Trickster (27 page)

“Yes,” Fallon breathed. “It is my finest Fabrication.”

He was
proud
of it.

It was clearly designed to be underground. It was a single corridor, really. It resembled a corkscrew, starting off as a wide square, running along right angles until it suddenly ducked down under itself, descending ten feet at an angle and then spinning around the
four corners again at a reduced footprint. It spiraled down to a single small chamber at the bottom.

The outer wall of the corridor was lined with recessed areas. Equipped with restraints. Spring-loaded blades. Sized and shaped for human beings. Its purpose was obvious. You started at the top. Slit a throat. The energy released by that sacrifice triggered the pod next to it. A blade snapped out, slit another throat. And on and on, spiraling down through what had to be hundreds of pods, murdering people as it spun. I didn’t know what the number actually was. I didn’t count it; that would be too scary. But the machine would be precise. It would be exactly what the
Biludha-tah-namus
required in order to begin its own domino effect. This Fabrication was designed as a spark plug. Mika Renar would murder a couple dozen, a couple hundred people in three minutes, and the collected energy would be funneled into the
biludha,
which would then begin an unstoppable chain reaction of death. It had been done on smaller scales. Kill fifty people to cause an earthquake that kills tens of thousands, soak up
that
bloodshed for an even bigger spell. It had been done on monumental, nightmarish scales in the past. This was different. This was mechanized. Efficient. Bigger than anything I’d ever heard of.

I tore my eyes away and stared at Fallon. He was looking down at his own plans rapturously. In love with his own genius.

“I knew it would be used,” he said without looking at me. “I knew it would be used for something big,
and I knew, since it was Renar, that it would be terrible. But I didn’t suspect it would be used to cast the
Tah-namus
.”

My hands were fists at my sides. It was okay to murder all these people. As long as it didn’t murder the world entire. As long as it didn’t murder
you
.

We were not good people.

I reminded myself that Fallon had a connection to a reserve of blood somewhere that I couldn’t feel, couldn’t touch. This whole place, I realized, was a Fabrication. Huge. Complex. This warehouse, designed to make him a godling in his own space. He’d shielded it. Others couldn’t touch it, somehow. Anyone acts up, a word or two from his thin, old lips and we were doomed.

“I have been in this place for a long time,” Fallon whispered, apparently to himself. “Too long. Too long out of the world.”

“You have to show me how to get in there,” I said slowly. “And how to get out.”

And how to destroy it,
I thought.
Time to leave a mark.

He didn’t say anything for a few seconds. Just loomed over his own plans and spells and stared down at them. Maybe a flicker of conscience making him momentarily unhappy. “You must enter from below,” he said finally, his voice like sand pouring from him. “There is an entrance. It is located in the center of the house.”

I nodded. “You have plans of the house itself?”

He sighed. “I do. But they are the official plans filed with the city, and no doubt only vaguely match
the reality. I keep complete records, Mr. Vonnegan.” He rummaged in the file and tossed some folded-up blueprints at me. He planted his fists on the tabletop and leaned forward. I thought he was remarkably fit for an old codger. Toned. Muscular.

“I will—” he said, and then shut his mouth as the soft glow of the light turned red. There was a palpable shudder in the ground beneath our feet, and a moment later a fine dust rained down on us.

I swallowed sudden fear. “Trouble?”

A second shudder, more dust. His yellowed eyes swiveled toward me.

“Intruders,” he said. A third shudder, heavier than the first two, brought chunks of mortar out of the walls. Fallon’s dry eyes swiveled upwards. “Large ones.”

F
allon barked a single syllable and the little room was flooded with blank white light, blinding me. He barked another syllable and the door burst open. A second later the old man was flying through the basement, now lit up like noontime. I grabbed the files from the table and followed after him. It was a cramped space of support columns and cinder blocks. The joists were right above us, just an inch above Mags’s head. It was nowhere as vast as I had imagined it in the dark.

As we ran after Fallon, the whole building shook at irregular intervals, dust raining down on us.

“Mags!” I shouted as we reached the stairs.

“Ready, Lem! I’m ready!”

“Ketterly!”

I meant it to mean
Be ready to defend yourself.

“I’ll bleed on this one, Vonnegan!” he wheezed from behind me. “You’re better with the Words!” I took the
stairs two by two. I had a second to reflect on the fact that for the first time in . . . in as long as I could
remember,
I didn’t feel like hell. Because I hadn’t bled myself in a while. I was topped-up, running with a full tank. Fallon had already disappeared around the landing. I wondered what, exactly, I was running
into
. The first time Cal Amir had come after me, Hiram Bosch had died hurling fireballs at him. The second time, I’d almost bought the farm buried under an entire fucking house.

I didn’t like the progression.

I sailed through the open doorway onto the main floor. Fallon was at his work area, staring down at a set of security monitors. As we crossed to him, the floor leaped and rocked beneath me again. Fallon looked up at us, his face blank.

“
Dimma,
” he said.

There was a word for everything. I rolled this one around in my mind.
Monster. Golem
. There were a variety of translations. It meant a being constructed as opposed to created or summoned. Beyond that, specifics were up to the creativity of the mage. They could come in all shapes and sizes.

The ground shuddered. I assumed this guy would lean toward the deep end of the size pool.

“How many?” I asked. I started to add,
How big?
but felt the floor shudder again and decided not to waste my breath. The answer was:
Fucking huge.

“Six,” Fallon said, and then stood up straight, closed his eyes, and began reciting. Casting.

I didn’t know how much juice he had in that battery
of his, but I had no way of accessing it. When there was blood in the air I could feel it, sense it, and take hold and draw on it. With Fallon I felt nothing. I turned and found Mags and Ketterly both standing at the ready behind me, sleeves rolled up, blades in hand. Daryl floated a few feet behind them, eyes wide.

I spun back, and the wall directly across from us crumbled inward.

Standing amid the sudden rubble was a . . . thing.

It was humanoid. It had arms and legs. A torso. A neck like a stubbed-out cigarette and a head like a gruesome gray potato. It appeared to be made out of stone. A solid, single block of stone.

As I stared it casually flicked the remains of the wall aside and hunched down to step into the interior.

My mind raced. Trying to think of something I could cast that would help against a . . . thing.
Dimma.
The word was hard and dark in my mind. I felt soft and weak. The thing’s hands were permanent fists, spheres of rock the size of barrels. I imagined getting hit by one at speed.

Six,
I thought.

The
dimma
moved suddenly. Faster than should have been possible. In a swirl of bricks and dust it leaped into the building, landing a few feet to our left. The whole floor jumped under me. A second
dimma
pushed its way into the hole in the wall.

Fallon threw out his arms and shouted the final word of his spell. The first
dimma
raised one barrel fist into the air over us.

Then Fallon turned into a giant.

He
stretched,
every part of him simultaneously elongated, like an animation. Fallon screamed like it hurt like hell. Pops like gunshots reverberated through the air as each of his limbs suddenly expanded outward, fast and messy. He doubled, then tripled, then quadrupled in size, crowding the roof, twitching and roaring. Sweat rolled off him, crashing to the floor and spraying all of us as the floor shook.

“Jesus!” Ketterly shouted.

“I seen pictures of Jesus, guy,” Daryl shouted. “That ain’t him!”

I turned to look back. Both Mags and Ketterly were cut, fresh gas welling up from their wounds. My eyes met Daryl’s. The poor guy stared at me, unblinking.

“If I die,” he shouted, backing away, “tell Claire I was all brave and shit, okay?”

The
dimma
swung its arm down. Fallon leaned in and intercepted it, taking the blow on his shoulder and launching himself into what would be its stomach. Just as he crashed into it and knocked it down, the second
dimma
shouldered its way through the hole. A third appeared behind it.

Mind racing, I spat out the first spell I could remember: Thirteen syllables dredged from the inky end of my brain.

There was a flash next to me, and a copy of me appeared. Just light and shadows. Three more flashes behind me, then four more. And four more. That made three copies of each of us. I barked another word, and
the illusions scattered, running around the place randomly. The second
dimma
swung laboriously at them as they passed close by, its stone fists passing through without effect. The third one joined in, slamming both fists down onto the floor as the ghosts of Mags and Daryl scampered past. There was a snapping noise. The concrete floor shattered beneath its blow, cracks shooting out in all directions.

The fourth
dimma
appeared. Widened the hole in the wall with an almost casual twitch of its arms. The noise was unbelievable. Every move the
dimma
made was a thunderous scrape of stone against stone. Fallon was screaming, thrown across the warehouse and crashing into a concrete column. It shattered behind him and he sprawled on top of the stub left on the floor as the ceiling above sagged with a stretched-out, unhappy groan.

“Vonnegan!” Ketterly shouted. “Time to
go
!”

I hesitated. Felt a certain responsibility to Fallon. I’d brought this on him. Braced him in his nifty little Fabricated hideaway, six fucking monsters on my trail. The old man had rolled off the wreckage of the column and gotten back on his feet just as a pair of
dimma
reached him, swinging their cudgel hands in fast, crisscross arcs. He danced back, the floor vibrating, and managed to grab onto the nearest one of the creatures. Both hands on its irregular head. Howling, the giant Fallon twisted, and with a report like a gunshot the head snapped off.

The
dimma
disintegrated. Turned into a few lumps of stone and some dust, falling into a heap on the floor.

Immediately, the second
dimma
on Fallon swung both arms, connecting with Fallon’s chest and sending him sailing again. He smashed into the wall and the whole
building
shook around us. I thought about the odds of getting buried in a collapsed building
twice
.

“Lem!” Mags shouted.

I looked up. Two of our doubles were racing right at us, two
dimma
in pursuit. The frozen expressions on the illusions were awful to look at. Like someone wearing a lifelike mask of me and my idiot sidekick. For a second I couldn’t move. I stared at the huge stone bodies loping toward me, my vision jumping and shaking with each impact of their flat, granite feet.

Then Mags crashed into me, knocking me to the floor. I felt the breeze as one of the stone monstrosities barreled past us, skidding to a halt in a rain of concrete chips. We both rolled onto our backs and a scream escaped me, my vision filled with the cracked, veined torso of one of the
dimma
.

Praying that one of them was still bleeding, I shouted the first spell that came to mind. Felt the power surge through me, and the huge stone man shot upward, smashing against the rafters far above us and shattering into dust.

Ketterly and Daryl were there as stone rained down on us. “Time to fucking
go,
” Ketterly hissed, pulling me up by the armpit and dragging me toward the door. I caught a glimpse of Fallon, beset by three of the things, swinging a hunk of concrete in front of him like a club. Even supersized, he looked old. Tired.
Already beaten. Not my problem. At the last second I stopped just short of the exit and spun around.

“Fallon!” I shouted. “Cut and run! Come with us!”

He jerked his head halfway in my direction, then shook it.

“
This,
” he boomed, his voice as huge as he’d become, deep and painful and audible over the noise of the
dimma,
“
is my
house
!
”