Trickster (34 page)

The study was empty. It was thick carpet and the huge ebony desk and the bookshelves. Exactly as I remembered it, without the dried-out mummy and the delectable illusion.

The bubble of energy was so huge, the hairs on my body were standing up, crackling. There was pressure in my ears, like I’d just taken an elevator on a fast ride.

The room had the same sealed feeling I’d experienced
before. Like the walls were thick, and soundproofed. Like the whole space had been poured from a molten state into a mold, the walls continuous. Like we were deep underground.

I paused. Deep underground.

I spun and looked at the door. Huge. Four feet wide, eight feet tall. Studded. Black. Not exactly wood.

“Give me a bit of gas, Mags,” I said. My voice was a croak. Every muscle in my body ached.

Mags started to do it without hesitation. Just flicked out his blade and raised his arm. At the last second I turned and grabbed his wrist.

“Wait,” I said.

I closed my eyes. The whole place was a fucking generator. There was so much gas in the air, I could cast anything. I felt it, grabbed onto it. Took some of the excess that was spilling out, muttered four syllables. Felt the warm breeze of power trickle through me. Not enough to be noticed by Renar, under the circumstances. Behind that trickle, Jesus fucking Christ, a fucking
ocean
. I could feel it, trying to roar in, fill me with light and rot, energy and death.

I opened my eyes. Could see the runes on the door, glowing clearly. I ran my eyes over them, knowing what I’d find. A portal. You stepped in on the first floor of the house, you stepped
out
somewhere else entirely. Teleported. Could take you anywhere in the world as long as the creator of the portal could physically travel to the other location to lay down the runes.

Renar was in a wheelchair. She wouldn’t want to bother with stairs, or a ramp, or an elevator, if she could just create a portal and instantly be buried under the house, a few hundred feet below. You walked through a doorway on the first floor, you stepped into a study deep underground. It was elegant.

I turned around again. The room looked the same. I stepped over to the nearest bookshelf. Reached up for one of the leather-bound books. Titles in faded rusty blood. My hand came up against what felt like a glass partition.

There were no books. No shelves. It was all an illusion.

I felt for the cloud of power surrounding us, like a nearby star blowing a solar wind against us. Spoke a few words, felt the resistance of a really strong, well-crafted Glamour, something beyond what I normally encountered in my Trickster life, beating idiots like Ketterly at their game. I tried again. Eight words. Ten. Fifteen. I kept probing it, piling on more, drawing more and more gas in a thick, invisible thread. Siphoning Renar’s
biludha
for myself.

It was glorious. The power was incredible. Like sunshine flowing through you. Life itself—literally. The lives of people being crushed like bugs nearby, squeezed dry, fed right into me. It was nauseating. I retched, my whole body shuddering. It was wonderful. Like the purest drug in the world poured directly into me, lighting me up. I wanted to puke. I wanted to dance. I was a parasite living in the universe’s bowels, and I was getting fat on death.

Twenty-two words, and I felt the Glamour break apart.

I opened my eyes and we weren’t in a study anymore. The huge ebony desk and red chairs were still there, but the bookshelves were gone. We were in a small cave. The walls were rough rock, sharp and jagged. A single flickering lightbulb hanging from the ceiling gave us the only light.

In front of me was another door. Steel. Not fancy. It looked charred and blasted, as if created by applying lightning bolts to something primeval, a lump of metal from the ground. It had a simple mechanism. There was no magic keeping it locked. It was just a door that had been hidden by simple magic.

I reached out and found the handle was warm under my skin.

I pulled it open, and the room filled with shrieking.

T
he short, rough tunnel had been just tall enough for me to crouch in, so narrow I thought Mags might not be able to squeeze himself through it. It was dark, but plenty of light bled from the other end to make it navigable. After just a dozen feet I’d ducked under a rough sort of lintel and into a tiny space with no roof.

The floor was polished black stone. It glowed with a dim bluish light.

It was a small space, and it was crowded.

Mika Renar was in her ancient wheelchair, slumped to one side as if someone had dropped her into it carelessly, then not bothered to right her. Cal Amir stood across from her. They were
both
chanting, speaking the
Biludha-tah-namus
rapidly.

Between them, lying on a narrow platform made of the same stone as the floor, was Claire.

She was conscious, and terrified. Her eyes were
locked on me. She lay stiff and still, like an invisible force kept her there even beyond the chains around her. She didn’t look like she’d been tortured or beaten in any way. She didn’t look
good,
either.

The screams were a wall of sound pushing down on us. I looked up, almost expecting a black disc of solid noise. From the tiny compartment I was standing in, Fallon’s hellish architecture spiraled upward, widening as it went. Women, all of them blurred copies of Claire in height, hair, shape, and general palette, were chained to the walls of the corkscrew and had been for some time—by all appearances decades, centuries, approaching forever.

They were maddened, spectral things, formerly women.

The ones nearest were still just dirty and terrified, but as I looked up they got worse and worse. By the time I’d scanned the third level above us they were ghosts, jibbering and raving. Screaming, I had the feeling, because they’d been screaming for so long, they knew little else anymore.

Seeing them all together in one place, in uniform physical condition, I realized they not only all looked alike, they all looked like
Mika Renar
. A Mika Renar with dark hair, a Mika Renar from eighty years ago, but Mika Renar nonetheless.

With a passing resemblance to Cal Amir, too. With magic on your side, anything was possible, and I thought of Renar’s spectacular, erotic Glamour, and decided maybe I’d figured out why it was so good, so practiced.

I looked higher. The Fabrication stretched up and up. Widening and wrapping around. About halfway up to the darkened canopy of bedrock above us, the girls were on fire.

It was a blue-green fire. The Fabrication twisted up and away, wrapping around itself, each circle of the thing reaching higher up into the rock. The girls were chained in place, the ones near the top dark. Dead. Burned away by the ritual, every bit of them, I thought, used to fuel it. As each one began to burn, they were fueling the next step. As each one caught fire, the one next to her began to scream and kick even harder. Uselessly.

It leaped to the next one in line every few seconds. When it did, the girl would stop screaming—for just a moment—and tense up as the universe closed its grip around her and started to squeeze. Then she would flare up, too bright to look at, and I would feel the invisible sun of power swell.

A dry wind whipped at me, swirling through my clothes and tugging at me in different directions every moment. A crazy, impossible wind. The noise wasn’t so bad, I realized—but everything sounded muted, like cotton had been stuffed deep into my ears. The screams, the wind, all of it far away but right there next to me. And Renar’s and Amir’s voices clear and loud, like they were standing next to me.

Above, there was darkness. Pure, inky black. The light from the sacrifices didn’t make any mark on it. The three figures near me at the bottom of it seemed tiny. The Fabrication was as tall as a skyscraper, embedded
here underground. I wondered how much blood it had taken to build it.

“Fuck
me,
” Mags shouted in my ear. As if I needed to hear it.

I looked back at them. Renar hadn’t moved, but Amir had turned to glare at me, his face a bizarre mix of sudden worry, anger, and twitchy puzzlement. I supposed I’d been left for dead or something. Not dead. Left for
harmless
.

They were still reciting, and that Amir hadn’t begun casting on me told me instantly that they were vulnerable. They couldn’t pause. They couldn’t stop, even for a second. The pent-up energy of all that blood being burned up was held in place with their words, and even a microsecond of hesitation would release it, and we would all go boom. So they couldn’t cast against
us
.

I caught Amir’s eyes. Smiled at him.

As if he’d been practicing the move in front of a mirror, the tall, immaculate bastard looked away, shut his eyes, reached into his jacket, and produced an automatic pistol. Swung it around toward Mags and me and fired five times, rapidly.

We both hit the floor. The floor hit me back, and pain exploded throughout my whole body, sinking deep into my bones. I let out a strangled cry and curled up like a pill bug. Two more shots made me roll randomly until I slapped into a wall. Fucking guns. It was such an accepted fact that you couldn’t beat
enustari
with a gun, you forgot to fucking
try anyway
.

I turned to orient myself and saw Mags crash into
Amir. The gun shot up between them, each with a hand on it. Amir was
still
reciting, his face tight and strained as he struggled against Mags, trying to keep his balance, hold on to the gun, and speak simultaneously.

I forced myself up. On my knees. On one knee. On my feet, crouching, my bones burning. I was underwater. The air clung to my arms and pulled at me.

Up above, another girl flared up. The screaming didn’t seem reduced by her loss.

I started to gather myself to intervene. To throw myself at them and hope I did some good for Mags just by crashing into them. Then I stopped and looked around. The sense of power in the air was overwhelming. It was like standing next to a huge generator, one of those immense contraptions in the bellies of river dams. You felt it piercing you, shoving your atoms aside as it flowed along secret riverbeds. I could do anything with this much gas. I could fly. Transform into something else. Any spell I could think of, any spell I could
make up on the spot
—it didn’t matter what it was designed to do, it would work. There was so much blood being held in suspension I could speak
one word
and do almost anything.

I didn’t need to fight Cal Amir.
He
needed to fight
me
.

I swallowed hard and thought. I didn’t know any big spells. Any offensive spells. I knew tricks. And the idea of touching the power around me, of tapping into the death throes of all these women—all these
people
—made me gag on the spot, my stomach rising within me.

A few feet away, Mags staggered backward. Amir loomed over him, still reciting. The gun wavered in the air.

I took a deep breath. I had one spell. One spell of power. Hiram Bosch’s
hun-kiuba
. I’d never cast it, but I still had it memorized from that night with the girl in the sneakers. Twenty-seven syllables. Feeling the power in the air like oil on my skin, I opened my mouth. I would spit it out fast.

Something heavy slammed into me from behind. I was in the air again, for a moment. Then I hit the polished floor and slid a few more feet. Saw stars. Sucking in breath, I flipped over onto my back. I muttered a quick Cantrip, six syllables, and I went numb. The pain didn’t end or go away. I just didn’t feel it anymore. Pushed myself to my feet.

Mags and Amir were still locked together. Gun still pointed up in the air. Mags too dim to cast something, anything. D.A. Ketterly stood in the entrance of the chamber. Stared at me with a steady, angry expression. Lips moving.

The shrieking, if anything, had gotten louder. I imagined them all, trapped here for weeks. Probably held in some sort of magical sleep, unconscious. Then suddenly waking up to
this
. To the
Biludha-tah-namus.
To mass murder.