The little man's eyes opened. He looked at Polly, then at me. His eyes were red and dark, unhealthy. He had the most curious, ugly little face, smashed like a puppet's. He lifted his free hand and he had a little blade in it, a tiny, sharp piece of metal. He pulled up his sleeve and jabbed himself with it, a sudden, violent motion that excited me.
I sensed something then. I will always remember the first time I tasted a sacrifice.
He whispered something. A few Words, though I did not know them then. He whispered them, and he rose into the air. Just a few more inches. The walking stick he had been holding fell over with a loud clatter. Aunt Polly gasped and stumbled backward and fell on her ass, and that was the best part about the whole experience.
I couldn't stop thinking about the little man and his feat--how it had been done. I knew these things were tricks, but I couldn't see how the trick was done.
The next day, very early, I escaped through my bedroom window and made my way back. I was always escaping; Father had ordered the servants to be on guard, but I was smarter than all of them. And I suspected some of them would not have shed tears if I went missing. I did not shed tears when I buried them, despite their pleas, their pledges of loyalty to the family.
It was twilight when I arrived at the spot. The little man was there, once again seemingly suspended by the stick. He was sleeping, so I crept up to examine him more closely. I had seen him float--really float--and I intended to find out how, for I wanted to float, to rise above and hover over them all. Astound people. Terrify them. It was the first time I had ever felt that, the desire to terrify. My heart beat and my cheeks burned. I knew that I was particularly pretty when I was flushed, rosy cheeked and the picture of a doll, a moppet.
As I tried to lift his robes to see under, his hand suddenly flashed out, letting the stick once again clatter to the ground. His grip was incredibly strong for such a tiny hand. He pulled me close, and I could smell him. Smell him. I'd never been so close to another human being, I didn't think. It was horrible. Human beings are disgusting chattel, awful meat and stench.
"You want?" he hissed in my ear as I screamed. "You want?" he hissed. "You bleed."
He whispered three Words in my ear. I didn't know them. They sounded strange.
The Words were a simple, savage spell, the first I would ever learn, the first I would ever cast. Three Words to stop a heart. You want, you bleed. Simple instructions, and four days later I chewed on my own tongue until blood flooded my mouth, and then I spoke the three Words I'd been taught, and watched as Father bugged his eyes out, made a strange choking noise, and died face-first in his turtle soup.
And I was happy.
2.
My apprentice will kill me someday.
I knew this the moment I interviewed him, this beautiful brown-skinned boy not even ten years old yet, the most beautiful person I'd ever seen. I was younger then, though still old--too old--a wrinkled bag of bones. He showed promise, a boy from Newark who lisped and sweated, but beautiful. Despite his young age, I could see he would be gorgeous. The first time I slapped him for mispronouncing a Word, he looked at me with such hatred, such permanent hate, that I knew it: it might take decades, but he would kill me. That was how I would end. My apprentice would kill me.
I started training him to do so. That much was duty.
I leaned forward, the tea steaming around us. I had not yet perfected my other face, and I was there, near him. "Do you know how old I am?"
He studied me. A child, he worried over having the correct answer. He chewed his lip. "Forty," he said, defiant. The oldest he could imagine.
I smiled. "I am sixty-nine," I said. "How much longer do you think I will live?"
His thinking face again. Then he smiled. Triumphant. "Not long."
I slapped him again. "I will live forever, Calvin. Forever." I smiled. "I know the spell, the biludha. You know this word, biludha?"
He shook his head.
"That is your first Word, then. It means 'ritual.' It means 'big spell.' The one I know, when I cast it, it will make me live forever."
Little Calvin blinked at me. "Forever?"
I nodded. "I will bond you. I will bond you as my apprentice, and I will teach you everything I know. I will teach you every spell I have. You will become more powerful than any other person in the world, in history."
His beautiful face lit up, greedy and covetous.
"But," I said, "I will not teach you this final spell. I will not teach you how to live forever. That spell you must take from me." I cocked my head and studied his face. "You want? You bleed."
His tiny, beautiful face hardened, and I knew. I knew he would kill me, someday, as any good urtuku, apprentice, would.
3.
He comes in with my lunch. I watch him from the corner of the room. Is it poison? It will not be poison, because that is too obvious, too easy. And he has not learned everything from me, not yet. He is the second-most powerful mage in the world. But even confined to my bed and unable to lift my limbs, I am still the most powerful, and he knows that.
He feeds me soup. He feeds me puree. Later he will go down to the library and search it for hidden grimoires. I have left a terrible surprise for him, as one of the antique books is a trap, a book that appears to be filled with ancient spells and lore but is covered with invisible wards and runes that will compel him to read incessantly, forever, until he dies of starvation and thirst. Someday he might find it, and if he is not as strong as he should be and fails to save himself, then I will need a new urtuku.
In ancient times, ustari were more poetic. Most mages today learn their spells in an oral tradition, passed down from master to apprentice. There was a time when they were written down more routinely, and in those old days there was more poetry to the spells. More wasted time and space. These days the focus is always on speed, efficiency, war spells that cut out all unnecessary verbiage to gain a second's casting time. But older spells gloried in the unnecessary, often including lines that were simply beautiful, or that conveyed a thought or observation. When I was a young girl, just learning, I loved discovering these moments. They had no effect on the spell. They were wasted time. But I loved discovering them.
In many old grimoires you encounter the phrase nigsu ga tesgu. It is meaningless for the spell itself. It accomplishes nothing. It means, loosely, "everything I have is devoured," and old-time mages used to close out their spells with it to signal they'd given their all to the spell, every idea, every drop of blood.
I've always loved the phrase, from the moment I stumbled across it in my studies under my old gasam. I loved it because it described us, the ustari, the small number of people who saw through the veil and knew how the universe worked. Who knew how to bleed others and speak the Words and summon the forces of the universe to our bidding. It described how we devoured the world, bleeding it dry. And it described the relationship between a gasam and their urtuku, a master and their apprentice. The apprentice devoured--they enslaved themselves to you for your knowledge. They gobbled it up, sucking you dry, and when everything you had was devoured, they destroyed you and took your place as the master.
Cal Amir has grown great under me. And he will devour me, if I give him the chance.
There is another tedious meeting with my fellow enustari. With the exception of perhaps Evelyn Fallon, none of them deserve the title. Those lower down in my order, the saganustari and ustari, are such star-fuckers. If you bleed a room full of people, they call you enustari, Archmage, even if the spell is shit, even if it does nothing or does nothing well. It is a title of acclamation, after all, and if the people doing the acclaiming are idiots, what does their praise mean?
Calvin dutifully wheels me to the car, humming. He smells clean and leathery, a musky scent he has custom-made. His Italian shoes creak pleasingly as he pushes me. His entire presence is calibrated for effect: the way he fills out his suit; the way he smells; the precise sheen of his hair, dark and lustrous. He is one of the most handsome m
en I have ever seen, and it is all without trickery, without illusion.
My own illusion walks ahead of us, swaying, immaculate, expensive.
I am incurable, as far as I have been able to tell. I am incurable because my affliction is not physical, it is magical; I have been cursed. A curse of slow erosion, incremental consumption. Pieces of me, consumed, completely destroyed. Annihilated. Not merely burnt, or eaten, or dissolved into their component molecules--made so as to have never existed. It is a complex spell that took many years of study and work to compose, a complex spell that skirts causality and comes dangerously close to undoing reality itself.
Many, many people were bled white to cast this spell upon me.
If the curse had been designed to take effect all at once, the universe would have collapsed--assuming the spell had access to enough sacrificial blood to fuel it, which would not be easy to attain. Changing reality is difficult. But the curse is ingenious, as it annihilates small parts of me slowly, allowing the fabric of reality to heal itself. And it had run its course for some time before I realized what had been done to me, that I was being devoured one cell at a time.
The curse is by far Cal Amir's greatest work.
From the moment I saw the curse clearly, I knew it was my apprentice who had afflicted me. Who else? I did not leave enemies behind; it is cleaner by far to kill and destroy than to show mercy. Few ustari could even possibly write such a spell, much less devise ways to fuel it. And the hatred behind it, the despite that drives such a concept, is unmistakably that of an urtuku seeking to destroy his master.
There is no cure. He has fixed that. There are solutions but no cures. A massive Artifact, a magically operated mechanism, could be built to manipulate reality directly. I have no facility with Artifacts, and there are few true Fabricators left in the world. But if it were constructed, it could counteract the curse very effectively. I could in fact change the moment in time so that Calvin did not inflict it on me at all, or even remove Calvin from my service. From existence itself.
But the Fabrication remains out of reach, even for me. The spell, the massive biludha that conveys immortality--true, unending life--would cancel out the effects of the curse; not cure me, per se, but prevent the curse from devouring me entirely. I would live on, much as I do now, crippled, nearly silent, able only to cast and to plot.
But the sacrifice required for the biludha is enormous.
Calvin knows that it can be cast only once in a millennium, owing to its requirements for fresh blood. If I cast it, I leave him behind to rot and ruin, to dust and putrefaction, even if I bring him through the ritual safely. Amir wishes to learn the secret, but he has miscalculated. He has cursed me, and I may perish and be erased before he discovers it.
I feel my mouth try to pinch it into a smile.
Calvin is very dutiful. He inspects the interior of the car before lifting me into it. He does not cast to move me, as that would be disrespectful. He sets me gently in the backseat, and my Glamour, the illusion of me, hovers outside, placid, patient, smiling. She is beautiful. When he pauses, briefly, next to her they form a perfect couple, the sort of pair who stop conversations in hotel lobbies, the sort of couple people hate on sight for no reason they can articulate beyond the raging maw of jealousy inside them. My Glamour and my apprentice appear destined for each other.
Calvin gets into the front seat and starts the car. I cannot move my head, so I stare at the back of his, this beautiful man who has killed me and now wishes he had done so perhaps ever slightly more slowly.
He does not know how I have survived this long. His spell, his curse, it should have consumed me long ago. He believes that in my final moments I will reveal the immortality spell to him, that death and oblivion will soften me. Or that perhaps he can offer to save me and in my desperation I will grovel. He does not know how I am still alive, but the answer is simple. I have crafted my own spell. I have altered the bond of urtuku between us, the magical bond between master and apprentice, so that when his curse tries to take a bit from me and devour it, it takes from him. Thus he weakens and I remain in stasis, hovering on the edge of total destruction.
I want to live. So I have taken from him.
4.
Something is happening.
The roar of sacrifice wakes me. All ustari, no matter how humble, share the ability to sense the invisible and silent act of blood being shed. Raw and fresh, pulsing with a life that decays and fades within seconds, blood in the air calls to us. The amount being shed somewhere in my house at any moment is always high; my Glamour is a work of art. It has no equal. It fools the keenest eye. But this level of spell requires a great deal of blood, and I farm it with a steady supply siphoned from indigents and debtors who come into my custody, all bled slowly, steadily.
But over that persistent cloud of sacrifice, I can sense another torrent of fresh blood; someone is casting in my house, and by the volume of sacrifice, it is no small spell.
The advantage to having to live my life through an illusion is that walls and doors mean nothing to me. I cannot physically rise from my bed without assistance, but I roam freely nonetheless. I close my eyes and I see the world from another perspective, one that is artificial, constructed from magic and artifice, from blood and effort. I feel nothing as I glide through my grand house. I am a turtle, shrunken and reduced over the years, lost within her shell.
There are signs of a conflict--a broken vase, an overturned chair. Spells have been cast. There is no sign of Calvin, and his absence makes me suspicious.
I hurry my Glamour toward the small library, where much of my scholarly work is done. Where the grimoires are kept, my notes, my experiments. There, I find Calvin, quite dead, his beautiful form broken and his youthful appearance sloughing off as the spells fade. He is still a handsome man, a powerfully attractive corpse, but he looks his age: pushing sixty, soft. The ability to bleed someone else makes one lazy, reluctant to pay for in sweat what you can instead purchase with blood.
This is not the work of my counterattack, which was designed to be as slow and implacable as the curse he laid on me. Someone has murdered Calvin. Someone very powerful. Or very unpredictable.
I draw on the sacrifice being harvested for my Glamour and cast a simple spell, creating a second Glamour. It ripples into being, a perfect copy. I float away and remain in the library. Passing through walls, I send myself outside the house while I secure the library, invoking old Wards and spells to hide it, to defend it, to lock it up. Because as I can see the moment I pass outside, I am under attack.
Enustari are appearing in the circular driveway, popping into existence on a wave of spent blood and a whisper. I see Alfonse Alligherti first, fat and jowly and cruel and arrogant. Faber Gottschalk, also fat, wearing a diaphanous robe that might as well be a woman's housedress. Archmages are traveling great distances to attack me, because they sense weakness. My urtuku is gone, and I am a lone old woman, paralyzed and near death. A perfect opportunity for parasites who think I am vulnerable.
Behind each of them appear their Bleeders. I have always disdained such cultism. These mages make promises to their Bleeders. Riches. Luxury. All their desires met. In return they must stay fleshy, they must sacrifice on command and be prepared for the certainty that someday the sacrifice required will be too much and their bodies will be consumed. They accept these risks because of their slavish devotion to their masters--sometimes urged along by a Charm, sometimes by a simple human devotion to their own appetites. I prefer to be honest. I prefer to hunt. I take sacrifice as my due, because all these people--all people--are here to be bled.
They will come for my body.
It is the obvious tactic. I am in bed, unable to move without assistance. I normally rely on Calvin for all my needs, but now he is a beautiful corpse and they imagine me helpless. They imagine old grudges made well--Archmages are like old washerwomen when it comes to gossip and grudges; both are eternal, nurtured and suckled like their own children. But I have blood eno
ugh to destroy them. They will not devour me today.
I begin casting. Three spells.
The universe is a mouth. Eternally open, eternally hungry. If you feed it, it dances, twitching, an automatic response, like a frog split open, an electrode introduced to its muscles. When the dance is done, there is nothing left, and no sign the universe has even noticed you.
The mouth does not care where the sacrifice comes from, or who forms the Words that shape its intent. The mouth is dumb and does not judge. If there is blood, fresh and pulsing, still alive in some mysterious sense for a few seconds, still part of the person it is drawn from, if there are Words to give it shape and intent, the mouth drinks and the universe twitches and the spell is cast.
Few know that a Glamour, an illusion, can cast. Few have spent so much time living through their illusions, few have studied the mechanics of the Glamour spell as minutely as I have. The voice is an illusion, a projection. I whisper a spell in my bedroom, unable to turn my head. My Glamour outside speaks a spell. My Glamour in the library speaks a spell. The universe, the hungry maw, does not differentiate--it does not care. It accepts the sacrifice poured into it. It shimmies and shakes according to the Words it hears.
My enemies reach the house and find they cannot enter.
Fat, sweaty Alfonse--who ruins his expensive suits the moment he puts them on, sweating through the cloth and turning them swampy--races for the front door, because Alfonse is all aggression, all artless force. His spells are brutal, simple fists of power he draws from his Bleeders in sudden bursts, sometimes draining them in seconds for a decisive blow. Alfonse is dangerous, but he is a blunt instrument.
Alfonse bounces away from the door and stumbles backward. His red face twists in rage.
Faber Gottschalk is even fatter and does not run. I have never seen him walk under his own power, in fact, and thus am momentarily distracted by an anthropological interest in seeing the huge man move utilizing his gargantuan limbs. His Bleeders are anomalies; they are thin, gray things in burlap clothes. Where other enustari feed their Bleeders lavishly, Faber starves them on his little ranch. He makes up for this with numbers and has brought a gang of his skinnies to fuel his spells.