We Are Not Good People (Ustari Cycle) (55 page)

“You go to war.”

43.
“A SUMMONING,” FALLON SAID, MAKING
the word sound like it tasted bad, “is very dangerous. With someone of his level.”

“Ev, I’d say the time for worrying about safety is passed.” Pitr was dead. “They’ve already used the fucking
kurre-nikas
once, maybe twice. Who knows? They’ve been bleeding the world for years, poking
away at this. You think it matters if we play it
safe
? Do we just sit on our dicks and wait for them to use it again?”

He held up his hands in a placating gesture. “A Summoning is not a typical spell, Mr. Vonnegan. It violates many things. The will of the summoned. The physical laws of the universe. Violate one, yes, it can be done easily. Violate
both
and you have the potential for a viol
ent
outcome.” He glanced around the room, his dry, careful eyes landing on Claire and Daryl before flitting back to me. Everyone else had crowded back out into the bar area. “What do you accomplish if you attempt to Summon him and he resists, and you . . . do not survive the attempt?”

Truth be told, I hadn’t realized death was a possible consequence of a failed spell like this. Summoning someone—even someone as powerful and strange as the Negotiator—seemed straightforward enough.

“They resist, Mr. Vonnegan,” he continued, as if reading my mind. “They feel you pulling at them, and they resist. A normal person, not part of our
guild,
has little to resist with. This Negotiator, Mr. Harrows, he is skilled. His resistance would be more intense.”

He sighed. For a moment we all just existed in silence.

“Hey.”

I jumped a little and turned to look at Claire.

“So, I’m fucking
here,
” she said. “
Why
am I fucking here?”

Fallon beat me to it, so I let him talk.

“You are here, Ms. Mannice, because everyone wishes to kill you. Mika Renar for her interrupted Rite—you are the only person who may be bled as the cornerstone of the Ritual. Mika worked diligently to create you, Ms. Mannice. She wishes to use you as she intended.”

It was one way of saying Mika Renar had played geneticist with her own apprentice and created dozens of daughters, all marked for the Ritual, who would give their mother eternal life. I saw no profit in reminding Claire of that.

“Elsa—whom you have not had the pleasure of meeting—wishes to kill you outside Renar’s Ritual, thereby rendering it moot. For, without
you there can
be
no Ritual, I assume, as I do not caucus with Elsa anymore. I must extrapolate.”

Fallon in his nifty cream suit. Like he was on vacation. “You are irreplaceable,” he said softly. “You are the most unique person in the world, Ms. Mannice.”

She stared at him, a half-smile on her face. “No, I’m not.”

Fallon closed his eyes. “When the
kurre-nikas
is used, it essentially creates an alternate universe. In one universe, the previous moment. In the new, the adjustment. We do this constantly simply by making decisions. This is why the Fabrication is possible without bleeding the world dry each time—the mechanics already exist.

“In each of these universes, a version of you exists. It is possible, although unlikely, that in every other possible universe, you have died. You no longer exist there. You have reached what we call
Terminus
.” He opened his tired, sharp eyes. “You are truly unique. As a Terminus, there remains only one of you. Only one.” He opened his eyes and glanced at me. “There is much we fought to keep secret.”

No one said anything. Or moved. After a few seconds Fallon clucked his tongue in a way I recognized from my lessons with Hiram, when the old man thought I was being particularly stupid.

“I fire a gun at your head,” he said, making a gun-shape with his nimble, age-spotted hand. “In one universe, you are killed. In another, you live. In the latter, I fire the gun again—the process repeats. On and on, branching, branching. This is a simplification, you understand, for your
benefit.
Over a long enough time—or if assisted by magical meddling, say in the construction of a large
biludha
of which you are the cornerstone—there is only one version of you left, the version that lives each time. The last version.

“Ms. Mannice, if you die here, in
this
universe, you cease to exist anywhere. You remain marked because Renar’s
biludha
cannot be cast without you. She has been trumped by a force more fundamental and powerful than magic.”

I thought of Pitr, thought of him in another dimension or some shit, exactly the same, hanging out with someone just like me but
not
me. My head was spinning. “How do you know she’s a fucking
Terminus
?”

“The runes. They should have disappeared when the
tah-namus
collapsed, but they remained. The
biludha
is trapped with you.”

She blew out a breath and leaned back. “Ah, fuck all of you,” she said tiredly, scrubbing her face. “Just tell me what it fucking
means
.”

“It means they can’t use anyone else as the keystone of the Ritual. It’s all suspended in you,” I said, pulling off my jacket and draping it over a chair. “
That’s
why the whole fucking world didn’t end when we stopped the ritual. It didn’t really collapse; it’s been suspended
in
you ever since. Because there’s no place else for it to go. And it means this.”

I slashed a quick line of blood down my arm and spoke four Words. Felt the energy move from me, draining me. And nothing happened.

Fallon sat forward. “Remarkable.”

“This is new.
Before
Mad Day, magic curved around you, warped because of the power of the Rite. Now you’re like a fucking black hole,” I said. “Everything cast within a few feet of you just dies on the vine. The gas is sucked into you and gone.” I smiled, thinking of Pitr, alive somewhere. “You’re a secret weapon, Claire. You fuck up magic in ways I don’t even pretend to understand, and we’ve barely scratched the surface. Who knows what happens if someone casts a really big spell on you.”

“Well, bully for fucking me,” she said, scowling and crossing her arms under her breasts.

I looked at Fallon and wondered whether I’d be up for stopping her if she tried to leave. I knew she felt some sense of debt to me because I’d saved her. I knew she had some affection for me—more for Pitr but some for me, too. I also knew she was the Survivor Type, and it all came down to what she saw as her currently running best shot. I couldn’t Charm her, and I couldn’t Compel her. For the first time in my life, I was dependent entirely on someone’s goodwill.

I felt sick. But hell, it was good to have her smell in the room again.

“So,” I said, tearing my eyes from her. “A Summoning?”

Fallon sighed and closed his eyes again. “I regret . . . There was an Artifact, once in my possession, that would be of use here. It required some amount of sacrifice, but it made such a Summoning much easier.”

I rolled my sleeve down to the wrist. “What happened to it?”

Fallon opened one eye. “Your old
gasam,
Bosch, stole it. As he stole
everything
.”

I paused, staring down at the buttons on my sleeve. “Describe it.”

He waved his wand in the air. “It was decades ago—”

“Describe it!”

He closed his eye again. “A small ivory box. A symbol of a scarab on it inlaid in gold. No obvious way to open it.”

“I know where it is.”

The eye opened. I looked at Claire. “You up for some breaking and entering?”

“THIS IS CREEPY.”

I sighed, staring at the building from across the street. “Tell me one moment you’ve spent in my company that
wasn’t
creepy.”

She didn’t respond, and we went back to staring at Hiram’s old building. We were in the alley where she’d killed two cops not so long ago.

“How do you know it’s still in there?” she asked.

“It’s Warded. Pitr . . . Pitr and me, we made the whole place invisible.”

I walked through the time line in my head. We’d done the Warding
before
we’d gone to Abdagnale’s place.
Before
Pitr had died. So it had really happened, still.

I was pretty sure.

She chewed that for a moment. It was dark and quiet and the only streetlight was half a block away. The rest of the building blazed with
light. Hiram’s blown-out windows were dark and forgotten. The alley smelled like garbage and rain.

“Why?”

I thought of Hiram. I hadn’t seen much of him in those later years. I’d ignored him, resented him, made no effort to stay in touch with him—and yet at the end, when I was desperate, I’d had no compunction about begging him for help in spite of it all. Now he was gone, and I still wasn’t used to that.

That made me think of Pitr. My Pitr wouldn’t even have a stinking, rotting apartment as a headstone. No one but me would remember him, and soon enough I’d be gone, too.

“I didn’t want anyone else living there,” I said honestly. “And I didn’t want to have to go through all the shit Hiram stole, burned out or not. So we just
hid
it. Come on.”

Claire followed me across the alley to the bottom of the fire escape, where we’d barely escaped Cal Amir two years prior. I started climbing.

“What about everyone else who lives here? They just don’t think about it?”

She was right behind me. I hadn’t heard her jump onto the ladder or start climbing. I tried to control my heavy, out-of-shape breathing but couldn’t manage it. “Pretty much,” I agreed. “They just don’t think about it.”

The windows to Hiram’s kitchen were empty, and so the world had invaded his pristine space. What I remembered as a clean white room with appliances that were rarely touched, aside from the burner where he brewed his tea, had become a nesting place for birds, unaffected by my Wards. I felt those Wards as we crossed the plane from outside to in. They weren’t heavy artillery, just some simple tricks to inspire people not to notice this place.

As Claire pushed one leg through the window, I felt the Wards vanish. Just be absorbed by her, a walking magical black hole. I felt exposed, because for the first time in years anyone could see Hiram’s apartment, would notice it, think of it, wonder about the smell.

The whole apartment was a damp, rotting mess. The floors were covered in mold and felt soft and spongy under my feet. Doors had sagged off the cabinets, and the whole place smelled like shit. As we climbed in, a riot of disturbed birds flew up in a panic, causing two seconds of sheer crazy as they fluttered around, escaping the way we’d come.

“Fuck,” Claire said, “you couldn’t come up with any goddamn magic to keep the place
clean
?”

The areas not directly exposed to the elements were preserved under a layer of white dust. The walls were scorched from Hiram’s battle with Amir, the debris from the explosion all that was left of the furniture. We crunched through to the tiny closet he’d used as his office. As we moved, all the Wards and Glamours we’d laid on the apartment vanished one by one, but that shit had worked: No one had been here in all the time we’d left it. I could remember Pitr and me working the place over, both of us eager to leave, to get out of Hiram’s mausoleum. For a second I wasn’t sure I could trust the memory. I remembered things that had not actually happened. How could I be certain of any memory if I didn’t know what moments the
kurre-nikas
had altered? What else I didn’t know about because my memories came from a different version of the world?

In the tiny office, even the invisible keys that protected the safe melted away as she entered, exposing everything. I glanced at Claire and considered this new idea that she was the last of herself. Which wasn’t much different mathematically than the day before, when I’d thought, like most people did, that all of us were the one and only—and thus the last—of ourselves. This following right on the new idea that we all had various versions of ourselves, that when Renar had tweaked reality with her
kurre-nikas
she’d created a new me, leaving the old me behind. Terminus. There were no other Claires, and despite having no fucking idea what that meant, it made me sad.

“You know why I’m doing this, right?” Claire said suddenly, leaning in close to watch my hands, her smell cigarettes and something vanilla. “I’m doing it ’cause I pay my debts.”

I nodded, not looking at her. I was very still.

“I want to be clear, because I get the feeling that for you we’re some sort of love story.”

I nodded again. I loved Claire’s nearly sociopathic directness. I did. But I wanted to cast something that would shut her up. Except it was increasingly clear that I’d never manage to cast another spell on Claire Mannice ever again. I reached down and pulled Hiram’s old floor safe open. She knelt down next to me, our sides touching. “Oooh, pretty!”

She reached into the safe and pulled out a gold bracelet inlaid with green and red gems. I had no idea if it was paste or real, an Artifact or just something that had caught Hiram’s eye. Claire slipped it on her wrist with all the bravado of someone who’d been stealing since birth. I started picking through the rest of the safe’s contents. I’d left everything. Even the money, wads of cash in rubber bands. Cash was cash, there was nothing magical or sentimental about it, but taking anything from Hiram’s panic hole had felt like stealing.

For a second, I thought of the
Udug,
heard its slithery voice in my ear. Wanted to hear it again so badly my balls ached.

Then I spotted the little white box. I knew everything Hiram had ever stolen. I’d lived in the house for years, and even after our estrangement, I knew on my infrequent visits exactly what was new, what had been acquired recently. The white box had been on Hiram’s desk that first day when I’d shown up and asked the fat old man to be my
gasam,
to teach me. That first day with Pitr standing behind him, staring at me so fucking
angry
 . . .