He’d closed his eyes, feeling his way through it. When he opened his eyes, he grinned down at us. “He’s in the subway.”
THE SUBWAYS TEEMED with Tricksters. It was an ideal breeding ground for grifts aided by a pricked thumb and some mumbling—everyone in a rush, everyone hot and tired and slightly confused. The Twenty-third Street station always seemed larger on the inside than the outside, a maze of stairs and tunnels and escalators and even the occasionally functional elevator. Every inch of the underground complex had achieved a strange status that wasn’t clean or dirty: Everything looked filthy, but there was no trash anywhere, no debris, no pools of mystery liquids or other obvious problems. The city had gotten so clean in some areas that I seriously wondered where they were putting all the shit. It had to go somewhere. Following magical intuition, Ketterly moved with purpose, and we just kept pace as he led us down into the ever hotter lower levels of subway hell. On the N train platform, he stopped at the bottom of the stairs and surveyed the scene. The platform stretched out in front of us and behind us; it wasn’t overly crowded, just a few dozen tired people headed to Brooklyn for who knew what reason, most of them gathered at the edges, toeing the yellow safety line that you weren’t ever supposed to cross.
“He’s coming,” Ketterly said.
I perked up and looked at Mags, who smiled brightly. This might be the easiest money we ever made, I thought. A good dinner, some sleep, and I’d be right as rain by the morning, assuming Ketterly was good for it.
A moment later we saw Landry, recognizable from the photos his wife had shown us, a tall man with snow-white hair and the loping, lanky gait of someone who’d been born big and never quite got used to it. He had an enormous belly and was in a state of disarray, his hair wild, his clothes mismatched—he wasn’t wearing shoes, and his coat looked like something he’d picked up off the street.
The train started pulling into the station. People began to gather themselves, moving closer to the edge. It was instinctive and natural, and no one ever thought about it until an old man began shoving people off the platform.
He did it casually and so quickly that he’d knocked five people onto the tracks before anyone even reacted. He just sailed down the platform, and as he passed a plump Latino woman wrapped in an overlarge winter coat, he reached out with one long arm and shoved her. She didn’t cry out; she staggered forward with a pop-eyed expression and fell hard as Mr. Landry was on to the next person.
Mags took off, putting some leg into it, shouting,
“Hey!” I didn’t know much about Pitr, but he’d demonstrated a shocking lack of basic knowledge, which made me think he was mostly feral. And Hiram had declared him the dumbest person he’d ever met, a man so dumb that Hiram refused to bond him urtuku.
“Hey!” Mags shouted again as old man Landry hip-checked a tired-looking black guy in a snazzy fedora-style hat onto the tracks.
My switchblade was in my hand. I didn’t have the gas for anything huge, and I only knew one huge spell anyway—and it would have to be fucking useful, but if I bled for it I would certainly pass out before finishing. And dying in the subway system was not a particular life goal of mine.
Mind racing, I ran through my slim repertoire of mu, the tiny Cantrips that didn’t cost much in blood—the spells I made my living with, such as it was. There were an infinite number of dirty tricks you could play when you had the gas and knew the Words, but none seemed likely to save five people from being run over by a train in the next five seconds.
Except one. I slashed my palm, deeper than I should have, and as the gas sizzled into the air, Mags crashed into Landry, knocking him down right before the man managed to shove two young kids wearing backpacks larger than they were. I spoke six Words, two of which served to invert the spell so it would affect everyone but me.
Levitation was the oldest trick in the book, and trivial in terms of gas, really. It impressed the rubes, so if you were pulling a Guru or implying you were divine or something like that, it was indispensable. Everyone on the platform started to float, and a wave of horrified screams filled the thick air. The train crashed into Landry’s airborne victims as it slowed down—painful, probably, but not a body-sawing impact under the steel wheels.
A wave of exhausted nausea swept through me as the train stopped, brakes screeching. A moment later, everyone fell back to the ground.
This was frowned upon. Ustari had spent the entire history of the world staying off the radar, and casting like this in a public place, in a way that would be remembered—that had potentially been recorded—got you into trouble. There was no central committee, but if enough ustari around the world frowned at you, someone would come knocking, and there would be discipline. Discipline, for mages, generally meant execution.