Trickster by Jeff Somers Page B

light glinting on his glasses. He laced his fingers behind his head. “Your boy Mags here is adorable and I like having him pant around my office. You’re ugly as hell and boring to boot. So to what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?”
    I smiled. Mags was already trying to guess at the Words of Ketterly’s stupid Cantrip, mouthing them in a hushed voice. This was a doomed effort, but Mags’s face was a mask of somber effort, and I didn’t have the heart to mock him. “I need you to find someone for me.”
    “Ah,” he said, nodding. “My specialty.”
    I hesitated. I didn’t trust most other mages. Wewere all grifters of one sort or another, and we were all parasites—of others or ourselves. Ketterly I trusted less than most. I’d never heard of Ketterly actively cheating one of his own, but I thought it entirely possible that he would.
    “I’m told spells won’t work well on this one.”
    He squinted at me. “Why not?”
    I pulled a wad of cash, already damp from my own sweaty pocket, and tossed it onto his desk. “That’s three zeros. A retainer.”
    He looked down his short torso at the money, wrapped up in a rubber band, and then looked back at me. I willed him to take it, to pick it up and accept the job, but he kept his eyes on me.
    “You’re pretty eager to grease me off, Vonnegan,” he said. “And I can’t use a spell, huh?”
    I shrugged, failure burning my shoulders. “You can use a spell,” I said. “It just probably won’t work.”
    He squinted at me, then glanced down at the wad of money, then back at me. “All right,” he said. “I’ll ask: Have you been shitting in some other mage’s sandbox?”
    I nodded. “Shit everywhere.”
    He looked back at the money. “I don’t like getting into fucking ustari politics, kid. Always messy.”
    I nodded.
    Our rules—you didn’t get involved in another magician’s business; you didn’t cast anything big enough to mess with the fundamental underpinnings of the fucking universe—were mostly to keep us from tearing the world apart.
    Throughout history, there’s been a number of attempts to break the second rule, and other magicians around the world had gathered together in coalitions to defeat them. It hadn’t been pretty. Half the stories in the Old Testament were foggy histories of enustari wars, oceans of blood shed to destroy one of their own declared dangerous to the whole world. It hadn’t been that long ago that four enustari had engineered a world war just to settle their own accounts.
    Sometimes the overriding opinion was that fighting the crazy bastards caused more harm than good. Hence the first rule: Mind your own business.
    “That’s a thousand dollars, cash. You don’t have to touch her, okay? Just find her, let me know where she is, and I’ll take it from there.”
    Ketterly scowled, leaning back again for a moment and then lunging forward, pulling open a desk drawer and sweeping the cash into it with his arm. Still hunched over the desk, he scowled up at me. “Fine. If I get shit on my shoes, kid, the bill will come your way, and it’ll probably take more blood than you have in your wasted little frame to pay it. You okay with that? Someone bleeding for you?”
    I stared at him. “No,” I said, turning away. “I’ll be outside. Teach him the fucking bird, okay?”
    •   •   •
    I leaned against the railing and managed to glom a cigarette off a civilian passing by, skinny guy who hadn’t showered in days, his irises like pinpricks.Didn’t even need any gas for it; I just asked nicely and he handed one over. Most natural thing in the world.
    I smoked and fought to keep my eyes open. My stomach was growling, and every single cut on my arms and hands pulsed with burning low-level pain. Even so, I saw the two cops approaching me from half a block away, thinking they were being sneaky. If Mags had been standing right there next to me, if I wasn’t already a pint or so down, I would have asked the Big