The Stringer (2 page)

“Help me, Mr. Ketterly. You're the only person I trust. Whatever it costs!”

Ketterly looked up at me, considering. “I'll up it to fifty each,” he said, “if you'll bleed.”

I glanced at Mags, who was holding the door in one hand as if he'd forgotten all about it. Bleeding for someone else was okay. It was my blood, I could do whatever I wanted with it. So could Mags. As long as we didn't bleed other people, it was fine.

I looked back at Ketterly. “We're in.”

2.

BEING BLED FOR ANY
spell that was more than a small Cantrip, a
mu
, was disconcerting. You felt the weird green drain of the universe sticking its proboscis into you and feeding. You felt every bit of it, all that life force, all that energy—your very existence—being siphoned off.

Hiram had bled me. One of the few actual requirements of being
urtuku
or apprentice to an
ustari—
in point of fact, pretty much all you got to do for the first six months or so—was to bleed for them. I'd left home the moment I could and spent weeks wandering the city; I didn't even know what to look for. When I saw the old man stealing donuts by making them float over to him, I didn't think about consequences. I signed up, and Hiram, the old bastard, handed me a knife on my first day and told me to cut myself to get used to the pain.

I knew what it was like to bleed: It was slow death. The first time Hiram had insisted I bleed someone else, I'd walked away, and I still thought about her and her pink sneakers. And every time I thought of her, I felt like an asshole.

I felt like an asshole and I
hadn't
bled her.

The worst thing about being bled was having someone incompetent speaking the Words. You're there bleeding, and they're hemming and hawing through ten unnecessary syllables, wasting it. The second Ketterly opened his mouth, I knew we were in trouble. The man spoke the Words like he'd learned them long ago, in translation.

We were back in the old bookshop, kneeling on a sheet of plastic, me and Mags, with our right arms extended. Ketterly had never bothered cleaning the place out, and it was crowded with dusty books that hadn't been moved in years. He'd simply swept the stuff off the small wooden desk in the front, put a bottle of bourbon in one drawer, and declared D. A. Ketterly Investigations—slogan:
Miracles Achieved!
—to be in business.

We'd cut pretty deep, because a Finding spell needed a lot of gas in a city the size of New York, and Ketterly's sloppy, greedy spell sucked every drop from my wound, making me feel like the jackass was going to bleed me to death, roll me up in the plastic, and ship me out to Staten Island.

“For fuck's sake, Digory,” I said, using his given name because he hated it. “Didn't you grab something personal from the home to use as calibration? I don't want to die in your crappy office because you don't know how to cast a
kigni
.”

Ketterly glanced at me, still reciting, and extended his middle finger. I had to give him that much credit: He didn't pause. Hesitation on a spell caused it to collapse, often spectacularly. If the spell was big enough, if enough blood was fed into it, not tying it off with a cadence could result in an explosion that would do real damage.
Ustari
had been killed.

I offered my own middle finger back, hand shaking as I held it up. Sweat dripped onto the plastic; the blood was absorbed by the spell. I listened intently, following each Word choice. I could see where he was going with the
kigni
, the Searcher spell, and it wasn't half bad: He would be able to follow his instincts and know exactly where Mr. Earl Landry was at any given moment. A lesser
ustari
would have wasted blood and energy on something fancier, something that told you where Landry was so you could race over to his precise location. Except then, Landry might move, and you'd have to try again, and either way you were racing around. Ketterly's spell combined the racing with the locator, killing two birds and all that jazz. It was a clever idea wrapped in a bloated spell; I could have accomplished the same thing in half the Words, using half the gas, if only I were willing to bleed other people. As it was, I waited impatiently for the son of a bitch to finally
get
there.

When he spoke the final Word, I sagged as the universe took the last bit of me. Head spinning, I turned to check on Mags, who was marveling—as usual—at his instantly healed wound, studying it intently with a slight grin. I swallowed a smile. Mags was a moron, but he was
my
moron.

“Well?” I croaked, trying to hide how much Ketterly's shitty spell had taken from me.

He'd closed his eyes, feeling his way through it. When he opened his eyes, he grinned down at us. “He's in the subway.”

THE SUBWAYS TEEMED
with Tricksters. It was an ideal breeding ground for grifts aided by a pricked thumb and some mumbling—everyone in a rush, everyone hot and tired and slightly confused. The Twenty-third Street station always seemed larger on the inside than the outside, a maze of stairs and tunnels and escalators and even the occasionally functional elevator. Every inch of the underground complex had achieved a strange status that wasn't clean or dirty: Everything looked filthy, but there was no trash anywhere, no debris, no pools of mystery liquids or other obvious problems. The city had gotten so clean in some areas that I seriously wondered where they were putting all the shit. It had to go somewhere. Following magical intuition, Ketterly moved with purpose, and we just kept pace as he led us down into the ever hotter lower levels of subway hell. On the N train platform, he stopped at the bottom of the stairs and surveyed the scene. The platform stretched out in front of us and behind us; it wasn't overly crowded, just a few dozen tired people headed to Brooklyn for who knew what reason, most of them gathered at the edges, toeing the yellow safety line that you weren't ever supposed to cross.

“He's coming,” Ketterly said.

I perked up and looked at Mags, who smiled brightly.
This might be the easiest money we ever made
, I thought. A good dinner, some sleep, and I'd be right as rain by the morning, assuming Ketterly was good for it.

A moment later we saw Landry, recognizable from the photos his wife had shown us, a tall man with snow-white hair and the loping, lanky gait of someone who'd been born big and never quite got used to it. He had an enormous belly and was in a state of disarray, his hair wild, his clothes mismatched—he wasn't wearing shoes, and his coat looked like something he'd picked up off the street.

The train started pulling into the station. People began to gather themselves, moving closer to the edge. It was instinctive and natural, and no one ever thought about it until an old man began shoving people off the platform.

He did it casually and so quickly that he'd knocked five people onto the tracks before anyone even reacted. He just sailed down the platform, and as he passed a plump Latino woman wrapped in an overlarge winter coat, he reached out with one long arm and shoved her. She didn't cry out; she staggered forward with a pop-eyed expression and fell hard as Mr. Landry was on to the next person.

Mags took off, putting some leg into it, shouting,

“Hey!” I didn't know much about Pitr, but he'd demonstrated a shocking lack of basic knowledge, which made me think he was mostly feral. And Hiram had declared him the dumbest person he'd ever met, a man so dumb that Hiram refused to bond him
urtuku
.

“Hey!” Mags shouted again as old man Landry hip-checked a tired-looking black guy in a snazzy fedora-style hat onto the tracks.

My switchblade was in my hand. I didn't have the gas for anything huge, and I only knew one
huge
spell anyway—and it would have to be fucking useful, but if I bled for it I would certainly pass out before finishing. And dying in the subway system was not a particular life goal of mine.

Mind racing, I ran through my slim repertoire of
mu
, the tiny Cantrips that didn't cost much in blood—the spells I made my living with, such as it was. There were an infinite number of dirty tricks you could play when you had the gas and knew the Words, but none seemed likely to save five people from being run over by a train in the next five seconds.

Except one. I slashed my palm, deeper than I should have, and as the gas sizzled into the air, Mags crashed into Landry, knocking him down right before the man managed to shove two young kids wearing backpacks larger than they were. I spoke six Words, two of which served to invert the spell so it would affect everyone
but
me.

Levitation was the oldest trick in the book, and trivial in terms of gas, really. It impressed the rubes, so if you were pulling a Guru or implying you were divine or something like that, it was indispensable. Everyone on the platform started to float, and a wave of horrified screams filled the thick air. The train crashed into Landry's airborne victims as it slowed down—painful, probably, but not a body-sawing impact under the steel wheels.

A wave of exhausted nausea swept through me as the train stopped, brakes screeching. A moment later, everyone fell back to the ground.

This was frowned upon.
Ustari
had spent the entire history of the world staying off the radar, and casting like this in a public place, in a way that would be remembered—that had potentially been recorded—got you into trouble. There was no central committee, but if enough
ustari
around the world frowned at you, someone would come knocking, and there would be discipline. Discipline, for mages, generally meant execution.

We weren't good people.

“Come on,” I slurred, heading for Mags, who was struggling with our quarry. Calls were being made, cops would be coming. We needed to get Landry out of here before I saw my payday melt away. When I was a few steps away, Mags—the strongest man I'd ever met—was shoved violently toward me, windmilling his massive arms and squeaking like a baby bird. I dodged and let Ketterly take the hit, and for a moment I was face-to-face with Mr. Landry.

He grinned at me. His face was oval, deeply lined, and his teeth were the bright squares of dentures. There was something off about him—something in the eyes, which were flat and lifeless, and the skin, which was yellowed and slack.

“
Balahul
,” he said.

Behind me, I heard Ketterly say, “Oh,
fuck me
.”

The Word meant, literally,
evil
change
, more popularly translated as
chaos
. It wasn't a Word that a lot of
ustari
tossed about, since most of us—at least people at my level, the
idimustari
—were practically illiterate, knowing just enough vocabulary to get by. It was definitely not a Word you'd hear from a non-mage.

“
Balahul!
” Landry shrieked, leaning forward and shoving me back with both hands. Then he surged forward and took hold of my jacket and, with surprising strength, spun and slammed me against a column, knocking my head back and causing my vision to swim. A second after that, he was torn away from me as Mags crashed into him, roaring, and I slid down to the platform, my legs going rubbery.

Mags was struggling with the old man. I'd never seen Mags struggle with a human being. I doubted he'd get much
struggle
from a bus. Mags routinely broke things by touching them gently, and we had a long-standing rule regarding kittens and puppies. But this old man, who looked like he weighed about fifty pounds, was giving Mags a run for his money, shouting the one Word he seemed to know over and over, grinning his yellow grin.

I could taste a little gas in the air and realized my head was bleeding. Since I had gas to use, I croaked out three Words of my own. When I opened my eyes, the old man lay prone. Mags twisted around, seams splitting. His face was horrified.

“Don't worry, Magsie,” I said, ignoring the people who were grouping around me, concerned. “I just put him to sleep.”

Mags shook his head. “Dead.”

I POUNDED ON
the door again, making the plate glass rattle. “Come on, Ketterly!” I shouted. “For fuck's sake, I can
see
you in there, you cowardly piece of shit!”

Mags stood next to me with the old man draped over his shoulders like a shawl, but thanks to a little spell that made Mags and me the least interesting thing in anyone's field of vision, no one paid us any attention. It was handy for hiding from the cops, and it was handy for wandering the streets with a corpse.

“I swear to fucking
God
,
Ketterly, if you don't open this door, you will never have another peaceful day in your life!”

Our world was pretty small. There were mages everywhere, but in this city, the band of
idimustari
pulling short cons and little jobs here and there was tight and intimate. Ketterly would never be able to avoid us, and if we complained loudly enough, he'd start to get the cold shoulder. Tricksters didn't have many rules, but one we all stuck to was
You don't fuck each other.
At least not unless it was absolutely necessary.

He opened the door, the bell tinkling, and stepped back. “In!” he hissed. “Quick, before someone sees you.”

We went in. Mags shrugged the old man off his shoulders and set him gently on the floor.

I pointed at Ketterly. “You fucking left us there.”

He nodded, putting his hands up. “Look, I panicked, okay? You know what he said?”

I nodded. “
Balahul
. Chaos.”

Ketterly shook his head. “It's a
name
. An intelligence.”

A demon.
Udug
was the Word. I frowned, glancing at the old man, who now looked like he'd been dead for days. “That doesn't make any sense, Digs,” I said. “You summon a demon, you trap it in something. That's what a Fabricator does. Little machines or pieces of jewelry. To do things for you, you get something that can think. They don't possess people.”

Ketterly shrugged. “Balahul wasn't possessing that old man—it was
animating
him.” He shrugged. “I'm sorry I left you, I am. But this shit is above my pay grade.”

I looked at the old man again. He'd been dead before we got there, so I hadn't accidentally killed him, which was good for my sleep patterns. But the idea that Landry was a meat puppet—that was some deep magic. And deep magic meant an Archmage, and that meant I suddenly understood perfectly why Ketterly had run. I swallowed and looked back at him, suddenly nervous being near the body. “So what do we do?”