We Are Not Good People (Ustari Cycle) (67 page)

I remembered Pitr grabbing me by the shoulders in another time line, telling me I couldn’t tell them where Claire was. I clamped my teeth together and hoped I had some tricks left.

Fallon sighed, conveying the irritated affection of a man whose patience was tried by fools. “I can, if need be, Compel you, Mr. Vonnegan.”

I nodded. “You’re . . . going to . . . have to,” I ground out, my voice thick and ragged as the silver leash squeezed.

My mind raced over ideas. I could gas up a little, and either Fallon couldn’t sense it in the air like a squirming cloud of energy anymore or he didn’t care, because the other side of it was, I couldn’t cast. The Words got stuck in my throat. And soon Fallon was going to cut himself—or
me
—and cast a Charm or a Compulsion, or he was going to pull another fucking gadget from his pockets that he would insert into my ear and it would wriggle in and turn me into a fucking zombie slave and that would be that.

“He’s in the apartment,” I managed to squeeze out, my own pulse pounding in my head. “I told him to hide. In . . . the . . . closet.”

The silver leash tightened until I couldn’t breathe as Fallon studied me with that half-smile.

“No, he is not,” he finally said, sighing heavily. He began walking back towards me. “Now I will have to bleed you, and Compel you, and then I will be forced to punish both you and Mr. Mageshkumar. Which is unfortunate. I
like
Mr. Mageshkumar. He is rather like a trained dog, yes? I recall our teaching sessions. Very pleasant. He is a man who has no deceit in him, which is refreshing. And he was so conscientious about his lessons! I recall when we were studying the Binding Ritual, he almost had it! And almost, I suspect, is—”

He stopped, and as my consciousness began to recede in strangled waves, red pulses in my eyes, he stared at me again.

He chuckled. “Oh, Mr. Vonnegan, don’t tell me—”

Dying twice and coming back,
I thought grimly,
seemed to improve a man, and Pitr was better with the Words than he had been
.

Except, Fallon didn’t
know
that.

Beneath us, there was a deep, shaking rumble. It went on and on, second after second, mutating rapidly into a high-pitched grinding noise that kept getting higher- and higher-pitched until it seemed to fade away. But I had a feeling it was still there, fluttering my heart valves and lungs, just too high up on the register for me to hear.

My vision had pinned down to a hazy tunnel. I couldn’t breathe. Fallon just stood there, suddenly blackly austere, chewing his lip and watching me suffocate.

“
Fekete kutya,
” he said, grimacing. Then he pushed his free hand into his coat pocket and a second later, without transition, we were in the parking garage under Elsa’s building.

I stared around, smiling. A warm bloom of pride, maybe, spread through my chest.

Pitr Mageshkumar,
I thought,
today you are a man
.

I wanted to jump and shout for him. I wanted to let the stupid bastard give me one of his patented bone-crushing hugs. It wasn’t
right,
that Pitr would pull something like this off and not be able to give me that aw-shucks grin while dancing on his tiny feet like an embarrassed schoolboy.

The
kurre-nikas
had come to life. I dropped to my knees and put my left hand uselessly up to the silver wire, tugging feebly at it. Through the pinhole, I could see a faint blue glow suffusing all the cables, similar to the faerie light I’d summoned to reveal runes and other hidden things. Runes covered the walls, flickering in and out of solidity as if they existed in more than one plane, as if they were slipping back and forth, first in one time line, then another, or maybe all time lines at once.

The work was immense. The runes were precise and tiny and covered the walls and floor and all of the cable and other components, written by hand in a steady, unwavering line. I’d never seen so much written work, all of it Bound, infused into the mechanics of the Fabrication. It must have taken months. It must have taken months and endless bleeding, endless.

Pitr Mags was nowhere to be seen.

57.
“ACH
,” FALLON SPAT, A RAW
sound of disgust brought up from his chest. “This, this is a waste of time.” He scanned the area. “Mr. Mageshkumar!” he shouted. “I commend you on your first successful Binding! I must admit I am surprised. But not unpleasantly so!”

Jesus fucking Christ
, I thought dimly. This was different from Renar’s brand of evil. This was a guy who’d been devouring souls in order to survive for so long he didn’t think twice about it. He didn’t have any bad feelings towards us. He was just fucking
irritated
that we were complicating his merry day of genocide and revenge followed by a calming evening of tea, Fabrication, and the bleeding of acquaintances.

“Reveal yourself, Mr. Mageshkumar. I know you are not as foolhardy as your friend here. Who is well, as you can see!” Fallon glanced back at me, and his face registered exasperation as he realized he had just contradicted himself. He muttered something, closing his eyes. A second later, the silver wire loosened, and blood rushed back to my
brain as I sucked in a chestful of damp, cold air. Immediately, I began coughing.

Fallon waited, turning slowly as his old gray eyes scanned the gloom. Then he sighed and looked down at his shiny shoes, the black leather like mirrors. “
Stupid
man,” he said to no one. Then he turned and looked back at me. “Mr. Vonnegan, I am afraid your new career will begin a bit earlier than expected. Attend to me, please.”

The silver leash tugged at me gently. Still fighting for each breath, I staggered to my feet and started towards him. I wasn’t sure if I was volunteering or if I was being compelled by the Artifact. It didn’t matter much. This would be, if something creative didn’t occur to me first, the rest of my miserable existence: the leash, Fallon’s smooth politeness, the occasional choking hazard.

“Kneel,” Fallon said absentmindedly. I recognized the tone of the in-charge, the
enustari
who couldn’t fathom
not
being obeyed. Fallon had always had an air of command about him, an air of aristocracy. It was just that he’d never had a fucking leash around my neck before. Even when he’d been playing me for a fool, working around the world to bleed the crowds for Renar’s
kurre-nikas
while pretending to be my reluctant Wise Man, available for counsel and advice and the occasional murder of his fellow Archmages, he’d always had the expectation that he would be obeyed, listened to, worried over.

I peered up at him through eyes that felt red and burst. “How old are you, then?”

Fallon was affixing the other end of the leash to his wrist to free up both hands. He snorted. “I am six hundred and thirty-three years old. I was born a sixth daughter to a poor man and was set out in the woods to die of exposure. Or so I have been told. And here I am, six and a half centuries later.” The knot finished, he reached into his coat and extracted a straight razor. It had a pearl handle and looked strangely familiar.

“Mika,” he said with a shake of his head. “You see how I could never take her seriously? Her power lay in her cruelty. Mika was willing to do
anything
. People feared her because of it. But her ideas . . . the
tah-namus
! So
unnecessary
. And all to avoid slumming, as she saw it. The wrong type of body. The wrong
class.
Silly woman.” He sighed. “I could not openly oppose her. She had gathered too many powerful, stupid
ustari
around her banner. And she was dangerous in battle, when she was prepared.”

The world was dead, and Fallon didn’t seem to care one way or another.

He took hold of my greasy, unkempt hair and pulled my head back to expose my neck, then laid the cold steel of the blade against it.

“Mr. Mageshkumar!” he shouted. “The spell I will cast will bleed Mr. Vonnegan deeply. I cannot swear he will survive. If you would save him, I would reveal myself!”

The tortured grammar, I thought, would just confuse Pitr. I was as good as dead while he puzzled out.

“If you had the whole immortal thing solved,” I asked, my throat burning, “why let Renar do it?”

Fallon sighed, looking around the dark for any sign of Pitr. “I will admit, Mr. Vonnegan, that after so many years, this did start to seem
easier
. Especially since someone else had done most of the work. But as I said, stopping Mika and her confederates would not have been easy, and carried with it the risk of defeat. I examined the odds, and I made my choice.” He nodded, once, firmly. “Mr. Mageshkumar! Last opportunity!”

Silence greeted us.
Good for you, Pitr,
I thought. I’d been worried he was going to try something ridiculous and Mags-like by trying to attack the man who was, after all, the most powerful
enustari
in the world now.

Fallon sighed. “Very well, then.” He looked down at me, his face almost kindly. “Mr. Vonnegan, it has been a pleasure.”

I smirked. “Fuck you.”

He nodded. “Do not move; do not speak.” And though I didn’t feel anything, I knew, with the silver leash around my neck, that I would not be able to.

The blade was sharp and well cared for, and cut me with a gentle nudge from Fallon. He didn’t slit my throat entirely, just precisely opened the carotid artery so that a warm cascade of my blood swarmed out in gentle waves. The shock burned through me, and my nervous system went into instinctive overdrive. But I couldn’t move. I just knelt there, bleeding. I could already feel a tingling drain in the center of my body, that shivery, exhausted feeling I’d once known so well. The feeling of bleeding to death in slow motion. Except this wouldn’t be over the course of weeks or months but minutes.

I knew bleeds. I gave myself two minutes before I lost consciousness. Maybe two more before I was dead. Maybe one more. I was already in pretty sad shape.

Unexpected, horrifyingly, tears welled up. I watched them drop to the concrete floor, where they beaded like the floor had been treated with something, rolling this way and that and mixing with the blood that had begun to drip from me. Nothing had gone according to plan, as usual, but I’d always assumed that when my time came, Pitr would be there. I guessed he
was
somewhere nearby, but I felt all alone.

I closed my eyes and concentrated and could feel his heartbeat. I’d never had a chance to figure out why I was able to feel him like this. We were linked. Had been since the first time the
kurre-nikas
had brought him back. Twice that bastard had come back from the dead.

My thoughts were getting slow and heavy. I kept losing track. Breathing was suddenly a lot of fucking trouble.

I slumped on the dirty concrete, bleeding out. I thought that if he could at least keep himself hidden, if he could be
smart
for one time in his life, Mags would slip away. Fallon was
enustari
and might be able to track him down. But Fallon didn’t want to use the gas. He had a finite supply in this dead world he’d helped create, and he might decide Pitr was too stupid to worry over and just let him go.

Fallon made a
tsk
-ing noise with his mouth. “Mr. Mageshkumar!”

Another two heartbeats, echoed with Pitr’s somewhere nearby. I knew I would have fallen over by now if the leash had allowed it.

“Very well,” Fallon said. “Let us see where you are hiding, then.” He closed his eyes and began to recite.

Fallon finished and the spell drew energy from me, and I was so fucking cold all of a sudden, shivering. Shivering so hard my teeth rattled in my head. I opened my eyes slowly, each one heavy as a boulder, their natural state closed. And there was Pitr, standing right next to Fallon. He looked terrified. In one hand he held the Token, clutching it like I had, white-knuckled and shaking. He could have reached out and hit Fallon with it.

In his other hand, he held the gun I’d taken from Detective Stanley in another life, still smeared with the Negotiator’s blood, dead and tasteless.

Fallon remained standing with his eyes shut. When he opened them, he jerked back and barked a single Word—my new favorite Word, I thought dreamily—just as Pitr squeezed the trigger.

And for the third time that I knew of, Pitr Mags died.

I CAME TO LIKE
I was buried in snow, light trickling down in photons so big and fat I felt like I could reach up and grab them like globes. For some time I didn’t know if I was awake or alive. I just was. I marveled at the light and the cold and the awful, searing dry pain in my neck and just lay there and marveled and lay there and marveled and there was no time.

The pain in my neck grew worse and worse. It was a rusty, jagged pain, and every time I sipped some air, my breathing shallow and rapid, it swelled up and hurt like hell. And that led to a thought: Fallon had cast off my wound. He’d used the gas I’d been pouring into the air to reveal Pitr’s Glamour, and my wound had scarred up.

The one gift the universe gave back to the Bleeder: It healed the cuts.

The concrete I was lying on was ice-cold and stained black with my blood. Fallon had let me just bleed, wasting it. I assumed he’d intended to take me to the edge of death and then pull me back so he could
nurse me back to health to be bled again. Instantly that seemed pretty obvious what he had planned to do. Bleed Pitr and me repeatedly, storing the gas in his fancy Fabrication, so that one day when we finally died he’d have gotten his money’s worth.

I couldn’t stop shivering. I reached up and pulled the silver leash from my neck. It squirmed and hummed against my skin, then seemed to rush away when I dropped it.

A few feet away from me, two upright sets of shoes. Fallon’s were the super-shiny dress shoes, black leather, sturdy black laces, soles like new, without a scratch. Pitr’s were tennis shoes. Duct tape wrapped around them, holding the crumbling rubber soles on. They were muddy and torn. I should have paid more attention to his feet. I should have gotten him new shoes. I could have gotten him a new pair of shoes at any time.