We Are Not Good People (Ustari Cycle) (30 page)

“Fine,” Amir said.

I realized with sick disappointment that he didn’t
care
. He didn’t care what I thought of him or that his ruse had failed. He just wanted to know things. Everything. He wanted to know everything. He’d been sucking at Renar’s bloated, diseased tit for decades and had learned almost everything he could from her, and here was something he didn’t know. And he wanted to know it. And he was willing to risk the wrath of his
gasam
—a woman whose
affection
I feared, so I couldn’t imagine what her
wrath
was like—to learn something he didn’t know.

Cal Amir was an angel. A pure being. He wanted to
know
.

And he was in a chatty mood. We had at least another half hour on the road. Alone. I shifted in my seat and rolled the inside of my cheek between my teeth. Steeled myself. Bit down hard.

Copper flooded my mouth. Pain spiked my head. I controlled myself. Stayed still. It was a trickle, barely noticeable. I stole Ketterly’s old ventriloquist’s trick and barely moved my lips, lightly whispering the world’s simplest Charm, a weak, tiny thing he might never notice. Almost inaudible. It wouldn’t push him hard. Would just make him more amiable. Friendlier. Chattier. I didn’t have the juice to break the spell holding me in the seat or do anything to Amir. Nothing
useful
.

I thought of Amir asking me to teach him something clever the last
time we were driving out here. If the universe gave you patterns, the least you could do was study them and use them.

“Tell you what,” I said, trying to keep my swollen cheek at bay. To sound normal. “Let’s make a deal. I tell you something, you tell me something.”

He smiled brilliantly. Pleased. Charmed. “A deal! I
could
wait until we’re at the house and have a few Bleeders make you tell me whatever it is you think I would like to know. Make you talk until you’re croaking blood, my friend. But this is so much more sporting. Okay, you first!”

I considered. The Charm was a slender thing. Its power, such as it was, rested entirely on its not being noticed. I had to jolly him. I was working with the bare minimum of gas, the least amount of blood you could use to any effect at all. My advantage was tiny, and I had to work it.

“Fallon’s whole workshop—the whole building—is an Artifact. He lives inside it.”

Amir wasn’t smiling anymore. His face was lit from within. A manic, excited kind of light. He sat rigidly forward, hunched over the wheel, nodding. Eager. “I see! I suspected that. But the selfish bastard would never let me come near for an examination.”

I jumped in before he could think of his own tidbit to tell me. I rattled off a quick series of questions, an old grifter trick. You leveraged the Charm and set up a pattern, then let the Cantrip push him gently through.

“Where are we going?”

“To my
gasam
’s home,” he said easily, smiling.

“How old is that old bat, anyway?”

“Ninety-four,” he said immediately.

“Where’s Claire?”

He nodded, still calm. Pushed along by the pattern, he didn’t even hesitate. “She’s slot one. At the bottom. The final sacrifice!”

I pictured the design Fallon had shown me. The horrific corkscrew tunneling under the house. All the blood and suffering flowing down there, where Renar would be weaving the
biludha.

“Where does Fallon store the blood?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. I didn’t see that much. Why not ask your little green stone?”

The
Udug.
My hands twitched as I thought about it.

“I am not foolish enough to
touch
that Artifact,” he snapped.

I felt a slight tension in the spell: Amir displeased. Without thinking, I rushed to fill the gap. “There’s a secret room in the basement. He’s got all his designs and specs filed there, if he didn’t destroy it.”

Amir nodded gleefully. “I will search for it.”

“When will Renar begin casting?”
When will the world end?

He nodded as if agreeing with something I couldn’t hear. “Tonight. Assuming we are done with
you
.”

Alarm spiked inside me. Ridiculous. I’d been captured—again—and was heading to Renar’s death machine of a house—again. I was wearing alarm as a coat.

“What are you doing with me?”

Amir winked at the road. “We have to be sure you didn’t try to undo the marking. That you didn’t use one of your fucking little
tricks
to set some clever trap for us. We have to be
sure
.”

He shrugged. “So we’re going to have to hurt you.”

25.
THE WORST PART WAS THE
tape.

It was white duct tape. Thick. Sticky. Wrapped from one cheek to the other, covering my mouth. To keep me from speaking, from mouthing any of the Words. Casting spells. Simple and effective.

It wasn’t the fact that I couldn’t breathe well through my nose. It wasn’t the painful tug of the tape on my whiskers. It wasn’t the fact that my hands were bound behind me or that my ankles were tied to the chair legs. It wasn’t the way I could smell myself, days without a shower, days of sweat and worry. It wasn’t that I was at Renar’s house again. It was the knowledge that at some point Amir or Renar or a
fucking
dimma
—hey, why the fuck not—was going to march in here, and the first thing they were going to do was tear off the fucking tape with one mighty flourish. Taking my face with it.

It was coming. And knowing it was coming was terrible.

I kept tasting the air for the
biludha
. I would feel it. Long before it crested and started feeding on the world, I’d know it. It would be invisible electricity in the air. Only those of us with the art would feel it. Any of us who didn’t know what was happening—those of us not powerful enough to be invited to the party and too far away to have heard through the rumor mill—would go nuts. They’d feel it, this immense spell, and go nuts trying to figure out what was happening.

I was going to die in this fucking room.

It was a very
nice
room. The sort of room your grandmother kept for guests, with a layer of dust on the flowered bedspread, a vague smell of potpourri in the air.

It was a tomb. I imagined dozens of rooms just like it throughout the mansion, which would be, of course, larger on the inside than the outside. Of course. Naturally. And in each of these rooms was the rotting corpse of another Prince of the Assholes, another moron who’d thought he might test his will against the gods.

I steadied myself and exploded into a constrained tantrum, shaking and jerking and trying to smash the rope, the chair, anything.

The chair was nailed to the floor.

Or maybe glued there via spell. It didn’t matter. I didn’t gain any momentum. I was stuck like a beetle tied to a pin. Walking in tighter circles, endlessly. I breathed hard through my nose, trying to push against the tape with my tongue. If I could get the tape off, I could cast some tiny Cantrip. It would be enough to get me out of the chair. I didn’t doubt there was some deep magic on the door, so getting out of the room might not be easy, but losing the tape would be a start.

I sagged down and relaxed. Felt the sweat pouring down my back. I was going to die in this fucking room shortly before everyone else in the world died, wherever they happened to be.

A key in the lock. A whisper. The door swung inward on silent, greased hinges, and Cal Amir entered. Sauntered in like a cat with its tail in the air. A Bleeder trailed after him. Bald and fat, as Bleeders tended to be. Wearing a black suit. A big woman with no curves, a beaklike nose. Looking a little peaked already, with a fresh scar on her forehead. Like Renar and Amir had been forced to use their Bleeders more than usual. Run them down a little.

Amir glided about, silent, with that terrible grace rich, powerful people had. The Bleeder stepped back against the door, pushing it shut. There was no click. I had the impression of an airtight seal. I wondered how much air the three of us had.

With a nod from Amir, the Bleeder stepped forward with her blade and sliced one of my arms free from the chair. Thrust a pen into my hand and stepped back to hold a pad of paper up to me.

“You cast on her,” Amir said flatly. “What did you cast? Be specific.”

I rolled my eyes in their sockets. Looked at Amir. Looked back at the Bleeder. I studied her fleshy face. Got the feeling she was hoping intently that she wouldn’t have to roll up a sleeve and give Amir the gas.

I looked back at Amir. He was standing with his back to me. Studying the wallpaper. Hands easy behind him. As I watched, he turned. Raised his eyebrows. “What was it?”

I just stared. Thought about the runes on Claire. How they deflected magic. Every action had a reaction. Amir and Renar seemed worried that one of our tricks might have skewed their careful markings.

He nodded and stepped back towards me. “You see, the ritual is very complex. Each link in the chain must be very carefully prepared. Magic leaves a
residue
of sorts. Easy enough to detect, using more magic. But you see the problem, then? We can’t
use
magic on her to check if magic has been
used
. That would only worsen the problem. But we must know. The markings twist energy. They deflect, distort—they are designed to route energy a certain precise way. If they are already routing one of your idiotic
mu,
the results of the
biludha
will
be . . . unpredictable. We must know exactly what was cast so we can check for problems, make adjustments. Otherwise, weeks of work. Very disappointing. We’d prefer to spend ten minutes making you hurt, and then perhaps we can avoid that small hell.

“So the question: What did you cast on her? She’s an attractive girl, Trickster. Perhaps a bit of Charm to spread those long white legs at night? Perhaps she did not trust you. A bit of magic smooths all waters. Perhaps she ran from you. Resisted your help. A Cantrip just to calm her down.”

I thought of Hiram. Claire in his bathroom. Hope flushed through me, soured by fear for Claire. But at least if something we did queered the
biludha,
we weren’t taking the whole world down with us.

“You see, we cannot take your
word
for it, Mr. Vonnegan,” Amir purred. “It would be worthless. You would tell us you cast something complex and unbelievable on her in order to interrupt our plans. Or you would tell us you
did not
cast on her, hoping that at the last moment we would be ruined. This, I admit, is our largest concern.”

He extracted his black leather gloves from his jacket pocket and began pulling them on. Stepped closer to me.

“The conversation will be one-sided.” He leaned in close to me. He smelled like good, old leather and the beach. “It will be no impediment to my questioning.”

A moment of silence between us. Ruined by the low whistle of my breathing. He squatted down in front of me. “Tell me, something, Mr. Vonnegan: Do you know how I came to apprentice to Mika Renar?”

I shook my head. I wondered if I’d been Charmed, somehow, subtly. Amir was like a shining thing, creepy and gorgeous all at once. Captivating. I wanted to look at him.

“I was apprenticed to another
gasam
when I was very young. He was very cautious. Suspicious of me. He in turn was in service to Renar. She was young then, beautiful. But already horrified that she was no longer as young as she’d once been. It was just a few years later she created herself in Glamour, just a few years. I urged her to find a
new shell, to learn the art or purchase an Artifact, but she would never consider that solution, to live in a lesser form.” He paused, looking distant and pained, as if remembering something awful. Then he focused on me again. “My
gasam
had a particular spell I wished to know. A simple thing, really. A nice trick. Nothing more. You perhaps already know something like it. He kept telling me I was not ready. I was not ready to learn his trick. This silly spell, this trifle.”

He smiled down at me, cocking his head. “We are alone here. The other
enustari
have agreed to stay away, as the
biludha
is a fragile thing. My mistress is cruel, but she is honorable, else it would have been impossible to come to this agreement in the first place. Also, there is no one here to have second thoughts. No one of any ability to hear or see something that discomfits them. So we are
alone,
Mr. Vonnegan. Will you answer?” He waited a moment, then turned and shrugged at the Bleeder. She stepped back, dropping the pad, and began rolling up her sleeve.

“I went to Renar to ask for advice. She admired my impatience. She suggested I become
her
apprentice, as she had none. She told me to do so, I would have to kill my
gasam,
but that my reward would be her solemn oath to teach me everything she knew, without exception.” He smiled. “So far, as we have discussed, she has kept this oath save one last thing. And I have kept faith with her because of that. You see, Mr. Vonnegan, I am very good at
discovery
. I find out the things I wish to know.”

He let that hang in the air. Kept smiling at me. His lips were smooth and glossy.

“This,” he said without moving or changing expression, “is going to hurt
tremendously
.”

The Bleeder slashed a professional cut onto her arm. Blood welled up, dark. Amir whispered three Words. Agony bloomed deep inside me.

Someone had teleported a double-edged blade deep inside my bowels. And then applied a magnet, slowly drawing it out, hot and wet.
I bit down on my tongue. Blood flooded my mouth. Air exploded from my nostrils and I leaned forward, straining against the bonds. But I didn’t make any other noise.

The pain stopped.

“What did you cast on her?”

I sucked in breath. Exhaled. Blew snot all over him. He flinched. Pulled his handkerchief from his jacket breast pocket. Wiped his face. Whispered three Words.