up close I could see that their rifles were rusty. I wondered how many hands had been blown off when they tried to fire them, as the men fell in behind us wordlessly.
The place had the feel of an abandoned school or hospital. Cinder-block walls, concrete floors. Echoes crowding us as we walked. Silence. No power, as far as I could tell, but the place had a stale residue of blood, an old shadow of magic. Someone had used it for some serious rituals. The Little General was all grins now that he had found a way to please us. Our tour guide into hell. He led us to a chained-shut set of double doors and told us pleasantly that Rithy Kal once owned this facility, and drug lords before him. That it had been given to the Little General as a base of operations.
He led us down the stairs.
The stairwells were little tubes of humidity. The stairs themselves were metal and groaned alarmingly as we stepped onto them. I could see bolts jiggling and working as we descended, flakes of rust raining down to announce us. Every flight brought us into a thick new layer of heat and wet, and a thick new layer of ancient, dried-up blood. I’d never been able to sense old blood like this. Usually, the gas burned off and was gone, clean. Of course I could always sense the fresh stuff in the air, even at a distance. But I’d never sensed the dry-rot, furry aura of dead gas.
A lot of people had died here, and not well.
Down and down. The heat, the wet, the death all getting stronger.
At the bottom level—the subbasement, I supposed—we stood in ankle-deep water, warm as piss, brown and smelling like sewage. I stood feeling the water soak my socks and the cuffs of my pants as the two guards worked another padlocked set of doors, and thought that I should have just stuck with the old thrift store suits I used to wear.
The doors squealed open, and we’d arrived: hell, population my Asshole Army.
The doors led to an underground holding area—a wide, low-ceilinged center aisle banked on either side by iron-barred cells that had been carved out of the soft, damp rock. It was completely silent save for the splashing of our feet. The heat and damp hit me in the face; I’d been über-sweating for the last ten minutes and hadn’t noticed, my own level of humidity matching that of the air around me.
As Mags and I walked into the space, our people stared at us from the cells. Some of them hung off the bars, their faces pushed between them. Some leaned against the rear walls burning damp cigarettes that were trying hard to snuff out in the wet air. The Little General’s guards, six of them, stood in the center with their rifles slung over their shoulders. They stared sightlessly, their bodies stiff, their breathing even and calm.
I let my eyes adjust to the gloom. Farther down, the other cells were crowded with people too. Locals. Dark-skinned men and women and children and babies. All dressed differently, all staring at us—or straining to. They were silent. They looked like they’d been there for a long time.
“All right,” I said.
The cell doors nearest us groaned open. You couldn’t hold a bunch of idimustari in fucking jail. They all swam out, kicking up the awful water and arranging themselves along the sides, shooting cuffs and pushing hair out of their faces, plucking cigarettes from behind their ears.
“Who are they?” I asked, gesturing at the locals.
The Little General shrugged. “They belong to Del Traje Blanco. Señor Kal, he holds them here.”
“Chief.”
I squinted through the gloom until I found Billington. She looked spotless, untouched by the heat and dirt. I had her pegged: She liked to look plain and unconcerned about her appearance, but I was almost certain she used a constant stream of mu to maintain her look.
I stepped away from Mags and the Little General and went over. She waited until I was right next to her, then turned to look down the rest of the aisle. I could just make out a large, heavy-looking door.
“It gets worse,” she said, and started walking. I followed, pushing my hands into my pockets. Even after all this time I wasn’t quite used to not feeling the burn of a dozen small wounds when I did that. The door resolved from the gloom, bloated, old, and wooden with rusted iron hinges, chained shut like everything else and green with moss or rot or both. As we got near, Billington raised an arm and snapped her fingers. A moment later, a tender shoot of gas trickled into the air. She spat two Words at the door and it sagged open, gentle, like a prom date.
Splashing forward and pulling it open, she gestured me through. I could still sense the tendril of gas burning into the universe’s hungry maw, and with two Words of my own I had a neat yellow ball of light, a minia
ture sun, floating over my shoulder. I’d cribbed the basic spell and rubbed it down to its basics. Two Words.
I stepped through the doorway, and the light floated a few inches ahead. After one step, I stumbled over something. I looked up, and with a thought the ball expanded slightly, bringing more of the space into the light. I stared.
This next room was larger than the prison area. And it was filled with corpses.
33. THEY WERE GUILTY.
The Little General, Charmed so hard I expected his ears to start bleeding. There were bits of food stuck in his yellowed teeth, which I knew because he never stopped smiling.
Del Traje Blanco informed us of their guilt.
I replayed his voice in my head as the car inched down Broadway. Neilsson, the old drunk, had gotten us home with just a small amount of cabin depressurization and queasy gravity shifts as he flew the jet like it was a fucking mobile home with wings. Mags had spent the entire flight with the lower half of his face thrust in a vomit bag, his eyes shooting rage everywhere, the expression somewhat ruined by his occasional whimper when we hit a pocket of turbulence.
The Little General, collecting bodies. Delivering them to Rithy Kal. The Negotiator. There was a missing step in there, something that would cause it all to make sense. I wasn’t smart enough to see what it was.
Outside the car, crowds of people milled about. New York was truly never asleep anymore. Thousands of people lived on the streets, choking traffic, cooking and sleeping and just being awake constantly. The police had given up. They still cleared a street here and there when they needed to, but when you had a few hundred thousand people camped out, what could you do?
They were guilty, so we executed them.
The corpses had been stacked neatly. The smell was incredible, all that flesh rotting in the heat and the damp. Their hands were all tied behind their backs with rough twine. A strip of dirty white cloth had been tied around their eyes as a blindfold.
I smoked a stale cigarette someone had given me, and the back of the car filled up with smoke. I didn’t want to crack a window. People were always sticking their fingers in, trying to push the window down, trying anything. Why not. Nothing was working, why not try whatever you could. See what happens.
We could have cast on the cars. I had Mags, Remy, and Roman, dusted off, their cuffs and shoes still smelling like shit, still damp. Mags was so irritated from the flight he probably would have killed anyone who came close enough, more or less by accident. We could have cast on the cars, but it was just too easy, casting and casting, bleeding and bleeding and not feeling any of it.
I’d been to and gone from Colombia in eighteen hours.
Our three cars averaged about six miles per hour through the meat of the city, but we never stopped. There was no cross traffic and no reason to stop for the lights, which were all blinking yellow anyway. So we actually made better time than we would have three years before. We pulled up outside Rue’s, one car after the other, Wards on the curb keeping the sidewalk clear of other vehicles. A few vagrants shuffled along the sidewalk, but we didn’t bother them and they didn’t bother us, and none of them ever came into the bar. No one but us came in.
I sat in the car after we’d parked, thinking on it. A puzzle. Something was tickling me, trying to break through and become an epiphany. All this. Everything. I had Renar, everywhere for three terrifying weeks of my life two years ago, now missing since, like a ghost. But not dead, I thought. Too much to hope for that she was dead. In the meantime, no word of her, no word of anything. Just the slow unwinding of the world, spinning out under its own internal pressure. Mass suicides. Mass killings. Bombs. Poisonings. Mutinies.
Now we had a fucking tinpot general collecting blood for the Negotiator. Del Traje Blanco. And not voluntarily, I didn’t think. There was a lot of daylight between an honorable bribe to protect Rithy Kal from the local authorities and actively rounding up your friends and neighbors to be bled white.
In the back room at Rue’s, Billington was already working on a bottle of bourbon, leaning against one of the tables with her arms crossed under her tits. There’d been a discussion about moving the Asshole Army to a new location, because Rue’s was known to be ours—we’d even pastured Kenny out of the picture with a payout and a Charmed kick in the ass. But I’d vetoed the idea. What difference did it make? If Renar or any of the death-crazy enustari wanted to find me, they’d find me. Mags had been gifted a candy bar, his nausea and terror forgotten as he did his level best to smear it all over himself without actually ingesting any of it.
A group of men and women in shitty black suits stood and sat across from him, watching him openly. But instead of wearing expressions of vague amusement and amazement, they looked like they were ready to scatter if he glanced up at them. Like he was something unexpected, supernatural.
“You’ll read about it in the papers, on some newsfeed or other,” Mel said without preamble. “Colombian military slaughters innocent villagers wholesale for weirdo in red shoes.”
I sat down and watched Mags eat, apparently via absorption. She was right—we’d gotten so used to the endless stream of horrors in what passed for the news these days that it had become numbing. But this shit . . . this was exactly the sort of thing you heard about and processed and ignored. Five hundred corpses found in Colombian prison. Huh, just five hundred? In Qinghai three weeks before, fifty-six people had been crushed to death by elephants from the southern provinces. Fucking elephants got you remembered. Just average everyday murder didn’t even budge the needle.
“That whole place,” Mags said thickly, sounding sticky, “reminded me of Fallon’s workshop. Lem, remember when Fallon made himself into a giant? He told me he’d teach me that one, but he never did.”
For a second I imagined Mags even larger.
Ev Fallon. An old man then, even older now. I recalled his sinewy, tough body, thin and scrappy, but somehow elegant. His huge, nimble hands. Enustari, easily. The only Fabricator I knew, and capable of building intricate, powerful magical Artifacts. Somehow the mechanical nature of the devices augmented or amplified the power, and spells could be bound to them permanently, sometimes without requiring repeated bleedings for repeated effects. Fallon had taken to teaching Mags the art of Fabrication, saying he had a touch for it. This was incredible, and so far I’d assumed Fallon was just being nice. Fallon didn’t seem to notice that Mags was showing signs of improvement, ever since he’d . . . come back.
For the millionth time I thought about what had happened that day in Abdagnale’s tiny universe. It certainly hadn’t been me who brought him back. One second I’d been sinking into the cold, bled-white failure I was so familiar with, casting a useless spell on a dead body, and the next—the next, Mags was coughing and sputtering beneath me, kicking like a bucking horse, and I’d become a legend.Whatever had happened, it had changed him, and no one else seemed to notice. Fallon didn’t. He still regarded Mag’s lessons as charity, entertainment for the dim giant. But Mags had a better memory for the Words, more discipline when casting now. Which made me feel like an asshole because I’d spent the last ten, twelve years teaching my friend absolutely nothing. In fact, it could be argued that before the . . . incident, I’d somehow made him even dumber through his association with me, if that were technically possible.
I was not a good friend. I felt Mags’s heartbeat, his respiration, him, like an invisible sun beating against me.
For his part, Fallon remained mysterious to me, but there was no harm in letting him teach Mags a few tricks. Fallon’s lessons were widely spaced, the old man showing no urgency in scheduling them, but Mags was really working at it, and that was good for him, too, I guessed. Since I was not a good friend. At least he was trying to learn something. I remembered meeting Fallon for the first time, presenting him with the fact that he’d helped engineer the end of the fucking world, and then immediately having to fight for our lives. Which at the time hadn’t been unusual, even though I hadn’t been the fucking L
eader of the Resistance back then or had a quote-unquote army. Yet since I’d acquired said army, since Mag’s resurrection, no one had attacked me. There had been assassination attempts, wetwork-type attempts. But no invasions. No lightning bolts from the sky. No dimma.
Five hundred corpses in Colombia. On the Negotiator’s order. Sucked dry, bled white, all of them marked, all of them under a simple geas even I could see, though there’d been no evidence of a spell cast from them. Nothing recent. Nothing. It was as if—
And the Negotiator had said he didn’t work for Renar. None of it fit together. Except maybe one piece.
I looked at Mags, now busily licking his fat fingers for every tiny smear of chocolate he could locate. Fallon’s workshop had been destroyed that night, but I remembered it. The Glamours in place to obfuscate its true purpose, both workshop . . . and Fabrication.
I stood up. “Tell Remy and Roman to get the cars.”
Billington shot up instantly. No matter how many times I failed to be whatever it was Melanie Billington imagined I was, she never lost faith. And despite the fact that I hadn’t seen so much as a sign from her, I knew the twins were already walking out to get the cars.
“Where’re we going, Chief?”
“Just you and Pitr,” I said. “We’re visiting the Old Man.”
THE DRIVE INTO HOBOKEN was creepy, as always. The tunnel was empty, unlit, and had two feet of water pooled at the deepest point, forcing us to slow to a crawl for a few minutes. One car passed us going the wrong way at about a hundred miles an hour. Billington, Mags, and I had our sleeves yanked up as it screamed past and splashed a tidal wave of dirty water over our car. No one had officially closed the tunnel. No one seemed to be keeping it open, either.