We Are Not Good People (Ustari Cycle) (14 page)

Mags: the perfect organism.

I STARED DOWN INTO
my glass. It was filled with whiskey, more than was wise for someone who was still anemic and weak; even the thick smell was making me woozy. I let it warm in my hands.

We were in Hiram’s seldom-used kitchen—a bright white box of a room with gleaming white cabinets, spotless white appliances, and a small Formica table with matching white plastic chairs. The only item in the room used with any regularity was the teakettle, which steamed cheerfully on the stove as the three of us sat glumly at the table.

Pitr Mags sipped his drink gingerly, scowling. He was unhappy because we’d finally ordered him to stop making the fucking glowing bird appear.

“Madness, in this day and age,” Hiram muttered, staring past me at the wall.

Hundreds of sacrifices just to get the burn started. A huge piece of magic to begin with, something beyond my experience, certainly. But that was the beginning. Spells with linked sacrifices as fulcrums started off with the small bit, like kindling to a fire. Cults had been popular in recent decades for this reason. Like the Movement for the Restoration in Africa, a few hundred Charmed people left behind like husks. Small bits of easy magic—Cantrips, even—to get people in the right frame of mind. Get them to kill themselves or each other. It didn’t matter which. The bonus was that the news was usually so sensational, no one noticed what happened next. The small bit set the big bit in motion, and the big bit was where the fireworks really happened. If the
Biludha-tah-namus
started off with hundreds of sacrifices as the
small bit
, I didn’t like imagining what the
big bit
was.

“What does it do?” I asked, forcing myself to sip some whiskey.

Hiram looked at me. For the first time that I could remember, he looked old.

“Do? It breeds disaster, courts destruction. It is one of a very few spells that once carried a sentence of death to any
ustari
found to know it. But those were different times . . .” He sighed. “It depends on how you look at it. If you are the caster, also the
object
of the spell, it . . . bends the laws of nature very close to their breaking point. It grants you immortality. Safety from death. Perhaps not permanently, but near enough not to matter.”

Immortality
. I pushed the word around. For a moment or two it was just a word. I forced myself to reply through my thick thoughts.

“That’s a lot of heavy lifting.”

Hiram nodded hollowly. “I knew Mika Renar had a death fetish,” he said slowly. “She fears death. We all do, but for her it is a mania. She
could never quite believe that the universe, after giving her such power, such immense power and luxury, would then play this cruel joke on her—that she might die like everyone else.” He sighed. “What is the use of being a god if you are also mortal?”

I stared at him, my brain moving slowly. “It’s impossible. You can’t break the natural order like that.”

“Of course you
ca
n
, boy,” Hiram said fiercely, his face flushing red. “Of course you
can
. It is not
easy,
it is not
allowed,
but you can always
try
. Would we have taboos against breaking the ‘natural order’ if it couldn’t be
done
?”

I considered the
big bit
again. I wasn’t
enustari,
I hadn’t even finished my primary education under Hiram, but I knew what it took to cast spells. “It would take . . . thousands—
tens
of thousands—to do something like that.”

Hiram smiled. I didn’t like it. He sat for a moment blowing on his tea. “You’ve never bled more than a trickle, Lemuel,” he said in a quiet voice I didn’t recognize. This was not Hiram Bosch. This was an old, tired man. The transformation scared the shit out of me.

“Not tens of thousands, Mr. Vonnegan. Not
hundreds
of thousands. It would take everyone, Mr. Vonnegan. All of us. Every
thing
.”

He sipped tea like we weren’t discussing the end of the world. “Or near enough. A handful might escape.” He smiled a little. “I imagine she might ensure the survival of her apprentice. In a scenario I find mystifying, she seems to actually
like
her apprentice.” He looked at me and frowned again. “Or fear him.”

I pictured Cal Amir: older than me already and still laboring under a
gasam
who was literally determined to live forever. How happy could an ambitious man be? No doubt Mika Renar was withholding the final fruits of her superior knowledge—every
gasam
played that game, because once your apprentice knew everything you did, there was little reason for them to stick around, carrying your water. Except the binding, the
urtuku
. It gave your
gasam
a certain amount of limited control over you. It forced plenty of apprentices to hang on long after they’d
learned all they could. It was a risk you took. You could break the binding between a
gasam
and an
urtuku
. If it was not voluntary, it simply required one of you to die. I swallowed a little more whiskey, even though the first dollop had made a home in my belly and set up a small business manufacturing vomit.

“The
Biludha-tah-namus
is an expensive item,” Hiram said softly. “Forever for one person requires more blood than has existed collectively up until this point. Every living thing, billions and billions—not just humans, Mr. Vonnegan, but by my calculations, all
living things
—will be burned away once the linked ritual is set in motion. She will live forever in a dead world.” He pursed his lips. “I assume she has considered this and accepted it.”

“Hiram,” I said slowly. “I know you don’t—”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Mr. Vonnegan,” he snapped. “Of course we have to oppose her. Every living mage in the world will oppose her. There is no question of opposing her. There is only the question of whether we—whether
I
—survive the experience.”

He sighed again and looked about the kitchen. I imagined he felt less secure here, without his knickknacks surrounding him. “Although I suppose I am dead in either scenario, aren’t I? The great Hiram Bosch.” He snorted and went on, his tone changing to the softer, thoughtful one that told me he was lost in his own thoughts. “The question is whether this girl is irreplaceable . . .
Difficult
to replace and
irreplaceable
are two different things. If we remove the girl from the equation, do we defeat Renar? Or do we simply delay her as she prepares another girl . . . ? I wonder,” he said, his voice lowering in volume as he sank into himself, “I wonder, I wonder if all of them resembling each other so strongly is
essential
or just a grace note . . .”

He trailed off, staring into the middle distance. I opened my mouth to speak but was interrupted by the deep tone of Hiram’s doorbell. We looked at each other, and then I looked at Mags. He had fallen asleep, his head on his crossed arms on the table.

I followed Hiram, noting his familiar portly strut, the uneven way his suspenders had been clipped to his pants. When he opened the door, I was standing behind him with a clear view of the doorway over his shoulder.

Claire Mannice was standing on his stoop. She looked clean and fresh and young and beautiful. Black jeans. Black T-shirt.

She stepped back when the door opened, then regarded us uncertainly for a second or two.

“Listen,” she finally said. “These markings . . . on me.” She bit her lip, gesturing at her neck. “Can you get them
of
f
?”

11.
I LIKED THE NERVOUS WAY
she chain-smoked, lighting each new cigarette from the burning coal of the previous one. I was sitting with her at the kitchen table while Hiram ransacked the apartment behind us, making a lot of noise and muttering to himself. Mags sat at the end of the table, staring at her with wide eyes, and I was on alert in case he tried to leap across the table and start licking her face and barking.

She was skinny as hell, but a nice skinny. Toned, not starved. Her hair was black and short and curled a little right over her eyes. Her nose was a little long and turned up, which I liked, and her skin was a perfect, creamy tone except for a single tattoo—a real, normal one, blurry and blue, on her left shoulder, peeking out from under a bra strap and the T-shirt.

I’d let her sit closest to the doorway so she felt like she had an escape route.

She sucked in smoke from a fresh cigarette and leaned back, one arm wrapped around her belly. She stared at me. “Magic,” she said at last.

I nodded. “You can see the runes?”

She stretched her free arm out in front of her. As far as I could see without the aid of a spell, her skin was unblemished, clear and covered in soft, downy hair. It was skin I wanted to touch.

“I can’t
not
see them. But yeah, no one else can see ’em. I went to . . . a friend of mine to see about having them removed. I couldn’t tell if they were tats or just surface or what. He thought I was crazy. So did everyone else.” She retracted her arm and looked at me again. “So I got desperate and remembered you and that crazy night. And I thought, hell, you
did
save my life. In the most horrifying way
possible
, but still.”

I nodded, encouraging that train of thought. I wanted to ask her how old she was.

Smoke leaked from her nostrils. She had a steady stare, a thousand-yard kind of thing. Most kids her age just eyed their shoes. She locked on you. “You know what it’s like to look in the mirror and see fucking hieroglyphics on your fucking face?”

A number of heavy things fell from a high shelf off in the distance, and Hiram cursed in his round, professorial tones.

“What is he
doing
?” she asked.

“Getting ready to leave,” I said. “You’re a hot commodity. He doesn’t want you here, attracting interested parties.”

I decided not to mention there were even odds that Hiram would decide to kill her himself. Or that if killing her meant stopping Renar from killing
us
, from killing
everyone
, I might have to sit back and let him do it. I hadn’t worked that out in my head yet. Saw no reason to bring it up.

She squinted at me. “Okay. So . . . magic.”

I nodded again, looked at Mags. He looked like he could have been convinced to commit murder in exchange for a lock of her hair. “Show her your new toy, Magsie.”

Mags was up in a flash, grinning and rolling up his sleeve. Moving with practiced speed, he had his knife out in a second. Just as Claire leaned back stiffly in her chair, shocked, he slashed a shallow cut down his scarred arm, bringing up a trickle of blood.

“Oh,
God,
” she whispered.

Mags ran through it fast, excited, and with a flash of brilliant light, the golden bird appeared, two or three times larger than Ketterly had made it in his office. This one was the size of a small child. It sailed gloriously around Hiram’s kitchen on silent, bejeweled wings.

I looked at Claire Mannice. She was staring at the bird with her mouth slightly open.

“It’s called a Glamour,” I said helpfully. “There’s a lot of different ways to use it. This is just for fun.”

She moved her eyes to me again. They were big and round and green, and in the fake glow of the bird’s golden light, they sparkled. I marveled at them. I had seen something like that green with golden flecks. In a painting, maybe.

Mags was still standing, grinning as he watched his creation move elegantly around the room. His arm had stopped bleeding and was just another shallow wound on an arm that had borne plenty of them, and for a second I was jealous of his apparent health and energy. He was brimming with blood and fire, and I felt ready to fall asleep.

“Magic,” she said. “Well, okay—”

The doorbell chimed.

The whole place went quiet; the sudden absence of Hiram’s muttered cursing and floor-shaking rampage made me jump out of my seat, waving down Claire and Mags. Mags killed the bird and we all just hovered there, listening. From the kitchen I could see down the corridor, past the front door and into the bedroom, but there was no sign of Hiram at all.

The lights went off. I heard Claire grunt, but she didn’t scream or panic or move.

Soft, nonthreatening, I heard the sound of the tumblers in the lock moving, easing their way open, falling into line.

I thought fast. I was about to fall over from blood loss and was more or less effectively blind. My switchblade was in my hand out of
deep habit, but I knew if I tried to cast anything meaty, anything requiring a lot of gas, I’d pass out before I got halfway through.

One second, two seconds, the handle of the front door turning all the way. I sliced my palm, a flicker of the blade, a kiss. Weak, thin blood seeped out, and I whispered a short Cantrip. Nothing. A child’s trick.

A wave of manageable weariness swept through me, dragging me down, and I could see. The dark took on sharp white edges, all color bled out of the world. I looked around; Mags was still standing, his own knife in hand, unmoving. Claire sat rigidly, eyes moving everywhere, blind and not liking it.

I looked up in time to see the front door drifting open, like an ancient, grainy black-and-white movie.

“Mags!” I whispered, sharp and urgent. “What’ve you got?”

“Fuck,” he hissed back. “I don’t know! You!”

I shook my head, watching the door. It remained pushed open, obscuring anything behind it. The silence was complete. “I don’t have the gas, Mags. It’s on you.”

“I’ll bleed!”

Revulsion and excitement rose up in my throat and I choked it back. I wanted to feel that power, Mags’s
life,
pouring into me. The thought made me gag. “No!” I struggled to keep my voice on mute. “Mags,
now
!”

Just as I remembered my interview with Renar, and I remembered how magic bounced off of Claire, I heard him whispering, running through a spell. I recognized it and thought it was probably safe, focused not on
us
or Claire but on those looking at us. I spun, pulling Claire out of her chair and onto the floor, dragging her back towards the wall. She let me—and I was conscious of the permission, conscious that if she hadn’t approved things would have gone very differently—stiffening but keeping her mouth shut. Mags dropped down beside me as he finished.