The Stringer (5 page)

Behind her stood a large man with the beefy look of a Bleeder: tall, fat, and with scars crisscrossing his arms in a complex pattern. He wore black pants, a black sleeveless shirt, and a black hood on his head. He stood perfectly still, at attention. Whoever this woman was, she was power:
saganustari
, at least, possibly higher up on the food chain.

She didn't look up as we crashed into the room, or when Landry tossed me casually into the other chair and then slipped behind me and wrapped his bony arm around my throat, exerting expert pressure and cutting off my breathing.

My eyes bugged out and I strained ineffectually against him as the woman looked up from her knitting. She slid the glasses off her face so they hung around her neck on a silver chain and cupped her hands in her lap. As I choked, she ran her eyes up and down me and offered a half-smile.

“So good of you,” she said, sounding like everybody's grandmother. “Can I offer you some tea?”

5.

LANDRY, MUTTERING
“
BALAHUL
”
UNDER
his breath, wheeled the cart into the tiny room with exaggerated care, as if he'd only recently learned how gravity worked. My hostess smiled blandly as he maneuvered the cart between us, bearing a delicate-looking teapot with pink flowers on it, two white teacups, and a small plate of butter cookies.

I looked up at her and opened my mouth. “I—”

The Bleeder behind her moved in a flash to cut himself, a thin, precise line of red opening up on his forearm. The grandma spoke a single Word,
sed
, gently, almost absent-mindedly, and my words died in my mouth. It was really disturbing that I hadn't seen any sign from her. Her Bleeder had just
moved
. I didn't often travel in the swanky circles of
enustari
, the powerful and the ruthless, but usually they had to give some sign to their Bleeders.

I sat in polite silence while Landry made his stiff, dead way out of the room, humming his one Word.

My host leaned forward and picked up the teapot and poured. “All right, let's find out what you're good for. I don't get enough living ones. More complex, of course, requires more effort but yields better results. You're a practitioner?
Ustari
?”

Ours was a small, strange club. I didn't know for certain how many of us there were, bleeding people for gas and casting spells, but certainly no more than a few thousand. Maybe fewer. I hesitated for a moment. The dancing, watery light of the kerosene lamp and the utter silence made the room feel even smaller. I wondered if I'd have any chance of making a run for it past Landry.

Deciding I needed a better shot, I nodded.

She smiled. “Sugar? Milk?”

I nodded again.

“Quiet one,” she said, dropping two cubes of sugar into a cup and following that with a dash of milk. Handing me the cup, she smiled again. “That's a sign of intelligence.”

I wanted to say something about how, if that was so, it hadn't done me much good, but I just shrugged, holding the teacup stupidly. It felt incredibly tiny in my hands, as if I might snap it with a twitch. It was like a glimpse into what it was like to be Pitr Mags, the whole world made to a smaller scale.

She picked up her own cup and settled back into her chair. “Now, this is very important, son,” she said, sucking on her teeth a bit. She leaned forward slightly and whispered, “Do you have any . . .
devices
on you?”

I blinked.

“A phone? A—” She winced. “A
computer
?”

Kerosene lamps, no outlets, the utter stillness—the source of the music was an ancient wind-up turntable, a thick black record on its green felt.
Ustari
as a rule didn't care for technology, that was true; I'd toyed with the idea of collecting spells in some digital files, but the thought made me uneasy and I'd never gotten around to it.

I shook my head.

Her eyes were old and flat and heartless, and she kept them on me unblinkingly.

“Oh,
good
. That is good.” She sipped her tea with a slurpy relish. “That's the problem with this world.
Devices
. Technology.” Her face took on a softer, dreamy look. “There was a time when this was
our
world. We summoned the peasants and they sent us their sacrifices. We directed the armies and they shed blood for us. The invisible hand.” She refocused on me. “I had an ancestor at Agincourt, you know. The tale is passed down to us to this day: Such glorious blood! Blood enough for any
biludha
,
for the most complex ritual! Mountains raised, seas drained,
anything
! He stood beside King Henry V, and
it was glorious
!”

Her cadence, energy, and unblinking stare were exactly what you encountered on the subway after midnight, people demanding that you stop following them, demanding that you admit the president was a robot. Except those people didn't have a chunky Bleeder ready to gas up some serious spells, and I didn't have Mags's intimidating presence looming over my shoulder.

She waved a hand. “Ahh, golden days of yore. It's different now, isn't it? Guns. Computers. All of it. Clever peasants have harnessed the forces of the universe—well, some of them
—
and here we are, scuttling about, hiding. We, the invisible hand!” She shook her head at the insanity of it all. “They discovered gunpowder and split the atom, and here we are.”

I didn't know what to do. There was no question to respond to, and I couldn't speak anyway. So I sipped my tea. It was delicious. There was something fruity going on that was simply lovely. I thought of the pale swill Hiram used to make and added that as an extra black mark against the fat man: bad tea, and plenty of it.

“So!” she said, setting down her cup and leaning forward, sucking her teeth again. “What shall we do with you?” She laced her fingers together and supported her head on them. “You have a Vocabulary, so no dumb brutes like our clumsy friend Balahul, eh? Something a bit more subtle.” She peered at me for a moment longer, and my internal alarms lit up. The time for information gathering was over; it was time to go. I needed T-shirts that read
TIME TO GO
on the front. I could wear them everywhere and save everyone some headaches.

The question was, did I hit an old woman in the face or not?

She'd shut me up with a neat bit of Wordplay, so casting was out. I had a feeling that if I made a move to escape, her Bleeder would have some gas in the air before I had my ass off the seat; I doubted I was getting far before she brought some serious thunder down on me. On the other hand, the interview was getting creepy, and I'd left Mags unattended in Hiram's house. Or dead.

Time to go. I threw my cup at her face and launched myself at the door. Tricksters weren't fancy.

She squawked, which made me feel good, and there was gas in the air almost immediately—a gush of it, as if her blubbery standby had just opened an artery. Which made me panic, and then I was through the door and moving as fast as I could, stumbling as I made the turn to head into the kitchen and the open window. I heard Grandma speaking Words but tried to outrun her—my slim experience with
enustari
was that they tended to be long-winded, luxuriating in their endless supplies of blood, using three impressive Words where one basic Word would do.

I was halfway to the window when the floor drifted away. There was a hand on my collar and I was lifted up, my legs still working for a moment.

“No dumb Collector for
you
,”
Grandma hissed into my ear. She was holding me up over her head, her grip like iron, magically enhanced. I could sense the gas pouring into the air; her Bleeder would be dead in a few seconds unless she did something about it. “You're skilled, yes? A lucky find. Something a bit more capable for you, I think.”

She carried me one-handed and wasn't even out of breath. We didn't head back to the tiny study. Instead she took me back into the narrow hall, slung me over one shoulder as if I weighed nothing, and bounded up the stairs. I found myself wishing I'd heard the spell she'd spoken so I could steal bits and pieces of it, maybe cut it down to Trickster length, something I could cast on my own gas and not pass out. I was good at that, stealing the ideas of
ustari
.

The second floor had the same floor plan as the first, and she took me toward the room above her den.

“I'm older than I look, you know.”

Archmages tended to be. There were many ways to slow down time if you were willing to bleed people for them. A guy like Evelyn Fallon, who looked to be a thousand years old, was likely
two
thousand years old.

“I saw it happening. I saw those busy little monkeys in their labs and their factories. I saw our influence and power being matched—exceeded, perhaps. We might summon our Bleeders and assemble our forces and unleash terrible rituals, but the monkeys would arrive in their tanks and their planes, and what? Their three-dimensional printers and their worldwide communication networks. I saw it happening and I tried to warn the rest, but no one listened. And where are we now? Hiding, like insects. Don't cast in public! Don't be
noticed
.”

She paused to kick a door in.

“Even someone like you,
idimustari
,
Little Magician that you are, even you must see how humiliating it is. This is
our
world. And we have allowed primitives to steal it from us.”

The room was empty of furniture, but six beefy guys in black hoods stood against the walls, confirming the old bat's status: Only
enustari
had so many Bleeders just standing around waiting to open a vein.

“A little chaos now and then . . .” she said in a singsong as she dropped me in the middle of the room. The floorboards were stained a dark reddish brown and felt soft and damp under me as I crawled backward away from her. “. . . is a tonic for the best of men.”

Gas in the air, another flood. I turned to look at her Bleeders: Two of them had slit their wrists silently. No command, no sign from her. They'd just done it. The gas was sour and golden in the air, the most beautiful sensation in the world, pure power curdling my stomach and making my throat gag.

“You will be host to Lugal,” she said. “His brothers are lesser lights—savage, eager, stupid. They will continue to tear down the infrastructure, to sow chaos, uncertainty. They will claw at the foundations of this mechanical world.
You
will assist Lugal with a higher purpose. Together we will tear this world down and reassert the proper order. People will crawl to us when we are revealed, begging us to save them, to rule them.”

She smiled at me. It was a warm, sad smile, the sort of smile your grandmother might offer when she was about to push you off a roof or shoot you in the head. Then she spoke a torrent of Words, a rapid-fire series of syllables that exploded in the room, burning up the river of gas. I was flung down onto the floor, arms and legs spread, my scream locked in my throat. I couldn't move. I'd never felt this kind of power, this wanton waste of someone else's lifeblood. I did the only thing left to me: I listened. I tried to remember.

One of the Bleeders dropped to his knees with a thud, then fell forward.

I remembered the girl in Hiram's house. Shivering, looking down at her canvas sneakers. I remembered Hiram ordering me to bleed her, to get used to it, and I'd recoiled from the tiny flow of gas in the air, someone else's life, gorgeous and revolting. I'd thought I knew what it felt like to steal someone's life, but I'd been wrong.
This
was murder.
This
was power. And there was no difference.

The old woman spoke the Words, and I felt my existence being pried open, something wedging its way into my mind. And still my scream was lodged in my throat, choking me.

6.

I CAME TO SLOWLY,
swimming up through a haze that sucked at my thoughts and sent them spinning down unexpected tangents. And then I was even more confused, because I wasn't lying down, I was walking, already in motion. It was a bright, chilly day and I was walking briskly down the street as I woke up, swinging my arms and making an incessant tuneless humming noise.

I mentally flailed, trying to seize control of my own limbs. Nothing happened. I kept walking. I kept swinging my arms. I kept humming. It was like I was a passenger in my own body.

And then I became aware of Lugal.

It was like someone was standing too close to me, breathing on my neck, hands in my pockets. Or like someone was with me in a small room, but I couldn't see them. Or like a story I once heard from an old duffer sitting at the bar at Rue Morgue who told me how he woke up several times a week unable to move or speak or open his eyes, and often remained that way for hours.

I could feel my lungs, my leg muscles, working; I hadn't walked this fast in a long time. I was practically running, and my anemic, malnourished body wasn't happy, but the fucking demon kept me motoring forward. I knew it would push my body like a machine, making me move as fast as it needed me to, for as long as it needed me to, until I dropped dead. Lugal, I thought, was a better class of demon, and the old lady had inserted it into me while I was still alive. I had a feeling Fallon would be impressed by me when he saw me.

I knew the neighborhood: Lower East Side, slowly gentrifying but still scuzzy, the sort of place where ancient rotten tattoo parlors sat between newly renovated wine bars. It was riddled with Tricksters. Little Magicians like me, we liked rich drunk people, and a neighborhood like this was infested with them at all hours of the day, ideal folks to cast a Charm
mu
on, a Glamour, sometimes both. I kept a lookout for someone I knew, someone who I might find a way to signal, though I didn't have any clue
how
.

Peculiarly, the streets were empty for the middle of the day, like everyone was inside watching television news and refreshing web pages. There were sirens in the air, more or less continuously, and as the demon moved me down the sidewalk, two cop cars raced by in quick succession, lights flashing.

I stopped in front of a bar with no name, a narrow storefront with a single BEER sign lit up red and flickering. A jolt of panic went through me, because I knew this place. If it had an official name, I didn't know it. But if someone said they were heading to the bar to buy some Bleeders, everyone knew they were headed to this shithole with the walls covered in doodles and signatures and doggerel, this shithole where the Brokers sat all day and night, their little notebooks at the ready, their sad inventory seated in the back.

Only big shots had Bleeders, permanent blood bags. If you weren't
enustari
,
and you needed a lot of blood, or needed it fast without having to engage in fifteen separate insane negotiations with crazy, desperate people, you came downtown and found a Broker.

Bleeders were curious people; at the higher levels, owned by
enustari
,
they lived well. They were rich and well cared for, well fed and worried over—in exchange for the odd chance of being bled to death. Most were devoted. They loved their masters and mistresses, somehow—perhaps helped along by a premium-grade Charm spell.

But even at the lower levels, like the folks a Broker would find for you, there was something odd. A willingness to die. An eagerness, maybe. To be part of something bigger. To literally give yourself to something.

I struggled to stop my body. I put my back into it, such as it was, trying to worm my hands onto the controls, to assert myself. The panic returned, burning through my thoughts. It was worse than being paralyzed. I was moving, I was whole—I just wasn't in charge.

Lugal took notice of me.

The sensation was unsettling and drove the panic and desperation out of me, replacing it with a skin-crawling terror that froze me. Lugal was
enormous
. It was an intelligence, heavy and dense, crushing me under it. Feeling that invisible gaze on me was like having an elephant lowered onto my mind one excruciating millimeter at a time. It filled me, pushing me into the corners, compressing me until I wanted to scream.

And then it punished me, lighting me up. The pain was real, it was physical, caused by the entity that now had ownership of my body. It built and built until I was ready to cry, to beg, to pass out, if any of those options had been open to me. It was educational,
too. Lugal had full fucking access. My memories, my skill set, my reflexes—everything I was or could be was available. I was a puppet in every way.

When it lifted and returned to its own business, the relief was visceral. I remained in the dark corners of my own existence as my body strode into the bar, and I made no effort to do anything further.

The Brokers straightened up as I walked in. There were six of them, sitting at the bar with their notebooks, their well-licked pencils marking up accounts.

“Who's this, then?” one of them asked.

They all peered at me.

“Vonnegan,” said a round, bald black guy with bright red gums sitting far back near the taps. “Chelsea.”

“Who's your
gasam
?” asked a third.

“Bosch,” another answered, and everyone laughed.

“That fat bastard,” said the round black guy, chortling. “Careful, gents, this one might be here to lift your wallets!”

“What can we do for you, then, Vonnegan?” a tall, older woman said. She was wearing a pink housedress and fluffy pink slippers, blue-tinged sunglasses and a white shawl. She opened her notebook, which had the puffy, squished look of paper that had fallen into water, and clicked a cheap ballpoint pen, hovering it over her notebook.

No Normals walked into this bar, that was obvious.

Again I dived for the controls, seeking them far off in a dark room I'd never been to, vast and unexplored.
Not this
,
I thought, trying somehow to communicate with the presence that had taken over my body.
Anything but this
. I didn't bleed people. But here I was, about to contract for some Bleeders. And based on the sense I had of Lugal, of this alien, inscrutable power that animated me and pulled my strings, I thought it very likely that none of those Bleeders would survive the experience.

Outwardly, I stood there, immobile and silent as Lugal turned its attention inward and sought me out, chasing me down in the shadows of my own subconscious and taking hold, dragging me painfully out into the harsh, burning invisible light of its unblinking eye, and I felt the will, the immense, implacable
will
. This was what it meant to be controlled, possessed, owned, whatever you wanted to call it.

It began dragging words out of me.

One by one, it formed a sentence, pulling it from me like rotten teeth. I did my best, struggling to cloud my thoughts, to confuse it, to offer up incorrect words.

“Blood,” I heard my voice say. “Bleeders. As many as you have, I'll take.”

I shrank from the demon's presence, exhausted, a failure. It was tempting to just curl up mentally and drift, let it happen.

The Brokers looked at one another. Housedress reached up to slide her glasses down the bridge of her nose, then looked around. “Fucking
idimustari
wants every piece of meat we got!”

A wave of gentle laughter rippled through the room.

“Listen, Little Magician,” she said, turning back to me. “I dunno what kind of asshole your
gasam
is, but trust me when I say whatever Love Cantrip or check-kiting bullshit you're pulling together,
one
of our prime Bleeders is all you're gonna need. You might wanna hear about our fractional plans, too, go in with a couple of your little friends, spread the cost.”

Lugal reached down into me and yanked up a word. “All.”

“Maybe he was sent to deal with some of this shit,” the round black Broker said, nodding at the televisions above the bar. Hell was breaking loose. People had been gunned down in Times Square. A dozen folks had been pushed in front of trains—my old pal Landry/Balahul hard at work, no doubt—and an explosion uptown had turned a block of brownstones into a war zone. A crawl of text along the bottom of each screen implied other ongoing disasters.

“Fucking terrorists,” someone muttered. “We should all get together and donate the Bleeders and fucking show 'em who's boss.”

“Bad idea,” another said. “Unless you wanna explain everything the next day when we're all over the goddamn screens everywhere.”

I heard the Old Bat back at the house:
Hiding, like insects. Don't cast in public! Don't be noticed!

Housedress stared at the TVs, then looked at her peers again, sighing and making a note. “All right, kid. You got the scratch to cover that?”

To my amazement, my hand went to my pocket and produced a thick wad of cash, easily enough to keep Mags in hot dogs for years to come. I'd never seen so much money in one place. The Broker stared, and then one by one her peers all looked up, catching the scent, and they stared, too. Tricksters like me didn't usually wander in with actual money. Usually
idimustari
wanted charity, the kindness of strangers.

“That why you're here, kid?” Housedress asked. “Buying Bleeders for your
gasam
and his pals, gonna save the city?”

Lugal didn't know how to respond to that, so my body just stood there, proffering the cash. After a moment she turned and had a whispered consultation with everyone. Then she turned back to me, looking down at her notebook.

“We got fifteen you can have right now, standard rates, triple kill penalties. We can get ten more in—” She glanced back, and signals were passed forward from the Brokers. “In two hours.” She looked up at me, expectant.

Lugal pushed the money toward her and repeated its favorite word: “All.”