We Are Not Good People (Ustari Cycle) (26 page)

“You have to show me how to get in there,” I said slowly. “And how to get out.”

And how to destroy it,
I thought
. Time to leave a mark.

He didn’t say anything for a few seconds. Just loomed over his own plans and spells and stared down at them. Maybe a flicker of conscience making him momentarily unhappy. “You must enter from below,” he said at last, his voice like sand pouring from him. “There is an entrance. It is located in the center of the house.”

I nodded. “You have plans of the house itself?”

He sighed. “I do. But they are the official plans, filed with the city, and no doubt only vaguely match the reality. I keep complete records,
Mr. Vonnegan.” He rummaged in the file and tossed some folded-up blueprints at me. He planted his fists on the tabletop and leaned forward. I thought he was remarkably fit for an old codger. Toned. Muscular.

“I will—” he said, and then shut his mouth as the soft glow of the light turned red. There was a palpable shudder in the ground beneath our feet, and a moment later, a fine dust rained down on us.

I swallowed sudden fear. “Trouble?”

A second shudder, more dust. His yellowed eyes swiveled towards me.

“Intruders,” he said. A third shudder, heavier than the first two, brought chunks of mortar out of the walls. Fallon’s dry eyes swiveled upwards. “Large ones.”

20.
FALLON BARKED A SINGLE SYLLABLE
and the little room was flooded with blank white light, blinding me. He barked another syllable and the door burst open. A second later, the old man was flying through the basement, now lit up like noontime. I grabbed the files from the table and followed after him. It was a cramped space of support columns and cinder blocks. The joists were right above us, an inch above Mags’s head. It was nowhere as vast as I had imagined in the dark.

As we ran after Fallon, the whole building shook at irregular intervals, dust raining down on us.

“Mags!” I shouted as we reached the stairs.

“Ready, Lem! I’m ready!”

“Ketterly!” I meant it to mean
Be ready to defend yourself.

“I’ll bleed on this one, Vonnegan!” he wheezed from behind me. “You’re better with the Words!”

I took the stairs two by two. I had a second to reflect on the fact that
for the first time in . . . in as long as I could
remember
, I didn’t feel like hell. Because I hadn’t bled myself in a while. I was topped up, running with a full tank. Fallon had already disappeared around the landing. I wondered what, exactly, I was running
into
. The first time Cal Amir had come after me, Hiram Bosch had died hurling fireballs at him. The second time, I’d almost bought the farm buried under an entire fucking house.

I didn’t like the progression.

I sailed through the open doorway onto the main floor. Fallon was at his work area, staring down at a set of security monitors. As we crossed to him, the floor leaped and rocked beneath me again. Fallon looked up at us, his face blank.

“
Dimma,
” he said.

There was a Word for everything. I rolled this one around in my mind.
Monster. Golem
. There were a variety of translations. It meant a being constructed, as opposed to created or summoned. Beyond that, specifics were up to the creativity of the mage. They could come in all shapes and sizes.

The ground shuddered. I assumed this guy would lean towards the deep end of the size pool.

“How many?” I asked. I started to add,
How big?
but felt the floor shudder again and decided not to waste my breath. The answer was:
Fucking huge.

“Six,” Fallon said, and then stood up straight, closed his eyes, and began reciting. Casting.

I didn’t know how much juice he had in that battery of his, but I had no way of accessing it. When there was blood in the air, I could feel it, sense it, take hold, and draw on it. With Fallon, I felt nothing. I turned and found Mags and Ketterly standing at the ready behind me, sleeves rolled up, blades in hand. Daryl floated a few feet behind them, eyes wide.

I spun back, and the wall directly across from us crumbled inward.

Standing amid the sudden rubble was a . . . thing.

It was humanoid. It had arms and legs. A torso. A neck like a stubbed-out cigarette and a head like a gruesome gray potato. It appeared to be made out of stone. A solid single block of stone.

As I stared, it casually flicked aside the remains of the wall and hunched down to step into the interior.

My mind raced. Trying to think of something I could cast that would help against a . . . thing.
Dimma.
The word was hard and dark in my mind. I felt soft and weak. The thing’s hands were permanent fists, spheres of rock the size of barrels. I imagined getting hit by one at speed.

Six,
I thought.

The
dimma
moved suddenly. Faster than should have been possible. In a swirl of bricks and dust, it leaped into the building, landing a few feet to our left. The whole floor jumped under me. A second
dimma
pushed its way into the hole in the wall.

Fallon threw out his arms and shouted the final word of his spell. The first
dimma
raised one barrel fist into the air over us.

Then Fallon turned into a giant.

He
stretched,
every part of him simultaneously elongated, like an animation. Fallon screamed as if it hurt like hell. Pops like gunshots reverberated through the air as each of his limbs expanded outward, fast and messy. He doubled, then tripled, then quadrupled in size, crowding the roof, twitching and roaring. Sweat rolled off him, crashing to the floor and spraying all of us as the floor shook.

“Jesus!” Ketterly shouted.

“I seen pictures of Jesus, guy,” Daryl shouted. “That ain’t him!”

I turned to look back. Both Mags and Ketterly were cut, fresh gas welling up from their wounds. My eyes met Daryl’s. The poor guy stared at me, unblinking.

“If I die,” he shouted, backing away, “tell Claire I was all brave and shit, okay?”

The
dimma
swung its arm down. Fallon leaned in and intercepted it, taking the blow on his shoulder and launching himself into what
would be its stomach. Just as he crashed into it and knocked it down, the second
dimma
shouldered its way through the hole. A third appeared behind it.

Mind racing, I spat out the first spell I could remember: thirteen syllables dredged from the inky end of my brain.

There was a flash next to me, and a copy of me appeared. Just light and shadows. Three more flashes behind me, then four more. And four more. That made three copies of each of us. I barked another word, and the illusions scattered, running around the place randomly. The second
dimma
swung laboriously at them as they passed close by, its stone fists passing through without effect. The third one joined in, slamming both fists down onto the floor as the ghosts of Mags and Daryl scampered past. There was a snapping noise. The concrete floor shattered beneath its blow, cracks shooting out in all directions.

A fourth
dimma
appeared. Widened the hole in the wall with an almost casual twitch of its arms. The noise was unbelievable. Every move the
dimma
made was a thunderous scrape of stone against stone. Fallon was screaming, thrown across the warehouse and crashing into a concrete column. It shattered behind him, and he sprawled on top of the stub left on the floor as the ceiling above sagged with a stretched-out, unhappy groan.

“Vonnegan!” Ketterly shouted. “Time to
go
!”

I hesitated. Felt a certain responsibility to Fallon. I’d brought this on him. Braced him in his nifty little Fabricated hideaway, six fucking monsters on my trail. The old man had rolled off the wreckage of the column and gotten back on his feet just as a pair of
dimma
reached him, swinging their cudgel hands in fast crisscross arcs. He danced back, the floor vibrating, and managed to grab on to the nearest one of the creatures. Both hands on its irregular head. Howling, the giant Fallon twisted, and with a report like a gunshot, the head snapped off.

The
dimma
disintegrated. Turned into a few lumps of stone and some dust, falling into a heap on the floor.

Immediately, the second
dimma
on Fallon swung both arms, connecting with Fallon’s chest and sending him sailing again. He smashed into the wall, and the whole
building
shook around us. I thought about the odds of getting buried in a collapsed building
twice
.

“Lem!” Mags shouted.

I looked up. Two of our doubles were racing right at us, two
dimma
in pursuit. The frozen expressions on the illusions were awful to look at. Like someone wearing a lifelike mask of me and my idiot sidekick. For a second I couldn’t move. I stared at the huge stone bodies loping towards me, my vision jumping and shaking with each impact of their flat granite feet.

Then Mags crashed into me, knocking me to the floor. I felt the breeze as one of the stone monstrosities barreled past us, skidding to a halt in a rain of concrete chips. We both rolled onto our backs and a scream escaped me, my vision filled with the cracked, veined torso of one of the
dimma
.

Praying that one of them was still bleeding, I shouted the first spell that came to mind. Felt the power surge through me, and the huge stone man shot upwards, smashing against the rafters far above us and shattering into dust.

Ketterly and Daryl were there as stone rained down on us. “Time to fucking
go,
” Ketterly hissed, pulling me up by the armpit and dragging me towards the door. I caught a glimpse of Fallon, beset by three of the things, swinging a hunk of concrete in front of him like a club. Even supersized, he looked old. Tired. Already beaten. Not my problem. At the last second I stopped short of the exit and spun around.

“Fallon!” I shouted. “Cut and run! Come with us!”

He jerked his head halfway in my direction, then shook it.

“
This,
” he boomed, his voice as huge as he’d become, deep and painful and audible over the noise of the
dimma,
“
is my
house
!
”

He renewed his attack on the nearest
dimma
. I watched for another heartbeat and turned and ran.

They were all already in Daryl’s truck. Our pet hick was shaking,
eyes white and wide as he fumbled with his keys, dropping them on the floor of the cab. As I crashed up into the seat, practically in Mags’s bloody lap, I snarled two words and the engine roared into life.

“Go!”

The ease of throwing the Words around—of being able to cast without feeling the drain, without paying the price—was intoxicating. I imagined a life without the minor annoyances. Everything solvable with a few words. I pictured Gottschalk swathed in sheets, a man who hadn’t gotten out of bed in years.

Daryl slammed the truck into gear and it leaped forward, throwing us back into the seats. Behind us, I heard something almost like an explosion. A rain of pebbles scattered across the roof and windshield.

Then it was just the inky, silent night and the buzz of the engine. I could hear all of us panting. I could hear the grit of the tires on the pavement. I could hear the tap of Daryl’s ring on the steering wheel as his hands shook while he drove.

“Jesus fucked,” Ketterly finally whispered. “What in hell is going on?”

I swallowed dust. “They’re going to fucking end the world,” I said. “I told you.” I turned to look at him. “If you’re going to murder everyone, there’s no point in
subtlety,
is there?”

“Lem,” Mags said quietly. “Lem, what do we do now?”

I turned to look forward. “I don’t know,” I said. “But I know how to find out.”

21.
THE YELLOW-AND-BLACK POLICE
tape barring
Hiram’s front door wasn’t a problem. The unmarked police cars right out in front of the building and in the back alley were.

I was surprised to see them and stood for a moment in the shadows, nonplussed. I wasn’t used to cops giving two shits about me or
mine. People like Hiram and me, to the rest of the world, were seedy assholes. They could smell it on us, the short cons, the desperation. The cops hassled me plenty, but that was it. The idea that they might take an interest in Hiram’s death amazed me, and then I remembered the two cops who had died: Marichal. Holloway. The rest of the city might burn to the ground, but the cops were gonna keep a team sitting here just in case.

I didn’t worry about it. There wasn’t a problem that couldn’t be solved with the application of enough blood. I didn’t have to hesitate, to take stock of my physical condition. I didn’t have to worry about the last time I ate or whether I was going to pass out before completing the spell, causing an explosion.

A glance at Mags and he was bleeding.

I made up a spell on the spot. It was easy. Some of us had to memorize spells, could cast only what they’d committed to memory. The real trick was to memorize small things, then link them together. If you knew one Cantrip that bent the light and another Cantrip that fooled the ears, you could put together any sort of illusion on the fly just by changing a few words. Quick and dirty. Hacking, Hiram had called it. But it could be complex and elegant, too, if you worked at it.

I cast and felt Mags’s life passing through me, gloriously repellent.

“Come on,” I said, and started walking.

We passed right in front of the car. The two cops inside stared through us.

At the crime scene tape, I nicked my own thumb and gave it fourteen syllables, and Mags and I stepped through without breaking it. Fourteen syllables, but the spell didn’t cost much, and I barely felt the drain. I was high-energy anyway, topped up. I thought maybe my body had created
too much
blood, running on overdrive because it was used to being in a state of emergency all the time. We could have just torn them down, because what did I care if the police returned, sniffing around endlessly because two of their detectives were dead? But I was getting back into the swing of longer spells. More complex
spells. I was remembering bits and pieces of things I’d learned along the way. Things from Hiram. Things from other people. It was like flexing muscles.