We Are Not Good People (Ustari Cycle) (66 page)

I reminded myself she was the most dangerous
enustari
in history, and could not quite believe it. Then thought, what did she have to fear? Whoever she had brought with her into this empty world, whoever had helped her to cast the
tah-namus
and become immortal—she had turned on them. She had betrayed them. How could she not? She was Mika Renar.

“We can’t let her speak,” Billington whispered.

We did nothing. I knew our window was closing; my Glamour wouldn’t fool
hers
for long. I pushed myself back against the wall and closed my eyes. You could do a lot with two relatively healthy people a pint or so down between them. You could do plenty. But it had to be right. It had to work the first time.

I pushed my hands into my pockets and found the tiny jeweled box I’d taken from Elsa.

I didn’t have a name for it. It was warm and heavy in my hand, and when she’d tried to use it on me there had been no spell, no Words at all. A Fabrication, built and bound. A tap to the forehead. Fucking
magic
.

Reaching across myself, I gently tugged Melanie until she turned to me. Her face was deeply lined. I’d never noticed before, or maybe she’d
aged in this weird time line I’d never experienced. She said she’d woken up in Alabama. I’d never asked her where she was from, what she’d been through, and hadn’t wondered. And she hadn’t asked me.

“Keep her distracted,” I said. Her eyes flicked to the box, then back to me. She nodded and started to turn away, but I caught her. “
Distracted,
” I repeated.

She smiled. “We’re fucking Tricksters, Chief,” she whispered. “That’s all we do.”

She lifted her blade with one hand and her thick, heavy braid with the other, revealing a bloody mess behind her ear. “Head wounds,” she said simply. I nodded.

As the gas filled the air, she began to whisper the Words. Again, I was struck by how much more skilled she was than she had been. When she hit the cadence, twenty or thirty of her blinked into existence. It was clever—each one moved in a way that was a half inch towards wonky, making them all seem like individual versions, acting independently.

“Wish me luck,” she said, then let out a whoop at the top of her lungs and ran around the corner. A second later, her army of Glamours followed, whooping in concert.

I cut myself. I spoke ten Words, fifteen syllables. Fucking with the physical universe was hard as hell, but fooling people’s perceptions was easy. That had always been the rule. I turned the corner and started walking, slow.

Melanie was making a real effort. Her two dozen Glamours were racing around Renar, who looked already dead, frail and motionless in her wheelchair. I glanced up and over my shoulder, and there was Renar’s Glamour—her eyes and ears, I realized, the only way she could see or hear—terrible in its beauty, floating down to the street, the beautiful face locked in a frown, the black coat fluttering in realistic detail. She looked like she couldn’t quite believe what she was seeing. I didn’t blame her. Who came at Mika fucking Renar like this?

I kept walking. Slow and steady. I could feel Pitr’s heart out of sync with mine, five beats of mine to one of his. I clung to it. I felt like that connection was the only thing real; everything else was bullshit.

I stared at Renar, the dozens of Billingtons racing between us. I avoided them as best I could; illusions were easy to ruin with a quick physics lesson, and Renar hadn’t lived to be forever and a day (and counting up to eternity) by being
unobservant
. I kept walking. I sidestepped the Melanies. When Renar’s Glamour passed over me, there was no shadow, and I was momentarily pleased to note one fucking mistake in that spell. One fucking mistake.

Then her Glamour was right in front of me. I drafted it as it glided forward, slightly faster than I was walking. Tricks on tricks on tricks. We were a few feet away from the mummy in the chair. Tension built inside me, and I couldn’t believe I was this close to Mika Renar.

The Glamour suddenly reached out one hand and pointed. The mummy’s white lips moved. One of the Melanies exploded into bone and blood, and a hard consonant sound, the beginnings of a scream, cut off. The other Melanies disappeared, just gone, in an instant. I froze. I was two feet away. The Glamour, Renar’s eyes and ears, was turned away from me.

I held my breath. The Glamour surveyed the remains of Melanie Billington calmly. The quiet was once again complete. I’d gotten one more person killed, inching towards my perfect record of killing
everyone I came in contact with
.

I felt Pitr’s heart beating. I thought of Claire. And I launched myself forward.

I passed through the Glamour, like flying through dry clouds, red and black and pink. The mummy’s slitted eyes leaped to me at the last second. The rest of her tiny, puppet body remained perfectly still. I thought I could feel those eyes physically. It was like jumping on top of a sharp spike in the ground, belly-first. I stretched out my arm just as the Glamour began to shout something, as the mummy’s mouth began to twitch.

I felt something slide around my neck, like a snake, cold and dry.

The jeweled box, seemingly tiny and fragile, slammed into Renar’s forehead like a rock. A jolt of fire lanced up my arm, agony for one split second and then complete, buzzing numbness as the box leaped from my hand and hit the ground, thudding there like a much larger, much heavier object. I fell to my knees in front of it, my left hand going to my throat, where they found a thin silver wire, like a garrote, wrapped around my neck. It tingled at the touch.

I looked up. Renar’s Glamour was gone.

The mummy held the same position, but the eyes had gone flat and staring, and there was no sign of her slight, labored breathing. I looked from her to the box.

The silver wire around my neck tightened. My right arm still hung at my side, and I couldn’t move it, so I worked the fingers of my left hand under and tugged at it. There was a jerk on the wire and I flipped over, searing pain burning into the skin of my neck as someone gave it an enthusiastic yank.

I rolled onto my belly and lay there, panting. I looked up, following the length of the nearly invisible, thin silver wire to where Ev Fallon stood, looking dapper in a well-tailored white suit.

“Hurry up, now,” he said with a kindly grin. “It is time.”

56.
“A VERY OLD ARTIFACT,” FALLON
said conversationally as he led me on what was essentially a leash through the bone-strewed streets of Shanghai. “Perhaps two thousand years old. Amazing that such things have been preserved. I discovered it in a storage unit in Miami, Florida, seventy-odd years ago. Just coiled in an unmarked wooden box. Artifacts are always like this, mischievous. Always falling through cracks and becoming lost, always seeking to be found by those
who do not know how to control them. The intelligences imprisoned within them are . . . resentful.”

The pain was constant, a sensation of burning. My right arm was still numb and useless, and I’d found that I could only answer questions; I could not say anything else. If I tried to resist being led through the streets like a dog, the pain doubled, and tripled, and then made my vision turn red and my brain threaten to explode. So I was following the old man in silence.

“That is the main difference between an Artifact, as we call them, and a Fabrication. Fabrications are more complex, of course, but the main difference is this intelligence. This awareness. Artifacts of the old school involved Summonings, intelligences. Fabrications usually do not. They simply manipulate energy in mechanical ways.”

I wondered if this was a lesson he had taught Pitr.

Fallon turned, transferring the end of the leash to his right hand and producing the jeweled box from his right pocket and holding it up. “This, not so old. In fact, I created this.”

I stared at him.

He nodded. “Yes! Elsa liked to take credit for things. Elsa is not nearly so old as I am, and not nearly as talented, despite what others—quoting Elsa herself—may have told you. I am the Fabricator, Mr. Vonnegan. When you encounter a beautiful Fabrication, a Fabrication that works and is clever, you have found some of my work.” He laughed. “I am, I believe, the oldest man in history. And now, thanks to dear Mika, I will always be. Elsa was talented, yes. She had the ability to see something, once, and then replicate it, perfectly. Extraordinary, in her way . . .” Trailing off, he studied me for a moment as he walked backwards and I followed, limping slightly, and then he sighed and turned away. “You have questions. Ask them.”

I didn’t know what to say. I could still feel Pitr somewhere, and I hoped he wasn’t panicked or scared or just failing. I didn’t know where Fallon was taking me, or what he planned to do to me.

“It was you all along,” I said at last. “Wasn’t it? Behind everything.”

He laughed. Fallon had laughed so infrequently in my experience that it sounded bizarre and disconcerting. “No! No, Mr. Vonnegan, that is the fun of it. I remember our previous existences, as you do. I was not aware of Mika’s plans when I originally designed her custom work. And I did not know what it was intended for. I have lived for centuries using the
barna
like this one. I have been here a long time, Mr. Vonnegan. I was content to work and study and use only the occasional body to perpetuate myself. I am of the old school. You do not leave marks. You stay hidden, you do not discuss certain lore. You control the situation.” He sighed. “I was content. I worked, and when my body became too old to function, or when it become ill, I borrowed another. But only then. Not as Elsa did, reckless, ruthless. Cruel. In this way I did intend to live forever, Mr. Vonnegan, and for that you may judge me. But Mika’s plan was her own.”

He walked a few steps in silence.

“But your visit shocked me. Because I had never considered the possibility of another
enustari
ending
me
. Almost as an afterthought. As if I did not matter—me, who had lived so
long
. So when you had thrown your wrench into the plan, I approached Mika, and made terms, and worked with her to solve the problem you had created. I held no harsh feelings towards you, Mr. Vonnegan. I would have been happy for you to survive. However, Mika was no fool, and when she accepted me into her camp, I was forced to agree to terms.”

I nodded to myself. Tried speaking again and found I could. “The Negotiator.”

There was no gas in the air, so I pulled the tired old trick of biting my tongue. The tongue bleeds. It’s filled with vessels, and it
bleeds
. Iron and salt filled my mouth and the gas hit the air, and I didn’t waste a second: I pulled on it hard and tried whispering my new favorite word:
gulla
. My throat locked, and I choked. I tried again and made a gagging noise, the silver leash seeming to tighten around my neck.

“Mr. Harrows, yes,” Fallon said without acknowledging my attempt
to cast. “I pledged not to harm Mika directly. This became problematic when we found ourselves both on the other side of the
tah-namus,
yes? Like we were an old married couple. Marriage always ends in divorce, you know. Among our kind, divorce can be quite final. And Mika thought she was clever:
She
was not bound by the same restriction to respect the existence of her colleagues. One by one, she isolated them and destroyed them. They all had their
pride
and attempted to take her on, directly, without tricks, without guile. And they were
destroyed
. And then only I remained.”

I nodded. It was funny, I thought, how it all became clear when someone was explaining it to you. “You let me live so I could kill her for you.” I had a slight lisp from my bitten tongue.

“Oh, Mr. Vonnegan, I let you live so you could
try
.” He laughed and spun around again. “And look at you! You have succeeded! It was a dirty trick, especially against an
enustari
of such history and reputation. But certainly I do not blame you.”

I swallowed. I was sweating. “What happens to me?”

He turned again. “And Mr. Mageshkumar? Do not worry, Mr. Vonnegan, you will not die. You will
bleed,
for I find myself in need of blood. The reserves I have so carefully maintained will last some time. But not forever. It is good to have some living stock to work with, so you will join the others I have acquired, rather painstakingly.” His free hand went up in a classic rhetoric gesture. “I will observe the ancient traditions of
ustari
and
siskur
.”

Siskur
. I’d heard the Word. I wasn’t sure where. I’d never heard anyone else use it, but then I didn’t spend a lot of time hanging around with Archmages. If I had to guess—and I did—I would guess it meant
Bleeder
.

The silver leash squirmed on my neck like a living thing.

“And right now?” I asked. It was a big world. A big empty world. I tried to comprehend the three of us being the last people in the world. It was impossible. The
Biludha-tah-namus
wouldn’t have killed everyone. Someone had survived, maybe even hundreds, thousands of people. A tiny amount, but still—someone.

Fallon stopped suddenly. I stopped too, curiously. Forced by the leash. For a second I thought I was still moving, my brain sending the signals to my legs, but they wouldn’t obey.

He turned slowly, almost posing, like he was in a photo shoot for a fashion magazine.
Old Coots Who Dress Better
or something.

He looked at me with a sort of wry half-smile. “Where
is
Mr. Mageshkumar?”

We stared at each other. My mind was blank. For the first time in as long as I could remember, I had nothing smart to say.

He wrapped the silver leash around his hand two, three times, then slowly tugged it closer to him. The leash tightened around my neck, making my eyes bulge and my face turn hot red. I tried to stagger towards him but couldn’t.

“Mr. Vonnegan,
where
is Mr. Mageshkumar?
Exactly?
”