Fallon picked up his glass. “The crude and uneducated refer to them as Stringers. We haven’t seen any in a very long time.”
I walked over to Hiram’s small bar, picked up a decanter of bourbon, and poured myself a drink, waiting for Hiram’s sudden howl of rage, but when I turned back, the fat man was just watching me. I put one hand in my pocket and tried to look smarter than I was.
“How do you know, Mr. Fallon?” I asked.
Fallon smirked. “I have been too much out of society,” he said, the barest hint of an angular accent in his words. “Too much time spent on custom orders. No one knows me anymore.”
“Our Mr. Fallon is an accomplished Fabricator,” Hiram said, face impassive. “Enustari, soaked in the blood of innocents, far too smart to associate with the likes of us.”
A Fabricator. Building devices imbued with magic or a demonic intelligence. They were rare enough. Finding one to apprentice with was like discovering an oil well in your backyard, and I started plotting. My gasam, the ever-angry and bitterly disappointed Hiram, was here. I might be able to negotiate a transfer of the bond if I could convince Fallon to take me on. Assuming he would be willing to feed and water Mags as a condition.
“Your Master does not like me, Mr. Vonnegan,” Fallon said, not sounding even slightly concerned. “Tell me, has he taught you all his thieving tricks, the mu and Cantrips that bring a cascade of tarnished nickels and dimes into his bottomless pockets?”
“If you ask nicely,” Hiram said heatedly, “Mr. Fallon will teach you about murdering people by the thousands for research.”
This was new; Hiram had no compunction about bleeding people. It was true that he generally paid, cajoled, or bullied people into consent before bleeding them—I could still picture the sweaty twenty-dollar bill he’d given the girl, all of fourteen and shivering and terrified—but I wasn’t sure it made much difference when you were stealing something irreplaceable from idiots who didn’t know better. Because no one outside of our order understood it, there was no way they could give anything resembling consent. If Fallon had crossed some sort of line that Hiram regarded as sacred, we were in wild and unmapped territory.
Mages at Fallon’s level were dangerous. Enustari bled the world for their spells, epic complex rituals that required dozens of people to bleed—or a few people to bleed to death. Enustari and the next level down, saganustari, engineered disasters and mass suicides, spawned death cults and started wars to harvest the blood. I eyed Fallon: He wore the hell out of the suit and he sat with immense confidence, his hands powerful and deft, a builder’s hands. A Fabricator. But he didn’t have any Bleeders, and a mage without Bleeders—well, it came down to the spells you had memorized, how good you were with the Words.
I had a feeling Fallon was very good with them.
“Why are you here, Mr. Vonnegan?” Fallon asked, putting those flat, pale eyes on me.
I swallowed. “I need help.”
He nodded. “Indeed. I am here because your gasam, as is his habit, has stolen something that is now required.”
Hiram snorted. “Required,” he muttered, shaking his head.
Fallon glanced at him, then back at me, and I wished fervently that he would look anywhere else. “Your stupid, boorish gasam, who trades in tricks and trivialities to fuel his base and unremarkable appetites—this ridiculous man you chose to be your teacher—does not grasp the severity of our situation. For you are correct, Mr. Vonnegan: Arad do not inhabit living things. They can inhabit only the dead, animating them as puppets. And this they can do only via assignment.”
I stared at him. He sighed. “They must be placed within a vessel by ustari. Someone has done this. More than once. Is still doing this. Sowing chaos. Your man, what was he doing?”
“Pushing people in front of a train.”
Fallon nodded as if this fit some secret category of behavior. “Mine was stabbing people in the park with a screwdriver,” he said. “There are many more, and they are all engaged in random violence. There is no plan, no escape route, no elegance to it. They are rabid intelligences given form and let off their leash.”
This was so far above my level of experience, I was going to get a nosebleed. It was time to bow out and get back to figuring out how to retire on one hundred dollars. Before I could vocalize my exit strategy and leave this mess to the enustari of the world, however, there was a sudden commotion from the direction of the bathroom.
Fallon raised one eyebrow a precise amount that he must have practiced in a mirror, assigning a specific reaction to each millimeter. “Our guests have shrugged off their magical bonds,” he said. “Shall we ask them a few questions?”