Trickster (14 page)

“Eleven hours. Mr. Mageshkumar brought you.” He winced suddenly. “He has been casting a Glamour of a glowing . . . bird. Constantly.”

I smiled a little. My pulse was fast and wobbly, but I felt okay. “Sorry, Hiram,” I said. “Thank you.”

He shrugged, turning toward his mobile bar, stuffing his worry stone into his pocket. “I didn’t do anything except admit you. And for that you can thank the puppylike charm of Mr. Mageshkumar.”

I scrubbed my stiff hair. “Has D. A. Ketterly called or stopped by?”

Hiram paused, a decanter of something rust-colored
in one hand. He turned his head slightly toward me. “Ketterly? What in the world is that charlatan doing for you?”

I shrugged. “Looking for somebody. What else does Ketterly
do
?”

Hiram went back to mixing his drink. “Not that girl, I trust. You are a confused boy, Mr. Vonnegan, but I never took you for
stupid
.”

Stretching, I shrugged and told him the short version of the story since I’d left him. He turned and leaned against the bar, holding a tall glass with a wedge of orange jammed onto the rim. His white beard was perfectly trimmed and looked exactly as it always did, as if he’d contrived to stop it from growing permanently.

Which he might have.

For a few seconds, he just stared at me. Then he set the glass down behind him and strode for the door, dry-washing his hands as he walked. “Mr. Vonnegan, we should have a discussion.”

I watched him leave the room with his usual strut, but I didn’t follow him immediately. I knew where his office was, and
that
was a less comfortable memory. I wasn’t interested in entering that tiny, clogged space with Hiram’s aftershave and strange brown cigarettes thick in the air. Feeling leaden, I thought it a much better idea to just sit on the couch and breathe until Hiram decided to tell me his news out here.

A moment later Bosch’s head reappeared, peering around the door at me. “Mr. Vonnegan? I think perhaps time is a concern here.”

Reminding myself that Hiram was perhaps my only friend aside from Mags, I hurried after him.

Hiram’s office. Four feet by eight feet—a closet, technically, with no windows. Hiram did not use his apartment as it was originally intended; the living room he’d made his study, the bedroom he’d made into a museum of stolen artifacts, magical and otherwise. The closet off the bedroom/museum was his office. The only rooms that retained their original purpose were the kitchen and bathroom.

Mags had followed us in, his hand a bloody mess from nicking himself to cast his new favorite toy, and—seeming to fill fully half the space in the little cove—leaned against a towering pile of books and papers that might have grown over a bookshelf or two, like fungus. The books had no titles, handwritten and hand-bound in an age before computers and photocopiers, but they were sadly familiar from my unhappy time studying under Hiram’s terse tutelage. I’d retitled each in my head. There was
Far Too Many Words to Create Simple Illusions
and
Endless Repetitions Written by Assholes
. A few were even useful, like
Ancient Tome of Useful Three-Word Cantrips
and
An Explanation of Everything That Can Go Wrong When Casting a Spell Which Is Everything,
subtitled
All Elderly Tricksters Are Maimed
.

Fond memories.

Mags hummed, studying his hand, happy with the universe. I was jammed in behind Hiram’s plump torso as my
gasam
sat at the tiny child’s desk he’d installed
in the room. Everything in Hiram’s world burst with
things,
endless piles and rows of things, trinkets, pebbles, toys, jewelry, books, shoes, tiepins, hats, statues, boxes inside boxes inside boxes, maps, paintings, pens—the universe of nonliving things was fully represented in miniature in Hiram’s apartment, like an anti-zoo.

He’d spread several sheets of white paper on the desk before him. They were covered in sketches of runes, the ancient glyphs used in conjunction with the Tongue to cast and bind the more complicated spells, as well as copious bursts of his own thin, shaky handwriting.

“Because I am curious,” he said, his voice back to its rich, schoolteacher timbre, “I made some notes from memory about the marks on Ms. Mannice. It is not often you can study even the slightest work of an
enustari
. I transcribed what I could remember of the small patch of, um,
skin
we were able to observe, and began researching what I could about the specific combinations.”

I nodded. Hiram liked to lecture.

“She appeared to be marked all over her body.”

I nodded again. “Inside of her ears, between her fingers—everywhere.”

“Yes. Difficult to replicate, and a serious investment of time and blood, so they naturally want her back. And there are no repetitions, none that I could find in the small sample I had. Which is—”

“Unusual,” I finished, leaning over his shoulder to
study the glyphs he’d copied. Most markings were brief and terse, designed simply to tie magical energy to a specific person or object—rarely more than a few runes, often repeated ad infinitum. Even the small sampling Hiram had copied from memory were more glyphs than I’d seen in one place in my small experience.

He leaned back. “Yes. Mr. Vonnegan, this is a major,
major
piece of work. This is no Cantrip. This is not even a normal, everyday epic ritual.” He paused, and I could see him looking at me in my peripheral vision, his white-ringed face pink and round. “You said there were more women? Marked like Ms. Mannice?”

I nodded. The glyphs sketched on the paper seemed to be unhappy, and I imagined I could feel them radiating energy at me, pulsing. “Dozens,” I said. I thought of the police photographs. “Maybe more. His memories were jumbled.”

Hiram sighed. “I would imagine there were. Perhaps hundreds.”

I frowned. “There hasn’t been a
biludha
cast at that scale in seventy years.”

“Nineteen forty-five, to be exact,” he said absently. A thin line of anxiety formed like sediment between my spine and my skin. “This piqued my interest. I am no Archmage, but I have studied this art my entire life. Mr. Vonnegan, I have seen these glyphs before, briefly.”

I glanced down at the bald spot on his round head. Hiram had not changed since I’d met him. He was simultaneously old and fragile and filled with energy and life. “Where?”

“My own
gasam
was a powerful
enustari
. More skilled than you or I. More deeply read, less afraid of . . . consequences. Faber Gottschalk pursued such knowledge—forbidden and dangerous spells. Not for his own casting; he was no fool. Simply for knowledge. He kept old grimoires of ancient spells, spells not cast in a thousand years. One of which I remember well, one which required linked sacrifices, marked with runes similar to this.” He sighed, leaning back. “An old, old spell.”

“What was it?”

He paused for a moment before responding. “The
Biludha-tah-namus,
” he said simply, sounding old. “The Ritual of Death.”

Behind me, I heard Mags suck in breath. “Fuck,” he whispered.

When I turned, I found him frowning down at a spot of blood on his shirt as he rubbed it with his thumb.

•   •   •

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 of it was making me woozy. I let it warm in my hands.

We were in Hiram’s little-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, feeling defeated and unhappy.

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 just 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. 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 a little 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, and I forced myself to reply through my thick thoughts.

“That’s a lot of heavy lifting,” I said.

He 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.” He looked at me. “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 just like everyone else.” He sighed again. “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
can,
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 suddenly 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 . . .”