by Jeff Somers
I had a spell. I sliced my arm. Before I could speak, Mags was reciting. I turned, gas leaking out of me, and there was the huge son of a bitch, eyes closed and brow furrowed in the traditional Mags-is-trying-to-think expression. He spoke sixteen Words, thirty-six syllables. It was awful. Sloppy and loose, stuffed with noises that made sense only to Mags. Halfway through, I knew how I could have cut it in half, sliced off the fat. I felt the drain as he cast from me, nausea and yellow exhaustion, old familiar friends. At the same moment, I felt him as he filled up with it, the awful strength passing through him, golden and shivery. I wavered a little on my feet as my vision went dark, went up to the line of unconsciousness then steadied.
I staggered to the window.
“Clever,” Fallon said quietly as even more gas leaked into the air, thick, healthy streams of it, green with rot and horror. “Mr. Mageshkumar—clever. You have caught Perinine and Mugase by surprise. But Alligherti is Warded against such tricks as a matter of course.”
Outside, the woman and one of the first men to arrive—short and round, jowly and yellow-skinned under his fur cap and thick coat—were frowning, hands at their throats in unknowing mimicry. As I watched, the woman opened her mouth and said something. Or tried to. What came out was the distinct bleating of a donkey: Ee-ore, ee-ore.
I smiled slightly, swaying on my feet. It once amused Pitr Mags for six days straight to cast a mu that threw his voice, startling people as we walked the streets. Cast it one more time, Lem, just one more, c’mon, please. Six days with a thumbtack in my pocket, making Mags giggle, and I’d been anemic and half-dead, but it had been worth it to keep him happy. It made sense that this kind of donkey ridiculousness would be the first spell Mags wrote all on his own. Even if it was the worst piece of writing I’d ever heard.
The third man and the Negotiator offered their colleagues brief ice-cold glances of almost total contempt. Fallon took in a deep breath and whispered. I felt him pulling the gas in the air, knew he was casting, but couldn’t catch the Words he used. He spoke twenty-three syllables, but half of them were gibberish. Obfuscation. Slow—but secure. This was not waste but secrecy. I frowned in professional disapproval of such tactics.
The round man and white-haired woman, still braying as they tried to shake off Mags’s spell, dropped to the ground in a simultaneous collapse. I wondered why Fallon hadn’t gone after Alligherti, who seemed like the boss of this moment. There was a single fat second of silence between us, and then the old man spoke.
“In war, Mr. Vonnegan, it is always advisable to press your advantage—and never pass up low-hanging fruit.” I was suddenly creeped out and terrified to be in the same room as Fallon. He was, after all, one of those ustari who stayed in the shadows, whispering out death.
Outside, Alligherti spoke, eyes closed. I strained to feel him pulling on our gas, sucking us dry to kill us, but there was nothing. He wasn’t using our gas. He was casting from some other source, remote. Gas in the air but walled off from me, which meant there had to be something linking them to it, an Artifact. Everything was changing, and magic was starting to feel broken, too.
I thought of the designs we’d taken from Kal’s place. I thought of Fallon’s old workshop. A battery for magical energy, for blood, buried in some secret place and broadcasting. And the designs we’d taken had indicated the ability to broadcast that energy. How much gas had been stored? Two years now, the world had been breaking up. Two years of bloodbaths and massacres, two years of mass suicides and terrorist bombs, wars and assassinations. Two years of death on an epic, accelerated scale, stored somewhere.
“Jesus,” I whispered, “he’s got enough g—”
The room exploded. This happened in slow motion.
For a moment I didn’t know what was happening; I stood there with my mouth open, the word gas like syrup in it, spilling out slowly. I watched seams open up between the window and the wall, like they were being pulled apart. Light slipping in. The floor tilted subtly, and we all rose off the ground a few centimeters as if gravity had gotten tired of holding us down. There was a low rumble of noise under it all, like an endless train going by six miles away, the sound of an explosion slowed down.
Slow. I had experience with slow. Hiram’s lessons were still in my head, his theatrical voice, all boom and bombast, telling me about the Law of Perception, the Law of Volume. This was a second, a moment, and I was experiencing it in slow motion. I wondered why. Why blow us to hell but make it last?
Then I saw my answer.
The other Archmage, Alligherti, appeared in the room. Impeccable. He was swarthy, olive-skinned, but taut and healthy, not a scar on him. The idea of all that gas in a tank somewhere, always at your fingertips—fuck, I’d be casting mu to shave in the morning. I’d cast for everything if I didn’t have to bleed, or bleed someone else. The freedom of it.
Shame bloated inside me. Freedom. I’d spent years thinking I was the best guy in the room because I wouldn’t bleed anyone. I didn’t touch anyone. I didn’t do anything. And then I’d started bleeding people, and I remembered the first few months, feeling so powerful, so free.
It hadn’t lasted. I’d gotten used to it. It didn’t feel free anymore. It felt normal, and I twisted and itched against it. Freedom was a fucking moving target. I imagined myself pointing at one of our people and them tearing off a sleeve and opening a vein so I could cast anything and be just as strong afterwards.
Alligherti stood there surveying us, moving—from my perspective—normally. Or he was moving super-fast and we saw it as normal. Or something. He was a bear of a man, six feet, six three, wide in the shoulders, his hands wide and big with short fingers. A gold ring on every finger—plain bands, no gems, no etchings. His face was round and jowly, his lips delicate and pouty. Big bags under his eyes. The sort of face that always looked sad. The sort of guy who stood silent in the background, being ignored, then said one Word that killed everybody.
Our eyes met. His were old. Yellow and drippy, faded. He looked mid-forties and strong as a bull in his suit and coat. His eyes were ancient.
Alligherti leaned forward, put his arms around Roman, and then they both winked out of the room. Just gone.
I pondered this as all the old worn-out clamshell trim in the room began to split, jagged diagonal cracks appearing at the seams. A moment—one of my moments—went by, and Alligherti returned. He blinked back into existence as the low roar of the room exploding slowly built into intolerable noise around us. He laced one thick arm around Remy, and then they blinked away.
I knew all about time. At full speed, I figured, this was all happening in about two seconds. At full speed, I’d be standing there with my mouth open as the room burst into flame, superheated air expanding and swelling the room, smashing out the glass and tearing the walls from the studs. At full speed, I’d have time for about one Word.
You could and couldn’t do a lot with one Word. The Griefers proved that. But you had to pick the right one. Not every Word could be used to Grief. Some were too vague, too dependent on context. They had to be action verbs. The sort of concepts the universe could not confuse. Otherwise you got a very tiny blowback on an unfinished spell, not enough to make any trouble.
The Word I chose was dalra.
Dal meant to fly. Adding the suffix made it more specific: to fly out.
I spoke it and began to drift. In real time, I was speeding through the air. In real time, the window did not slowly crack open as I put a shoulder to it, shards of glass like snowflakes around me as the cold air admitted me like a jelly behind a thin plastic sheet.
Without any other Words, I’d fly until I bled my people white. I twisted my head around as I drifted through the slow air in time to see Alligherti blink into space next to the Negotiator, holding Remy around the neck. As I approached, the Negotiator was shaking his head. They were hunting for someone. Someone the Negotiator had seen before, could identify. Someone the Negotiator was afraid to confront in person: me. Who else? Who else had
beaten him bloody, made him run? I recalled the haunted look in his watery eyes. For all the flash, the Negotiator was half broken already.
I’d asked the gulla to find the Negotiator for me, to get the drop on him. And I’d fucked it up, like I’d fucked every other thing since the day I left home.
I felt for the thread of gas in the air, reached out one languorous hand as I swooped down. Took hold of the white jacket, and he rose up off the ground slowly, like a balloon, red shoes kicking the air. I marveled at the expression on his face as it shifted into shock and dismay. His sudden weight spun me around majestically, yanking at my arm in painful slow motion, ligaments popping like timpani drum fills. The air against my cheek and pulling at my hair was thick and warm despite the chill. Thinking in real time was disorienting: I thought of turning my head to see where I was headed, and my muscles responded in a lazy, frustrating swivel, dragging my gaze along the slightly blurred, blasted landscape of Seward: trees, snow, cars, exploding motel.
I moved like I was heavy, but I felt nothing: no weight, no drag, no inertia.
I remembered spinning Pitr Mags around like a parade float in Renar’s murder hole. I remembered the feel of him, huge and alive, his hair long because I kept forgetting to make him cut it.
My head finally swiveled to face our trajectory, a copse of dead-looking trees jutting up from the ground like bones. I couldn’t do the complex math needed to calculate how quickly we would get there. With the thin thread of our gas in hand, I whispered another Word: silig. Stop.
We stopped, but as happened with one-Word spells, not in the way I’d wanted. Instead of drifting to a slow-motion landing, everything rushed back to normal speed with a roar. With a visible stutter, time reasserted itself as the Negotiator and I smacked into a gnarled old tree and separated, each of us flying off at an angle. I hit the frosted, dead grass and skimmed along for a few feet, my leg twisted under my body, and finally rolled to a stop.
I pushed myself up onto one elbow, my leg sending red waves of agony directly into my brain, like I was having a stroke. My vision swam, but I felt for the gas and found more than there had been—me and White Suit feeding in to it, I guessed. I reminded myself that Alligherti had an endless supply of invisible gas stored somewhere. He could cast anything.
I pulled the gas from my people through me and spoke a Word. A Grief, but fuck it, I couldn’t think.
The ground at Alligherti’s feet exploded into a spray of snow and dirt, knocking him backwards. Roman dropped to the ground, limp. I muttered a cute little mu I’d picked up from Mags, perhaps the only thing the huge moron had ever taught me. I’d cut out some words. When he’d whispered it sixty or seventy times to keep me alive, once, he’d almost killed himself.
Six syllables, and I felt a flush of hot, rotten energy flow into me directly from my Bleeders. The pain went numb—still there, a throbbing that I could feel like audio through a wall, but blunted, rounded off.
I whispered it again and felt strong enough to stand up. I started walking towards Alligherti and whispered it again, another wave of awful, slimy energy filling me up, making my heart pound and my vision swim. I’d probably just killed someone; I didn’t even know any of my Bleeders’ names. I’d just bled some follower to death so I could stand up and fight. I was a fucking hero. I swallowed back something acid and thick, making it settle in my belly like a nest of spiders.
As I walked, Fallon appeared next to me. He stumbled slightly as he transitioned from the level floor of the motel to the rough ground outside.
“That was impressive,” he said in his almost-accent.
“Do you know the names of the Bleeders?” I asked as we walked.
In my peripheral vision I saw him turn to look at me, then forward again. “It is best not to.”
Roman wasn’t dead. He was out cold but breathing. Alligherti was nowhere to be seen. Fallon knelt next to Roman and peered around like an owl.
“Where have you run, Alfonse?” he said quietly.
I stood there with the sickening energy pulsing through me, animating me. I looked around. The crumpled form of the Negotiator lay in the frosted grass where he’d landed. But the barrel-chested enustari who’d been plucking people from the room and presenting them to him for identification—he was gone.
I looked at Fallon. Thought, He ran away from Fallon. From a man named Evelyn. Not from me—from Fallon.
We needed to flush Alligherti out. I closed my eyes and pulled an old chestnut from my street days, plucking loose change from people’s pockets with my own gas until I’d nearly passed out, Mags leading me around like a seeing-eye dog. Just four syllables, a rough outline of a spell, but enough to do the job. I felt the trickle of power flow through me, leaving me untouched. A second later, a piercing scream burst out of the air, its source a few feet away, where the blacktop of the motel parking lot met the frozen grass.
Fallon shifted and focused on the noise, then spoke rapidly, the same twisting, sliding verbiage, half of it sounds that could have been Words, were almost Words. I didn’t waste time trying to catch it; I could steal from Fallon some other time. Mel Billington rolled up between us, bleeding from her scalp and panting.
“Light him up for us, Mel,” I said, pushing myself into motion.
She nodded with assurance and began muttering something, but I knew it was a fifty-fifty shot whether she’d successfully cast anything.
Fallon finished speaking, and there was a burning man in front of us.
The burning shape of a man, because Alligherti was still invisible. It was the shape of a man outlined in flames, running full tilt towards the motel. I could hear him hissing out his own spell and was impressed. I tried to think of the things I’d be capable of doing while on fire, and the list was fucking short.
After a stunned second, I spat another Word.
Alligherti and I finished our spells simultaneously. The fire winked out, sputtering away into a few tendrils of icy white smoke. The ground at his feet exploded again; I had no pride—if something worked, work it. I wasn’t some Archmage, no matter what Billington said. He was blown sideways but managed to keep his feet and kept running.
Billington finished her own spell a moment later and Alligherti flickered back into sight. The bastard was still on the move, his nice coat charred and smoking. Tough son of a bitch. I guess you didn’t get invited into a cabal set to bleed the world dry by being fragile. Running, he suddenly spun and started reciting syllables in a ragged, strained voice that was almost a choked growl. But he would wear us down. He had access to a massive, invisible pool of blood. He would bury us. Long after our poor Bleeders had been killed, he would still be raining thunderbolts down on us.
As I was thinking this, Mags came roaring from the direction of the motel, head down and massive hands curled into fists, and Alligherti did begin raining thunderbolts down on us.
The Archmage hit his cadence when Pitr was three steps away. Sensing his opponent, the older man spun to face Mags, throwing out his hands and hissing five Words in a slithery accent. Mags was three, two, one step away and suddenly shot backwards, all four limbs splayed in the air, his face purple with receding rage as Alligherti began running again.
A second later, I felt Mags hit the ground.
For a moment, nothing else happened. Fallon was casting, muttering another twisty little spell. Billington was cutting and casting, using her own gas. I was casting my explosive mu, trying to time it so I could trip up Alligherti. Then a flash above us, and a bright blue-white bolt of energy cracked from the sky and slammed into the ground about two feet in front of Fallon, sending up a spray of dirt and rock like liquid, the air filling with greasy white smoke. The Old Man took one half-step back, keeping his balance without difficulty, never missing a beat. He finished his own spell just as another flash in the air signaled another bolt.
The second bolt hit Fallon. A direct hit, a slithering line of blue-white energy from the clouds above smacking right into him . . . and skitt
ering away in a crackling, harmless scatter. The smell of ozone hit me, but Fallon hadn’t been touched.
With the slightest smirk, he began walking towards Alligherti. The other enustari had begun a second spell, leaving the first to run its course. You could tie off spells to keep repeating, if you knew the tricks, the way to lead the grammar from one syllable to the next in a perfect, twisting loop. I knew one thing about Alligherti: He knew his way around the Words.
The gas that I could feel had gotten thin. At least one of our Bleeders was down. I tried to picture them, and couldn’t. They were just faceless men in suits. And I’d never know a single additional fact about them. There had been a time when only the very worst and most powerful enustari had Bleeders. When someone like me wouldn’t have been able to inspire anyone to bleed for them. But the world was broken now.
Fallon reached into his jacket pocket as a bolt of energy hit him square on target and sizzled away with another bitter breeze of ozone. He produced what looked like a small black box with a single white button on top. Small enough to fit in his palm. A Fabrication, I realized.
As I fell in behind the old man, Billington came limping alongside me, still bleeding, her own thin trickle of gas mixing into what was in the air. I thought: The Asshole Army is shaping up nicely. And then Fallon extended his arm, holding his little box out in front of him, vaguely in the direction of Alligherti.
“Good-bye, Alfonse,” Fallon said in a conversational tone, and pressed the button.
For a few beats, nothing obvious happened. Fallon stopped walking; so did we. In the windy silence, I could hear Alligherti speaking the Words, distant. The sky began to flash again, a deep, almost subaudible rumble that heralded another bolt of energy. Just as I was wondering how far Fallon’s protection spell could stretch, Alligherti stopped running and twisted his head around to stare at us, and then he froze in place instantaneously. His voice stopped.