The Stringer Read online

  My only limitation was that Hiram didn’t cast very many interesting spells. Most of his spells were Cantrips, tiny mu to make his life easier. He’d claimed authorship of the hun-kiuba, but as time went on I wasn’t sure I believed him—it was far too complex for Hiram to have written it. Like everything else in his apartment, the hun-kiuba had been stolen. So I had to steal all the Cantrips he muttered, to float things toward him with a pricked thumb, to distract people, to make people automatically avoid him when walking down busy streets. All of Hiram’s spells were fast, sloppy, and cost just a few drops of blood; they were designed to let him be as lazy as possible while stealing as much as possible.

  From that hot mess, I’d taught myself the Words, their grammar, how chunks of a spell could be spliced together to do something more powerful.

  THE DEMON WANTED a spell. I was in agony. Something was taking hold of my essential being like an old blanket and twisting and tugging it, trying to squeeze some damp out of it. I stiffened, my hands going clawlike on the bar, my head snapping back, a low growl bubbling down in my chest. I shook for a few moments, grimacing, sweat popping out all over my body, sizzling on my skin like blood.

  The Bleeders were lined up to my left; I could see them in the tarnished mirror, the saddest group of assholes ever. They scratched at themselves, shuffled their feet, and licked their lips nervously, all of them concerned with one thing: when they were getting their money. I didn’t know what the going rate for a part-time bottom-feeding Bleeder was, but I knew it couldn’t possibly be enough. Nothing would be enough.

  I tried to hide from Lugal, to throw up confusion and uncertainty. I tossed everything I had at it, my memories, scraps of spells, doggerel, and bullshit. It clawed through and I could feel it splitting me open, destroying me to get what it wanted: a spell that would cause chaos and bloodshed, a spell that would add to the destruction its Master wanted.

  The demon wanted a spell. As the pressure mounted inside my existence, agonizingly bursting me at the seams, I started making one up.

  8.

  HIRAM DIDN’T ANSWER HIS door; the old Fabricator, Fallon, did. The old man’s deeply lined face was impassive and lit by the flames and cherry tops as he studied me for a second, then lashed out an arm and pulled me in.

  “Quickly,” he said.

  Across the street, three buildings were burning, and a lone cop, his car at an odd angle in the middle of the street with all four doors open, was standing there watching it with a dumb look on his face.

  “All,” I said, my voice thick and rough. “All.”

  Fallon spun me into Hiram’s hallway and slammed the door behind him. “Bosch!” he shouted, taking me by the arm and walking me rapidly toward the bathroom. “Bosch!”

  I was barely moving my legs; the old man was a lot stronger than he looked, and I was being half carried. Hiram emerged from his bedroom with a sleep mask perched on top of his head, looking rough and ragged.

  “What—”

  “Come!” Fallon snapped. I’d never seen anyone treat Hiram like this; my memories of the man were mainly of him yelling at me. Here, though, he blinked in surprise and followed the old man readily enough, and soon we were all crowded into the bathroom with Mags mooning in the doorway.

  “Lem!” he cried, trying to shoulder his way into the tiny space despite the fact that the laws of physics deemed that impossible. But Fallon turned and put one hand on Mags’s chest, and the giant stopped cold.

  “Mr. Mageshkumar,” Fallon said gently. “Please, wait in the hall.”

  Mags hesitated, trying to see around Fallon and Hiram, then took a step back, deflating like a schoolboy who’d been told there would be no ice cream now or ever. Fallon nodded crisply and shut the door.

  “Now,” he said, turning. “Mr. Vonnegan, are you able to speak?”

  “What’s going on?” Hiram asked, sounding annoyed.

  “Can you not sense it?” Fallon asked, his leathery hands aiming my face up at his as his eyes studied me. “We have a Stringer. He has a presence in him. An intelligence. He appears to have partially neutralized it, but the trick will not hold. Mr. Vonnegan? Can you speak?”

  I nodded. “All,” I said. “All all all.”

  THERE WAS A room in the back of the bar that had been renovated into a large shower in black tile. They marched all twenty-five Bleeders into it, Lugal communicating its desires with grunts and a small number of words.

  “Bleedin’ ’em here costs extra,” Housedress said, making a mark in her notebook.

  I existed in a tiny corner of my own mind, a darkened space where I was only dimly aware of what my senses were perceiving, everything secondhand and filtered through Lugal’s distinctly alien sensibilities while the demon worked my limbs and my voice and my face.

  “All,” I said. Lugal liked the word and felt no need to learn new ones. It multitasked, crushing me with its demand for a spell while walking my body into the room. The Bleeders were breaking my heart—these were not people making a sober economic decision, a bit of blood in exchange for some ready cash. These were desperate people, broken people. These were people who’d accepted the possibility that the roulette wheel was going to land on fucked up and still walked into the goddamn black-tiled shower room in the back of the sketchiest bar in history. A shower room. In a bar. Done in black tile. The fact that none of them had made a break for the door told me all I needed to know about their situations.

  I didn’t bleed people. It was the only rule I had and the only reason I could sleep at night. I would have to work fast if I was going to minimize the damage. I could wrestle with the philosophical question of whether it was me or the demon doing the bleeding later. Right now I needed to get out with as little blood on my hands as possible.

  I started with the Trickster’s basic building block: a Charm.

  There were a million Charm spells. Cantrips or mu short and sweet and designed to make people like you, all the way up to biludha that were tens of thousands of Words long and could sway thousands of people into being your cult, your army, your servants. For idimustari looking to pry a few dollars here and there from the unknowing and the uninitiated, a solid Charm Cantrip was an absolute necessity. You accost someone on the street when you’ve had it rough for a few nights, sleeping in the open, bleeding gas to evade the cops, and you need a little Charm just to keep your target from fleeing the smell. I had plenty of them in the old memory banks; Hiram used them all the time, constantly, so I’d picked up the basics from listening to him, and then I’d improved things: I’d pared them down and added my own innovations. I picked a short, short-lived mu; I needed it to take effect as quickly as possible so I could minimize the damage.

  Next I needed a piece from Hiram’s spell, the hun-kiuba. While Housedress unfolded a shiny straight razor and put it in my hand, I raced through the spell, following the threads and getting rid of the useless verbiage. I ripped out the seventeen Words that did the heavy lifting and swapped several, changing what it did. Hiram’s spell stopped time—within a defined space, the extent of which depended on the amount of gas fed into it—for everyone but the caster and anyone he designated; when Hiram had demonstrated it to me, we’d robbed a subway car full of people, all frozen in time while Hiram and I moved normally.

  I inverted it so it would freeze the caster.

  The razor was in my hand and Lugal was moving me toward the Bleeders. In agony, I raced, pulling in bits and pieces from the hundreds of small spells, piecing them together. All I knew were small spells, tricks, but what was a biludha except many small spells strung together, a chain of effects and modifiers?

  I raced. I reached out for the first Bleeder’s arm. She was someone’s grandma, an old, skinny woman with nicotine-stained hands and teeth, skinny, sagging, her eyes tightly closed. When I touched her, she flinched and screwed her eyes even tighter.

  Lugal demanded, squeezing me until I
thought I was going to pop. I worked, filling my spell with nonsense. I took every lesson I’d learned from shitty mages who couldn’t write and plumped the spell until it was bloated, lengthy, convoluted. Until it looked like the major spell Lugal demanded, until it looked like a ritual that would rip shit up.

  I sliced the Bleeder’s arm, deep, a suicide cut. Lugal knew human anatomy, at least. And when it turned inward again and crushed me with agony, compressing me until I barely existed, I barfed up my masterpiece, the greatest grift I’d ever managed, and spoke the spell.

  “BLEED,” FALLON SNAPPED.

  Hiram drew himself up, summoning his dignity. It was undercut by the way his suspenders strained over his belly. “You are mistaken, sir. I am ustari and—”

  Fallon turned and snarled at him. “Your urtuku is in grave danger, you fat little toad. You will bleed.”

  I witnessed Hiram Bosch, whom I’d seen go crimson in anger many times, turn white as a sheet, and it was strangely satisfying—and confirmation that Evelyn Fallon was someone to be feared. If I hadn’t been hanging on to control of my own body by a fingernail, I would have savored the moment more.

  “Very well,” Hiram said stiffly, producing his ornate straight razor. “What is the volume?”

  Fallon turned back to me. “What is its name, Vonnegan?”

  I struggled to assert control over my voice, my mouth. It was disconcerting. I lived by my voice, by the Words. Being unsure of that voice left me weak, helpless. For some reason, speaking the demon’s name was easier. I was reminded of cheery old Balahul, who seemed fond of its own name, too. “Lugal.”

  “Lugal,” Fallon repeated, closing his eyes. “Ah yes, a nasty piece. Master, it means literally, ideal for a Stringer. Tell me: How have you asserted control?”

  I licked my lips. The demon was like a bowling ball sewn inside my head; there wasn’t room for anything like thoughts. I had to string together a regular sentence as if I were casting, choosing each word as if it were a Word, as if every syllable had consequence. It was like being brain-damaged.

  “It wanted . . . spell,” I said, breathing hard, my body tense with effort. “I . . . tricked. Froze it in . . . moment.”

  Fallon’s smile was papery. “Clever,” he said, then sobered. “It will not last. Lugal was fooled by its own disdain—the stronger intelligences believe us to be little more than chattel to be run under their wheels. But it is powerful, and you can already feel it slipping your bonds, yes?”

  I nodded. Words were too difficult.

  Fallon pursed his lips. “A pint, Bosch. Perhaps a bit more. On my mark.”

  Enustari were used to people bleeding for them. Someone like Fallon had a casual expectancy that when they needed gas in the air, there would be gas in the air.

  “Mageshkumar,” Hiram said, sounding relieved. “He’s—”

  “You,” Fallon said quietly. “You will bleed.”

  Hiram shut up. My gasam was learning his true place in the world. That sort of thing was never pretty. Ustari varied just like other people: You had smart ones, dumb ones, funny ones, thin ones, fat ones, tall and short ones, but none of us were nice. You can’t rely on killing people for the things you want and be nice, and we as a class killed everyone. We are not good people.

  “Mr. Vonnegan,” Fallon said as the sweet sour sense of gas hit the air, the most wonderful feeling of nausea. Hiram was surprisingly robust. “It will resist me. This will not be pleasant.” He began speaking the Words of a spell I’d never heard. Five Words in, and Lugal kicked, sensing that someone was trying to evict it, and my veins lit on fire.

  I screamed.

  With a crash, the bathroom door was knocked inward, shoving a woozy Hiram aside as Mags leaped into the room, face red, fists clenched. “Lem!”

  My pet Mags, ready to rip the claw-foot tub from the floor and start swinging it around like a club until everyone but me was dead. Fallon frowned at me, closed his eyes, and broke off speaking his spell, causing it to collapse around us with a mild explosion of heat and air.

  I sagged in relief as the pain faded. My own cobbled-together spell, keeping the demon frozen within me had snapped, too brittle and fragile for all of this commotion, and I could sense the demon pushing outward again, stretching to reclaim me.

  “Silig,” Fallon said clearly, almost casually, and Mags froze in place. Fallon took a deep breath and looked at me wearily. “Let us begin again.”

  He started at the beginning as Hiram leaned against the sink with a grunt and a wince. I burst into invisible flame again. I could feel Lugal worming its way into my nerves and muscles, clamping down tightly and sending agony deep into me until it was all I was, just a sack filling with green-yellow acidic agony.

  Fallon cast with a steady, somnolent rhythm and tone, his Words a mumble that only he and the universe could understand. Outside my shell of pain and suffering, I could feel the power of the spell as it grew, as Hiram sagged against the sink, his open wound feeding it one pulse at a time. The spell was all buildup, all mounting tension. I was a Trickster; most of the spells I used were short and dirty, over almost before I finished speaking them. This was all prelude, all grace notes, subtle and interlocking, like epic poetry.

  I could feel the demon panic, twisting and struggling, trying to escape the fate that Fallon was spinning for it, but I could tell it wasn’t going to. The old man had it; from the first Word, the old man had it. When Fallon tied off the end of the spell, the temperature in the room rose ten degrees and I felt like my skeleton was being removed from my body by a giant pair of invisible tweezers. I stiffened, my limbs going out stiffly from my body, and I fell back against the wall with a thud.

  “Come, now,” Fallon whispered. “Your resistance is unseemly.”

  Like steam, the pain sizzled off me and I dropped to the floor, limp and soaked through with sweat from head to toe. Even my much darned socks were squishy with it. I was shaking, and then with a roar Mags was back in motion, crashing into the wall next to me and mashing his huge arm behind me and around my shoulders. Then he went still.

  “Lem?” he said in a small voice.

  I looked at him and patted his knee. “It’s all right, Mags,” I said. “I’m okay.”

  Fallon’s smile was the tiniest movement at the corners of his mouth. “Good! Sometimes there is tremendous damage from such rescues.” He slapped my leg. “Come! There is no time for loafing. You must tell us everything.”

  I looked up at him, moving my head like pushing a boulder up a small hill. “Us?”

  Fallon stood up and clapped his hands. “Come, boy,” he said, shooting his cuffs. “Meet your betters.”

  III.

  9.

  “DESCRIBE HER,” FALLON SAID intensely, leaning over the table. “Describe everything.”

  The golden shit sensation of gas in the air was overpowering, making me dizzy. I’d never sensed so much blood in my life; every single enustari in the place—and I had the firm sense that everyone here (aside from Hiram, Mags, and me) was Archmage and their urtuku (who would be considered saganustari even if their own skill level were just as high)—seemed to have a fat, bloated Bleeder standing around, leeching an open wound just in case a war broke out.

  We were in Jersey, which right there made this a red-letter day, because no one went to Jersey unless they absolutely had to.

  AS THE TOWN Car cruised the streets, we passed buildings on fire, crowds battling cops in riot gear, and the odd neighborhood where absolutely nothing was happening, everything peace and calm, the only sign of trouble the orange glow in the sky. The Old Bat’s Stringers were busy little bastards.

  As we approached the first police barricade diverting traffic away from the bridges and tunnels, which the city had closed, Fallon reached into his jacket pocket and extracted a small green bendy Gumby doll, the kind you gave to kids so they could pose them any way they wanted.r />
  “All right, Dalhamun,” the old man said, setting Gumby on the seat between us, “cloud some minds for us.”

  Gumby animated, looking up at Fallon and saluting with one tiny green hand. It then crouched down and put its hands to its head in the classic mind-reader pose. The car cruised past a few cops, then slowly maneuvered around the barriers while the police all acted like they couldn’t see us.

  “How old are you?” I asked. “Gumby?”

  “Useful, no?”

  I glanced at the little figure. “I’ve had enough demons, thanks,” I said. “Even ones trapped inside Gumby.”

  Fallon snorted. “You did well with Lugal,” he said. “You should reconsider your prejudices. You appear to have a talent for Summoning. That talent is often paired with a commiserate ability in Fabrication.”

  I stared out the window.

  The tunnel was deserted, closed off on the New York side, and we cruised through without incident, the tiny toy remaining in its pose of concentration as the driver took us wordlessly into Jersey City, which started off looking like a mall, then slowly fell apart before our eyes, souring into a shithole. When the car pulled up outside a sad-looking brick building, I thought for a moment it was a mistake, but Fallon scooped up tiny Dalhamun, who offered me a sardonic salute as it was slipped back into Fallon’s pocket.

  “Come,” said the Archmage, comfortable giving orders.

  The street was deserted, but an old-school movie theater was burning brightly up the block, and cop helicopters crowded the air, searchlights stabbing at the ground. The Old Bat was busy.

  Hiram and Mags emerged from the second car. I wasn’t used to seeing Hiram so subdued, so clearly out of his element. Instead of looking at my gasam and being disturbed, I looked at the building. It was only four floors high to my eye, but the ancient elevator we entered had seventeen buttons, and Fallon pressed number 17 without hesitation. It opened into an ornate restaurant, red carpeting and old-school everything, wooden booths and paper lanterns.