We Are Not Good People (Ustari Cycle) (24 page)

I spoke again, and it froze in the air. Dust sprinkled down on us. I could hear Mags breathing hard, his breath hot against me.

Then someone was dragging me. I let him. From my back, I watched the frozen geyser of debris as I slid backwards from it, Mags staggering after me. When we were near the truck, I spoke a single word and it all crashed down, like it had wanted. I lay in the dirt for a few minutes, gasping. Then Mags was leaning over me. Then Daryl was there, looking like he’d slept in his truck.

“Why the fuck,” I croaked, swallowing painfully, “are you still here?”

He blinked. “Waiting for Claire,” he said simply.

The suggestible type, easily pushed. Easier when it involved a girl, certainly.

Head swimming, I pushed myself up onto my elbows. The house was gone. It was a shallow mountain of debris, burning in places. The surrounding gardens and structures were intact. The house had just imploded. A few people in white robes wandered aimlessly out in the fields. Some of them appeared to be running.

I squinted up at Daryl. He looked back at me with a dopey, innocent expression. A moron.

“She’s been taken. To New York.”

He frowned. “Well, shit. Let’s go get her, then.”

I nodded. Reached out for Mags. He was there, pulling me up, slipping under my shoulder. Holding me up. I leaned in close to whisper.

“Will you bleed for me, Mags?” I said slowly. It hurt to speak. “I don’t have much left in the tank.”

He nodded. No hesitation. “Yes, Lem,” he said, serious. Calm. His voice a shredded croak, too. “Of course.”

I nodded. Looked at Daryl and nodded at him. “Let’s go.”

It was time to leave a mark.

19.
I BLEW THE DOOR INWARD
with a Word. The plate glass cracked with a grinding noise but stayed in place. I walked in with Daryl and Mags behind me, Daryl still in his shitkicker costume, smelling pretty ripe, and Mags bleeding from a shallow wound on his arm. I stood for a moment to let my eyes adjust, then spoke a few soft syllables, and my eyes brightened, bringing everything into sharp contrast. I could feel Mags tethered to me, feeding me. I couldn’t feel Daryl, but I could smell him.

Using someone else’s blood was terrible. It made me feel like the universe’s asshole. But it felt
good
, too. All that power, all that strength, and you just pulled on it and you didn’t feel it. It rushed
through
you. But it didn’t drain you.

The gloom was the same as always. Ketterly was sitting behind his little desk. Stiff and shocked. I muttered four more Words and burned a bit of Mags’s gas, pointing at Ketterly and then dragging him with my index finger. He popped out of his chair like he’d been attached to wire. I flicked my wrist and he slammed into the bookshelves behind him. He winced and gasped in pain. I kept my finger on him as I walked, and he squirmed there as if a battering ram had been planted in his chest.

“Jesus, Lem,” he said with difficulty. Hard to breathe with a ton of invisible energy pushing into your chest. “That was fucking
fast
. Jesus. Hiram always said you hadda touch with the Words.”

I stopped in front of him, my finger now physically on his chest and pinning him to the bookcase. His glasses had gone askew but clung to his face. A light film of perspiration covered his exposed skin.

“Digs, you sold us out, huh? Gottschalk was all set to save his skin by going against Renar, calling in the troops, and then somehow the old bitch finds us at his little Ranch of Horrors, and Gottschalk changes his tune, cuts a deal. I asked myself: How’d
that
happen? Who might have been keeping tabs on me? Who had I been stupid enough to trust?”

His eyes flicked from me to Daryl. Lingered there a moment in perplexity. Then he looked at Mags. Didn’t recognize him, because Mags wasn’t giggling. Then recognized him and became terrified, looking back at me.

“I had a choice? C’mon, Lem—Amir came in here with his fucking Bleeders, and you know how that works. Do this thing and we’ll pay you off, don’t do it and we’ll cut your head off.” He tried to shrug. Managed just a strange sort of spasm. “C’mon, Lem, what was I supposed to do?”

I leaned in. “You tip us
off,
Digs. You give us the high sign, and we play along.” I pressed my finger deeper into his chest. The bookshelf groaned and splintered behind him. He gasped in discomfort. “Now we aren’t friends anymore.”

“Listen, Lem, listen—I gave her to them, sure, they hired me and I found her. I didn’t know she was anything to you. She’s marked, she’s
property,
for God’s sake. They told me you would be okay, they weren’t there for you,” he hissed.

“That’s good. Because if I had a fucking
house
dropped on me and you
knew
it was coming, I’d be irritated. As it is, Digs, we can talk about reparations.”

He licked his lips, looked past me at Mags. Still didn’t like what he saw there. In truth, I’d told Mags to look mean—his mean face was
startlingly terrifying. Like he was going to eat your face while you were still alive. It had something to do with the unibrow.

“This isn’t you, Vonnegan,” Ketterly said, his face screwed up in a mask of discomfort. “You don’t come heavy. You’re
idimustari
—”

I jabbed my finger and his voice cut off, his face turning red as his tongue and eyes tried to bulge out of his head. “A friend of mine is going to be ground up into dust so some freak can live forever, because
you put the finger on us
. I
am
coming heavy, Digs. And I can fucking come
heavier
. As in: Right now, right here in this stinking pit of an office, I will fucking
crush you to death
.”

I had his eyes locked in. They were wide and crazy, terrified. I felt a godlike exhilaration. I wasn’t going to kill D. A. Ketterly. I wasn’t going to kill anyone if I could help it. But he didn’t need to know that. And that fear in his eyes felt good. I could see how people got addicted to it. To it all: bleeding someone else for your spells, terrifying everyone around you.

All it took was a precise application of will, and you were a Monster God. Like Amir, like Renar. It was easy. I could see that now. It was easier than restraining yourself.

Still, I pulled back. Ketterly sucked in air, nodding. “Sure . . . sure, Lem, whatever you need. Sure.” He smiled. Scraping whatever dignity he had left off the floor.

I spun away and he dropped with a grunt. Stayed down for a few seconds on his hands and knees, coughing and spitting. I sat in his chair. It was warm. I looked at Daryl. I’d told him to look mean and, no matter what I said to him, to nod. He didn’t look very mean, but he was trying.

“He tries to cast, break his jaw.”

Daryl hesitated for one slow-witted moment, then managed a serviceable curt jerk of his head. Ketterly looked from him to me and back, sweat dripping off of him onto the floor.

I considered Ketterly. Decided my little show had him appropriately
terrified. You could take the Trickster out of the gutter, but it was always smoke and mirrors, tricks.

“You’re still working for Renar?” I asked.

He nodded at the floor. “Freelance shit. They need someone found, someone kept tabs on, they call me. What, am I supposed to tell the goddamn
enustari
to fuck off?”

“You been to the mansion?”

He nodded, pushing himself to sit back on his knees. “I know the place.”

“You’re going to get us inside without being noticed.”

He looked at me. The red was gone from his face. “You don’t want to go back there, Lem.”

“But I have to.”

“Don’t make
me
go back there, then,” he said. “That place will fucking kill your sleep.”

“But
you
have to, Digs. I need a guide, and I don’t trust you out of my sight. And if you say no, I’m going to crush you to death.” I shrugged. “You see my position?”

I’d run enough cons. I knew how to play a role.

He spun himself around on his knees, an awkward, panting procedure. “I can do better than that. Can I?” He mimed standing up, and I nodded. Marveling. Violence was like a different kind of magic. You pointed it at the things you wished to command. Things happened.

“Listen, you don’t need me. I’ve been there just three times, Lem. In . . . in the basement just once. I’m no fucking good, I can’t help you. But I can take you to the guy who designed the place. The Fabricator.”

I looked at Mags. He was still practicing his Angry Face and wasn’t really paying attention. I’d never met a Fabricator. Hadn’t known any real ones still existed. I looked back at Ketterly.

“You’re telling me, Digs, that a Fabricator built Renar’s mansion.
That a
saganustari
or
enustari
who can make Artifacts made one the size of a house.”

Ketterly shook his sweaty head. “Just the basement.”

DARYL DROVE. HE DIDN’T
like driving in the city. Drove with his hands white-knuckled on the wheel, stiff and bent in the seat. Traffic was light, but I was worried he would either have a stroke or wear out the Charm, suddenly realizing he’d effectively been kidnapped. We could reinforce the spell, but without Claire’s physical presence, we’d have to use one of us as the focus, which might have some unexpected consequences.

As he drove, Daryl talked. And talked. He told us about growing up in the Hill Country, football, and German, and how everybody’s parents were alcoholics, secretly. All his friends had left. They’d graduated high school and gone to college, and he’d waited for them to come back, but then they didn’t. He got a job at the meatpacking place. It was a good job. He didn’t mind it. He was bothered how time just slipped past him, though. Waiting for everyone to come home, and then one day he’d realized it had been six years, and Jesus, they weren’t ever coming back.

And then he’d thought maybe it was time for him to go away, too, but where? To do what? He figured he could drop a line on some old friends and go for a visit, but then that six years had crept between him and the idea, and all of a sudden it seemed impossible. Besides, his mother was out at the Knopp Assisted Living Facility, and who would visit her if he left?

That summed up the first fifty chapters of Daryl’s life, and then he’d taken those fifty chapters and set them on fire, because he’d met Claire and suddenly he knew why he’d hung around the Hill Country so long. Because he’d been waiting for Claire, he just hadn’t known it yet.

Mags and I glanced at each other. Mags practically had the word
Mother
printed on his furrowed brow, but I shrugged. Daryl would go home soon enough. I’d see to it.

We crossed the bridge. Into the wilderness. Onto the maze of highways,
heading south and west. Ketterly, wedged with Mags in the backseat, gave us steady directions. We ended up outside an old warehouse on a block of old warehouses. They were redbrick buildings with ruined windows of broken glass. There was a lot of untreated graffiti. No cars parked on the street.

I climbed out of Daryl’s shitbox and stood stretching my back, looking up at it. “This is where a real live
Fabricator
lives?”

Ketterly dragged something up out of himself and spat it into the street. “This is where I’ve met him. Running errands. Picking things up for people. Dropping things off.”

It was clearly abandoned, at least in the official sense. Squatters, maybe. Drug users. Not a Fabricator, who was basically a
saganustari
or
enustari
who worked with objects instead of spells. Or, more accurately, who embedded spells
into
objects. Most commonly machines nowadays. The mechanical nature amplified the effects, somehow. I’d never understood that part, but then, Hiram hadn’t been a Fabricator, and even if he had he wouldn’t have taught me.

“All right, Digs,” I said. “Lead on.”

As we followed Ketterly over the cracked pavement, I considered that I would have to knock him around again if this turned out to be bullshit, which seemed likely. He led us to a spot where a sheet of one-inch plywood replaced a window, leaned down, and pulled it up from the bottom. It was on hinges. From a distance, it looked for all the world like it had been screwed into place. Ketterly held it open as we ducked under, and we were in a cold room of concrete, dusty and unfinished. Another sheet of plywood, this one shaped more or less like a door and oriented with the hinges on the left. It had been spray-painted with a big red X.

Ketterly pulled it open and stepped through. I followed. I stopped. Mags walked into me.

We were in a cathedral.

The ceiling soared above us a hundred feet. Buttresses flew everywhere, and stained glass filled hundreds of tall, narrow windows.
Bright light pushed through the glass, tinting the air inside. Everything seemed hazy, as if there were candles burning somewhere, sending thin smoke up into the rafters.

It was empty. A huge emptiness. My gasp of surprise was echoed back at me, thin and ghostly. Far away, in the center of the cavernous space, was a collection of tables and desks, bookshelves, and filing cabinets. It was lit with a golden light that had no obvious source. Ketterly started walking towards it. I followed him slowly, spinning around.

I knew it was magic. I’d seen amazing things done via magic. And yet something in my mind, some small math processor deep in there, refused to relax, because what was inside the warehouse was impossible. My brain wouldn’t let go.

An old man was sitting at one of the desks. He was past seventy, lean and wrinkled, his white hair thin, his hands gnarled. But he looked strong. Like there was a band of steel under his skin, keeping his back straight, his eyes clear. As we approached, he glanced up at us and then down at his work. When we were a few feet away from the desk, there was a roar, and I jerked back as a metal wall like the side of a cage sprang up directly in front of me. I spun in place in time to see three identical walls pop up out of the ground, forming a ten-foot perimeter around us. Instant jail cell: Just add magic.