Blood was blood. The skinny, scowling men and women who crawled gingerly off the bus looked to be suffering from any number of diseases and afflictions, several of which I didn’t doubt had been contracted within the last hour while riding on that very bus. These, the saddest people in the world, marched into the bar, shuffling past us with watery stares and twitchy, nervous expressions. This prompted my puppet master to heave me up off the bar stool and follow them to the rear of the joint, where the Brokers were checking off figures in their notebooks.
“All right, Vonnegan,” Housedress said, licking her pencil. “Twenty-five top-flight cows ripe for milking. You wanna inspect them before you haul ’em off?”
I wanted to slap her, all of them, these fucks who pretended that if they didn’t know exactly what some asshole was going to do with twenty-five miserable, desperate Bleeders—and you could do some fucking damage with that much gas—then they weren’t responsible. But my rage didn’t matter, because Lugal suddenly reached into my brain and split it open, searching for a spell. And not just any spell, a spell of consequence, a spell that would rip a hole in New York and grind up whatever fell in, and then there’d be more blood, more gas in the air, a chain reaction of bleeding and spells feeding on that gas, swirling together while everything boiled away.
Lugal pushed. It wanted a spell, a real spell, something heavy. But the joke was on it: I didn’t know any real spells, because Hiram had never taught me any.
THE RITUAL THAT made you someone’s apprentice—more formally, the Ritual of Urtuku—is like every other piece of magic: It can be an endless haul of a biludha, complete with theatrics and fires and robes and shit, or it can be over in fifteen painful minutes with you lying in some fat old bastard’s tub bleeding more than you’d ever imagined possible, light-headed and nauseated and definitely, definitely regretting most of your life decisions.
For all his pompous bullshit, Hiram Bosch was too impatient for the robes and the fires. When he agreed to take me as his apprentice, he bonded me in the fucking bathroom, muttering a slur of syllables I couldn’t quite catch while I bled out and wondered if I’d just killed myself for his delight. For one horrifying moment I was somehow aware of Hiram’s heartbeat—lurching and flabby—superimposed on my own, and then it was over and my wounds had healed and Hiram handed me a bucket and a rag and told me to clean up my own bloodstains. From that moment forward, I could feel Hiram. He was a presence in the back of my brain, usually easily ignored but always there. And that connection, that invisible line between us, prevented me from going too far away from my gasam, and it allowed my Master to inflict pain on me when he was displeased.
Hiram was a grouchy motherfucker. He was always displeased.
He was also forgetful. He always forgot to feed me, and any food I scored for myself had to be shared with Mags, who I’d been tacitly given as part of my apprenticeship. Hiram also repeated his lessons, going over the same ground over and over and becoming enraged when I pointed that out to him.
Hiram taught me one major spell. Just one. It was an amazing spell he’d written himself called the hun-kiuba. It stopped time. Back then, I’d been excited, thrilled. Hiram wasn’t much fun to be around, but he was teaching me. One day in and I had a split lip, but I’d learned more about magic than I’d ever imagined I would. I felt like a fucking sorcerer.
Hiram never taught me anything that big ever again, though I got plenty more split lips when I forgot to scrub the bathroom, or touched one of his stolen trinkets, or was found loitering within five feet of the safe in his closet. As I slowly came to realize that Hiram and I were idimustari, Tricksters, Little Magicians, I learned that you had to steal everything, including knowledge.
So I started paying attention, and every time Hiram cast a spell, I stole it.
The Words fascinated me. This secret language, just syllables, noises, but combine them with blood in the air and they could do anything. Rework reality, fool people, hurt people—as with any language, the only limit to what you could sculpt with blood and Words was your imagination. I picked them up fast; if I heard a spell once, I knew it, and if I had some time, I could improve it, make it shorter, faster, more powerful.
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.