Trickster (35 page)

I shook myself. Started toward Ketterly—no time for anything fancy; I just needed to stop the son of a bitch from casting, and the easiest way to get that done was to acquaint Mr. Ketterly with the ancient magic of the fist.

I took a step toward him, then stopped. Renar. I looked at her. She looked like a doll, folded up and left sitting in the wheelchair. The easiest thing in the world, I thought suddenly, to stop her from casting. A hand over her dried, papery lips. Apply pressure. Wait. I saw myself doing that. Imagined the feel of her dry tongue against my palm. The pressure of her yellow eyes on me. Then I saw the Rite bursting into fire and violence, the whole place consumed, me and Claire and Mags dead. Or I saw Amir, nothing left to lose, breaking off his own casting and turning on me, directing more energy than I’d ever imagined at my head.

Tearing my eyes from the old crone, I threw myself back at Ketterly.

He startled and backed away from me, still casting. Slow with the Words. A lazy mage, he’d never really understood the grammar, the patterns. His hair was wild, sticking up from his head in sudden, sharp moves, like water disturbed by an earthquake and flash-frozen. The flecks of white and gray made him look crazy instead of wise. I forced myself into a shambling run; with so much fucking gas in the air, whatever Ketterly was going to cast was going to
hurt
.

I was a step away from him when he finished. And it did hurt.

A cannonball of air slammed into my chest. Lifted me up off my feet and sent me sailing back the way I’d come. Into the wall. Onto the floor. A good offensive spell, though it took him long enough.

I rolled away, closed my eyes, and hit the lights: two
syllables, a wave of warm, sickening power coursing through me, and the sun rose. Blinding white light. I heard Ketterly hiss a curse and I cracked my eyelids into a squint. The light burned my retinas immediately. I could just make out the edges of the world around me. I’d used the Cantrip before to startle and confuse, but I’d never had so much
power
in the air. A slow seeping wound gave you a flash that faded quickly. People being sucked dry at a rate of ten every minute gave you a fucking supernova in a cave.

Nearly blind, I felt my way toward Ketterly. Where he’d
been,
at least. When he spoke, I realized he was on the move.

“I made my deal, Vonnegan,” he said. “I thought maybe I could just get you out of here. I made my deal. The
biludha
doesn’t kill
everyone
. Leaves that one percent. I’m gonna
be
that one percent.”

The voice sounded like it was moving. Like he was circling around me, slipping in between the silky whisperings of Renar and Amir—Cal Amir’s voice distinct because of a stray line of stress in it as he struggled with my pet bear Mags. Skipping over the jagged edges of the screaming.

You stupid fuck,
I wanted to say.
What do you think’s gonna happen when it’s you and a bunch of shitheel Tricksters in an empty world teed off against every fucking
enustari
in the world? They just wanted Bleeders. Servants. Slaves.

Instead, I tried to quietly drift away from his voice, hands out in front of me. I started whispering Hiram’s
spell. The
hun-kiuba
. Slow time down to a crawl, except for you.

“Oh no you don’t,” Ketterly said.

The invisible cannonball clipped me, taking my feet out from under me. My teeth clicked together as I hit the floor again, the spell interrupted, and I felt the tiny bit of gas I’d siphoned off exploding around me, a firecracker.

“Stupid
bastard,
” Ketterly hissed. He was right behind me. A second later his hand slapped over my mouth and his arm wrapped around my neck, choking me pretty efficiently.

For a second, I was crushed under Ketterly’s heavy, flabby knees. His hot breath in my ear. His greasy coat sleeve under my chin, his callous, scarred hand pressed against my lips. He smelled bad.

Then the gun went off. Loud enough to cut through the cacophony.

And Amir stopped speaking.

There was a moment, fleeting, where I thought it would be okay. The screaming didn’t stop, but I could feel the flow of power around us change. It had been roiling and twisting in the air around us, pent up by invisible barriers. The barriers fell away, and for a second it was just raw energy hanging in the air, unstructured. Chaos. And I thought,
Shit, maybe it just dissipates. Maybe it just collapses and disappears.
I’d never been around so much fucking power. I didn’t know anything about it and maybe it was different on this scale—

And then it all went to hell.

The screams suddenly leaped in volume, like some of the girls above us had been asleep and were now awake. There were three more gunshots in quick succession and Ketterly dived backward from me, his arm disappearing, his hand tearing away from my face. The energy in the air began to recoil, to collapse inward, like a star forming in an alternate dimension. I could see it clearly; I’d always been good at my calling. I could see it would collapse inward until it reached a mysterious inner pressure, and then it would burst outward, entropic and violent. Without any spell to guide it, without the will of the practitioner to form it, it would just burn. Consume. Destroy.

Still blind, I stood up. I thought of Claire. Of all the dozens of Claires chained up, screaming their heads off. Waiting for someone to save them.

“Mags!” I shouted. “Time for you to
go
!”

I didn’t wait to see if Mags obeyed me. There was no time. I started struggling forward. I didn’t know how much time there was before the blow. The universe was unpredictable. Seconds? A minute? Could I get to Claire and out—could I do
anything
—before we were vaporized?

Then it changed. I heard voices. Casting. Reciting. The
Biludha-tah-namus,
picking up the threads, backtracking a few lines and pulling it back into motion. And I felt the immense volcano of power all around us stop its collapse, hang still for a moment, and then, incredibly,
impossibly,
it started to sort itself out again.

Two voices. Renar and someone picking up where Amir had left off. I crawled through the sun-bright cloud of light I’d created and realized the voices sounded similar. One youthful and clear, like a bell ringing. A voice that made my cock twitch and my breathing stutter. The other a dry piece of ancient sandpaper. Irritating and horrifying. But both voices the same.

Renar and her Glamour.

For a second, I was stunned. This was balls. This was
brilliance
. Creating an artificial version of yourself to cast a two-person Rite. Nothing I’d ever learned had hinted this was possible, but then, my teacher had been a low-level confidence man and I’d been a shitty student.

And I thought about Renar’s Other. It was the most realistic Glamour I’d ever encountered. Pitch-perfect. With so many of her descendants chained up above us, it had to be. Perfected over years, perfected to make life easier for her apprentice. I’d half expected to feel something if I touched it, and derided myself as an asshole for thinking it, but suddenly I wondered if it was true. To fool the universe, it had to be. This wasn’t a Glamour. This was something more. Something
better
.

I squinted, and there they were. Renar like a sack of potatoes. Her Glamour, fully binary at this point, staring at me with hatred. Perfect posture. Perfect tone. So real I wanted to reach out and strangle her.

“Mags!” I screamed over the roar and wail, over the
boiling power that floated like a cloud of vaporized magma, everywhere, searing, distracting. “Pitr!”

I heard him scream something back. I couldn’t tell where he was. I couldn’t
see
him.

All I could think to do was buy time, stretch out Renar’s resources. Throw wrenches like crazy and hope for the best. I thought about my flash spell, that if a tiny Cantrip like that soaks up enough gas to go fucking supernova, a dozen Cantrips, fifty, would maybe soak up enough power to fuck up the
biludha
.

Why not? It was the only play I could see: steal her gas. Steal every bit of it, and starve her ritual.

“Cast!” I shouted. “Cast
everything
! Every fucking spell you have!”

I was a fucking hero.

And then I thought,
Fuck, if a Cantrip’s going to soak her, Bosch’s spell will fucking
ruin
it for everyone,
and I started once again to speak the Words to Hiram’s
hun-kiuba
.

Don’t stop,
I said to myself.
Don’t stop reciting. For anything.

I crawled around as I breathed out words. It was a small space, and I just kept crawling and crawling, blind and deafened by the silent explosion around us, but never hit a wall. Or Mags. Or Renar. When Ketterly jumped on my back, I was almost glad to know I hadn’t been dropped into a void made of bright white light and the sound of my own strangled voice.

He tried to get a choke hold on me, but I managed
to shove my hand in place over my windpipe, and kept casting. Kept speaking the Words Hiram had wanted me to speak for a decade. Felt the power flowing into me again. Craved it. All those people dying above me, bursting as they were being squashed, all their energy flowing down into me, spilling over me. It felt
wonderful
. I threw up at the thought, through my own words all over Ketterly’s arms.

Ketterly panted into my ear and squeezed as hard as he could. It got hard to breathe. I kept spitting out the syllables, filling up with power. It roared into me with every word. An impossible amount. Enough to burn me to ashes from the inside, yet just a trickle of what Renar was going to unleash.

We fell backward, my weight on his chest. I heard him grunt in my ear. I wondered why he didn’t cast again but figured he’d been warned to keep it to a minimum, to use only his own gas. So as not to queer Renar’s casting, like I was trying to do. I felt him shift underneath me. Saw his free hand in my peripheral vision a moment before it lunged toward my neck, sinking the tiny blade of his penknife into me.

With a grunt that I heard perfectly, he yanked the blade with a jerk of his arm and I
felt
it tear through skin and muscle and veins and nerves. A flash of the worst burning pain I’d ever felt on the side of my neck under my ear. Worse than the pain Amir had visited on me earlier. Worse than anything.

Jesus, Ketterly, you fucking murdered me
.

Blood poured out of me. I barely felt the loss. As
blood flowed out, power was flowing in. I kept whispering Bosch’s spell.

And then Ketterly started casting. Using
my
blood.

It was an incredible sensation. Power flowing in, a torrent, a river. Power being leached out of me. I was exhausted. I was immensely strong. I was giddy. I was tethered to D. A. Ketterly as intimately as I’d ever been tethered to anyone. I could feel his heart beating, his exhalations. His panic. His dread. His desperation. I was dizzy. It was a race. I was casting the longest spell I knew and I was trying to get it down before I fucking bled out, every ragged beat of my heart.

The light was starting to fade. Or I was dying and it was just my soul bursting through the cracks. My soul wouldn’t be some bright, silvery thing. It wouldn’t float and soar. It would be a humming black cube, heavy. Heavier than it should be. Affected by dark gravity no one else had experienced.

I could see Mags. He was kneeling over Claire. Hunched over, elbows moving. Trying to pull her loose. It wasn’t going to work. The Rite was holding her in place.

Renar was getting close. I didn’t know the Rite, but I could sense the cadence coming. Twenty words? Fifteen?

I didn’t feel any pain. I’d gone numb and weak. I was breathing the Words of Hiram’s spell, just exhaling them gently.

I looked up.

Above us, the flaming line of dying women was just a few dozen away from the bottom. Away from Claire. I’d let most of them die. This surprised no one. I wondered if Claire was lost to hysterics or if she knew I was still here. If she knew how badly I’d fucked everything up. How badly I’d failed to save her. Or Mags. Or, fuck,
me,
bleeding to death like a fucking sucker.

Ten words? Twelve?

I felt my strength sagging. Leaking out of me. The power around me continued to flow into me, a golden river of shit. Physically, I fell back against Ketterly. I was numb. My heartbeat felt light and random, like an afterthought. My vision got cloudy, darkness edging in from the sides. I let my hands fall away from Ketterly’s arms. I lay back against him, exhausted.

I kept whispering the
hun-kiuba
.

Renar kept casting both ends of the
biludha
. Five words? Three? Three. I decided. I looked up. Smiled as I cast.

The girl in the sneakers

I had saved her I had saved her

I had saved her by doing nothing

I had saved her by doing nothing

nothing nothing at all.

Two words.

I shut my eyes.

One.

The last word of Hiram’s spell slurred out of me.