We Are Not Good People (Ustari Cycle) (47 page)

People walking, growing tired, divesting themselves of their possessions.

The luggage thinned out as we got near the metallic shoreline, but we didn’t need its direction anymore. We found everyone in the ice-cold gray water lapping at the town, erasing it a millimeter at a time.

All of them were fully dressed, all of them weighed down by different things: logs, stones, backpacks filled with power tools. They’d slashed their wrists, mostly, though some had opted for the throat. Self-inflicted, to judge by the angles and the variety of blades on the ground or in the water. They’d lined up on the edge of the freezing Pacific and opened their veins and tipped backwards into the water one by one. Not a drop of blood anywhere to be seen.

We stood for a moment or two, just studying their bloated gray bodies. I was shivering, hard. I heard someone approach and turned to find Fallon next to me, hands thrust in his coat pockets, breath steaming.

“Collected,” he said. “The blood.”

I nodded. “Everywhere.”

I thought of Claire. Then unthought of her. The Ritual of Death had failed, but she was still marked for it in a way no one else could be. I didn’t know why. My education was incomplete because I’d gotten my Master killed.

My shivering became epic. My whole body jerked and twitched. “What . . . do we do . . . about . . . this?” I managed to chatter through my clicking teeth.

My legs went out from under me, but Mags was there, catching me easily under the shoulders and then heaving me up, supporting me.

“You should be inside, Mr. Vonnegan,” Fallon said, his hands strong and firm on my shoulders. “The
gulla
has brought you here. The thing you seek is here, somewhere. We cannot see it because
this is a trap
.”

I nodded. That made perfect sense. Or no sense at all. And Fallon was fading away anyway, turning into mist, and then I was passing out. It felt like I was falling into the water. A woman’s bloated face, peeling away from her skull a few inches under the gray water, stared up at me, her teeth showing through her frayed cheek like an awful smile.

36.
IN THE DREAM, AS ALWAYS,
Claire was wearing a bear costume, her leg a bloody mess, caught in a huge rusty trap bolted to the floor. Tiny flies swarmed the wound, laying eggs.

I WAS BACK IN
the motel. I could tell from the rotten-egg appearance of the water-damaged popcorn ceiling. Remy, Roman, and our three Bleeders were sitting around and smoking cigarettes. Fallon, Mags, and Billington were playing cards. I didn’t need to pay much attention to know that Melanie was winning. Mags’s face was screwed up into the red mask of anger he wore when he was losing, and Fallon was up against true grift. You didn’t win at cards with
idimustari
.

I lay still. Enjoying the silence, the space. I’d spent the last two years surrounded by people who were always looking at me like I was going to do something amazing at any moment, because I’d defeated Renar—if you could call near-total failure
defeating
somone. And ever since Billington had told everyone I’d brought Mags back to life—resurrected him—the Cult o’ Lem had picked up its suffocating pace. Since she’d started building my myth, it was like I was always surrounded by people, but no one looked directly at me. So it was nice to be ignored. I felt my body ache for a while. But I felt warmer. And I wanted a cigarette, which was a good sign. I didn’t know, with the whole town deserted, why we kept coming back to this shithole.

“Mr. Vonnegan,” Fallon said. “A moment.”

I took a deep breath and pushed myself up. Swung my legs over the edge of the bed. I felt like I’d been filled with molten copper. I stumped my way over to the table by the window where Fallon and Billington sat, their cards down. Fallon gestured at the window.

“We have visitors.”

I looked up. Two men wearing heavy overcoats and ridiculous fur caps were standing in the parking lot of the motel. As I stared, a woman blinked into existence. One second empty space, the next a striking older woman in an expensive fur that looked at a distance like it might still have the claws attached to the sleeves.

I’d seen this trick once before. Except the time I’d seen it, the demonstration had involved a vagrant bled dry for the spell, but there was no sign that these people had bled anyone. As I thought of the memory, he appeared. Still wearing the same white suit, still icy blond and almost invisible, he was so pale. Still thin and still mocking. He wore the same red shoes, too. I had only fragments of his teleportation spell in my memory. I probably would be able to figure out the rest if I wanted to. I hadn’t wanted to. Now I wished I had.

“Be ready for a fight,” I said.

“Jesus, you
think
?” Billington spat.

I considered my Asshole Army in miniature.

Melanie Billington was useless. She wouldn’t bleed. She considered herself too high up for that. She was shit with the Words. She knew some nifty
mu,
so in theory she could be of use. But she stuttered and warped Words in her mouth, spat out gibberish or spells that went awry. And not bleeding, she wouldn’t get off anything useful.

Remy and Roman were scrappers. They’d never done anything amazing, but they were like me and the other Tricksters: roaches. They survived. It wasn’t pretty, but I knew I could count on them to at least put up a fight.

Ev Fallon was
enustari
. He knew the Words and he knew how to use them. We were all scared shitless of Ev Fallon, and for good reason.

Pitr Mags had become a wild card. He still sneezed in the middle of reciting and caused minor explosions, but he’d been making progress with Fallon’s lessons, and ever since he’d been dead for five minutes, he’d been sharper, darker, more focused.

The three Bleeders were halfway dead.

Fallon could do something with them, though. The rest of us would just kill them. He kept staring out the window and nodded, once. Crisp.

“Fallon doesn’t bleed,” I said, my voice rust and dust. “Everyone else fuels their own.”

The Bleeders, reluctant, eyed the door for a few lingering seconds, until Roman glared back at them with an implied threat. I rolled up the sleeve of my right arm.

“That is Alfonse Alligherti,” Fallon said quietly. “Alfonse, you are forever picking the wrong side of things! Be alert. He will use a Compulsion.” He sighed almost sadly. “He always does.”

Gas in the air. Multiple streams of it.

“If they didn’t bring any Bleeders,” Billington said slowly, “who will they cast from?”

Fallon sighed again. “Us.”

I nodded. Before Renar, before everything,
enustari
never would have stooped to stealing gas from the likes of us. They’d have come with a dozen Bleeders, beefy men and women paid to fuel their spells. But back then they’d never have actually
fought
us, either—they would have ignored us. Now they weren’t ignoring us; come to fight Tricksters, it made sense for them to use our tricks. Nothing worked the way it used to.

I didn’t know many
enustari
. The ones I’d met were psychotic, murderous, and contemptuous of me and my kind. They were also usually too sure of themselves, surrounded by sycophants, the Charmed and Compelled. They were terrifying, but in all my dealings with them, they’d been arrogant and stupid, too. And these were no different. Bleeding out some poor son of a bitch so they could
wink in like fucking demigods. Then assuming we would all just kneel down and present our throats so they could wink back to wherever they’d come from.

I had a spell. I sliced my arm. Before I could speak, Mags was reciting. I turned, gas leaking out of me, and there was the huge son of a bitch, eyes closed and brow furrowed in the traditional Mags-is-trying-to-think expression. He spoke sixteen Words, thirty-six syllables. It was awful. Sloppy and loose, stuffed with noises that made sense only to Mags. Halfway through, I knew how I could have cut it in half, sliced off the fat. I felt the drain as he cast from me, nausea and yellow exhaustion, old familiar friends. At the same moment, I felt
him
as he filled up with it, the awful strength passing through him, golden and shivery. I wavered a little on my feet as my vision went dark, went up to the line of unconsciousness then steadied.

I staggered to the window.

“Clever,” Fallon said quietly as even more gas leaked into the air, thick, healthy streams of it, green with rot and horror. “Mr. Mageshkumar—clever. You have caught Perinine and Mugase by surprise. But Alligherti is Warded against such tricks as a matter of course.”

Outside, the woman and one of the first men to arrive—short and round, jowly and yellow-skinned under his fur cap and thick coat—were frowning, hands at their throats in unknowing mimicry. As I watched, the woman opened her mouth and said something. Or tried to. What came out was the distinct bleating of a donkey:
Ee-ore, ee-ore
.

I smiled slightly, swaying on my feet. It once amused Pitr Mags for six days straight to cast a
mu
that threw his voice, startling people as we walked the streets.
Cast it one more time, Lem, just one more, c’mon, please
. Six days with a thumbtack in my pocket, making Mags giggle, and I’d been anemic and half-dead, but it had been worth it to keep him happy. It made sense that this kind of donkey ridiculousness would be the first spell Mags wrote all on his own. Even if it was the worst piece of writing I’d ever heard.

The third man and the Negotiator offered their colleagues brief ice-cold glances of almost total contempt. Fallon took in a deep breath and whispered. I felt him pulling the gas in the air, knew he was casting, but couldn’t catch the Words he used. He spoke twenty-three syllables, but half of them were gibberish. Obfuscation. Slow—but secure. This was not waste but secrecy. I frowned in professional disapproval of such tactics.

The round man and white-haired woman, still braying as they tried to shake off Mags’s spell, dropped to the ground in a simultaneous collapse. I wondered why Fallon hadn’t gone after Alligherti, who seemed like the boss of this moment. There was a single fat second of silence between us, and then the old man spoke.

“In war, Mr. Vonnegan, it is always advisable to press your advantage—and never pass up low-hanging fruit.” I was suddenly creeped out and terrified to be in the same room as Fallon. He was, after all, one of those
ustari
who stayed in the shadows, whispering out death.

Outside, Alligherti spoke, eyes closed. I strained to feel him pulling on our gas, sucking us dry to kill us, but there was nothing. He wasn’t using our gas. He was casting from some other source, remote. Gas in the air but walled off from me, which meant there had to be something linking them to it, an Artifact. Everything was changing, and magic was starting to feel broken, too.

I thought of the designs we’d taken from Kal’s place. I thought of Fallon’s old workshop. A battery for magical energy, for blood, buried in some secret place and broadcasting. And the designs we’d taken had indicated the ability to broadcast that energy. How much gas had been stored? Two years now, the world had been breaking up. Two years of bloodbaths and massacres, two years of mass suicides and terrorist bombs, wars and assassinations. Two years of death on an epic, accelerated scale, stored somewhere.

“Jesus,” I whispered, “he’s got enough g—”

The room exploded. This happened in slow motion.

For a moment I didn’t know what was happening; I stood there with my mouth open, the word
gas
like syrup in it, spilling out slowly. I watched seams open up between the window and the wall, like they were being pulled apart. Light slipping in. The floor tilted subtly, and we all rose off the ground a few centimeters as if gravity had gotten tired of holding us down. There was a low rumble of noise under it all, like an endless train going by six miles away, the sound of an explosion slowed down.

Slow. I had experience with slow. Hiram’s lessons were still in my head, his theatrical voice, all boom and bombast, telling me about the Law of Perception, the Law of Volume. This was a second, a moment, and I was experiencing it in slow motion. I wondered why. Why blow us to hell but make it last?

Then I saw my answer.

The other Archmage, Alligherti, appeared in the room. Impeccable. He was swarthy, olive-skinned, but taut and healthy, not a scar on him. The idea of all that gas in a tank somewhere, always at your fingertips—fuck, I’d be casting
mu
to shave in the morning. I’d cast for
everything
if I didn’t have to bleed, or bleed someone else. The
freedom
of it.

Shame bloated inside me. Freedom. I’d spent years thinking I was the best guy in the room because I wouldn’t bleed anyone. I didn’t touch anyone. I didn’t do anything. And then I’d started bleeding people, and I remembered the first few months, feeling so powerful, so
free
.

It hadn’t lasted. I’d gotten used to it. It didn’t feel free anymore. It felt
normal
, and I twisted and itched against it. Freedom was a fucking moving target. I imagined myself pointing at one of our people and them tearing off a sleeve and opening a vein so I could cast anything and be just as strong afterwards.

Alligherti stood there surveying us, moving—from my perspective—normally. Or he was moving super-fast and we saw it as normal. Or something. He was a bear of a man, six feet, six three, wide in the shoulders, his hands wide and big with short fingers. A gold ring on every
finger—plain bands, no gems, no etchings. His face was round and jowly, his lips delicate and pouty. Big bags under his eyes. The sort of face that always looked sad. The sort of guy who stood silent in the background, being ignored, then said one Word that killed everybody.

Our eyes met. His were old. Yellow and drippy, faded. He looked mid-forties and strong as a bull in his suit and coat. His eyes were ancient.

Alligherti leaned forward, put his arms around Roman, and then they both winked out of the room. Just gone.