We Are Not Good People (Ustari Cycle) (43 page)

“That was fucking useful,” Billington said, sounding bored. “You want to keep him around awhile, Chief? Try again?”

I shook my head. “No. He’ll be on his toes,” I said, “and I can’t go body blows with an Archmage.”

As we passed through into the white living room, stepping over the bodies with care, I felt the sharp flood of gas that was Rithy Kal’s final gift to the universe. Billington liked the idea of that final humiliation: just wasting their blood, these
enustari.

A second later, she was there behind me again. I took a deep breath as we stepped outside, all the Bleeders turning to look at us, quiet. The air in my lungs was damp and awful. “
Kurre-nikas
.” I rolled the words around in my mouth. A literal translation was something like
change maker
. “That mean anything to you?”

“No, Chief,” Billington said. Which wasn’t surprising. If I was uneducated, relatively speaking, then Melanie Billington was fucking illiterate.

I didn’t even look at Mags.

The crowd of Bleeders parted in front of me, swirling behind as I walked. It took me a moment to realize there were soldiers crowding the driveway, sweating, unhappy men and women in ill-fitting dun yellow uniforms, caps on their heads, automatic rifles in their hands. A short older man with a thin mustache and a huge, overpowering nose stood in front of them all, relaxed. No rifle for him, just a leather holster on his hip and knee-high boots that gleamed with a fresh shine and provincial authority.

“Fuck,” Mags spat. I paused to analyze him: his hair, his face, the way he’d spat the word. Was that Mags? Was that how he spoke, how he moved? Or had I been seeing an illusion for so long it seemed real?

Billington was in my ear. “We do not have time for this.”

I turned my head slightly, keeping my eyes on the Little General. “Mel, you want to take on an army?” I shook my head. “I don’t. I’m not
enustari
.”

She grunted. “Look behind you, Chief. You sure?”

I turned a bit more. Three dozen men and women, sporting similar black suits in varying states of repair, cleanliness, and bloodsoakedness, were following us at a loose distance. My Army of Assholes.

My Bleeders. Each and every one of them convinced that I’d graduated to
enustari
six months ago, when I’d brought Mags back from the dead.

Except I hadn’t. I couldn’t have.

32.
IN MY DREAM, CLAIRE MANNICE
stood on a porch with the pre-storm wind whipping her hair, holding a shotgun on me.

I STARTLED AWAKE WITH
Mags’s elbow in my ribs. The two of us were in the Little General’s office, a plain room with pressed wood walls, a concrete floor, and four pieces of furniture: a metal desk that had seen better days, a wooden rolling chair, two stiff, uncomfortable guest chairs, and a filing cabinet. There were zero windows and one door. We’d been driven in the back of a truck for about an hour; I had no idea where we were.

Billington, typically, had suggested we shed a bit of gas and murder our way out. Me, I wondered about the coincidence of the Little General showing up in the middle of the jungle, and I decided to spend some time finding out. Time, I had. Two years and all we’d seen was death and tragedy, nary a hair on Renar’s mummy head. We had gotten nowhere.

The troops had hovered, ready to leap into action, while Melanie debated my proposal. Finally, she’d nodded, made a waving gesture with her hand, and our people relaxed as one and let themselves be arrested and taken . . . somewhere.

It all felt surreal. A few hours ago I’d been in fucking
New Jersey,
for God’s sake.

“Lem,” Mags whispered. “I’m
starving.
”

I considered my pockets: some cash. Bandages. I shook my head.

He shifted his massive frame in the chair. “Fuck,” he said. “It’s
hot
.”

I’d been listening to Mags complain my whole life, it seemed, but I’d stopped being annoyed by it. I liked listening to Mags complain. I had caught some strain of Stockholm syndrome, I figured.

“Cast something,” I said without looking at him, “and be not hungry.”

Mags grunted in frustrated annoyance. I thought about the bodies back at Kal’s, the black suits on the floor. Six or seven, I thought I’d counted. I didn’t know anything about them—I’d lost track of all the
idimustari
who’d come to New York and taken service with Lem Vonnegan’s Traveling Shadow Show. They were Billington’s people, not mine.

Still, I saw myself stepping over them, careful not to get blood on my shoes.

The door opened, and the Little General entered with two slovenly soldiers. Up close, his army looked about as ragtag as mine. They were unshaved, smelled pretty ripe, and their boots were more tape than leather. The Little General was in better shape, but not by much.

He sat down behind his desk and smiled at us. He leaned back and laced his fingers over his immense belly. It was as if someone else’s stomach had been grafted on to his skinny little body.

“Gentlemen,” he said in a thick accent. “I have a difficulty.”

We stared back at him. They’d taken my razor, and I didn’t have my old collection of aching wounds to split open for a bit of gas. I’d gotten soft. There was nothing on the desk that was useful, nothing in sight at all. I could always bite my tongue for a little trickle. A little Charm. A Little General on my side. I wasn’t worried.

“Señor Kal, he paid for protection, yes? I kept . . . elements away from him. Made him safe out in the middle of nowhere? I take my obligations very seriously.”

I ran my hands over the sides of the chair. A ragged screw caught at my skin, a half-assed repair. I imagined pushing my palm against it and jerking my hand back and up. The ragged tear through my skin, the shock of warm pain, the gas in the air. Pure and unsullied. Just energy for the taking.

“So, you have invaded his privacy, and I am honor-bound to punish you.” He leaned forward. “But, of course, Señor Kal, he is dead.”

I knew a con when I smelled one. Colombia wasn’t a country anymore; Bogotá was a ghost town, according to the news sites, half burned to the ground, claimed by dozens of gangs picking over the bones. Outside the cities were the remnants of the army and the police, formed up into militias. The bigger countries were holding it together. If you had dollars or euros or yuan, you could make things happen. I thought I could almost see the Little General’s nose twitch.

I pinched the jagged piece of metal, jutting an eighth of an inch from the chair, between my thumb and forefinger. Waited for his pitch.

The Little General seemed nonplussed when we didn’t respond, and glanced down at his hands. “You understand? There is . . . what is . . . there is
overhead
. There is the cleaning up of the house. The disposal of the . . . the
disposal
. There is the issue of the dead man. The fact that none of you are in Colombia legally.”

I nodded, wondering what
affable
looked like and if I had the necessary facial muscles to project it. Wondered exactly who the Little General thought was going to give a shit about Colombia’s border enforcement. I took a deep breath and slashed my hand against the nub of screw and tore my palm open. The pain was sudden, severe, and familiar. The gas filled the air like heavy syrup as I bled. I gave it three words. Felt the draining moment of exhaustion, but I was so flush and healthy these days, it didn’t phase me in the least.

The Little General started to smile.

Your standard Charm was the tiny engine of the universe I was familiar with. Easy to cast, not very expensive in terms of blood, and infinitely pliable. A Word here, a Word not there, and the Charm became something completely different and wonderful. Assholes always hit the Charms hard, bleeding out a tub of gas and frying brains, but that was stupid. A light touch. Get in their heads and whisper.

I thought of the
Udug
. A fragment of rock that became a whispering
voice in your head when you touched it. A shiver of combined fear and lust went through me.

Back at the house, there’d been too much chaos and too many guns. You started casting spells en masse it was hard to hide, hard to keep people from becoming alarmed. Hard for soldiers who looked like their training had involved identifying the boom end of a rifle and a hearty slap on the back to resist squeezing their triggers just because they didn’t know what the fuck was going on. You saw it every day in the papers, what papers were left, or on the blogs, what blogs were left. Half the massacres that happened in the world, this world that we had broken, involved soldiers. I didn’t want my people in the news, so I’d passed the word to stand fast until we had more advantageous circumstances.
Idimustari
worked better close up, one on one.

“You work for Rithy Kal?” I asked, keeping my voice neutral.

The Little General had recently fallen in love with me and his expression implied he was super curious as to what color underwear I had on.

“No, no,” the Little General said, eyes bugging out. “Señor Kal is a
client
. Colonel Luis Suarez does not
work
for anyone.” He frowned slightly, something poisoning my nice Charm. “Yes. But. No. Yes.”

I resisted the urge to look at Mags. “What is it?”

The Little General’s grin came and went like someone was sitting on a keyboard somewhere, hitting the
ENTER
key over and over. “
Del Traje Blanco,
” he muttered, and looked apologetic.

My Spanish . . . I had no Spanish aside from insults. But I knew enough. I thought of him. The Man in the White Suit.

I remembered his voice, nasal and flat.
Nonsense. I am the Negotiator
.

I struggled not to lean forward and slap the Little General. The poor sap had been Charmed so hard, his brain was half fried. “White suit?”

He nodded, happy again now that we were in agreement. “
Sí!
Yes. It is fair to say I work for him.” His face darkened again. “Between you and me,
amigo,
I wish I did not. I will not be welcome in heaven, I will
never see my poor mama again, this I know, but this . . . work . . . this is evil work.”

I nodded. “Show me.”

The Little General’s smile returned, wide and exultant. He sat back and clapped his hands. “An excellent
idea
, señor! Come! I will show you everything.”

The Charm. I told some of the young ones sometimes: If you could only manage to learn one fucking Cantrip, learn a fucking
Charm
.

“Is there anything to eat?” Mags wanted to know. He stood up, but the metal chair was too small for him and remained clamped on his ass. For a full twenty seconds the Little General and I stood there watching him spin around like a dog trying to chase its tail. When Mags finally got a hand on it and yanked himself free, he let it drop and stood there grinning shamefacedly.

As if nothing had happened, the Little General beckoned us, grinning. Outside his office, the two guards looked momentarily confused but managed an approximation of attention. Up close I could see that their rifles were rusty. I wondered how many hands had been blown off when they tried to fire them, as the men fell in behind us wordlessly.

The place had the feel of an abandoned school or hospital. Cinder-block walls, concrete floors. Echoes crowding us as we walked. Silence. No power, as far as I could tell, but the place had a stale residue of blood, an old shadow of magic. Someone had used it for some serious rituals. The Little General was all grins now that he had found a way to please us. Our tour guide into hell. He led us to a chained-shut set of double doors and told us pleasantly that Rithy Kal once owned this facility, and drug lords before him. That it had been given to the Little General as a base of operations.

He led us down the stairs.

The stairwells were little tubes of humidity. The stairs themselves were metal and groaned alarmingly as we stepped onto them. I could see bolts jiggling and working as we descended, flakes of rust raining down to announce us. Every flight brought us into a thick new layer of
heat and wet, and a thick new layer of ancient, dried-up blood. I’d never been able to sense old blood like this. Usually, the gas burned off and was gone, clean. Of course I could always sense the fresh stuff in the air, even at a distance. But I’d never sensed the dry-rot, furry aura of dead gas.

A lot of people had died here, and not well.

Down and down. The heat, the wet, the death all getting stronger.

At the bottom level—the subbasement, I supposed—we stood in ankle-deep water, warm as piss, brown and smelling like sewage. I stood feeling the water soak my socks and the cuffs of my pants as the two guards worked another padlocked set of doors, and thought that I should have just stuck with the old thrift store suits I used to wear.

The doors squealed open, and we’d arrived: hell, population my Asshole Army.

The doors led to an underground holding area—a wide, low-ceilinged center aisle banked on either side by iron-barred cells that had been carved out of the soft, damp rock. It was completely silent save for the splashing of our feet. The heat and damp hit me in the face; I’d been über-sweating for the last ten minutes and hadn’t noticed, my own level of humidity matching that of the air around me.

As Mags and I walked into the space, our people stared at us from the cells. Some of them hung off the bars, their faces pushed between them. Some leaned against the rear walls burning damp cigarettes that were trying hard to snuff out in the wet air. The Little General’s guards, six of them, stood in the center with their rifles slung over their shoulders. They stared sightlessly, their bodies stiff, their breathing even and calm.

I let my eyes adjust to the gloom. Farther down, the other cells were crowded with people too. Locals. Dark-skinned men and women and children and babies. All dressed differently, all staring at us—or straining to. They were silent. They looked like they’d been there for a long time.