We Are Not Good People (Ustari Cycle) (31 page)

I jerked back as the knife reappeared. It felt like something living and covered in sharp scales was wriggling inside me. Tearing me apart. I kept my mouth shut tight behind the tape. Three seconds, the pain disappeared. Not even a lingering burn.

“What did you cast on her?”

Before I could even contemplate a response, Amir spoke three Words.

Before he finished the final syllable, I clenched my body tight and shut my eyes, drawing in and holding a deep breath. The pain sliced up from within anyway. It was all illusion, magic directly attacking my nervous system. Nothing I did physically was going to stop it or alter it. It was like a recording being played and rewound and played again. Always exactly the same.

The pain vanished, and I sagged down, limp.

“What,” he said as mildly as before, “did you cast on her?” The Bleeder picked up the pad of paper and held it up to my hand, a thick line of blood marring the white surface. “Specifics, Mr. Vonnegan. As specific as possible.”

I wondered if the stupid Charm we’d cast—the stupid Charm that was still tugging Daryl Houy by the cock days after it should have faded—was enough to queer the ritual. Amir and Renar were clearly afraid of even the smallest interference. That all that blood and magic would hit Claire precisely the way it was supposed to . . . and then would squeak out of control, a tiny miscalculation, and then who the fuck knew: magical force suddenly burning through everything in
sight, uncontrolled. So
we
would
all
die, but at least the world would be safe.

Or I would break and write it out for him, and Renar would be able to make adjustments, and I would get to appreciate that at least no one was going to tear this tape off my mouth.

I didn’t like either option.

With a heavy sigh theatrically conveying his disappointment in me, Amir spoke three Words.

I tried to surge upward again, every muscle in my body straining like boiled leather. Then it was gone. I collapsed back into my own sweat.

“I do not trust other mages,” Amir said conversationally, still squatting there. Still beautiful. “Especially
idimustari
. You are crafty. If I cast a spell on you to ensure truthfulness, will you know a way to subvert it? I once caught one of you lifting my wallet. Poor fellow did not know who I was. Who I was apprenticed to. I decided to have a bit of fun with him and cast something similar to what I’m using now. A prank, really. He added a Word. A
syllable
. Just whispered it as I spoke the spell, inserting it perfectly, transforming my little Cantrip and pushing it back on
me
.” He shrugged. “So, you cannot speak. You cannot be trusted. You are not
quality,
Mr. Vonnegan. And you wonder why you are being left behind while the rest of us go onward forever.”

He tilted his head. Reached into his jacket. “So, Mr. Vonnegan, magic will not help you here. Your tricks will not prevail against your betters.” He produced a pack of cigarettes. “Tell me: What did you cast on her?”

I pushed my swollen tongue against the tape. There was enough blood in the air, just being wasted, I could cast a dozen fucking spells to my benefit. If I could make the Words. Sweat ran into my eyes. I willed it down my face, willed it to loosen the glue. I needed two seconds. Then I’d show this smug asshole what a Trickster could do.

I thought of the
Udug,
and in my hunger almost felt it. I wanted it to
tell me some secret, something that would help. How did people figure things out without it? How had I lived without that flat voice telling me everything I needed to know, everything I didn’t need to know,
everything,
in one endless rush of confusion?

Amir smiled, shaking out a cigarette. Held it between two gloved fingers. “Very well, Mr. Vonnegan.”

I shut my eyes. Clenched my jaw.

Amir spoke three Words.

26.
I DRIFTED UP TOWARDS THE
dim, milky light. Flinched away from it and sank.

Rose up again.

Opened my eyes. Still in the chair. Still damp. Sweat and urine. I felt certain there would be some blood, but the pain had been imaginary. Real enough. Real enough to bruise where I was bound; every muscle ached from hours of strain. Hours of Amir whispering in my ear, hours of an invisible knife slicing up my insides.

Every breath hurt. Razor blades.

I tried to focus. There wasn’t much light. It had gotten dark. I tried to remember the hours with Amir. Had I said anything? I wasn’t entirely sure. Did it matter? I wasn’t sure of that, either.

I became aware of a noise. I became aware of the invisible sizzling of magic in the air. Blood burning off. Huge amounts of it. More than I’d ever felt in my life. Closer than I’d ever felt. Like a nuclear bomb had gone off five feet away in an alternate universe.

The
biludha
. Renar had started the Rite.

I focused on the noise.

The noise was right outside the door. Shouting. Heavy thuds. A mix of voices. As I sat there staring at the door, it shuddered, leaping a little as something crashed into it.

I thought of the
Udug,
of it telling me what was coming. Found I could almost still feel it in my hand, like it had been amputated instead of lost.

Something crashed into the door again. There was a distinct cracking sound. I tried to strain against my bonds again. I tried to shift the chair again. My whole body convulsed. Every muscle seized painfully. I slowly relaxed, breathing hard through my nose. My head hanging down. Eyes closed. I’d become so used to the thick tape across my mouth, I’d almost forgotten about it.

I opened my eyes. Looked down past my own feet at the floor. Tendrils of smoke, white and dissolving, crept up between the floorboards.

First I thought,
Good, someone is burning the place down.
Then I thought,
Shit, someone is burning the place down.

The door exploded in, spraying the room with splinters. It smacked against the wall and hung off of one hinge. A man appeared where the door had been, sailing through the air. He hit the floor a foot or two away from me and rolled to an ungentle stop. He was bald and pale and fat. Had once been well dressed. One of Renar and Amir’s Bleeders. He looked like he’d been doing a
lot
of bleeding.

I looked up. The doorway was empty. I blinked. Pitr Mags filled the doorway, his hot, rapid breathing thunderous. His jacket and shirt had been torn open as if an animal with claws had attacked him. He was bloody and dirty. Framed in the doorway, he
looked
like a wild animal. Eyes flashing. Feral mouth hanging open. Hands curled into fists.

“Lem,” he hissed, charging in and sinking to his knees at my feet. He reached around me and started working on the knots binding my hands, his face pressed against my chest. It burned painfully, my shredded muscles tender. “Me and Ketterly and Fallon came,” he whispered. “No one else would. I think Renar was still expecting an army, not a couple of guys. Fallon cast something and we slipped right in. No trouble. No one’s here, anyway. A bunch of Bleeders. No Renar, no Amir!”

He laughed. It was a pure, spontaneous sound. Mags thought he
was winning. I wanted to tell him that when you showed up for a fight and no one was there to fight you, you’d already
lost.

My hands slid free from the rope and fell heavily at my side. I felt like I’d been chewed.

“There’s gas in the air, huh, Lem? You can feel it, huh? Someone’s got the spigot
open
.”

He was excited. Affection for Mags and his stupidity flooded me. For a moment, I couldn’t feel anything else. No pain. No weakness. Just a pure love for Pitr Mageshkumar, my nonsexual crush, the child I’d never had, the pet dog I’d never had.

I tried to raise an arm to pat Mags on the shoulder. My arms wouldn’t work. I was broken. Amir had broken me. With a fucking Cantrip three words long.

Mags untied my ankles and pulled away from me, grinning his stupid monkey grin. I didn’t move. He frowned, working through it, and muttered a quick bunch of words and I was free of the chair. The invisible threads that had laced through my skin dissolved and I slid off the chair to my right, hitting the floor hard. I convulsed, trying to cry out, but couldn’t get my lungs to cooperate. Smoke floated lazily up around me.

“
Fuck,
” Mags said, the word just drooling from his mouth like lazy air. A moment later my neck muscles screamed as he grasped my head in his immense hands and pointed it more or less up towards his troubled, grit-smeared face.

I wanted to say,
Don’t worry. I’ll die here, but I’m okay with that because I am tired and it hurts to breathe. And we’re all going to die in a few moments anyway.
And that I was glad to die with him, the only friend I’d ever had. That I was sad to have let Claire die. All the other girls, too, all the ones the Skinny Fuck had kidnapped. All I could do was frown at Mags’s shadowed face.

Abruptly, he let my head drop into his lap. Pulled his sleeve up to the elbow, revealing several fresh, weeping wounds. Tore one open with his fingers, a fresh stream of dark blood pouring down his arm.
He started to recite, rocking a little as he did so. A concentration exercise. Like he was three years old, rhyming out the fucking times tables. As he spoke, my pain faded. Remained, lurking under a layer of gauze, but manageable. I could move again, and laboriously extracted myself from Mags’s lap.

I marveled at this. Being a Trickster had always meant being a parasite. You pushed your pincered head deep into someone’s flesh and sucked them dry. Even if they volunteered, even if they exposed their own bellies and invited you to live inside them, it was parasitic. It was taking something from someone.

This was different.

Mags, giving me his own energy. Just enough to get me back to exhausted and ruined instead of nearly dead. I still didn’t want to move. I wanted to remain curled up with my head in his lap and sleep until the world ended and released me. But he’d just bled to help me, and I owed him something. So I focused my eyes on him. Was surprised to find tears in them, an overwhelming feeling of affection pulsing in me. I loved this freak. My only friend, but when you had Pitr Mags, you didn’t need more than one. “Good to see you, Magsie.”

I thought,
If these are the last ten minutes of my life, not a bad way to go.
I wished Hiram had made it, too.

His ears perked forward like a puppy’s. “Good to see
you,
Lem.” He got to his feet, breathing hard.

I slipped an arm around him, wincing from the agony that remained in spite of his spell. We limped together out of the room. What had I said to Amir? What had I convinced him of? I couldn’t remember, but I suspected that in the end, I’d scribbled the Cantrip out for him. Somewhere inside, I knew I had, in shaky, big-looped letters, numb from pain and despair.

The blood in the air was immense. I’d heard of huge rituals in the past. Battles staged. Cults organized. Mass murders scripted. An
enustari
in India once engineered the capture and slow bleeding of more than a hundred British soldiers to launch a
biludha
into motion. Not so long
ago, an
enustari
had caused an Airbus A320 to crash in são Paulo, killing 181 people to kick-start a ritual. This had happened over and over, history absorbing the tragedies and explaining them, investigating them, eschewing anything that didn’t make sense—because magic didn’t exist.

I’d never felt even a hint of the power I felt being drawn now.

Claire would be consumed, burned up, by the spell. She would die in pain. Suffering. Alone. Thinking maybe I hadn’t even
tried
for her.

We stepped out into the hall. I hadn’t been on the upper floors of the house before. It was a fussy-looking place. The walls were paneled in dark wood that looked like it had a hundred years’ worth of wax on it. The floors were old, wide planks. Thick, dusty-looking runners covered them, heavy things from a previous age. Right outside the door, a small piece of furniture and what had once been a white-and-blue vase had been smashed to pieces. Deep marks had been gouged into the walls. Pitr Mags, who was usually scared of his own shadow, airing it out for a change.

Down,
I thought.
Head down
. Claire was down. Renar and Amir would be down.

The hallway was endless and dark. Doors on either side. Heavy black doors with silver handles. I did not want to know what was behind any of them. The staircase had seen some battle: It was a wide, curving number. The railing had been knocked out of place and hung useless, like a twig clinging to a branch. A hole about the size of Mags’s head had been punched in the drywall halfway up.

The silence was total. Every noise we made climbing down seemed to echo back at us extravagantly. As we cleared the landing, a sizzling, crackling noise filled the void. As we stepped onto the first floor, the crackling noise resolved into a wall of fire: All the curtains and some of the furniture were burning. A slow, black-smoke kind of fire. So slow I felt like it would be burning several years from now, moving from the walls to the rugs, to the floorboards, back to the walls.

We found Fallon in what must have been the formal dining room. The huge mahogany table in the middle was ablaze; the orange flames
reached up towards a crystal chandelier, making it sway this way and that from the rising heat. Two Bleeders lay prone on the floor. One was on fire, the black material of his nice suit licked by bluish flames. Flames licked at one of Fallon’s sleeves, too, but he didn’t seem to notice. He looked like a ghost: gray and skinny and dry. Like tinder. Like he might just combust.

“We are too late,” he said in a dull tone. “The Rite is begun.” His voice sounded red with self-loathing. “I looked forward to my work. I woke up the other day, the day you visited with me, and my heart was light, because I had so much work to do. I was a fool. And now I am not a fool, I am merely useless.”