The Stringer (6 page)

7.

AS WE ALL WAITED
for the saddest assholes in the world to arrive, Lugal managed to maneuver me to sitting at the bar. The televisions continued to disgorge new calamities: murders, bombings, buses crashing into buildings. The Old Bat was getting busy, trying to tear down the modern world until everyone was huddled around fires and ready to worship the old gods—which she obviously thought were the
ustari
.

As a Trickster, I knew that was hilarious.
Ustari
had caused so many of the world's disasters, pulling a string and bleeding out a tribe, a village, a city, an entire population in order to cast their spells. We weren't gods. We were an infection, an infestation, and we fed on the people who hadn't discovered the Words, the power of sacrifice. And we worked hard—like the cowards we were—to keep everyone ignorant. If everyone knew the Words, even
enustari
would have to start working with their hands, like suckers.

Outside, police and ambulances raced by every little while, filling the air with strident panic. I found myself waiting, trapped inside my own body, for the lights to flicker and fail. That would be the next step, the power going off.

An intelligence like Lugal wasn't well versed in acting appropriately in social situations, so it had me sitting very still, staring straight ahead. The Brokers buzzed and whispered, both about me and about the disasters that were spilling out of the TV sets. I was crushed into a tiny corner of my own consciousness, paralyzed and mute, and panic kept nipping at my heels.

I realized with a start that my body was taking deep breaths. I was hyperventilating.

In the mirror across from my body, I looked calm and steady. Creepily steady. I thought about the complexity of running a living human body like a puppet—a living body with a resident consciousness, namely
m
e. The instruction set had to be huge. As opposed to Balahul and the corpse of Mr. Landry, which just required inhabiting an empty vessel, Lugal had to deal with a nervous system if it wanted to appear alive, if it wanted to pass all the smell tests. Lugal wasn't sending me on a murder spree, like Balahul had Landry doing. It was trying to use me as a Trojan horse. Get some Bleeders, then pick my brain and force me to cast something ugly, contribute to the attack, undermine the world.

I wondered if the Old Bat was planning to ride in on a broomstick and save the world with a seriously bloody
biludha
—a major ritual of some sort. Maybe that was her plan—kill the world, then become its hero?

I concentrated on slowing my breathing. Told myself to relax. Pictured Mags sleeping, his face going through a complex series of expressions as he dreamed amazing things.

And my breathing slowed down.

Not much, but it was a little control, a tiny corner of my wiring that Lugal hadn't been able to take over.

Reflected in the mirror across the bar, a dilapidated old yellow school bus pulled up outside, belching black smoke and sagging in the middle in a way I was pretty sure buses weren't supposed to sag. The door opened, and it began disgorging the saddest motherfuckers I'd ever seen in my life: our Bleeders.

Blood was blood. The skinny, scowling men and women who crawled gingerly off the bus looked to be suffering from any number of diseases and afflictions, several of which I didn't doubt had been contracted within the last hour while riding on that very bus. These, the saddest people in the world, marched into the bar, shuffling past us with watery stares and twitchy, nervous expressions. This prompted my puppet master to heave me up off the bar stool and follow them to the rear of the joint, where the Brokers were checking off figures in their notebooks.

“All right, Vonnegan,” Housedress said, licking her pencil. “Twenty-five top-flight cows ripe for milking. You wanna inspect them before you haul 'em off?”

I wanted to slap her, all of them, these fucks who pretended that if they didn't know exactly
what some asshole was going to do with twenty-five miserable, desperate Bleeders—and you could do some fucking
damage
with that much gas—then they weren't responsible. But my rage didn't matter, because Lugal suddenly reached into my brain and split it open, searching for a spell. And not just any spell, a spell of consequence, a spell that would rip a hole in New York and grind up whatever fell in, and then there'd be more blood, more gas in the air, a chain reaction of bleeding and spells feeding on that gas, swirling together while everything boiled away.

Lugal
pushed
. It wanted a spell, a
real
spell, something heavy. But the joke was on it: I didn't know any real spells, because Hiram had never taught me any.

THE RITUAL THAT
made you someone's apprentice—more formally, the Ritual of
Urtuku
—is like every other piece of magic: It can be an endless haul of a
biludha
, complete with theatrics and fires and robes and shit, or it can be over in fifteen painful minutes with you lying in some fat old bastard's tub bleeding more than you'd ever imagined possible, light-headed and nauseated and definitely,
definitely
regretting most of your life decisions.

For all his pompous bullshit, Hiram Bosch was too impatient for the robes and the fires. When he agreed to take me as his apprentice, he bonded me in the fucking bathroom, muttering a slur of syllables I couldn't quite catch while I bled out and wondered if I'd just killed myself for his delight. For one horrifying moment I was somehow aware of Hiram's heartbeat—lurching and flabby—superimposed on my own, and then it was over and my wounds had healed and Hiram handed me a bucket and a rag and told me to clean up my own bloodstains. From that moment forward, I could feel Hiram. He was a presence in the back of my brain, usually easily ignored but always
there
. And that connection, that invisible line between us, prevented me from going too far away from my
gasam
, and it allowed my Master to inflict pain on me when he was displeased.

Hiram was a grouchy motherfucker. He was
always
displeased.

He was also forgetful. He always forgot to feed me, and any food I scored for myself had to be shared with Mags, who I'd been tacitly given as part of my apprenticeship. Hiram also repeated his lessons, going over the same ground over and over and becoming enraged when I pointed that out to him.

Hiram taught me one major spell. Just one. It was an amazing spell he'd written himself called the
hun-kiuba
. It stopped time. Back then, I'd been excited, thrilled. Hiram wasn't much fun to be around, but he was
teaching
me. One day in and I had a split lip, but I'd learned more about magic than I'd ever imagined I would. I felt like a fucking
sorcerer
.

Hiram never taught me anything that big ever again, though I got plenty more split lips when I forgot to scrub the bathroom, or touched one of his stolen trinkets, or was found loitering within five feet of the safe in his closet. As I slowly came to realize that Hiram and I were
idimustari
, Tricksters, Little Magicians, I learned that you had to steal everything, including knowledge.

So I started paying attention, and every time Hiram cast a spell, I stole it.

The Words fascinated me. This secret language, just syllables, noises, but combine them with blood in the air and they could do anything. Rework reality, fool people, hurt people—as with any language, the only limit to what you could sculpt with blood and Words was your imagination. I picked them up fast; if I heard a spell once, I knew it, and if I had some time, I could improve it, make it shorter, faster, more powerful.

My only limitation was that Hiram didn't cast very many interesting spells. Most of his spells were Cantrips, tiny
mu
to make his life easier. He'd claimed authorship of the
hun-kiuba
, but as time went on I wasn't sure I believed him—it was far too complex for Hiram to have written it. Like everything else in his apartment, the
hun-kiuba
had been stolen. So I had to steal all the Cantrips he muttered, to float things toward him with a pricked thumb, to distract people, to make people automatically avoid him when walking down busy streets. All of Hiram's spells were fast, sloppy, and cost just a few drops of blood; they were designed to let him be as lazy as possible while stealing as much as possible.

From that hot mess, I'd taught myself the Words, their grammar, how chunks of a spell could be spliced together to do something more powerful.

THE DEMON WANTED
a spell. I was in agony. Something was taking hold of my essential being like an old blanket and twisting and tugging it, trying to squeeze some damp out of it. I stiffened, my hands going clawlike on the bar, my head snapping back, a low growl bubbling down in my chest. I shook for a few moments, grimacing, sweat popping out all over my body, sizzling on my skin like blood.

The Bleeders were lined up to my left; I could see them in the tarnished mirror, the saddest group of assholes ever. They scratched at themselves, shuffled their feet, and licked their lips nervously, all of them concerned with one thing: when they were getting their money. I didn't know what the going rate for a part-time bottom-feeding Bleeder was, but I knew it couldn't possibly be enough. Nothing would be enough.

I tried to hide from Lugal, to throw up confusion and uncertainty. I tossed everything I had at it, my memories, scraps of spells, doggerel, and bullshit. It clawed through and I could feel it splitting me open, destroying me to get what it wanted: a spell that would cause chaos and bloodshed, a spell that would add to the destruction its Master wanted.

The demon wanted a spell. As the pressure mounted inside my existence, agonizingly bursting me at the seams, I started making one up.

8.

HIRAM DIDN'T ANSWER HIS
door; the old Fabricator, Fallon, did. The old man's deeply lined face was impassive and lit by the flames and cherry tops as he studied me for a second, then lashed out an arm and pulled me in.

“Quickly,” he said.

Across the street, three buildings were burning, and a lone cop, his car at an odd angle in the middle of the street with all four doors open, was standing there watching it with a dumb look on his face.

“All,” I said, my voice thick and rough. “
All
.”

Fallon spun me into Hiram's hallway and slammed the door behind him. “Bosch!” he shouted, taking me by the arm and walking me rapidly toward the bathroom. “
Bosch!
”

I was barely moving my legs; the old man was a lot stronger than he looked, and I was being half carried. Hiram emerged from his bedroom with a sleep mask perched on top of his head, looking rough and ragged.

“What—”

“Come!” Fallon snapped. I'd never seen anyone treat Hiram like this; my memories of the man were mainly of him yelling at me. Here, though, he blinked in surprise and followed the old man readily enough, and soon we were all crowded into the bathroom with Mags mooning in the doorway.

“Lem!” he cried, trying to shoulder his way into the tiny space despite the fact that the laws of physics deemed that impossible. But Fallon turned and put one hand on Mags's chest, and the giant stopped cold.

“Mr. Mageshkumar,” Fallon said gently. “Please, wait in the hall.”

Mags hesitated, trying to see around Fallon and Hiram, then took a step back, deflating like a schoolboy who'd been told there would be no ice cream now or ever. Fallon nodded crisply and shut the door.

“Now,” he said, turning. “Mr. Vonnegan, are you able to speak?”

“What's going on?” Hiram asked, sounding annoyed.

“Can you not sense it?” Fallon asked, his leathery hands aiming my face up at his as his eyes studied me. “We have a Stringer. He has a presence in him. An intelligence. He appears to have partially neutralized it, but the trick will not hold. Mr. Vonnegan? Can you
speak
?”

I nodded. “All,” I said. “
All
all all.”

THERE WAS A
room in the back of the bar that had been renovated into a large shower in black tile. They marched all twenty-five Bleeders into it, Lugal communicating its desires with grunts and a small number of words.

“Bleedin' 'em
here
costs extra,” Housedress said, making a mark in her notebook.

I existed in a tiny corner of my own mind, a darkened space where I was only dimly aware of what my senses were perceiving, everything secondhand and filtered through Lugal's distinctly alien sensibilities while the demon worked my limbs and my voice and my face.

“All,” I said. Lugal liked the word and felt no need to learn new ones. It multitasked, crushing me with its demand for a spell while walking my body into the room. The Bleeders were breaking my heart—these were not people making a sober economic decision, a bit of blood in exchange for some ready cash. These were desperate people, broken people. These were people who'd accepted the possibility that the roulette wheel was going to land on
fucked up
and still walked into the goddamn black-tiled shower room in the back of the sketchiest bar in history. A shower room. In a bar.
Done in black tile.
The fact that none of them had made a break for the door told me all I needed to know about their situations.

I didn't bleed people. It was the only rule I had and the only reason I could sleep at night. I would have to work fast if I was going to minimize the damage. I could wrestle with the philosophical question of whether it was me or the demon doing the bleeding later. Right now I needed to get out with as little blood on my hands as possible.

I started with the Trickster's basic building block: a Charm.

There were a million Charm spells. Cantrips or
mu
short and sweet and designed to make people like you, all the way up to
biludha
that were tens of thousands of Words long and could sway thousands of people into being your cult, your army, your servants. For
idimustari
looking to pry a few dollars here and there from the unknowing and the uninitiated, a solid Charm Cantrip was an absolute necessity. You accost someone on the street when you've had it rough for a few nights, sleeping in the open, bleeding gas to evade the cops, and you need a little Charm just to keep your target from fleeing the smell. I had plenty of them in the old memory banks; Hiram used them all the time, constantly, so I'd picked up the basics from listening to him, and then I'd improved things: I'd pared them down and added my own innovations. I picked a short, short-lived
mu
; I needed it to take effect as quickly as possible so I could minimize the damage.

Next I needed a piece from Hiram's spell, the
hun-kiuba
. While Housedress unfolded a shiny straight razor and put it in my hand, I raced through the spell, following the threads and getting rid of the useless verbiage. I ripped out the seventeen Words that did the heavy lifting and swapped several, changing what it did. Hiram's spell stopped time—within a defined space, the extent of which depended on the amount of gas fed into it—for everyone but the caster and anyone he designated; when Hiram had demonstrated it to me, we'd robbed a subway car full of people, all frozen in time while Hiram and I moved normally.

I inverted it so it would freeze the caster.

The razor was in my hand and Lugal was moving me toward the Bleeders. In agony, I raced, pulling in bits and pieces from the hundreds of small spells, piecing them together. All I knew were small spells, tricks, but what was a
biludha
except many small spells strung together, a chain of effects and modifiers?

I raced. I reached out for the first Bleeder's arm. She was someone's grandma, an old, skinny woman with nicotine-stained hands and teeth, skinny, sagging, her eyes tightly closed. When I touched her, she flinched and screwed her eyes even tighter.

Lugal demanded, squeezing me until I thought I was going to pop. I worked, filling my spell with nonsense. I took every lesson I'd learned from shitty mages who couldn't write and plumped the spell until it was bloated, lengthy, convoluted. Until it
looked
like the major spell Lugal demanded, until it
looked
like a ritual that would rip shit up.

I sliced the Bleeder's arm, deep, a suicide cut. Lugal knew human anatomy, at least. And when it turned inward again and crushed me with agony, compressing me until I barely existed, I barfed up my masterpiece, the greatest grift I'd ever managed, and spoke the spell.

“BLEED,” FALLON SNAPPED.

Hiram drew himself up, summoning his dignity. It was undercut by the way his suspenders strained over his belly. “You are mistaken, sir. I am
ustari
and—”

Fallon turned and snarled at him. “Your
urtuku
is in grave danger, you fat little toad. You will
bleed
.”

I witnessed Hiram Bosch, whom I'd seen go crimson in anger many times, turn white as a sheet, and it was strangely satisfying—and confirmation that Evelyn Fallon was someone to be feared. If I hadn't been hanging on to control of my own body by a fingernail, I would have savored the moment more.

“Very well,” Hiram said stiffly, producing his ornate straight razor. “What is the volume?”

Fallon turned back to me. “What is its name, Vonnegan?”

I struggled to assert control over my voice, my mouth. It was disconcerting. I lived by my voice, by the Words. Being unsure of that voice left me weak, helpless. For some reason, speaking the demon's name was easier. I was reminded of cheery old Balahul, who seemed fond of its own name, too. “Lugal.”

“Lugal,” Fallon repeated, closing his eyes. “Ah yes, a nasty piece.
Master
, it means literally, ideal for a Stringer. Tell me: How have you asserted control?”

I licked my lips. The demon was like a bowling ball sewn inside my head; there wasn't room for anything like thoughts. I had to string together a regular sentence as if I were casting, choosing each word as if it were a Word, as if every syllable had consequence. It was like being brain-damaged.

“It wanted . . . spell,” I said, breathing hard, my body tense with effort. “I . . . tricked. Froze it in . . . moment.”

Fallon's smile was papery. “Clever,” he said, then sobered. “It will not last. Lugal was fooled by its own disdain—the stronger intelligences believe us to be little more than chattel to be run under their wheels. But it is powerful, and you can already feel it slipping your bonds, yes?”

I nodded. Words were too difficult.

Fallon pursed his lips. “A pint, Bosch. Perhaps a bit more. On my mark.”

Enustari
were used to people bleeding for them. Someone like Fallon had a casual expectancy that when they needed gas in the air, there would be gas in the air.

“Mageshkumar,” Hiram said, sounding relieved. “He's—”

“You,” Fallon said quietly. “
You
will bleed.”

Hiram shut up. My
gasam
was learning his true place in the world. That sort of thing was never pretty.
Ustari
varied just like other people: You had smart ones, dumb ones, funny ones, thin ones, fat ones, tall and short ones, but none of us were nice. You can't rely on killing people for the things you want and be nice, and we as a class killed everyone
.
We are not good people.

“Mr. Vonnegan,” Fallon said as the sweet sour sense of gas hit the air, the most wonderful feeling of nausea. Hiram was surprisingly robust. “It will resist me. This will not be
pleasant
.” He began speaking the Words of a spell I'd never heard. Five Words in, and Lugal kicked, sensing that someone was trying to evict it, and my veins lit on fire.

I screamed.

With a crash, the bathroom door was knocked inward, shoving a woozy Hiram aside as Mags leaped into the room, face red, fists clenched. “
Lem!
”

My pet Mags, ready to rip the claw-foot tub from the floor and start swinging it around like a club until everyone but me was dead. Fallon frowned at me, closed his eyes, and broke off speaking his spell, causing it to collapse around us with a mild explosion of heat and air.

I sagged in relief as the pain faded. My own cobbled-together spell, keeping the demon frozen within me had snapped, too brittle and fragile for all of this commotion, and I could sense the demon pushing outward again, stretching to reclaim me.

“
Silig
,” Fallon said clearly, almost casually, and Mags froze in place. Fallon took a deep breath and looked at me wearily. “Let us begin again.”

He started at the beginning as Hiram leaned against the sink with a grunt and a wince. I burst into invisible flame again. I could feel Lugal worming its way into my nerves and muscles, clamping down tightly and sending agony deep into me until it was all I was, just a sack filling with green-yellow acidic agony.

Fallon cast with a steady, somnolent rhythm and tone, his Words a mumble that only he and the universe could understand. Outside my shell of pain and suffering, I could feel the power of the spell as it grew, as Hiram sagged against the sink, his open wound feeding it one pulse at a time. The spell was all buildup, all mounting tension. I was a Trickster; most of the spells I used were short and dirty, over almost before I finished speaking them. This was all prelude, all grace notes, subtle and interlocking, like epic poetry.

I could feel the demon panic, twisting and struggling, trying to escape the fate that Fallon was spinning for it, but I could tell it wasn't going to. The old man had it; from the first Word, the old man had it. When Fallon tied off the end of the spell, the temperature in the room rose ten degrees and I felt like my skeleton was being removed from my body by a giant pair of invisible tweezers. I stiffened, my limbs going out stiffly from my body, and I fell back against the wall with a thud.

“Come, now,” Fallon whispered. “Your resistance is unseemly.”

Like steam, the pain sizzled off me and I dropped to the floor, limp and soaked through with sweat from head to toe. Even my much darned socks were squishy with it. I was shaking, and then with a roar Mags was back in motion, crashing into the wall next to me and mashing his huge arm behind me and around my shoulders. Then he went still.

“Lem?” he said in a small voice.

I looked at him and patted his knee. “It's all right, Mags,” I said. “I'm okay.”

Fallon's smile was the tiniest movement at the corners of his mouth. “Good! Sometimes there is tremendous damage from such rescues.” He slapped my leg. “Come! There is no time for loafing. You must tell us everything.”

I looked up at him, moving my head like pushing a boulder up a small hill. “Us?”

Fallon stood up and clapped his hands. “Come, boy,” he said, shooting his cuffs. “Meet your betters.”