We Are Not Good People (Ustari Cycle) (59 page)

“I offer you information! I offer to answer any question you ask! I offer your safety guaranteed! Your
terms
, Mr. Vonnegan!”

“I offer to fucking
have this conversation
!”

He looked ready to weep. “My
safety,
Mr. Vonnegan!”

“Jesus—I offer your safety guaranteed, okay?”

Relief swept over his face, damp with perspiration. “I accept your terms!”

My vision clicked back into focus, bright and clear. I focused on movement just over Mags’s shoulder, a narrow casement window that was open. I felt something go loose and wonky inside me.

It was an insect the size of a baby. Except so much worse.

47.
“WE SHOULD DISCUSS A SUBJECT
very foreign to both you and our oversize friend, Mr. Vonnegan. Intelligence. In the sense of a Summoned inhuman presence.”

I tried to listen to Hiram over the growling of my stomach. Part of our arrangement as
gasam
and
urtuku
was that Hiram would feed me and let me sleep in his kitchen at night. So far there had been an endless supply of weak pale tea and no food. I’d been feeding Mageshkumar and myself from regular raids on the coffee cart and the lunch cart that traded off on the corner a few blocks away. I waited until the end of their shift, and when they were hooking their cart up to the car—a dilapidated old wood-paneled station wagon for the coffee guy, a surprisingly sleek new SUV for the lunch guy—I just walked by on the street side, reached in, and took whatever I could.

Mags was demonstrating a worrying tendency to be able to eat
anything I gave him in one swallow and then declare he was still starving. I had the growing sense that Hiram had bequeathed Mags to me.

The really curious thing was that there was no food in the house. Tea, yes. Milk and sugar cubes. And nothing else. Hiram Bosch was a round man with a full, red face behind that white beard. He was so round that he wore a belt
and
suspenders. But there wasn’t a bite to eat in the place and I had
looked
.

Being Hiram’s apprentice was exhausting. Lessons came whenever Hiram was in the mood, without structure or planning. Sometimes he woke me up in the middle of the night when he made himself a cup of tea, and he would talk for an hour about shit I could not for the life of me apply in any practical way to the burning issues of
Jesus, I’m hungry
or
How do I cast fucking magic spells
. I’d decided to give it another week, and then I was going to find someone else. Hiram had told me the oath of
urtuku
bound me to him, but Hiram said a lot of shit.

“It will not surprise you to learn that there are alternate worlds, or universes. It will not surprise you that these alternate worlds can be very similar or dissimilar to our own. Some of the intelligences encountered are novel. And therefore useful. They can be imprisoned. They can be contacted, forced, and imprisoned into an Artifact or Fabrication and their energies and properties utilized in a focused, aware manner.”

Artifact. Fabrication. I’d heard the old man use the words, but he hadn’t bothered to explain them. I’d tried requesting those definitions, but that had only prompted an hour of roaring rage from him, red-faced as he lectured me on the proper behavior of
urtuku:
silent, servile, grateful. I’d weathered that storm easy; I’d been on my own long enough to be unimpressed by anger, especially when it came from round old men wearing both suspenders and a belt. But Mageshkumar, the biggest motherfucker I’d ever seen, had once been reduced to tears by the man. It had taken me fifteen minutes to coax Mags out of the bathroom where he’d fled, and he’d spent the rest of the day watching
Hiram with wide, fearful eyes. I’d decided not to piss off Hiram Bosch with Mageshkumar in the room ever again.

“There are many forms of intelligence you can master, imprison, and use. Today we will discuss one particular type:
gidim
. What is the meaning of this word,
gidim
?”

A pang of anxiety settled in my stomach. Hiram was insane. He had provided me with no reference materials and yet seemed to assume I could somehow actually learn this fucking vocabulary he kept referring to.

He waited a moment, then sighed. I tensed up. I’d been with Hiram for just two weeks, but I already knew this could go one of two ways: punishment or a lecture. He wasn’t an imposing man physically—or he
was,
but not in a threatening way—but he knew hundreds of what he called
Cantrips,
tiny spells he hissed out so fast you couldn’t hope to stop him, most of them designed to make you hurt a little or a lot.

“Literally, it means
sickness demon,
but it is commonly and poetically translated as
coming darkness
. The
gidim
are formed from sacrifices. They take on the physical form of that which is sacrificed to summon them. This makes them unusual in that they will form an organic body to live in, a physical, corporeal body. Most other intelligences you may Summon must be confined in artificial constructions designed at least partially for the purpose—your Artifacts, or your more modern Fabrications. The
gidim
create bodies from those sacrificed to Summon them. Some of our order view this as evidence that they are a more elegant or efficient manner of creation.” He sighed, rubbing his belly. “Those who think so are fools. You need only see a
gidim
once to understand.”

He looked up at me. Whether it was the expression of slight doubt and boredom on my face or the fact that I’d once again inexplicably failed to study the materials he had never supplied, I knew immediately that the old man was about to make me bleed.

“Come! A demonstration. A pint, no more.” His eyes burned with a
malevolent cheer, then shifted to the hulking form of Mageshkumar. “Pitr, perhaps you would like to be elsewhere. This may upset you.”

I knew this was more concern for his property than for anything else. The big baby could do some damage when he got freaked out.

But Mageshkumar shook his head, frowning, his face becoming fierce and bloody. “I’m here to learn, too. Just like him.”

He stabbed one gigantic finger at me. Mageshkumar had been camped out at Hiram’s for months now, begging to be taken on as an apprentice. Hiram had refused. The big idiot thought we were in competition for the post, despite the fact that I’d been bonded to Hiram in a disturbing ceremony involving far more of my own blood than I would have liked.

Hiram sighed. “Very well. Mr. Vonnegan, prepare yourself.”

He shuffled off into the dim, mysterious interior of his apartment. I hadn’t been allowed anywhere aside from the bathroom and the kitchen. With a sigh, I rolled up my sleeve and studied the eight or nine healing scars already present, a sharp contrast to the milky white skin everywhere else. Somehow, despite my father, I’d never had a serious injury. No broken bones. No stitches. I was all original equipment—or I had been until I’d apprenticed myself to Hiram Bosch.

I wasn’t used to cutting myself yet. It hurt like a motherfucker every time, and the sensation of my lifeblood running out of me still freaked me out. And I was tired all the time. Every second of every day, I could close my eyes and just fall asleep.

I pulled the simple razor blade I’d been using from my shirt pocket. It was clean and sharp. A thrill of horror went through me.

Hiram bustled back into the kitchen carrying a birdcage, in which a bright blue bird bounced and chirped, and a small wooden bowl. In the bowl wriggled a collection of slimy-looking earthworms.

“You may be tempted to think the
gidim
we produce here today is gruesome because of these chosen forms we will sacrifice,” he said. My eyes flickered to the tiny blue bird, and a stab of panic hit me. “But I assure you:
Gidim
always assume the worst possible form based on the
sacrifices. They are
malevolent
. Do not mistake this. Now: a pint, please.”

I hesitated. “Do we . . . Do we have to kill the bird?”

He sighed. “Mr. Vonnegan,” he said without looking up, busying himself with a long, curved blade he extracted from a velvet sheath, “this is old magic. Our roots, as it were. Violent and barbaric. You must
know
this, or you will fail. Magic is not power. It is not freedom. It is not faith or luck. Magic is
violence
. When you are comfortable with violence, when you are willing to inflict it on yourself and others, then you will be ready to master it.” He nodded and opened the cage, thrusting a plump hand inside. “
Gidim
are the true face of magic, Mr. Vonnegan. Better you see it now than later.”

Mageshkumar shifted in his chair and made what I would have sworn was a whimpering noise. I turned to stare at him. The big guy looked like he had already murdered several people. Now he was staring at the bird like he was going to burst into tears.

“Mr. Vonnegan?”

I looked back at my arm and held the blade over it.
Not too deep,
Hiram had taught me.
Deep enough
,
only
. Important not to sever any arteries, not to kill yourself by accident. Although the wounds healed right away. I hadn’t gotten used to that yet, either.

I pushed the blade down and pulled it across my arm. For a second nothing seemed to happen. There was no blood, no pain. Then they both came. A searing line of pain and a thick gush of blood, spilling out of me onto the table.

Hiram began speaking and strangled the bird.

48.
“KIDS,” I SAID IN A
conversational tone, inaudible to everyone, “what we got here is an everyone-for-themselves sort of situation.”

The wings were like thin diamonds, fluttering. The body was humanoid, two legs, a trunk, two arms. Cherubic hands. Covered in the coarse black hair of a fly. The head was triangular, sporting two shiny yellow eyes that glittered in the light, covering most of the skull. A long, thin tubelike proboscis extended a foot or two from the front of its head. There was no mouth.

The Negotiator was shouting at me, but I couldn’t hear him. I was staring at the humanoid body and those tiny, perfect little hands—
baby’s
hands, my brain kept telling me, reminding me cheerfully how, exactly, a
gidim
was created—bristling with a fly’s coarse fur, opening and closing into tiny fists.
Gidim
took the form of the things sacrificed to create them. The tiny hands were the worst thing I’d ever seen in my life.

The proboscis was the second worst.

The
gidim
’s tiny, perfect little feet suddenly curled over the edge of the windowsill and it launched itself into the air, streaking three or four feet into the loose crowd gathered in the room. One of my Bleeders, a chubby black guy whose suit had been tailored for a much larger man, spun at the last second, and I had a glimpse of his face as he registered complete and utter shock for the last full second of his life. Then the
gidim
landed on him and, with one savage jerk of its neck, sank the needlelike proboscis directly into his skull.

The
gidim
’s body convulsed, as if it was pumping something into the Bleeder. The big man jittered and shook like a fish on the line, and then it whirled away, leaping to the nearest body, a middle-aged woman with long hair that was just a mass of split ends. For his part, the bug guy continued to jitter and shake, and then his head began to swell, to distort in agonizing jerks, like something was pounding at his skull from the inside.

A moment before I realized what was happening, two tiny, perfect hands, glistening, reached out of his distended mouth and began to force his jaw apart from the inside.

The Bleeder crashed to the floor. Something crashed against the door. The sound of the
gidim
’s wings was now beyond loud; we had
reached the point where the world had gone deaf, the collected noise of their buzzing wings pushing everyone’s ears into the red zone. I tried, briefly, to imagine how many were outside, how many filled the neighborhood—or New York entirely, the fucking
world
—and then spun to grab hold of Pitr Mags’s jacket and pull him close.

He was shouting. Everyone was shouting. Holding on to him, I turned and put my other hand on Claire, yanking her close. I thought of everyone else. I thought of Daryl, and Melanie, and all the stupid fucks whose names I’d never bothered to learn, the kids who had hitchhiked and bled and tramped here over the last few years, and then I pushed them out of my thoughts. They’d come to bleed for me. And I wouldn’t be able to save them now, if there’d ever been a slim possibility that I might. I had to try to save who I could.

Claire shoved me away violently, spinning and searching for Daryl, who’d gotten lost in the panic and noise. For a split second I swallowed down anger and jealousy—I couldn’t believe that even in the face of death she didn’t want me. After all this time. After all we’d been through. I was fucking smarter than that dumb hick. I had fucking
followers
. And if I’d put her in a position to not only get killed but to be the last version of herself, her whole fucking existence burned out of the cosmos because of me, well, I fucking hadn’t
meant
to.

Four
gidim
now spat around the room, three still shining from their recent birth throes. I didn’t look down to see what was left of their incubators. I lunged for Claire, but she slipped between two bodies and was gone. Before I could think of what to do, someone took hold of me in a sweating panic and lifted me off the floor. I felt Mags’s heart skip a beat, and then it was Mags lifting me off the floor and we were on the move. Mags tossed people aside like he was running for the goal. I could feel him shouting, the deep vibration of air through his lungs. I planted my feet and hauled against him, and he whirled, face lit up by dark red blood, eyes flashing. He continued to shout at me.