Trickster (6 page)

Nothing about the house had changed, and I was willing to bet the interior was the same claustrophobic space filled up with rugs and bric-a-brac. Hiram was an unrepentant thief. Everything he saw, he tried to steal. Mags and I left the girl and corpse in the trunk and walked up the steps to the sounds of her muffled kicking and shouting. The street was deserted, so it would be all right for a few moments, and I didn’t dare release her until we had things under control.

At the top of the steps I swayed a little, going dizzy, and steadied myself by grasping the dragon’s-head knocker and hanging on to it while I slammed it against the door.

Hiram answered immediately, as if he’d seen us coming and had been waiting behind the door for our arrival, which he might have been, I supposed. The door
snapped inward and there he was, an old man who resembled Santa Claus: short, round, white hair and beard. He was wearing a nice suit without the jacket, just the trousers and waistcoat, and looked down his red, bulbous nose at me even though I was a foot taller.

“Master Vonnegan,” he said in his rolling actor’s lilt. “Always a disappointment. Mr. Mageshkumar, a pleasure.” He looked back at me. “What brings my erstwhile apprentice back home?”

“I hadn’t been called an idiot in a few days,” I said hoarsely. “Thought I’d get a refresher course.”

He stared at me for a moment. “Ever since you rejected my teaching methods—quite ungracefully—I only see you when you are drunk and belligerent, making demands of me, or desperate and in need of favors from someone I can only imagine now exists as your only friend.” He glanced at Mags. “No offense, Mr. Mageshkumar, as I know you have an unreasoning affection for our Mr. Vonnegan.”

Mags smiled at him and shook his head a little, not understanding any of it. Hiram looked back at me. “So which is it this time, Mr. Vonnegan?”

I sighed. I wanted to get off the street as quickly as possible. I was willing to eat all the shit Hiram had in store for me. Which, if memory served, was quite a lot.

“I’ve got a body and a . . . a girl in the trunk of that car.”

Hiram ticked his head to look over my shoulder, his sharp grifter’s eyes taking in the car. He looked back at me. “Which is stolen,” he said.

“Which is stolen.” I took a deep breath, the oxygen feeling good as it burned into my thinned blood. I didn’t want to tell Hiram the next part, but I owed him at least a warning. “This involves . . . someone out of my league.”

Hiram snorted, moving out onto the steps with us. “You have great ability, Mr. Vonnegan, and always have. You limit yourself.”

I nodded. I was a purist. Hiram was not, though he usually insisted on volunteers for his bleeds. Most of the
ustari,
the mages of average ability, lacked even those scruples.

“This is
far
out of my league, Hiram.”

My
gasam
glanced at me again, then nodded. “Bring them in. Try not to make any noise. That means you, Mr. Mageshkumar. You make noise just standing there, did you know that?”

•   •   •

The girl kicked and struggled and was smeared in the Skinny Fuck’s blood, making her as easy as a greased pig to carry into Hiram’s house. Since Hiram was in no mood to do anything more for us, Mags managed a respectable Glamour that made anyone who looked out their window or passed by simply ignore us, cutting a ragged-looking slice on his forearm for the gas. Hiram watched in what looked like increasing horror as first the bloody, kicking girl and then the cold, pale corpse, were dragged into the house.

“Put the dead one in the study,” Hiram instructed coolly, gesturing directions with one arm as if I hadn’t
spent years in this house. “Bring the girl to the washroom. Neither of you speak for a while, yes?”

I realized Hiram was furious. I’d been on the receiving end of his anger plenty of times when actively apprenticed to him and was in no rush to revisit my adolescence.

We slipped the girl into the bathtub, which I immediately regretted, seeing her as the other girl, the very, very dead girl in the old apartment. They looked very much alike, which couldn’t be a coincidence.

I didn’t say anything, though. The girl had stopped trying to scream and kick; just flashed her eyes at us, jumping from face to face.

Hiram studied her for a moment, then sighed, unbuttoning one sleeve and starting to roll it up. “We’re not going to get far with her in this state; we need to calm her,” he said, reaching into his pocket and producing the pearl-handled straight razor he liked to use. Although Hiram’s face and neck were free from scars, the white flesh of his left arm from the wrist to the elbow was a highway map of puckered old wounds, ranging from the delicate, almost-vanished to one ugly gnarl of pink that ran for three inches, like a mountain range on his skin.

Hiram didn’t mind bleeding others, but Hiram didn’t have the rank to attract Bleeders. He got by on his own gas a lot, just like the rest of us. When Hiram had a big spell to cast, he got some local rummies or a whore or two; people who would take money for anything.

I closed my eyes and saw my first girl again. Her sneakers. The pink marker. She was shivering. She’d
been skinny, with dark hair, too, but pale, skin like ice cream.

I opened my eyes again. With a quick, masterful twitch Hiram drew a nice bead of blood and laid the razor in the sink. He spoke the Cantrip in just six syllables. Hiram was a master of the language, which had always been appealing to me. He had a knack for paring down every spell to maximum efficiency; some mages had to chant for ten minutes to get the same effect.

I felt the power move gently outward from Hiram, and when I looked at the girl again, she looked back with calm, unfrightened eyes.

“I’m sorry about that,” I said, my voice wet and thick. “The, er, body, I mean.”

She shrugged, as if it were nothing to get excited about. She was still and calm, her face blank. Like a film had been inserted between her and the world, everything now at a safe distance. Hiram’s penchant for stealing had given him ample experience in calming people down with a drop of gas and a well-chosen Cantrip.

“My dear,” Hiram said, kneeling down by the tub and reaching in. “I am going to undo your gag and let you speak. Do you promise not to scream or make any noise?”

She nodded again, watching him placidly. When the ball had been removed from her mouth she worked her jaw a bit and then looked at me. “That was terrible,” she said.

Her voice was flat and unaffected. She sounded bored and tired. I studied her, something in my gut twitching. I tried to imagine if the girl who’d attempted
to assault me while hogtied in the trunk of a car was capable of faking this kind of calm.

Finally, I nodded.

“What is your name, dear?” Hiram asked gently, reaching for the razor in the sink and bending down to attend to her bonds.

“Claire,” she said, still sounding like she’d always expected to end up locked in a trunk and covered in blood. Hiram’s spell was subtle but effective. “Claire Mannice.”

“Claire,” Hiram said in that gentle way, “I have cut the ropes binding you. Please stay in the bathroom until I come for you. You can clean yourself up, but please do not leave. Can you do that for me?”

She nodded again. “Sure.”

Hiram stood and reached for a hand towel from the rack. Wiping the blade of his razor carefully, he folded it and returned it to his pocket, then held the towel against his wound momentarily. He looked at Mags and me and sighed, tossing the towel at the hamper in the corner.

“Come, gentlemen, let’s discuss your other problem.”

•   •   •

We’d laid the Skinny Fuck on his stomach, because Mags didn’t like looking at his face. Hiram mixed us all drinks at his elegant little bar in the corner while I told him the story from the beginning, from Neilsson to Heller’s to the dandy in the parking lot. It all sounded crazy, but that was the way with magic, sometimes.
Coincidence was just magic running wild, like a vine that envelops your entire garden, your house, creeping in through your windows. Sitting in one of Hiram’s high-backed plush chairs, I could feel sleep creeping over me like a spell.

Hiram’s study was like the rest of the house: crammed full of interesting things. Or at least things Hiram found interesting. There were four identical chairs, deep and soft, the kind you slid down over the course of an evening before eventually falling to the floor. The walls were lined with heavy-looking built-in bookshelves, each filled to capacity with a variety of tomes, some old and massive, some new, cheap paperbacks. In front of all the books were little knickknacks: dolls, snow globes, small sculptures—anything that had caught the old kleptomaniac’s eye at some point. The floor was covered by a thick Persian-type rug with a gold fringe. Between the chairs was a massive wooden coffee table littered with more things: a chess set and board carved from some dark, glossy wood, a thick glass ashtray, a fiddle of uncertain vintage. Taking up the last of the floor space was a huge old-fashioned globe in a wooden frame, the colors faded, the borders out of date, the Communists still in control.

No matter how long it had been, when I walked into Hiram’s house, I felt choked.

When I was done telling the tale, Hiram drained his gimlet and sighed, gesturing at the body. “All right. Let’s have a look. Roll him over.”

Mags leaped up like a puppy and scampered to the
corpse, flipping him faceup. His arms flopped out onto the rug, and I could have sworn the sliver of green stone was still affixed to the
exact
spot on his chest where I had first seen it. The light caught it and made it gleam.

“Jesus fucked,” Hiram said, stepping back from it. “Jesus
fucked,
Mr. Vonnegan, what have you been
up
to?”

“What?”

“Do you know what that is?”

Panic lapped at the edges of my thoughts again. “No. My education was pretty shitty.”

The old man looked at me, and then panic broke through and swamped me, because
he
looked panicked. “You did not
touch
it, did you?”

I shook my head, and relief edged into his face.

“That’s not just any ‘artifact,’ as your story had me believe. That is a very
old, old
artifact, Mr. Vonnegan. Or a piece of it.” He stepped to the left to get a better angle, and seemed careful to stay a certain distance from the green stone. “A very
dangerous
artifact.” He looked at me again. “The mage in the parking lot—describe him again. Carefully.”

I did, trying to be detailed, and he started nodding when I was halfway through.

“Calvin Amir, I think,” he said. He sighed and sat down on the edge of the coffee table, letting his hands dangle between his legs. “Do you know who Cal Amir is?”

I shook my head. I hadn’t kept up on the gossip.

“You
do
know who Mika Renar is, though?”

The name made me jump, and Mags looked down
at his hands and muttered “
Fuck
” as a grace note of despair and terror.

I swallowed thickly. “Renar is . . .
enustari
.” Archmage. “Probably the most powerful mage on earth.”

“Not probably,” Hiram said softly. “She
is
. She is old now, but she is the most dangerous person on the planet. Cal Amir,” he added almost gently, “is her apprentice.”

I put my head down in my hands. “Ah, shit.”

Mika Renar. Ancient, brittle old woman. Probably the worst living serial killer in the world. Able to reach around the globe and swat you off her ass without bleeding a drop of her own blood. Connected and rich in the mundane world, too, just for giggles. And I’d fucked with her
apprentice
.

“Lem?” Mags said, sounding like a lost kid.

I looked up and forced myself to put my hands on my knees and smile.

“It’s okay, Magsie,” I said as cheerfully as I could. “We’re with Hiram now.”

Mags smiled a little, relieved. I hated myself, but Mags could only understand four things at a time. We didn’t have time to teach him anything else. I looked at Hiram.

“What can I do?”

Hiram snorted, standing up and heading for the bar. “
Do?
Nothing, Mr. Vonnegan. You have a girl who has clearly been marked for ritual in my bathroom. You have a stolen car parked outside my house. You have a man wearing a three-thousand-year-old artifact neither of us could create or control under any
circumstances, which is the property of either the most powerful entity in the world or her apprentice, which makes very little difference.” He turned his head slightly as he worked the glass. “Mr. Vonnegan, I believe you have done
enough
.”

I swallowed. I had seen what powerful mages could do; magic required blood, and at their level, a lot of it. They were not a class of people concerned with ethics, or morality, as a rule. I’d seen people hideously deformed, killed in spectacular ways, cursed for life with the cruelest of subtle
geas
spells. I’d heard stories of worse, of course: buildings blown up and planes crashed, just to get the supply of fresh blood a spell required. The bigger the spell, the more blood needed. Some of the worst local disasters in history had been engineered by
saganustari
seeking huge amounts of gas for their spells.

When you went up a level from there, to the Archmages,
enustari,
you could link some of the worst
global
disasters to them. Wars had been started, extermination policies enacted, all to fuel the
biludha,
the epic rituals such individuals could cast. The names from Hiram’s lessons flashed through my mind. Flight 19, 1945. The
Mary Celeste,
1872. Roanoke, 1590. The Ninth Legion, 117. Dozens, hundreds, thousands dead, bled dry, burned up. Used by
enustari
like logs in a fire.

“I’m sorry, Hiram,” I choked, my body vibrating. “I didn’t—”

“Think, yes,” he said, turning back to me with a drink in one hand. “So, the die is cast. We have to get
rid of it all—the car, the body, the girl, the artifact. First, though, we need to know what we’re up against. Why does this man, who is not one of us, carry an artifact? Why was a girl with ritual runes on her in the trunk of his car?” He shook his head. “Before we panic and simply try to clean up the mess as quickly as possible, we need more information. I have a spell we can use . . . on
him
.” He nodded at the gaunt body on the floor, then looked at me. “I can cast it on you, and you will know everything
he
knew.”