We Are Not Good People (Ustari Cycle) (39 page)

Fucking hell. The sign:
An-uraš gu.

My universe.

This
was some serious deep magic.

I promoted Abdagnale in my head to a full
enustari
. A building full of johns getting bled continuously, fooled by Glamours into believing they were having the time of their lives, fueling a tiny personal universe where the old lady could make the rules. And we’d walked right in. The fucking blonde had said, “
Other door,
” and we’d bowed and scraped and walked into her universe like a bunch of obedient idiots.

I couldn’t stop myself from working out the layers. At the bottom, Abdagnale casting her spell off the gas in the air. Creating a bubble where she set the rules of perception. We’d walked into that bubble, and so she had complete control over us. If she decided we couldn’t feel the gas in the air, then we couldn’t feel the gas in the air. Ugh, fucking
magic
—

A voice echoed from far away, rushing at me, firming up.

“. . . 
zalag
 . . .”

—and the darkness disappeared. And I was in a cage.

It was in Abdagnale’s office. Except it was larger than it had been before, twice as large. I kept thinking I would get used to the disorienting way
saganustari
and
enustari
used magic just for effect, but it never ceased to fuck me up. She’d hidden half her office just for some vague psychological advantage.

The cage was made of gold, and there was no door or other obvious way to open it. I was on my knees with my hands tied behind me, and there was just enough room for me to shift my weight from knee to knee. I turned my head, and there was Mags, in a second cage, a few feet away. He filled it to bursting, his head pushed down into his chest,
his shoulders straining against the metal. I could hear him breathing in short, angry gasps.

I turned my head the other way, and there was Mel Billington in her own cage. She had her eyes closed, but I could tell she was awake. She was just kneeling there. Either accepting everything that was happening or patiently awaiting her moment for action.

I opened my mouth to speak. Made no sound. I could feel air moving through my throat, my tongue shifting in my mouth, but it produced no sound. I turned my head laboriously to look at Mags again. His lips were working, but he wasn’t managing any noise, either. I could tell by watching his mouth that he was whispering
fuck
over and over.

Carith Abdagnale sat behind her florid desk. The thin black fellow lounged, half sitting on its surface, to her left.

“How soon—” he started to ask.

“How should I know?” she tittered, fluttering her hands.

I bit my tongue again. I didn’t have anything better to do. Might as well chew my tongue off, pass the time. Again, there was pain but no blood. A neat trick, creating a tiny universe where you could do anything, where your rule was absolute. Where you could decide who was allowed to
bleed
and who wasn’t. Outside the old church, Carith Abdagnale was powerful, probably dangerous. But
inside
her old church, she was god. And god had decided Mags and I could not bleed or speak.

While I was chewing my tongue off, I thought about what went into achieving that. She had her girls, siphoning the gas from the guys. She had the guys, getting hooked in via hostesses out in the streets, in the tony bars and restaurants and hotels, a steady supply. She’d tied the spell off, which was impressive. You could set a loop in a spell to keep replicating itself as long as there was gas in the air. It wasn’t easy, and no one had ever taught me how to do it, but I knew it could be done. So years ago Carith Abdagnale had set the spell in motion, and her girls had been bleeding the men of New York
to keep it going ever since. A precise bleed, careful not to kill anyone, careful not to ruin the illusion.

The illusion: There was that, too. The setup, the overhead. Someone was casting that Glamour on us, and it was
good
.

The whole thing was fucking complicated. I got tired just thinking about the planning that went into this little operation. Though if it were up to me, I’d prefer taking more naps over being a tiny god.

The kid and Abdagnale were sitting in tight, awkward silence. Just waiting.

I forced myself to calm down. Closed my eyes. Imagined myself in a calm, empty room. White walls. No sound. Just me, no worries, no problems.

I opened my eyes again. There was a sixth person in the room.

He was young, a very blond, very thin man wearing a white suit and a black tie, white vest, and red shoes. Sneakers. Running shoes. The suit was very tight and narrowly cut, outlining his limbs and accentuating their fragility.

One of his long, delicate hands was grasping the hair of an older man. A vagrant, by his clothing and general level of cleanliness. The blond’s other hand held a very long, very thin blade, which he’d recently used to slit the vagrant’s throat. He released the older man and stepped back as the corpse collapsed to the floor, dry and inert. Whatever he’d cast to . . .
teleport
into the room, it had taken all the blood of a grown man to do it.

The Thin Man looked down at the old man. “I apologize. We are working on a more elegant solution,” he said. He looked up, sliding his blade into this jacket pocket. “Carith, your taste in home decor remains . . . horrific.”

“Welcome!” Abdagnale honked, standing up and waving her flabby arms. “Welcome! Do you crave refreshment? Such a long journey. Such a harrowing way to travel, with that . . . man. Come, take tea with me! Or perhaps you would like a meal in private with one of my associates?”

The Thin Man’s face was a collection of sharp lines and angles. His lips were bright red and twisted into an expression of distaste. There was something awful about his eyes. They were empty and distant, miserable. “I would sooner fuck this fellow here than one of your diseased employees, Carith. To business! My employer expects me back immediately to confirm the relevant facts.” There was something overly excited about his booming cheer. It felt fake. Forced. And it felt like he was exhausted keeping up the front. As I watched, he turned gracefully and gestured at the cages. “Which one is he . . . No, it’s obvious. He isn’t some sort of mutant, and he isn’t a woman. So
this
”—he stepped forward and gestured at me—“is the famous Lem Vonnegan.”

“The very same!” Abdagnale tittered. “The one and only! And now we must only negotiate my compensation for letting your
gasam
have him.”

The Thin Man frowned, kneeling down and shooting his cuffs as he peered at me. “She is not my
gasam,
you dotty old bitch. I am currently in her service.” He blinked slowly, languorously. “He doesn’t
look
like anyone dangerous.”

“In here he is not!” Abdagnale shouted, struggling to her feet. “I assure you of that. In here no one is dangerous, except
me
!”

The Thin Man’s face collapsed into an expression of impatience. He stood and spun on his heel, throwing out his arms.

“Carith, Carith, Carith, you and my employer have not been on good terms, yes, but you know she is a woman of honor, and she has given you assurances. And sent me in good faith into your little Honey Trap, where I am defenseless. So let us dispense with the bullshit and cut our deal so I can get out of here.”

Out of here
. I thought,
He bled someone to get here.
He would bleed someone to leave. Abdagnale would have to relax her rules a little. Give him a window.

I started reviewing spells I had on tap. Things I’d memorized. Stringing them together like puzzle pieces. There was going to be some gas in the air, and if I could touch it, I would be ready.

“I have a list of requirements prepared!” Abdagnale pushed her big hands through the endless piles of paper on her desk. She seized upon a long pink sheet of paper and held it out to the Thin Man. He stood for a moment, sighed, and stepped forward to take it. He stood there, reading.

“You’re not shy,” he said. “This third item may not be possible.”

Abdagnale sank back into her seat with a sigh like a deflating tire. “The terms are non-negotiable.”

“Nonsense.” He looked up at her. “I am the
Negotiator
.”

“He does not leave this place unless I have an agreement.”

The Negotiator spun and stared down at me. I stared back. “I must have a positive ID. No offense, Carith. Let him speak, so I may validate his identity.”

Abdagnale made a soft noise in protest. “That is not
wise,
” she sang. “He does not look like much, but he is
clever
.”

“So I have heard.” The Negotiator stepped closer to the cage and leaned down, his face near mine. I stared back at him. His skin was flawless, and it didn’t look like a Glamour. It looked like perfect, pink-tinged white skin. He smelled like pipe smoke. His eyes were the giveaway. They were deep and had no light in them; they looked raw. “Let him speak, Carith. I must determine if this is the one and only, if I am to bring your outrageous terms to my employer.”

Abdagnale sighed heavily, her body shifting like a mountain. “Very well.”

She did nothing. No Words, no gas. I didn’t feel a thing.

The Negotiator just kept smiling at me for a few moments. The expression on his face was difficult to categorize. I just kept thinking,
Give me the gas to make someone bleed
. He had to leave, and he wasn’t going to walk out the door and take the subway.

“Tell me, Mr. Vonnegan,” the Negotiator finally said, squinting at me, “tell me
anything
.”

I blinked. It could be a coincidence, that phrase, that precise piece of old Trickster patter designed to be one of a dozen rapid-fire questions
to keep you spinning. Every
idimustari
in the world had used the phrase
tell me anything
when Charming or Compelling someone. It was almost a secret handshake. Except this was no Trickster, in his red shoes and with his goddamn
teleportation
spell. I couldn’t sense any Charm or Compulsion on me, but Abdagnale’s bloodless casting meant anything was possible.

“You look like an asshole in that suit, Colonel,” I said. My voice sounded rusted, and my throat hurt pushing out the words, my tongue swollen and chewed up. But I could speak.

He nodded and stood up. “Very well. I accept this is Lemuel Vonnegan. As to your terms, number three on your list is impossible. It clashes with my employer’s intentions. The rest are acceptable.” He tossed the paper onto her desk. “Do you agree?”

Abdagnale struggled up from her chair again. “This is not negotiation! This is—”

“You are free to reject our terms,” the Negotiator said. “You will regret it. You know
her.
”

I ran through the spell in my head. I was ready.

Abdagnale stood quivering behind the desk, her tiny hands moving in tight circular patterns. Finally, she waved them in the air and sighed heavily.

“Oh, very well! We are being abused, but what is different about that? We agree. We are being abused, but we agree.”

The Negotiator smiled, throwing his arms out. “Then it is so. I will take possession.”

She hadn’t used his employer’s name. Someone at his level, I might have heard it. I remembered Hiram, in the early days, running down names for me. Him telling me
ustari
were dangerous, and I needed to know them when they entered my airspace. Me not listening too well. But I remembered some of them. And I’d been hearing new ones for the last six months as Melanie organized things, did the research: Aragaki. Rithy Kal. Tobin Anastole. Alfonse Alligherti. Mycroft Pell. But she hadn’t used his
name
.

Still smiling, he pivoted and gestured at the grinning black kid lounging stupidly on Abdagnale’s desk.

“May I bleed him? For my return?”

Abdagnale looked at her companion. It would be fast, I realized. The second I opened my mouth, Abdagnale would move to shut me off again. Fast. My heart pounded as I ran through the spells in my head. Too fast. Anything worth casting would take too long.

Anything longer than a Word. I had no time for finesse. I backtracked, cleared my head. Selected a Word.

The kid, for his part, had suddenly realized that Abdagnale and the Negotiator were looking at him like he was a side of beef and they were starving. He slid off the desk as the Negotiator pulled his blade from his pocket, and held up his hands in supplication. “Hey, now—”

The Negotiator simply took two steps forward on the balls of his feet, like a dancer, and slashed his blade across the kid’s neck, then bobbed back, gracefully evading the spray of blood with supple twists of his body. We cast simultaneously.

His
first Word was superfluous. Completely unnecessary. The kind of extra syllable you put in because it helped the meter, because it sounded good in the mouth and you wore a fucking white suit for some fancy reason. But it did nothing. The universe noted it and watched it float past, awaiting other instructions. Not the sort of Word an
ustari
with any training would bother with. He cast like a fucking asshole.

My Word was
hum
. I felt the flood of gas pouring out of the poor black kid, oily and vital, seized it and barked it out. One syllable. I filled with an intense, rotten sense of power and then it burst out of me in all directions, unstructured, unfocused. Chaos.

Hiram Bosch, my old
gasam,
once told me that magic was violence. He was right. It had taken me a while to understand.

The cage exploded like a bomb had gone off. Shards of broken metal flew everywhere, a sizzling noise like rain filling the air for one second as a million metal splinters flew through the air at a thousand
miles an hour. A gentle blowback from the Negotiator’s collapsed spell washed through the room like a soft breeze.

Suddenly there was gas just pouring into the world, just ready for the taking.