The Stringer Read online

  “Fuck you,” she whispered. “Tell me to be quiet like I haven’t been locked in a fucking basement for three days, drinking runoff? Babaca.”

  I nodded, shouldering the trap all the way up and poking my head up. I had a distinct flash: The last few years of my life ever since I’d refused to bleed the girl in Hiram’s apartment, ever since he’d angrily cast me out—If you will not do as you are told, if you will not do as you must, then you are wasting my time!—was a steep downward line on the graph.

  The trap led up into an interior room, an empty drywall cube without furniture or windows. It was dark; the only light was leaking in under the only door, outlining it in gold. I palmed my shard of glass and pulled myself up, the scrape of my shoes on the scuffed wooden floor sounding incredibly loud. I rolled onto my belly and dangled my arms down into the black square of the trap until I felt the girl’s hands slip into mine. She weighed nothing, so helping her up into the room was easy. She scrambled to her feet and crouched there, animal-like, her big eyes wide and white in the gloom.

  I rolled onto my feet, fingered the shard of glass—my sole asset in more ways than one—and crept toward the door.

  It wasn’t locked. I cracked it open and was momentarily blinded by the bright golden light provided by several kerosene lamps, the sort you took on camping trips or kept in abandoned mines or . . . fucking hell serial killer murder houses.

  They hung from nails on the walls, providing a flickering, greasy light that my eyes worked overtime to downgrade from painfully bright to barely bright enough. Well-lit, Larissa looked even worse. She was bone-skinny and covered in bruises, her torn clothes hanging off her, and she was younger than I’d thought, just a kid. I had a brief flash of canvas sneakers with pink marker doodles all over them, and I resisted the urge to reach out and put my hand on her shoulder.

  The hall was narrow, with white beadboard walls and wide-plank floors under a well-worn, filthy red runner. Under the oil smell of the lamps it smelled like mothballs and peppermint. I remembered my ancient granna’s house, where I’d been taken exactly three times as a small child when Mom and Dad were still trying to make it happen, when Dad’s frequent disappearances and my frequent kidnappings at his drunken, palsied hands were in the future. Always too fucking dark, always stuffy, as if the windows had never been opened. The smell of that ancient house had risen from the grave to assault my nose once again.

  There was a door on our left and stairs on our right. There was a door in front of us as well—based on the placement, it was the main entrance, but someone had taken the precaution of nailing six planks across it, along with a slab of plywood over the glass.

  “There is no way we go upstairs,” Larissa whispered urgently. “There is no way. Can you open the door? Like you did with the trapdoor? With your magia?”

  I shook my head. I was studying the Wards that had been laid on the front door in addition to the physical barriers. They were dense; I’d never seen work so complex. The Wards Hiram had shown me had been simple and straightforward; he’d never gotten around to teaching me anything sophisticated. It would take me hours to parse through each twist and turn in the patterns, and even then I wouldn’t know how to begin untying the threads.

  Larissa offered me an unimpressed grunt.

  I turned my attention to the door on our left. No Wards there. It wasn’t even locked, the knob turning easily in my hand. As I cracked it open, music and voices could be heard, distant and muffled. Before us was an unoccupied sitting room lit by a fire set in a massive stone fireplace on the opposite wall. The windows in the front had been boarded up—and Warded. A trio of large comfortable-looking leather chairs ringed a coffee table, where a decanter of whiskey, an old-fashioned water siphon, and several large crystal tumblers had been set.

  We crept inside, closing the door softly behind us. The room felt hot, and the air was thick and hard to breathe, like I was underwater and breathing through a straw. My head ached, my vision pulsed with my heartbeat, and my stomach kept flipping and sending warning signals to my brain. My legs were shaky, too, and I wondered how much more I’d be able to bleed before falling over.

  There were two doors off to our left as we entered, no Wards. The voices and music drifted in from some other room, muted and muffled; the fire crackled and popped. The song was scratchy and tinny, doleful horns and stately keys. I wanted nothing more than light and air, to see and to breathe, and the more I thought about it, the tighter and hotter the room became.

  Larissa moved forward quickly, silent because she weighed nothing. She listened at each door while I stood there, encased in the hot jellied air. Then she turned and jerked her thumb at the leftmost one.

  I followed as she stepped through, and we were in the kitchen. It was done up in all white, but the white had faded like an old photo. An enormous stove, black and charred, dominated one wall, and everything else was cabinets and marble counters. There was no refrigerator, no microwave—no appliances at all, in fact. There were, I noticed, no outlets anywhere. The room was lit by more kerosene lanterns, the queasy smell of the fuel making my head spin and making the faint music swirl into a circus dirge.

  Then I spied it: A window over the sink. It was boarded up like the others but had no Wards. Outside, it was too dark to see anything; I pointed at it, and Larissa nodded, crossing the room and climbing up on the countertop, her skinny frame lithe and agile. She began tugging ineffectually at the planks until I tapped her foot and motioned her down.

  Working in silence, I cut precisely into my arm, working the same scar. The gas in the air was immediate, and a risk—I spoke quickly, spitting out the Words and making the nails pop out one by one. The first plank fell, and I caught it and set it gently on the counter.

  The music stopped. The voices stopped.

  I heard Larissa catch her breath, but my spell kept working and the nails kept popping. I caught the second plank and set it aside just as softly. Then the voices came back, grew louder, and we heard a door squealing open in the next room.

  I turned, letting the last plank crash to the floor while I squeezed a fresh bleed from my newest wound and spoke three more Words, throwing the sloppiest barrier ever created onto the kitchen door. I looked at Larissa, who stood shivering, her bare feet filthy.

  “Go!” I shouted. “Now! That won’t hold for long!”

  She sprang into motion, scrambling back onto the counter and throwing the window open just as someone tried the door and then put a shoulder to it, beating against it savagely, howling. Even in the weak light, I could see the hinges jumping with each impact.

  I turned and found Larissa halfway out the window, crouched under its sash, staring back at me.

  “Mister—”

  I barked one Word: sutaka. With a yelp, she tumbled out the window, the sash crashing down behind her, as the door behind me smashed open with an explosion of snapping wood and tearing metal. Woozy, as the spell drained me, I turned just in time for good old Mr. Landry to hit me in the head hard enough to spin me around and drop me to the floor, my own blood spraying in a mist.

  He leaped on me and slapped one cold, slack hand over my mouth before I could cast again, then lifted me bodily off the floor. He carried me back out through the ruined door into the sitting room, and spun smartly, carrying me through the second door into a small office or den, dark and dense with bookshelves, lit by yet more kerosene lamps. A small desk and two chairs had been crammed into the space. In one sat a tidy older woman, handsome and slim, wearing trousers and a comfortable-looking sweater, her gray hair done in a neat bun. A pair of pink reading glasses perched on the end of her nose as she worked a pile of knitting in her lap, pink and yellow yarn, needles flashing.

  Behind her stood a large man with the beefy look of a Bleeder: tall, fat, and with scars crisscrossing his arms in a complex pattern. He wore black pants, a black sleeveless shirt, and a black hood on his head. He
stood perfectly still, at attention. Whoever this woman was, she was power: saganustari, at least, possibly higher up on the food chain.

  She didn’t look up as we crashed into the room, or when Landry tossed me casually into the other chair and then slipped behind me and wrapped his bony arm around my throat, exerting expert pressure and cutting off my breathing.

  My eyes bugged out and I strained ineffectually against him as the woman looked up from her knitting. She slid the glasses off her face so they hung around her neck on a silver chain and cupped her hands in her lap. As I choked, she ran her eyes up and down me and offered a half-smile.

  “So good of you,” she said, sounding like everybody’s grandmother. “Can I offer you some tea?”

  5.

  LANDRY, MUTTERING “BALAHUL” UNDER his breath, wheeled the cart into the tiny room with exaggerated care, as if he’d only recently learned how gravity worked. My hostess smiled blandly as he maneuvered the cart between us, bearing a delicate-looking teapot with pink flowers on it, two white teacups, and a small plate of butter cookies.

  I looked up at her and opened my mouth. “I—”

  The Bleeder behind her moved in a flash to cut himself, a thin, precise line of red opening up on his forearm. The grandma spoke a single Word, sed, gently, almost absent-mindedly, and my words died in my mouth. It was really disturbing that I hadn’t seen any sign from her. Her Bleeder had just moved. I didn’t often travel in the swanky circles of enustari, the powerful and the ruthless, but usually they had to give some sign to their Bleeders.

  I sat in polite silence while Landry made his stiff, dead way out of the room, humming his one Word.

  My host leaned forward and picked up the teapot and poured. “All right, let’s find out what you’re good for. I don’t get enough living ones. More complex, of course, requires more effort but yields better results. You’re a practitioner? Ustari?”

  Ours was a small, strange club. I didn’t know for certain how many of us there were, bleeding people for gas and casting spells, but certainly no more than a few thousand. Maybe fewer. I hesitated for a moment. The dancing, watery light of the kerosene lamp and the utter silence made the room feel even smaller. I wondered if I’d have any chance of making a run for it past Landry.

  Deciding I needed a better shot, I nodded.

  She smiled. “Sugar? Milk?”

  I nodded again.

  “Quiet one,” she said, dropping two cubes of sugar into a cup and following that with a dash of milk. Handing me the cup, she smiled again. “That’s a sign of intelligence.”

  I wanted to say something about how, if that was so, it hadn’t done me much good, but I just shrugged, holding the teacup stupidly. It felt incredibly tiny in my hands, as if I might snap it with a twitch. It was like a glimpse into what it was like to be Pitr Mags, the whole world made to a smaller scale.

  She picked up her own cup and settled back into her chair. “Now, this is very important, son,” she said, sucking on her teeth a bit. She leaned forward slightly and whispered, “Do you have any . . . devices on you?”

  I blinked.

  “A phone? A—” She winced. “A computer?”

  Kerosene lamps, no outlets, the utter stillness—the source of the music was an ancient wind-up turntable, a thick black record on its green felt. Ustari as a rule didn’t care for technology, that was true; I’d toyed with the idea of collecting spells in some digital files, but the thought made me uneasy and I’d never gotten around to it.

  I shook my head.

  Her eyes were old and flat and heartless, and she kept them on me unblinkingly.

  “Oh, good. That is good.” She sipped her tea with a slurpy relish. “That’s the problem with this world. Devices. Technology.” Her face took on a softer, dreamy look. “There was a time when this was our world. We summoned the peasants and they sent us their sacrifices. We directed the armies and they shed blood for us. The invisible hand.” She refocused on me. “I had an ancestor at Agincourt, you know. The tale is passed down to us to this day: Such glorious blood! Blood enough for any biludha, for the most complex ritual! Mountains raised, seas drained, anything! He stood beside King Henry V, and it was glorious!”

  Her cadence, energy, and unblinking stare were exactly what you encountered on the subway after midnight, people demanding that you stop following them, demanding that you admit the president was a robot. Except those people didn’t have a chunky Bleeder ready to gas up some serious spells, and I didn’t have Mags’s intimidating presence looming over my shoulder.

  She waved a hand. “Ahh, golden days of yore. It’s different now, isn’t it? Guns. Computers. All of it. Clever peasants have harnessed the forces of the universe—well, some of them—and here we are, scuttling about, hiding. We, the invisible hand!” She shook her head at the insanity of it all. “They discovered gunpowder and split the atom, and here we are.”

  I didn’t know what to do. There was no question to respond to, and I couldn’t speak anyway. So I sipped my tea. It was delicious. There was something fruity going on that was simply lovely. I thought of the pale swill Hiram used to make and added that as an extra black mark against the fat man: bad tea, and plenty of it.

  “So!” she said, setting down her cup and leaning forward, sucking her teeth again. “What shall we do with you?” She laced her fingers together and supported her head on them. “You have a Vocabulary, so no dumb brutes like our clumsy friend Balahul, eh? Something a bit more subtle.” She peered at me for a moment longer, and my internal alarms lit up. The time for information gathering was over; it was time to go. I needed T-shirts that read TIME TO GO on the front. I could wear them everywhere and save everyone some headaches.

  The question was, did I hit an old woman in the face or not?

  She’d shut me up with a neat bit of Wordplay, so casting was out. I had a feeling that if I made a move to escape, her Bleeder would have some gas in the air before I had my ass off the seat; I doubted I was getting far before she brought some serious thunder down on me. On the other hand, the interview was getting creepy, and I’d left Mags unattended in Hiram’s house. Or dead.

  Time to go. I threw my cup at her face and launched myself at the door. Tricksters weren’t fancy.

  She squawked, which made me feel good, and there was gas in the air almost immediately—a gush of it, as if her blubbery standby had just opened an artery. Which made me panic, and then I was through the door and moving as fast as I could, stumbling as I made the turn to head into the kitchen and the open window. I heard Grandma speaking Words but tried to outrun her—my slim experience with enustari was that they tended to be long-winded, luxuriating in their endless supplies of blood, using three impressive Words where one basic Word would do.

  I was halfway to the window when the floor drifted away. There was a hand on my collar and I was lifted up, my legs still working for a moment.

  “No dumb Collector for you,” Grandma hissed into my ear. She was holding me up over her head, her grip like iron, magically enhanced. I could sense the gas pouring into the air; her Bleeder would be dead in a few seconds unless she did something about it. “You’re skilled, yes? A lucky find. Something a bit more capable for you, I think.”

  She carried me one-handed and wasn’t even out of breath. We didn’t head back to the tiny study. Instead she took me back into the narrow hall, slung me over one shoulder as if I weighed nothing, and bounded up the stairs. I found myself wishing I’d heard the spell she’d spoken so I could steal bits and pieces of it, maybe cut it down to Trickster length, something I could cast on my own gas and not pass out. I was good at that, stealing the ideas of ustari.

  The second floor had the same floor plan as the first, and she took me toward the room above her den.

  “I’m older than I look, you know.”

  Archmages tended to be. There were many ways to slow down time if you were will
ing to bleed people for them. A guy like Evelyn Fallon, who looked to be a thousand years old, was likely two thousand years old.

  “I saw it happening. I saw those busy little monkeys in their labs and their factories. I saw our influence and power being matched—exceeded, perhaps. We might summon our Bleeders and assemble our forces and unleash terrible rituals, but the monkeys would arrive in their tanks and their planes, and what? Their three-dimensional printers and their worldwide communication networks. I saw it happening and I tried to warn the rest, but no one listened. And where are we now? Hiding, like insects. Don’t cast in public! Don’t be noticed.”

  She paused to kick a door in.

  “Even someone like you, idimustari, Little Magician that you are, even you must see how humiliating it is. This is our world. And we have allowed primitives to steal it from us.”

  The room was empty of furniture, but six beefy guys in black hoods stood against the walls, confirming the old bat’s status: Only enustari had so many Bleeders just standing around waiting to open a vein.

  “A little chaos now and then . . .” she said in a singsong as she dropped me in the middle of the room. The floorboards were stained a dark reddish brown and felt soft and damp under me as I crawled backward away from her. “. . . is a tonic for the best of men.”

  Gas in the air, another flood. I turned to look at her Bleeders: Two of them had slit their wrists silently. No command, no sign from her. They’d just done it. The gas was sour and golden in the air, the most beautiful sensation in the world, pure power curdling my stomach and making my throat gag.

  “You will be host to Lugal,” she said. “His brothers are lesser lights—savage, eager, stupid. They will continue to tear down the infrastructure, to sow chaos, uncertainty. They will claw at the foundations of this mechanical world. You will assist Lugal with a higher purpose. Together we will tear this world down and reassert the proper order. People will crawl to us when we are revealed, begging us to save them, to rule them.”