“All,” I said. Lugal liked the word and felt no need to learn new ones. It multitasked, crushing me with its demand for a spell while walking my body into the room. The Bleeders were breaking my heart—these were not people making a sober economic decision, a bit of blood in exchange for some ready cash. These were desperate people, broken people. These were people who’d accepted the possibility that the roulette wheel was going to land on fucked up and still walked into the goddamn black-tiled shower room in the back of the sketchiest bar in history. A shower room. In a bar. Done in black tile. The fact that none of them had made a break for the door told me all I needed to know about their situations.
I didn’t bleed people. It was the only rule I had and the only reason I could sleep at night. I would have to work fast if I was going to minimize the damage. I could wrestle with the philosophical question of whether it was me or the demon doing the bleeding later. Right now I needed to get out with as little blood on my hands as possible.
I started with the Trickster’s basic building block: a Charm.
There were a million Charm spells. Cantrips or mu short and sweet and designed to make people like you, all the way up to biludha that were tens of thousands of Words long and could sway thousands of people into being your cult, your army, your servants. For idimustari looking to pry a few dollars here and there from the unknowing and the uninitiated, a solid Charm Cantrip was an absolute necessity. You accost someone on the street when you’ve had it rough for a few nights, sleeping in the open, bleeding gas to evade the cops, and you need a little Charm just to keep your target from fleeing the smell. I had plenty of them in the old memory banks; Hiram used them all the time, constantly, so I’d picked up the basics from listening to him, and then I’d improved things: I’d pared them down and added my own innovations. I picked a short, short-lived mu; I needed it to take effect as quickly as possible so I could minimize the damage.
Next I needed a piece from Hiram’s spell, the hun-kiuba. While Housedress unfolded a shiny straight razor and put it in my hand, I raced through the spell, following the threads and getting rid of the useless verbiage. I ripped out the seventeen Words that did the heavy lifting and swapped several, changing what it did. Hiram’s spell stopped time—within a defined space, the extent of which depended on the amount of gas fed into it—for everyone but the caster and anyone he designated; when Hiram had demonstrated it to me, we’d robbed a subway car full of people, all frozen in time while Hiram and I moved normally.
I inverted it so it would freeze the caster.
The razor was in my hand and Lugal was moving me toward the Bleeders. In agony, I raced, pulling in bits and pieces from the hundreds of small spells, piecing them together. All I knew were small spells, tricks, but what was a biludha except many small spells strung together, a chain of effects and modifiers?
I raced. I reached out for the first Bleeder’s arm. She was someone’s grandma, an old, skinny woman with nicotine-stained hands and teeth, skinny, sagging, her eyes tightly closed. When I touched her, she flinched and screwed her eyes even tighter.
Lugal demanded, squeezing me until I thought I was going to pop. I worked, filling my spell with nonsense. I took every lesson I’d learned from shitty mages who couldn’t write and plumped the spell until it was bloated, lengthy, convoluted. Until it looked like the major spell Lugal demanded, until it looked like a ritual that would rip shit up.
I sliced the Bleeder’s arm, deep, a suicide cut. Lugal knew human anatomy, at least. And when it turned inward again and crushed me with agony, compressing me until I barely existed, I barfed up my masterpiece, the greatest grift I’d ever managed, and spoke the spell.
“BLEED,” FALLON SNAPPED.
Hiram drew himself up, summoning his dignity. It was undercut by the way his suspenders strained over his belly. “You are mistaken, sir. I am ustari and—”
Fallon turned and snarled at him. “Your urtuku is in grave danger, you fat little toad. You will bleed.”
I witnessed Hiram Bosch, whom I’d seen go crimson in anger many times, turn white as a sheet, and it was strangely satisfying—and confirmation that Evelyn Fallon was someone to be feared. If I hadn’t been hanging on to control of my own body by a fingernail, I would have savored the moment more.
“Very well,” Hiram said stiffly, producing his ornate straight razor. “What is the volume?”
Fallon turned back to me. “What is its name, Vonnegan?”
I struggled to assert control over my voice, my mouth. It was disconcerting. I lived by my voice, by the Words. Being unsure of that voice left me weak, helpless. For some reason, speaking the demon’s name was easier. I was reminded of cheery old Balahul, who seemed fond of its own name, too. “Lugal.”
“Lugal,” Fallon repeated, closing his eyes. “Ah yes, a nasty piece. Master, it means literally, ideal for a Stringer. Tell me: How have you asserted control?”
I licked my lips. The demon was like a bowling ball sewn inside my head; there wasn’t room for anything like thoughts. I had to string together a regular sentence as if I were casting, choosing each word as if it were a Word, as if every syllable had consequence. It was like being brain-damaged.