Trickster (26 page)

It was clearly abandoned, at least in the official sense. Squatters, maybe. Drug users. Not a Fabricator, who was basically
saganustari
or
enustari
who worked with objects instead of spells. Or, more accurately, who embedded spells
into
objects. Most commonly machines nowadays. The mechanical nature amplified the effects somehow. I’d never understood that part, but then, Hiram hadn’t been a Fabricator, and even if he had he wouldn’t have taught me.

“All right, Digs,” I said. “Lead on.”

As we followed Ketterly over the cracked pavement, I considered that I would have to knock him around again if this turned out to be bullshit, which seemed likely. He led us to a spot where a sheet of one-inch plywood replaced a window, leaned down, and pulled it up from the bottom. It was on hinges. From a distance it looked for all the world like it had been screwed into place. Ketterly held it open as we ducked under and we were in a cold room of concrete, dusty and unfinished. Another sheet of plywood, this one more or less shaped like a door and oriented with the hinges on the left. It had been spray-painted with a big red X.

Ketterly pulled it open and stepped through. I followed. I stopped. Mags walked into me.

We were in a cathedral.

The ceiling soared above us a hundred feet. Buttresses flew everywhere, and stained glass filled hundreds of tall, narrow windows. Bright light pushed
through the glass, tinting the air inside. Everything seemed hazy, as if there were candles burning somewhere, sending thin smoke up into the rafters.

It was empty. A huge emptiness. My gasp of surprise was echoed back at me, thin and ghostly. Far away, in the center of the cavernous space, was a collection of tables and desks, bookshelves, and filing cabinets. It was lit with a golden light that had no obvious source. Ketterly started walking toward it immediately. I followed him slowly, spinning around.

I knew it was magic. I’d seen amazing things done via magic. And yet something in my mind, some small math processor deep in there, refused to relax, because what was inside the warehouse was impossible. My brain wouldn’t let go.

An old man was sitting at one of the desks. He was past seventy, lean and wrinkled, his white hair thin, his hands gnarled. But he looked strong. Like there was a band of steel under his skin, keeping his back straight, his eyes clear. He glanced up at us as we approached and then down at his work. When we were a few feet away from the desk there was a sudden roar, and I jerked back as a metal wall like the side of a cage sprang up directly in front of me. I spun in place in time to see three identical walls pop up out of the ground, forming a ten-foot perimeter around us. Instant jail cell: Just add magic.

We could still cast, of course, but I wasn’t planning to. We were hoping for assistance, after all, and even if I’d never heard of him he was
enustari,
and I wasn’t
planning to get into any battles with an Archmage. Yet. If I could help it.

“Digory,” he said, his voice gravelly and hoarse. “As I watched you approach from down the road, I thought you must have good reason for coming here unannounced. But then I could not think of what that reason might
be
.”

“Sure do, Mr. Fallon,” Ketterly said, pushing his hands into his pockets. “Mr. Vonnegan here said he would crush me to death if I didn’t make an introduction. I believed him.”

The old man glanced up at Ketterly again. He lingered for a moment, and then looked down again. “Very well.”

A few awkward seconds passed by. Then Ketterly shrugged and pulled one hand from his pocket to gesture back at me. “Uh, Mr. Lemuel Vonnegan, meet Mr. Evelyn Fallon.”

I opened my mouth to say something. Fallon gestured at one of the other chairs strewn about the area. With an earsplitting roar, the cage walls dropped back into the floor. Like I’d been examined and found harmless. I wasn’t sure how to feel about that.

“Have a seat, Mr. Vonnegan.”

I shut my mouth with a click. Reminded myself that the old man was power. I didn’t see any Bleeders, but it wouldn’t hurt to play it careful. I stepped up and pulled an old metal rolling chair toward me. Flipped it around, sat with my arms draped across the back. “Call me Lem.”

He didn’t look at me. “I know why you’re here, Mr. Vonnegan. I was sorry to hear of Hiram Bosch’s death. That was unfortunate.”

“You knew Hiram?”

“I knew him,” he said flatly, and ticked his head toward me. His eyes stayed on the delicate workings laid out on the desk in front of him. They looked like little golden watch gears. “Foolish of him, to challenge Calvin Amir. There was only one outcome of that battle.”

I held myself in check. “You did some work for Amir.”

He paused. He was thin, and his arms were covered in the typical pink scars, most of them quite old. He didn’t have any Bleeders in the place that I could see, but he wasn’t cutting himself, either. At least, not recently.

“I did work for his
gasam,
yes,” he finally said. “Has no one killed Mika Renar yet? Pity.”

“You built a house,” I pressed.

He sat back with a sigh. Lifted his hands from the table. Turned to look at me. “I did not build a
house,
boy. I created a very large and complex Fabrication. Per custom order. The house was built
around
my work.”

“What does it do?”

He turned, glanced at Mags and Ketterly and Daryl in turn, and his mouth moved, like he found them unpleasant somehow. I considered the desk: It was neat. Incredibly neat, orderly, and clean. The man’s fingers were smudged with ink as he worked on plans, intricate drawings with millions of tiny notes in
something that I assumed was cursive writing, but his desk was perfect. He bent back to his work. “My contracts are confidential, Mr. Vonnegan. Have you come to contract my services? There must be some trinket or trick I can fashion for you. I make no judgments. I do not sneer at modest projects.”

I nodded. “My guess is it’s involved in the
Biludha-tah-namus
.”

He paused. It was subtle. It wasn’t like he’d been waving his arms, jumping around. He’d been picking at the tiny gears, staring down at them intently. But then he froze. Surprised. Maybe horrified; it was hard to tell. Fallon’s face was etched out of stone, all deep lines and geometric patterns.

“I’m guessing you weren’t invited into the conspiracy,” I said, struggling to keep my voice level. “The conspiracy of assholes who are going to come out of this
biludha
immortal. I don’t know how many.
Enustari,
every one. Maybe a couple of their apprentices to boot.”

He still hadn’t moved.

“No invite? Guess they have all the
trinkets
they’re gonna need.”

He moved suddenly. I was stupid, and slow, and feeling too fucking clever. And he didn’t cut himself. Even as I heard him speaking the Words—even as something invisible seized me and squeezed, pulling me several feet up into the air—I stared down at him, searching for a fresh bleed. There wasn’t one.

Mags twitched, yanking up his sleeve. Before I
could tell him not to, his knife flashed in his hand. Fallon’s eyes flicked over to him, but the old man didn’t move. Mags rose up into the air with a squawk and slammed into the far wall. His blade shook free and fell to the floor.

Fear spiked inside me. He hadn’t
bled
.

“You shouldn’t go around saying the name of that ritual, boy,” Fallon spat. “Just the
name
has power. I know you are not a mage of consequence—”

“Thanks,” I gasped. My lungs felt like they were being held in clamps.

“An
idimustari,
yes? Bleeding for nickels in dive bars and playing pranks. I
build,
Mr. Vonnegan. What do you do?
Destroy,
like so many of us. You take energy and waste it. Dissipate it into the ether for your own lusts and needs. I
build
. I do not worry over what my creations might be employed in—it is all the same. People like you—or your betters—commission work from me. I create. They use it to destroy, to waste. It is all the same.” He paused and squinted at me. “Where did you hear that name?”

“I heard it from Mika Renar,” I said. A lie, but close enough.

Fallon cursed. “That
biludha
would require the murder of thousands. It—”

He paused. Just stopped talking, stared down at the floor. I was wrapped tightly, hot and not breathing easy. A spike of anxiety threaded in around the fear. I had the feeling I’d just convinced Fallon. It didn’t make me feel any better.

He turned, and Mags and I dropped back to the floor. I stumbled, staggered backward a few steps, and found my balance again.

“Follow me,” Fallon said without looking at any of us.

He started walking toward the back of the cathedral. As he walked, it melted away. The buttresses, the windows, everything just faded, leaving just the tables and desks and an empty warehouse: crumbling, water-damaged brick walls and a concrete floor.

Daryl whistled, low and foreboding. “Daryl Houy, you ain’t in Texas anymore.”

I gestured Mags after me and followed. After a moment’s hesitation, Ketterly fell in with Mags. Daryl just stood where he was, looking confused, which was fine by me.

Fallon’s work area was a maze of desks and tables, chairs and filing cabinets, bookshelves and boxes filled with junk. We passed through it without touching a thing. At a heavy metal door, finally Fallon stopped, pausing to work a padlock looped through an old rusted chain. He let both drop to the floor and pulled the door open. It led to a stairway. He waited a second for me to catch up.

“Renar contracted me six years ago,” Fallon said as he led me down the stairs. At the bottom was pure, untouched darkness, perfectly black. As he sank into it, he whispered a single word and a pale blue ball of light appeared in his palm. I raked my eyes over him. He still hadn’t bled. His scars were old, ancient, healed. “To build for her a . . . mechanism.”

I wanted to ask him how he was casting without bleeding. But I thought it might be better if I made myself look smart before I started begging for answers. “A mechanism for
biludha,
right? To set off a controlled chain reaction. Bleedouts in a specific pattern, concentrating and focusing the energy.”

He slowed and looked back over his shoulder at me for a second.
Score one for Lem Vonnegan, Genius,
I thought.

“Yes,” he said. He was leading us through a tunnel made of perfect darkness. His blue light illuminated only the floor beneath us and a foot or two around. Deep and damp, by the feel. We were in the basement. I fought the urge to hurry and snuggle up close to the old man. “That is my specialty. I create Fabrications that work as
enhancers
. Amplifiers. Capable of combining the energies of multiple sacrifices, of storing energy sacrificed
now
for use in the
future
.”

The idea started to come clear in my head. Before I could be brilliant again, Mags beat me to it.

“Like a battery?” he asked, in the tone of an excited kid making a breakthrough. Mags was Frosty the Snowman, though. He woke up every day singing “Happy Birthday” and forgot everything that had happened to him the day before.

“Yes!” Fallon barked, turning to face us. There was the faintest hint of an accent there, just in that one excited bark. Something European, maybe Slavic. It was just a speck. “Like a battery. Stored.”

“That’s how you cast without bleeding,” I offered hastily before Mags could make me look dumb again.

“I have
bled,
Mr. Vonnegan,” Fallon said, his voice harsh and ragged and suddenly distant. “I have bled more than you. More than you ever will. You have
no idea
how I have bled.”

We fell into silence. I imagined offending him, and being abandoned down in this pitch-black basement. Wandering forever. The distant sound of that door being chained shut again—where, hard to tell: just an echo far off, maybe. Then you pick a direction and figure you’ll walk until you find a wall. Except in the dark the human mind is wobbly and you end up walking in circles without realizing it. The uniformly gritty floor seemed to be created seconds before the blue light crept up to it, and destroyed behind us, silently.

Finally, there was another door. Another padlock. Another chain. He worked it, the blue ball of light hovering over his shoulder like an attentive pet. He pulled the door open. Stepped aside.

“Enter, please.”

I stepped into a dim, small room. There wasn’t much light, but I was grateful for it, a dull green glow that was everywhere and nowhere. A simple spell. In my mind I formulated a two-word spell that would replicate it, just for fun.

It was a storage room, each wall lined with the sort of wide, oversized filing cabinets you saw in architectural firms. In the center of the room was a bare metal table, covered in dust.

“I apologize for the security measures,” Fallon said, sounding the opposite of
apologetic
. “Many would steal my work, if they could.”

He moved immediately to one of the cabinets, opened a drawer, and extracted a thick file folder. Mages resisted computers. I had no idea why, but even I hated them on instinct. I didn’t even wear a digital watch, and hated cell phones. Mags and I would pick up a burner when the need arose, or stole one. But I didn’t like having them. Didn’t like touching them. Someone knew why, but it wasn’t me.

Fallon could have scanned all this shit in, had a neat stack of DVDs or flash drives. Instead, he opened the file and began spreading out huge schematic drawings, sheets upon sheets of spells. I’d seen the Words written out. There were a variety of alphabets for it. It didn’t matter how you wrote them; they were inert on the page. All that mattered was how you voiced them. The pronunciation. The order. The grammar.

I looked at the schematic and froze. It was fucking
horrifying
.

“You built
this
?” I asked without taking my eyes from the plans.