Trickster (33 page)

I focused on the noise.

The noise was right outside the door. Shouting. Heavy thuds. A mix of voices. As I sat there staring at the door it shuddered, leaping a little as something crashed into it.

I thought of the
udug,
of it telling me what was coming. Found I couldn’t feel it in my hand anymore, like a stain.

Something crashed into the door again. There was a distinct cracking sound. I tried to strain against my bonds again. I tried to shift the chair again. My whole body convulsed. Every muscle seized painfully. I slowly relaxed, breathing hard through my nose. My head hanging down. Eyes closed. I’d become so used to the thick tape across my mouth, I’d almost forgotten about it.

I opened my eyes. Looked down past my own feet at the floor. Tendrils of smoke, white and dissolving, crept up between the floorboards.

First I thought,
Good, someone is burning the place down.
Then I thought,
Shit, someone is burning the place down.

The door exploded inward, spraying the room with splinters. It smacked against the wall and hung off one hinge. A man appeared where the door had been, sailing through the air. He hit the floor a foot or two away from me and rolled to an ungentle stop. He was
bald and pale and fat. Had once been well dressed. One of Renar and Amir’s Bleeders. He looked like he’d been doing a
lot
of bleeding.

I looked up. The doorway was empty. I blinked. Pitr Mags filled the doorway, his hot, rapid breathing thunderous. His jacket and shirt had been torn open as if an animal with claws had attacked him. He was bloody and dirty. For a moment, framed in the doorway, he
looked
like a wild animal. Eyes flashing. Feral mouth hanging open. Hands curled into fists.

“Lem,” he hissed, charging in and sinking down to his knees at my feet. He reached around me and started working on the knots around my hands, his face pressed against my chest. It burned painfully, my shredded muscles tender. “Me and Ketterly and Fallon came,” he whispered. “No one else would. I think Renar was expecting an army, not a couple of guys. Fallon cast something and we slipped right in. No trouble. No one’s here anyway. A bunch of Bleeders. No Renar, no Amir!”

He laughed. It was a pure, spontaneous sound. Mags thought he was winning. I wanted to tell him that when you showed up for a fight and no one was there to fight you, you’d already
lost
.

My hands slid free from the rope and fell heavily at my sides. I felt like I’d been chewed.

“There’s gas in the air, huh, Lem? You can feel it, huh? Someone’s got the spigot
open
.”

He was excited. Affection for Mags and his stupidity flooded me. For a moment, I couldn’t feel anything
else. No pain. No weakness. Just a pure love for Pitr Mageshkumar, my nonsexual crush, the child I’d never had, the pet dog I’d never had.

I tried to raise an arm, to pat Mags on the shoulder. My arms wouldn’t work. I was broken. Amir had broken me. With a fucking Cantrip three words long.

Mags untied my ankles and pulled away from me, grinning his stupid monkey grin. I didn’t move. He frowned, working through it, and muttered a quick bunch of words and I was free of the chair. The invisible threads that had laced through my skin dissolved and I slid off the chair to my right, hitting the floor hard. I convulsed, trying to cry out, but couldn’t get my lungs to cooperate. Smoke floated lazily up around me.

“
Fuck,
” Mags said, the word just drooling from his mouth like lazy air. A moment later my neck muscles screamed as he pulled my head into his lap, pointing my face more or less up toward his troubled, grit-smeared face.

I wanted to say,
Don’t worry. I’ll die here but I’m okay with that because I am tired and it hurts to breathe. And we’re all going to die in a few moments anyway.
And that I was glad to die with him, the only friend I’d ever had. That I was sad to have let Claire die. All the other girls, too, all the ones the Skinny Fuck had kidnapped. All I could do was frown at Mags’s shadowed face.

Abruptly, he let my head drop into his lap. Pulled his sleeve up to the elbow, revealing several fresh, weeping wounds. Tore one open with his fingers, a fresh stream of dark blood pouring down his arm. He
started to recite, rocking a little as he did so. A concentration exercise. Like he was three years old, rhyming out the fucking times tables. As he spoke my pain faded. Remained, lurking under a layer of gauze, but suddenly manageable. I could move again, and laboriously extracted myself from Mags’s lap.

I marveled at this. Being a Trickster had always meant being a parasite. You pushed your pincered head deep into someone’s flesh and sucked them dry. Even if they volunteered, even if they exposed their own bellies and invited you to live inside them, it was still parasitic. It was still taking something from someone.

This was different.

Mags, giving me his own energy. Just enough to get me back to exhausted and ruined, instead of nearly dead. I still didn’t want to move. I wanted to remain curled up with my head in his lap and sleep until the world ended and released me. But he’d just bled to help me, and I owed him something. So I focused my eyes on him. Was surprised to find tears in them, an overwhelming feeling of affection pulsing in me. I loved this freak. My only friend, but when you had Pitr Mags, you didn’t need more than one. “Good to see you, Magsie.”

I thought, if these are the last ten minutes of my life, not a bad way to go. I suddenly wished Hiram had made it, too.

His ears perked forward like a puppy. “Good to see
you,
Lem.” He got to his feet, breathing hard.

I slipped an arm around him, wincing from the
agony that remained in spite of his spell. We limped together out of the room. What had I said to Amir? What had I convinced him of? I couldn’t remember, but suspected that, in the end, I’d scribbled the Cantrip out for him. Somewhere inside I knew I had, in shaky, big-looped letters, numb from pain and despair.

The blood in the air was immense. I’d heard of huge rituals in the past. Battles staged. Cults organized. Mass murders scripted. An
enustari
in India had once engineered the capture and slow bleeding of over a hundred British soldiers to start a
biludha
into motion. Not so long ago an
enustari
had caused an Airbus A320 to crash in São Paulo, killing 181 people to kick-start a ritual. This had happened over and over again, history absorbing the tragedies and explaining them, investigating them, eschewing anything that didn’t make sense—because magic didn’t exist.

I’d never felt even a hint of the power I felt being drawn now.

Claire would be consumed, burned up by the spell. She would die in pain. Suffering. Alone. Thinking maybe I hadn’t even
tried
for her.

We stepped out into the hall. I hadn’t been on the upper floors of the house before. It was a fussy-looking place. The walls were paneled in dark wood that looked like it had a hundred years’ worth of wax on it. The floors were old, wide planks. Thick, dusty-looking runners covered them, heavy things from a previous age. Right outside the door a small piece of furniture and what had once been a white and blue vase had
been smashed to pieces. Deep marks had been gouged into the walls. Pitr Mags, who was usually scared of his own shadow, airing it out for a change.

Down,
I thought.
Head down.
Claire was down. Renar and Amir would be down.

The hallway was endless and dark. Doors on either side. Heavy black doors with silver handles. I did not want to know what was behind any of them. The staircase had seen some battle: It was a wide, curving number. The railing had been knocked out of place and hung, useless, like a twig clinging to a branch. A hole about the size of Mags’s head had been punched in the drywall halfway up.

The silence was total. Every noise we made climbing down seemed to echo back at us extravagantly. As we cleared the landing, a sizzling, crackling noise filled the void. As we stepped onto the first floor, the crackling noise resolved into a wall of fire: All the curtains and some of the furniture were burning. A slow, black-smoke kind of fire. It would be burning several years from now, moving from the walls to the rugs, to the floorboards, back to the walls.

We found Fallon in what must have been the formal dining room. The huge mahogany table in the middle was ablaze; the orange flames reached up toward a crystal chandelier, making it sway this way and that from the rising heat. Two Bleeders lay prone on the floor. One was on fire, the black material of his nice suit licked by bluish flames. Flames licked at one of Fallon’s sleeves, too, but he didn’t seem to notice.
He looked like a ghost: gray and skinny and dry. Like tinder. Like he might just combust.

“We are too late,” he said in a dull tone. “The Rite is begun.” His voice sounded red with self-loathing. “I looked forward to my work. I woke up the other day, the day you visited with me, and my heart was light, because I had so much work to do. I was a fool. And now I am not a fool and I am merely useless.”

I staggered over and almost fell into him, taking him by the lapels of his jacket. I could smell the fabric burning. “We have to
try,
” I said, begging. I needed help. Fallon was
enustari.
He knew spells I’d never heard of. I thought of Claire, burned up, swelling like a deep-sea fish brought up to the surface and exploding into power, then instantly vacuumed into Renar’s spell. I needed him.

He shook his head. “Mika Renar and Cal Amir, together, are too strong. If we could have disrupted the Rite before they began . . . Now it is too late.”

He was right, of course. Renar would be reciting the
biludha,
and Amir would just be there to hurl death at anyone who might interfere.

I let go and stepped back. Mags was there to stop me from falling over. “Then fuck you. I’m going to see if I can’t stop the end of the world.”

Fallon sighed, then suddenly noticed he was on fire. With an almost amused-sounding word he snuffed the flames on his arm. He hadn’t bled again, but this time there was so much gas in the air, he didn’t need any fancy Fabrications. And the
biludha
wouldn’t notice
a trickle of blood stolen away here and there. I wondered, for a second, how big a spell you would have to cast on that gas to make a dent in the ritual. If I knew any big enough. “Those of us who know the art may survive, Mr. Vonnegan. I’ve deduced that the
biludha
does not, as your
gasam
proposed, kill
everything
.” He looked up and his smile was awful. “Just
almost
everything. We
ustari
may survive. To fight on.”

Anger swelled inside me and for a moment I was able to stand on my own, shaking. “Fuck you
again,
you cowardly cunt. A dead world filled with
us
? Are you fucking kidding?”

I wanted to strike him. I sensed he would let me, that he wouldn’t put up any magical defense or punishment. That he
wanted
to be hit.

Sirens in the air. Too close for the fire department all the way out here. Police. I thought of the unmarked cars outside Hiram’s. Two dead detectives and a serial killer, I supposed, got all the resources you needed to follow even a couple of
ustari
out into the woods.

Fallon suddenly clarified. He glanced in the general direction of the sirens and nodded to himself. “Go,” he said. “
This
I can do. Go, and I will deal with the police.”

For a moment I still shook with fury, still wanted to slap him. Then I deflated, and the rage leaked out of me, replaced by exhaustion. As Fallon moved past me, trailing his own black smoke from his singed arm, I spun and almost fell over again.

“Wait! Where’s the entrance? How do I get
in
?”

“I do not know,” he called over his shoulder. He was moving with an agility I remembered from my youth, tearing off his jacket as he walked. “I designed the
artifact,
Mr. Vonnegan. Its entrance has been obscured.”

He stepped out of the room, and was gone.

“Fuck,” Mags muttered. I thought of Ketterly. Nowhere to be seen. The smart play. The place was going nuclear and the smart play was to get going. The smart play was to be anywhere but here. Go and set your affairs in order, if there was time. If there wasn’t time, at least you might hope that every step you took would equal one more second of existence when the ritual paid off. I could feel the level of energy swelling around us already—a quarter, a half, three-fourths of the way through?

I spun around, eyes searching. The smoke clung to everything like slime. The roaring of the fire and nothing else. No shouting, no screams. People were being used as spiritual batteries somewhere nearby, but all I had to prove that was the buzzing of blood in the air.

I closed my eyes. Tried to imagine myself as Mika Renar. A century old. Paralyzed. A fucking red dragon in her lair, licking her eternal wound.

Paralyzed. The whole fucking house was stairs. You could cast a little and float around, sure, but what a fucking bother. Instead, why not just be able to get wherever you wanted to go right from the room you did your business in?

Opening my eyes, I found myself alone in the burning room with Mags. “The study,” I said. “Has to be.”

We tore through the house. The fire was spreading. Mags sailed ahead of me even though he didn’t know where he was going. My lungs burned and my limbs were jelly. My muscles ached beneath Mags’s magical anesthetic. I sucked in smoke and coughed it back out, shambling along, trying to sync up the flaming, smoky house with my memory. We were coming from the opposite end of the house; Amir had walked me in through the front. We ran past the study door twice before I realized it. The door was exactly as I remembered it: It looked like leather, black and studded. Not at all like a door except size and shape.

It had no handle. It was shut tight and didn’t move when Mags put his shoulder to it. Fucking
ustari
. Nothing was simple enough that it couldn’t be replaced by a fucking spell. Another rolled-up sleeve, another slice for Mags, and two words and a shoulder later the door burst inward, knocked off its hinges. Mags had only one way. Loud.