We Are Not Good People (Ustari Cycle)

by Jeff Somers

  “SHE IS COMING.”

  I opened my eyes and couldn’t see anything. I could smell sawdust and shit, something like a skunk’s terror in the air. I could feel the splintery old floorboards under my hands, dry and pitted. My chest convulsed and I lay coughing, hands curling into claws as the coughing went on and on endlessly, painfully, each wave making my whole body tense up, every muscle cramping simultaneously.

  Each time I convulsed, there was a flash of dull red in my vision, and I thought, Not blind, at least.

  “Please—she is coming.”

  A strange noise swallowed the air. It sounded like rain but wasn’t.

  The convulsions stopped, but I just lay there, breathing. I felt like I was vibrating softly, every bone under my flesh jittering.

  “Please . . .”

  The voice died off and was replaced with a grunting, pain-soaked noise, a wet noise, like gurgling. As I pushed myself up onto my hands, the gurgling stopped, replaced by the Words, familiar. I sensed immediately what he was casting, but he stumbled on the third syllable and it collapsed, a warm breeze of dull power pushing past me.

  The skittering, dry-rain noise was still there. Louder? It was hard to tell. It sounded like the universe was being eaten by something. It sounded the way I always imagined time-lapse video of maggots might.

  After what sounded like a deep breath, the Negotiator whispered, “Please.” Then he started casting again. Now that I knew to look for it, I could sense the line of gas in the air—more than a trickle, but not by much. A bitten cheek or lip. The enustari were turning into Tricksters, one by one. You got desperate enough, you lost your fancy ways.

  Meanwhile, pounding at the door. The Army of Assholes. More gas in the air, big streams of it as my Bleeders got into the act, and a second later the door blew in, a hollow drumlike noise. I tried to speak, but my throat was tight and knotted.

  The Negotiator fucked up again, mangling his fourth Word, and the spell collapsed again. Feet on the floorboards, shouts, and then hands on me, pulling me up.

  “Please,” I heard the Negotiator say. “Please, she is coming. Please, I am willing to be accommodating. Please! We can come to an arrangement.”

  I was held up between two people, my legs numb and useless. I struggled to speak. “Shut him up,” I croaked. “Shut him the fuck up.”

  “Chief,” Billington shouted. “Chief! You okay?”

  “Fucking immortal,” I spat, swaying between my invisible supports. A chair scraped behind me and I was dropped into it. “I’m a fucking roach—you can’t kill me!”

  The dry rain had gotten louder. “Can you hear that shit?”

  “Watch him!”

  “Fuck!”

  He was on me, the Negotiator, damp and warm and clinging to my shirt with his hands. “Mr. Vonnegan! Mr. Vonnegan! Please! We can help each other—but we must be quick!”

  Someone was trying to pull him off, but he held fast. I thought I could just make out his outline right in front of me, a squirming shadow of terror.

  “Mr. Vonnegan! We must come to an arrangement for safe passage! For both of us! We can help each other, but we must be quick! Please! SHE IS COMING!”

  “Who?” I croaked, waving off whoever was tugging at him.

  “Renar,” he wept, fingers curling into the fabric of my shirt. “My old gasam. She is coming!”

  A spike of fear drove through me. She was an ancient, mummified old woman in a wheelchair, but I remembered those malevolent, dry yellow eyes and the way they’d stabbed at me during the Biludha-tah-namus, and I wanted to piss myself. Something about watching someone try to bleed the whole fucking world took the starch out of a person.

  The dry rain was maddening. It was like a distant wave of water. You knew it was out there, could tell it was coming to swamp you, to flood you out, but you had no idea how far, how long, how deep. It got louder and louder a tick at a time, impossible to catch in the act.

  “Mr. Vonnegan! We must make a deal!”

  I stared around, blind. I could make out shapes. Shapes were everywhere. My Bleeders, standing around leaking gas, their dicks in their hands. My heart pounded crazily in my chest, but I was aware of something else. Steady, slow, like a truck in low gear making its lazy way up a steep incline. In between my crazy pre-stroke heartbeat, someone else’s.

  I surged up and swayed, nearly falling down. “Mags!”

  It had been a long time since magic had amazed me. A long time since I’d thought of it as a way to do the impossible, the amazing, instead of just a way to make fifty dollars, a way to hide from the police, a way to make people do what I needed them to do, or just something to be terrified of. I remembered the first time I’d seen the old man, floating inches off the ground in that grungy parking lot. My bleeding hands, the first time I’d cast a spell by myself. Since then, there hadn’t been much amazement.

  Now I was amazed.

  “Mags!”

  And he was there, his hands on me with crushing force.

  “I’m here, Lem,” he said in his concerned voice, two shades south of fury, ready to destroy anything that had hurt me, anything that had made me even momentarily unhappy. Though I’d done nothing but contemplate leaving him behind, nothing but ruin his life and condemn him to a lifetime of starving and grifting and then one day led him into a fucking apartment that hadn’t been touched in fifty years and destroyed us both.

  I reached up and put my hands on his face. “You okay, buddy?” I let out a crazy laugh. “You all right?”

  Jesus fucking Christ, was I crying?

  “Hey!”

  Claire’s voice, deep into pissed-off territory, barely cutting through the hissing noise. “Hey! Did you hear the part about the psycho witch coming and what the fuck is that noise? Let’s fucking focus here, okay?”

  I shifted one hand to Mags’s shoulder and blinked rapidly. Everything was in twilight, but I could make out lines and shades. When I had some vacation time, I’d do some at-home studying and figure out what had happened to me, what price the universe had extracted from me for fucking with it.

  “She is coming for me!” the Negotiator shouted, grabbing me again. Mags hesitated, then reached over and plucked the writhing man up by his collar, holding him an inch or two off the floor. If I concentrated, I could make out his face. I squinted, then wished I hadn’t. If I’d been sitting around wondering what complete despair looked like, this would have been a good answer.

  The room was filled with voices and the intense sizzling noise that was like the fucking sound of insanity creeping up on us. I spun away from him.

  “Everybody shut UP!” I shouted.

  The voices died off. The dry rain got louder, as if in response.

  I spun back and leaned in towards the Negotiator. I could see details now. His chin and neck were covered in blood. It looked black and slick on his face. His careful hair was a tousled mess, and his suit, for the first time, looked like it didn’t fit him right.

  “All right,” I said. “Talk.”

  He nodded and raised his hands up between us. Strands of rope and tape still clung to them, and I made a note to ask if he’d really snapped his bonds through sheer terror.

  “We,” he said in a slow, shaking voice, as if he was containing his fear with extreme effort. He reached forward slightly as if to touch my face, then pulled back. “We must make a deal, Mr. Vonnegan, granting each other safe passage in return for understandings, concessions—anything. But we must do so quickly.”

  “A deal,” I said. “We make a deal giving each other safe fucking passage, and she can’t hurt us.” It was cons on cons on cons. Fucking cons all the way down.

  “Yes!” he shouted, reaching out for me again so suddenly I staggered backwards. He took his hands back and held them up in a placating gesture. “Yes—yes, if the language is precise, if the arrangement is carefully constructed. But luckily I have experience with such contracts!” He smiled, and I was willing to go blind again. The black blood, the wh
ite teeth, the deep dark holes that were his eyes. He was triumphant. “We have been punished, Mr. Vonnegan!” he shouted. “But we have learned!”

  The dry rain was almost too loud to shout over. “What about my people? What about their safe passage?”

  He began to shake his head, his eyes going wide. “I—I cannot construct—there must be believable gain on both sides! What can they offer me, all of them? I cannot make this work for so many! Please! She is coming!”

  I stared at him. He’d been Renar’s gasam after Amir. When I’d met him at Abdagnale’s, he’d already become the Negotiator. Whatever had happened between him and Renar, it had happened quick. He’d been a tool ever since. Kidnapped, no doubt, on a regular basis. Negotiating for his life over and over—I hadn’t been the first fucking genius to come up with that idea. He’d ping-ponged from one horror to another, and then he’d hooked up with Elsa. Revenge. I supposed they couldn’t come up with a way to make a deal to ruin Renar—or maybe they had, in a way. He’d thought he was free for a bit.

  And now here he was. I assumed Renar would not be in a mood to consider his debt paid.

  “Mags,” I shouted. “Me and Mags. Safety fucking guaranteed or however you want to phrase it. Fallon!” I yelled. I needed someone who knew all this shit. “Fallon!”

  “Why the fuck are you calling his name?” Claire demanded, leaning in close to shout directly into my ear. “When was the last time you saw that old man?”

  I hesitated. I started to say He was just here and then wondered if he really had been. Mags hadn’t been here. Now he was.

  “Mr. Vonnegan!” the Negotiator shouted, his voice distant, buried under the sound of hail hitting a tin roof, fed directly into an overcharged amplifier. “I will phrase as needed. I accept your terms! You must hear and accept—”

  I had brought Pitr back to life. I had brought Pitr back to life by abusing this man, and I wondered what else I might accomplish. “Jesus fuck me,” I hissed. “Your terms, Mr. Harrows!”

  Again I heard Billington say, You sure?

  “I offer you information! I offer to answer any question you ask! I offer your safety guaranteed! Your terms, Mr. Vonnegan!”

  “I offer to fucking have this conversation!”

  He looked ready to weep. “My safety, Mr. Vonnegan!”

  “Jesus—I offer your safety guaranteed, okay?”

  Relief swept over his face, damp with perspiration. “I accept your terms!”

  My vision clicked back into focus, bright and clear. I focused on movement just over Mags’s shoulder, a narrow casement window that was open. I felt something go loose and wonky inside me.

  It was an insect the size of a baby. Except so much worse.

  47. “WE SHOULD DISCUSS A SUBJECT very foreign to both you and our oversize friend, Mr. Vonnegan. Intelligence. In the sense of a Summoned inhuman presence.”

  I tried to listen to Hiram over the growling of my stomach. Part of our arrangement as gasam and urtuku was that Hiram would feed me and let me sleep in his kitchen at night. So far there had been an endless supply of weak pale tea and no food. I’d been feeding Mageshkumar and myself from regular raids on the coffee cart and the lunch cart that traded off on the corner a few blocks away. I waited until the end of their shift, and when they were hooking their cart up to the car—a dilapidated old wood-paneled station wagon for the coffee guy, a surprisingly sleek new SUV for the lunch guy—I just walked by on the street side, reached in, and took whatever I could.

  Mags was demonstrating a worrying tendency to be able to eat anything I gave him in one swallow and then declare he was still starving. I had the growing sense that Hiram had bequeathed Mags to me.

  The really curious thing was that there was no food in the house. Tea, yes. Milk and sugar cubes. And nothing else. Hiram Bosch was a round man with a full, red face behind that white beard. He was so round that he wore a belt and suspenders. But there wasn’t a bite to eat in the place and I had looked.

  Being Hiram’s apprentice was exhausting. Lessons came whenever Hiram was in the mood, without structure or planning. Sometimes he woke me up in the middle of the night when he made himself a cup of tea, and he would talk for an hour about shit I could not for the life of me apply in any practical way to the burning issues of Jesus, I’m hungry or How do I cast fucking magic spells. I’d decided to give it another week, and then I was going to find someone else. Hiram had told me the oath of urtuku bound me to him, but Hiram said a lot of shit.

  “It will not surprise you to learn that there are alternate worlds, or universes. It will not surprise you that these alternate worlds can be very similar or dissimilar to our own. Some of the intelligences encountered are novel. And therefore useful. They can be imprisoned. They can be contacted, forced, and imprisoned into an Artifact or Fabrication and their energies and properties utilized in a focused, aware manner.”

  Artifact. Fabrication. I’d heard the old man use the words, but he hadn’t bothered to explain them. I’d tried requesting those definitions, but that had only prompted an hour of roaring rage from him, red-faced as he lectured me on the proper behavior of urtuku: silent, servile, grateful. I’d weathered that storm easy; I’d been on my own long enough to be unimpressed by anger, especially when it came from round old men wearing both suspenders and a belt. But Mageshkumar, the biggest motherfucker I’d ever seen, had once been reduced to tears by the man. It had taken me fifteen minutes to coax Mags out of the bathroom where he’d fled, and he’d spent the rest of the day watching Hiram with wide, fearful eyes. I’d decided not to piss off Hiram Bosch with Mageshkumar in the room ever again.

  “There are many forms of intelligence you can master, imprison, and use. Today we will discuss one particular type: gidim. What is the meaning of this word, gidim?”

  A pang of anxiety settled in my stomach. Hiram was insane. He had provided me with no reference materials and yet seemed to assume I could somehow actually learn this fucking vocabulary he kept referring to.

  He waited a moment, then sighed. I tensed up. I’d been with Hiram for just two weeks, but I already knew this could go one of two ways: punishment or a lecture. He wasn’t an imposing man physically—or he was, but not in a threatening way—but he knew hundreds of what he called Cantrips, tiny spells he hissed out so fast you couldn’t hope to stop him, most of them designed to make you hurt a little or a lot.

  “Literally, it means sickness demon, but it is commonly and poetically translated as coming darkness. The gidim are formed from sacrifices. They take on the physical form of that which is sacrificed to summon them. This makes them unusual in that they will form an organic body to live in, a physical, corporeal body. Most other intelligences you may Summon must be confined in artificial constructions designed at least partially for the purpose—your Artifacts, or your more modern Fabrications. The gidim create bodies from those sacrificed to Summon them. Some of our order view this as evidence that they are a more elegant or efficient manner of creation.” He sighed, rubbing his belly. “Those who think so are fools. You need only see a gidim once to understand.”

  He looked up at me. Whether it was the expression of slight doubt and boredom on my face or the fact that I’d once again inexplicably failed to study the materials he had never supplied, I knew immediately that the old man was about to make me bleed.

  “Come! A demonstration. A pint, no more.” His eyes burned with a malevolent cheer, then shifted to the hulking form of Mageshkumar. “Pitr, perhaps you would like to be elsewhere. This may upset you.”

  I knew this was more concern for his property than for anything else. The big baby could do some damage when he got freaked out.

  But Mageshkumar shook his head, frowning, his face becoming fierce and bloody. “I’m here to learn, too. Just like him.”

  He stabbed one gigantic finger at me. Mageshkumar had been camped out at Hiram’s for months now, begging to be taken on as an apprentice. Hiram had refused. The big idiot thought we were in competition fo
r the post, despite the fact that I’d been bonded to Hiram in a disturbing ceremony involving far more of my own blood than I would have liked.

  Hiram sighed. “Very well. Mr. Vonnegan, prepare yourself.”

  He shuffled off into the dim, mysterious interior of his apartment. I hadn’t been allowed anywhere aside from the bathroom and the kitchen. With a sigh, I rolled up my sleeve and studied the eight or nine healing scars already present, a sharp contrast to the milky white skin everywhere else. Somehow, despite my father, I’d never had a serious injury. No broken bones. No stitches. I was all original equipment—or I had been until I’d apprenticed myself to Hiram Bosch.

  I wasn’t used to cutting myself yet. It hurt like a motherfucker every time, and the sensation of my lifeblood running out of me still freaked me out. And I was tired all the time. Every second of every day, I could close my eyes and just fall asleep.

  I pulled the simple razor blade I’d been using from my shirt pocket. It was clean and sharp. A thrill of horror went through me.

  Hiram bustled back into the kitchen carrying a birdcage, in which a bright blue bird bounced and chirped, and a small wooden bowl. In the bowl wriggled a collection of slimy-looking earthworms.

  “You may be tempted to think the gidim we produce here today is gruesome because of these chosen forms we will sacrifice,” he said. My eyes flickered to the tiny blue bird, and a stab of panic hit me. “But I assure you: Gidim always assume the worst possible form based on the sacrifices. They are malevolent. Do not mistake this. Now: a pint, please.”

  I hesitated. “Do we . . . Do we have to kill the bird?”

  He sighed. “Mr. Vonnegan,” he said without looking up, busying himself with a long, curved blade he extracted from a velvet sheath, “this is old magic. Our roots, as it were. Violent and barbaric. You must know this, or you will fail. Magic is not power. It is not freedom. It is not faith or luck. Magic is violence. When you are comfortable with violence, when you are willing to inflict it on yourself and others, then you will be ready to master it.” He nodded and opened the cage, thrusting a plump hand inside. “Gidim are the true face of magic, Mr. Vonnegan. Better you see it now than later.”