We Are Not Good People (Ustari Cycle) (42 page)

When Mags passed, hands clenched and murder in his eyes—which I knew was anger at the sky for frightening him—the runts all took involuntary, instinctive steps backward. None of them were sure if they could cast faster than he could lunge, and half of them thought he was some sort of
dimma
or
gidim,
something I’d created using his dead body and some gas. He was already sweating through his jacket, and his long black hair was having some sort of weird chemical reaction with the water in the air.

The house was a modern catastrophe. Out in the middle of Nowhere, Colombia, a million miles from Bogotá or anyplace else. Drug lord country, militia country. Guys with no fucking teeth and automatic weapons ginned up from 3-D printers via templates downloaded from the Internet. It was white stucco and glass, glass everywhere. It sat on an ugly concrete slab but had a satellite hookup and three huge military-grade generators chugging away. Not to mention, I’d been told, a staff of fifteen professional security men and at least twenty Bleeders and a few
saganustari
set to defend their
enustari
.

I found what remained of most of these in the living room. It had been decorated in pure white: white rugs, white tile, white couch, white walls. There was so much dead blood all over the place that it had gone a nauseous pink. I stood running my eyes over the carnage. Saw several of our people in the black suits Mel issued them, torn to pieces. Someone had uttered something absolutely fucking terrible in this room, and it had gone through everyone like a buzz saw.

There was a hissing static noise in the air. The stereo, sizzling, smoke drifting upwards.

Walking deeper into the house, I tripped over a leg. Separated from its body, it was still encased in the shiny material of a truly awful suit and a perfectly preserved black shoe without a scuff or a mark on it. As I moved, the house grew quiet as more and more of Mel’s team realized I was there. I hadn’t gotten used to that.

I stopped. Didn’t turn. “Everybody outside.”

“Right,” Roman said. I started forward again and he and Remy gathered up the others. I’d gotten used to this, to people doing things I told them to do. Mags turned and I had to grab him by the collar to remind him that he was not
everybody
.

In the bedroom, I met Rithy Kal,
enustari
.

We passed through what was left of a massive steel security door. It was bent and buckled, hanging from one final hinge. The bedroom beyond it was all white as well, but there was less blood. Less but still plenty. The lesson Mel kept teaching me was that if you had an
army,
it didn’t matter how low-level the grunts were. A hundred
idimustari
who knew one spell each could do damage, and a single
enustari
could be whipped by a bunch of Tricksters if they all worked together. She stood off to the right just inside the door, wearing her blue pin-striped suit with an overcoat, even in the heat. Her long red hair was pulled back, her face a painting, layers of makeup coalesced into a reasonable facsimile of a perfect complexion. Mel might have been thirty or fifty and stood at rigid attention. She nodded at us once, then waved off someone behind me with a casual dismissal.

Seated in a thronelike padded white chair, a strip of black tape covering his mouth—and wrapped all the way around his head—was a plump, balding man, his brown skin shining with sweat. He’d let his limp black hair grow long, which gave him an astonishingly large forehead. He glanced at me with furtive intensity, then looked down at his bare lap, his hands having been taped to the arms of the chair.

My cigarette was being stubborn in the damp air. I placed it between my lips and knelt in front of the man.

“Rithy Kal,” Mel said, sounding tired. Bored. “
Enustari
, one of the original conspirators. Supplied Renar and Amir with blood sacrifice in the building of the Renar Fabrication. Known to have purchased human beings through Slovenian slavers for the purpose of sacrifice. Known to—”

I held up my hand and she stopped talking. I didn’t know how she decided the line between her purview and my authority. It was entirely
up to her; I’d never asked her to pay attention to me. Some things she arranged on her own, without asking. Some things she waited for me. I couldn’t read the system. It was a machine built by someone else.

I stared down at Kal. “I’m going to take the tape off,” I said, cigarette bobbing up and down. “If you try to cast something, I will have my friend Pitr break every tooth in your mouth. Nod if you understand.”

Even
ustari
had reason to worry about broken teeth. Kal’s dancing eyes drifted to Mags, lingered for a stunned moment, traveling up from waist to chest, then jumped back to me. He nodded. I reached forward and tore the tape free.

“You are all
fucking dead,
” Rithy Kal hissed.

“And so are you!” I replied, throwing out my arms. “Guess you’re not getting on the Immortal Bus with your friends.” I shot my cuff and started rolling up my sleeve. “You ever been Charmed, Mr. Kal?”

Rithy Kal stared at my arm with a pop-eyed sneer. “You bleed for your own spells,” he said softly. “Like a common thief.”

“Jesus,” Mel said. “We got
volunteers
for that, Chief.”

I waved her away. Here was a true
enustari,
and there was a difference between him and me. I’d been losing sight of it. I thought of the black kid six months ago, thought of how I’d torn him up and crushed him under Words to squeeze him dry. I’d gotten used to bleeding people, but I was no Rithy Kal. It was time, I thought, to mark out the difference. To make it up, a little bit, with some sacrifice.

It was easy to steal things these days, and my switchblade was new. It had a glossy black shell that felt like skin as it warmed in my hand, with a set of dice showing snake eyes engraved on one side. Expensive, but the world was broken and everything was free.

I flicked it open and placed it against the skin of my forearm. Only a few of the scars there were recent. The rest had faded into pink, puckered memory, a skein of ancient roads I’d traveled down. The most recent ones were wide and thick, one on each arm, darker and wet-looking. The cold metal against my skin was familiar and comforting. I pushed and pulled, and the old searing pain released a thick flow of gas
into the air. I felt Mags and Billington react, subtle shifts in weight as they sensed it and instinctively reached for it.

I spoke seven words. A mouthful for me. But I wanted the spell to have some subtlety. Kal was
enustari;
he was a man who knew what a Charm was. I had to be tricky, but there were more tricks than magical ones: I’d used the word
Charm,
but I’d actually cast a Compulsion to answer my questions. Misdirection. If he’d been paying attention, he’d have heard the corresponding Words. But I still had my Trickster rat’s nose for people, and it was telling me that Rithy Kal had just survived an assault, had his Bleeders and Security team slaughtered by a bunch of schlubs one slice above Griefers, and had just seen the largest, angriest man in existence. So he might not be at his sharpest. Plus, Rithy Kal hadn’t had enough interaction with
idimustari
to know that we lied for a living.

You worked grifts the same way; there was a method. Step one was to start nonthreatening and establish a rapport. If you
could
establish a rapport with a sweating man who was taped to a chair and pretty sure you were going to kill him.

I glanced at Billington.
I
wasn’t going to kill him. Mel had turned out to be something of a hands-on fanatic on that point. The guilty had to be punished, and execution had the extra benefit of taking resources away from Renar.

I looked back at Kal. “You know who I am?”

He nodded. Wary. “The Trickster.”

I’d never been known as
the
anything before.

“Tell me where Mika Renar is.”

There hadn’t been any signs of Mika Renar or her pet in the two years since Mad Day. Two years of hunting. We didn’t even know for sure whether Renar had survived, as old and frail as she was. Amir, I was almost certain, had died—I’d seen him up close, in slow motion. But Renar—she had an army of Bleeders and more money than some small countries. Anything was possible. I didn’t doubt that in the absence of her fucking
Biludha-tah-namus,
she would just organize an
endless Bleed, would find open veins to fuel some looped spell that would keep her alive one more second, then one more second, then one more.

Mel had found plenty of
conspirators
. Mel had
killed
plenty of conspirators.
Enustari
who had somehow helped Renar—helped her build her murder machine, helped her phrase the Rite of Death. Helped her in any way.

“I do not know,” Kal said after a moment’s hesitation as he struggled against my Compulsion. It was a subtle spell. It didn’t make him want to answer me. It didn’t make him want to tell the truth. It made him not want to
lie
. Kal would steel himself against being forced to say things. He wouldn’t be ready for being forced to
not
say things.

It was like any grift: Keep them off-balance.

Of course, Kal was
enustari
. I had to accept the possibility that he might be fucking with
me
.

I didn’t hesitate. You had to pepper them with questions, keep them from thinking. “Why is your house out here in the middle of fucking nowhere?”

He shrugged. “Before the—” He hesitated again. “Before, it was very difficult to acquire blood in the cities. This was . . . private.”

I had never heard the word spoken with so much oily menace.

“Do you have an
urtuku
?”

The questions didn’t matter. I was just training him to answer.

He shook his head. “I have learned this never goes well.”

“Why is everything white?”

“So you can see the dirt.”

“Who was your
gasam
?”

“You would not know her.”

Not a lie. I let it pass. “How do you pronounce your name?”

“Ri-thee Kaal.”

“Tell me where Mika Renar is.”

“I don’t
know
.”

“Tell me where Cal Amir is.”

“He is dead.”

I hesitated for one second. Hearing it was somehow troubling. “Tell me what Renar is planning.”

“I . . . don’t wish to.”

“Tell me what Renar is planning.”

“No.”

Not a lie. I pushed. “Tell me what Renar is planning.”

“No!”

“Tell me
anything
.” It was an old trap. Set up a pattern. Then abandon it, suddenly.

Kal answered before he could think. “The
kurre-nikas.
”

The horrified look that immediately spread over his face told me I’d struck oil somehow. I paused, then let my cigarette drop to the floor. It was mostly ash anyway.
Kurre-nikas
. I’d never heard of anything like that, though a dirty translation would be
difference engine
. I rolled the phrase around in my head. Didn’t like it.

“What is the
kurre-nikas
?”

He opened his mouth. The struggle was clear on his face, and then his expression clarified into anger. He’d caught on to my little trick. I stood up; the Compulsion was too weak to work against an active resistance. I began rolling my sleeve down over the clean, dry wound.

“We’re going to kill you now, you know that?” I said.

He nodded. “Yes.”

I looked down, then reached up and carefully put the tape back over his mouth. He watched the whole time, studying me.

“We found something,” I heard Mel say behind me.

I put a fresh cigarette between my lips and let it dangle. Pushing my hands into my pockets as I looked at her over my shoulder. “Was it
inside
someone in the other room? Because
that
would explain a few things.”

She grimaced and stepped forward, a thick bundle of papers in her hands. I took them and turned.

“So what is it?” I asked, walking past Kal to the immaculate bed, the largest one I’d ever seen. The bed was crisp and white, had a thick column at each corner, and was big enough to fit an entire normal-person bedroom on top of it. I dropped the stack of paper on it and spread it on the sheet with one hand, like a pack of cards.

“Plans,” Mel said.

They were. Sheet after sheet of careful line drawings, equations in the margins, and runes. I didn’t recognize the alphabet, but there were dozens—the written form of the Words didn’t matter, and different
ustari
used different ones. I flipped through the pages more slowly. The drawings were layers, each page representing a level of an overall design. Lines, spidery and silvery, drawn by hand. Dozens of oversize pages, chalky blue, folded and scuffed, notes written haphazardly everywhere. None of it made any sense.

I paused, suddenly aware of a trembling in the room, the tiniest shiver under my feet, like a small earthquake. I realized the
s
in her saying
plans
had lingered, seemed to stretch out gritty and rubbery. I looked quickly over at Billington, but she was staring intently at Kal, deciding how she would execute him for his crimes. I looked at Kal, who appeared to be vibrating along with the room, his edges indistinct.

I looked at Mags. Mags looked back at me, his dark, flat face a mask of alarm. I watched to make sure he wasn’t fading away.

A second, no longer, and then with a physical shock that left me swaying on my feet it was over. Everything was back to normal. I looked at Mags and held up my hand before he could say anything. It was clear from their body language that Billington and Kal hadn’t noticed a thing.

I folded up the straight razor into its pearl handle and slipped it back into my pocket. Then I folded the sheaf of papers in half lengthwise and slipped it into my coat pocket. Getting up, I started for the door and felt rather than saw Mags fall into step behind me.