down into my chair by an invisible force, so hard I couldn’t breathe.
“I could Charm ya out of it,” Heller said, stepping over to take hold of an empty chair and dropping it next to me. I could move my eyes but nothing else. Someone behind me, casting spells.
My heart was pounding. Next to me, I could hear Mags, caught the same as me, straining against the spell, trying to launch himself from the chair. I hated Heller, suddenly. He’d seemed vaguely ridiculous before, running his games, dressing like a porn producer from the 1970s. But now I owed him thirty thousand dollars, and I hated him. And I’d come so close to getting out from under him, too.
It should have worked. It did work. Until it didn’t.
GASSING UP MONEY was harder than it seemed. When I’d made the break with Hiram, the round man yelling, telling me I was making a mistake and that when I came crawling back it would be too late, I’d been pretty sure I’d be able to make a living. When you could cast a Charm, gas up a dollar to look like a hundred, blind someone—all with a slash of blood and a few Words—how could you lose?
It was simple: Blood plus the Words made things happen. Magic. It didn’t have to be your blood, but for me it always was.
But Charms faded, and when they faded, people came looking for you. And if you misspoke one Word, shit fell apart and you got a feedback smack for your trouble. If you bled over and over again, cutting yourself to fuel the spell—because magic was greedy, magic was the universe taking your life and spending it elsewhere, using up your lifeblood and aging you prematurely—you wound up half dead, too weak to stand. The more blood; the bigger the payoff. And if you fucked it all up, no one was amazed. If you fucked it up, they came looking for you just like any other grifter losing his touch.
And if you decided to just try and find another ustari, begging them to take you in and show you a few more things, just to get some polish, they took one look at you and told you they could see your still-intact bond of urtuku and refused to have shit to do with you. The other ustari wouldn’t teach you one fucking Word if you were bonded to another one of them.
So you had to be creative to survive. I was proud of the scheme. As far as I knew, none of the other grifters that hung around Rue’s had ever thought of something like it. It was fucking elegant. It wouldn’t take much gas, and if it was labor-intensive, why not? I had time on my hands. Best of all, it didn’t require Pitr Mags to do much. The success or failure of any scheme, I was coming to realize, depended inversely on how much Pitr had to do to make it work.
The idea of ditching the big man had occurred to me. It was the smart thing to do. Pitr made it impossible to be inconspicuous, he was expensive to feed, and if I relaxed for a second he tended to inflict property damage. He whimpered in his sleep and followed me around with a single-minded intensity that made me think that I was going to someday wake up to find him cheerfully killing me in preparation for using my skin on some sort of Lem Vonnegan–shaped doll. He went through periods of asking me endless questions I couldn’t answer; he seemed to have the idea that I’d become his gasam somehow—that Hiram had given him to me. Hiram had certainly scraped Mags off his shoes in my general direction, and so skillfully I hadn’t even noticed him doing it. I didn’t recall a bill of sale or a deed being transferred; leaving him would have been smart.
But I couldn’t do it. And it wasn’t just the fear that an irate and betrayed Pitr Mageshkumar would track me down and crush me—weeping uncontrollably the whole time, of course—and would then carry my skeletal remains around like some sort of lucky charm for the rest of his life. Alone, Mags would die. From simple fucking loneliness. And when I imagined him sitting sad and alone somewhere, shrinking, I couldn’t just walk away
“I could Charm ya out of it,” Heller said, stepping over to take hold of an empty chair and dropping it next to me. I could move my eyes but nothing else. Someone behind me, casting spells.
My heart was pounding. Next to me, I could hear Mags, caught the same as me, straining against the spell, trying to launch himself from the chair. I hated Heller, suddenly. He’d seemed vaguely ridiculous before, running his games, dressing like a porn producer from the 1970s. But now I owed him thirty thousand dollars, and I hated him. And I’d come so close to getting out from under him, too.
It should have worked. It did work. Until it didn’t.
GASSING UP MONEY was harder than it seemed. When I’d made the break with Hiram, the round man yelling, telling me I was making a mistake and that when I came crawling back it would be too late, I’d been pretty sure I’d be able to make a living. When you could cast a Charm, gas up a dollar to look like a hundred, blind someone—all with a slash of blood and a few Words—how could you lose?
It was simple: Blood plus the Words made things happen. Magic. It didn’t have to be your blood, but for me it always was.
But Charms faded, and when they faded, people came looking for you. And if you misspoke one Word, shit fell apart and you got a feedback smack for your trouble. If you bled over and over again, cutting yourself to fuel the spell—because magic was greedy, magic was the universe taking your life and spending it elsewhere, using up your lifeblood and aging you prematurely—you wound up half dead, too weak to stand. The more blood; the bigger the payoff. And if you fucked it all up, no one was amazed. If you fucked it up, they came looking for you just like any other grifter losing his touch.
And if you decided to just try and find another ustari, begging them to take you in and show you a few more things, just to get some polish, they took one look at you and told you they could see your still-intact bond of urtuku and refused to have shit to do with you. The other ustari wouldn’t teach you one fucking Word if you were bonded to another one of them.
So you had to be creative to survive. I was proud of the scheme. As far as I knew, none of the other grifters that hung around Rue’s had ever thought of something like it. It was fucking elegant. It wouldn’t take much gas, and if it was labor-intensive, why not? I had time on my hands. Best of all, it didn’t require Pitr Mags to do much. The success or failure of any scheme, I was coming to realize, depended inversely on how much Pitr had to do to make it work.
The idea of ditching the big man had occurred to me. It was the smart thing to do. Pitr made it impossible to be inconspicuous, he was expensive to feed, and if I relaxed for a second he tended to inflict property damage. He whimpered in his sleep and followed me around with a single-minded intensity that made me think that I was going to someday wake up to find him cheerfully killing me in preparation for using my skin on some sort of Lem Vonnegan–shaped doll. He went through periods of asking me endless questions I couldn’t answer; he seemed to have the idea that I’d become his gasam somehow—that Hiram had given him to me. Hiram had certainly scraped Mags off his shoes in my general direction, and so skillfully I hadn’t even noticed him doing it. I didn’t recall a bill of sale or a deed being transferred; leaving him would have been smart.
But I couldn’t do it. And it wasn’t just the fear that an irate and betrayed Pitr Mageshkumar would track me down and crush me—weeping uncontrollably the whole time, of course—and would then carry my skeletal remains around like some sort of lucky charm for the rest of his life. Alone, Mags would die. From simple fucking loneliness. And when I imagined him sitting sad and alone somewhere, shrinking, I couldn’t just walk away
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