“So,” Fallon said. “If we are done prosecuting war crimes, if we are done sharpening personal vendettas, Lurida is the matter at hand.” He glanced at me. “Lurida Moret is of our order. A skilled enustari with particular skill in Summoning, in controlling and embedding intelligences. We studied together, for a time.”
“She’s batshit, kid,” Elsa said to me, cackling. “Thinks we never should have let y’all monkeys invent things. Wants the world back the way it used to be, you in the fucking mud, confused all the time, us ringing a bell and having Bleeders served up.” She drained her glass, winked at me, and held it up over her head, shaking it until one of the Chinese waiters scampered over to refill it.
“A century too late for that,” a fat Indian man with a huge nose like a potato said. “Two centuries too late.”
“Call the vote,” the fat, jowly man named Alfonse said. “That’s why we’re here.”
“The vote is called,” Fallon said immediately to forestall any discussion. “I vote action. Lurida will do nothing but rouse the entire world against us, reveal us to them, make them afraid. She overestimates her legion of Stringers. She must be put down.”
Put down. I jumped a little. His voice was cold and dispassionate. I never wanted an Archmage of Fallon’s level to say those words in my general direction.
Silence, and one by one they put up a hand, looking to the next person as they did so. The only one to vote against was the red-haired woman, who merely smirked again, studying her nails.
“So voted,” Fallon said. He turned to look at me. “Come, Vonnegan. You may yet learn something.”
10.
ON THE RIDE BACK into New York, the silence got to me. I was sitting next to an enustari, one of the few Fabricators left alive, as far as I knew, a man skilled in imbuing objects and machines with magical energy and demonic intelligences. Somewhere in the middle of the tunnel, I stared at Gumby doing his swami pose and decided the worst-case scenario involved Fallon doing something terrible and permanent to me in a fit of irritation.
“Who’s Lurida Moret?”
For a moment I didn’t think he’d answer. He was staring out his tinted window, calm and still, an elegant old man in a nice suit. “An old woman,” he finally said, “whose obsessions have swallowed her.”
He turned his head to look at me. “For a very long time she was an unremarkable mage. Skilled, and thus she held rank. But not influential. Age is not friendly to some people. It unbalances them. For decades, you can rely on yourself. Your body, your mind. You react in predictable ways. Then—suddenly, it seems—the rules change. You can no longer do the things you once did, or not so easily. And you see it, the void, the black circle on the horizon. Some choose to look into that void and they see wisdom. Some look and they see nothing. Lurida looked and she saw the end of us, of our order, swarmed by silicon chips and robots and nuclear weapons that put power that once cost a million lives into a button. And she despaired.”
He looked away.
“Do not underestimate despair, Mr. Vonnegan. There is a forbidden biludha called the Nidigir Nigal. It does not hurl fireballs. It does not split the earth open. It does not animate the dead or make the caster a god. It simply instills despair in all who hear it recited, and they tear open their veins and bleed for the ritual, and the next people to hear it do the same. That is all it does. Despair is powerful, and it conquered Lurida. She has come to blame her failure on the modern world. She believes that once she has drained every battery, disconnected every engine, burned off every gallon of gasoline, we will be ascendant, and she will be the first of us, celebrated for the victory she has engineered.” He shook his head. “She has been a joke among us for years, always exhorting us to rise up and take our rightful place, as if the bloated insects that are the main players of our order would ever leave their comforts behind. Now it appears she has become impatient and set her arad against the modern world.”
I decided to press my luck. “How come you don’t need Bleeders?”
He made a ticking noise in his throat. “To not need Bleeders, Mr. Vonnegan, you must bleed a great deal.” He turned to look at me again. “You are talented, boy, but you must choose this life or not. Your peculiar moral stance does not simply limit you, it holds you underwater, and you drown.” He sighed, looking out the window. “As the vulgar would say: Shit or get off the pot.”
I turned and stared out my own window.
Fallon knew a lot, but he was depressing as fuck.