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Calvin gets into the front seat and starts the car. I cannot move my head, so I stare at the back of his, this beautiful man who has killed me and now wishes he had done so perhaps ever slightly more slowly.
He does not know how I have survived this long. His spell, his curse, it should have consumed me long ago. He believes that in my final moments I will reveal the immortality spell to him, that death and oblivion will soften me. Or that perhaps he can offer to save me and in my desperation I will grovel. He does not know how I am still alive, but the answer is simple. I have crafted my own spell. I have altered the bond of urtuku between us, the magical bond between master and apprentice, so that when his curse tries to take a bit from me and devour it, it takes from him. Thus he weakens and I remain in stasis, hovering on the edge of total destruction.
I want to live. So I have taken from him.
4.
Something is happening.
The roar of sacrifice wakes me. All ustari, no matter how humble, share the ability to sense the invisible and silent act of blood being shed. Raw and fresh, pulsing with a life that decays and fades within seconds, blood in the air calls to us. The amount being shed somewhere in my house at any moment is always high; my Glamour is a work of art. It has no equal. It fools the keenest eye. But this level of spell requires a great deal of blood, and I farm it with a steady supply siphoned from indigents and debtors who come into my custody, all bled slowly, steadily.
But over that persistent cloud of sacrifice, I can sense another torrent of fresh blood; someone is casting in my house, and by the volume of sacrifice, it is no small spell.
The advantage to having to live my life through an illusion is that walls and doors mean nothing to me. I cannot physically rise from my bed without assistance, but I roam freely nonetheless. I close my eyes and I see the world from another perspective, one that is artificial, constructed from magic and artifice, from blood and effort. I feel nothing as I glide through my grand house. I am a turtle, shrunken and reduced over the years, lost within her shell.
There are signs of a conflict--a broken vase, an overturned chair. Spells have been cast. There is no sign of Calvin, and his absence makes me suspicious.
I hurry my Glamour toward the small library, where much of my scholarly work is done. Where the grimoires are kept, my notes, my experiments. There, I find Calvin, quite dead, his beautiful form broken and his youthful appearance sloughing off as the spells fade. He is still a handsome man, a powerfully attractive corpse, but he looks his age: pushing sixty, soft. The ability to bleed someone else makes one lazy, reluctant to pay for in sweat what you can instead purchase with blood.
This is not the work of my counterattack, which was designed to be as slow and implacable as the curse he laid on me. Someone has murdered Calvin. Someone very powerful. Or very unpredictable.
I draw on the sacrifice being harvested for my Glamour and cast a simple spell, creating a second Glamour. It ripples into being, a perfect copy. I float away and remain in the library. Passing through walls, I send myself outside the house while I secure the library, invoking old Wards and spells to hide it, to defend it, to lock it up. Because as I can see the moment I pass outside, I am under attack.
Enustari are appearing in the circular driveway, popping into existence on a wave of spent blood and a whisper. I see Alfonse Alligherti first, fat and jowly and cruel and arrogant. Faber Gottschalk, also fat, wearing a diaphanous robe that might as well be a woman's housedress. Archmages are traveling great distances to attack me, because they sense weakness. My urtuku is gone, and I am a lone old woman, paralyzed and near death. A perfect opportunity for parasites who think I am vulnerable.
Behind each of them appear their Bleeders. I have always disdained such cultism. These mages make promises to their Bleeders. Riches. Luxury. All their desires met. In return they must stay fleshy, they must sacrifice on command and be prepared for the certainty that someday the sacrifice required will be too much and their bodies will be consumed. They accept these risks because of their slavish devotion to their masters--sometimes urged along by a Charm, sometimes by a simple human devotion to their own appetites. I prefer to be honest. I prefer to hunt. I take sacrifice as my due, because all these people--all people--are here to be bled.
They will come for my body.
It is the obvious tactic. I am in bed, unable to move without assistance. I normally rely on Calvin for all my needs, but now he is a beautiful corpse and they imagine me helpless. They imagine old grudges made well--Archmages are like old washerwomen when it comes to gossip and grudges; both are eternal, nurtured and suckled like their own children. But I have blood eno
ugh to destroy them. They will not devour me today.
I begin casting. Three spells.
The universe is a mouth. Eternally open, eternally hungry. If you feed it, it dances, twitching, an automatic response, like a frog split open, an electrode introduced to its muscles. When the dance is done, there is nothing left, and no sign the universe has even noticed you.
The mouth does not care where the sacrifice comes from, or who forms the Words that shape its intent. The mouth is dumb and does not judge. If there is blood, fresh and pulsing, still alive in some mysterious sense for a few seconds, still part of the person it is drawn from, if there are Words to give it shape and intent, the mouth drinks and the universe twitches and the spell is cast.
Few know that a Glamour, an illusion, can cast. Few have spent so much time living through their illusions, few have studied the mechanics of the Glamour spell as minutely as I have. The voice is an illusion, a projection. I whisper a spell in my bedroom, unable to turn my head. My Glamour outside speaks a spell. My Glamour in the library speaks a spell. The universe, the hungry maw, does not differentiate--it does not care. It accepts the sacrifice poured into it. It shimmies and shakes according to the Words it hears.
My enemies reach the house and find they cannot enter.
Fat, sweaty Alfonse--who ruins his expensive suits the moment he puts them on, sweating through the cloth and turning them swampy--races for the front door, because Alfonse is all aggression, all artless force. His spells are brutal, simple fists of power he draws from his Bleeders in sudden bursts, sometimes draining them in seconds for a decisive blow. Alfonse is dangerous, but he is a blunt instrument.
Alfonse bounces away from the door and stumbles backward. His red face twists in rage.
Faber Gottschalk is even fatter and does not run. I have never seen him walk under his own power, in fact, and thus am momentarily distracted by an anthropological interest in seeing the huge man move utilizing his gargantuan limbs. His Bleeders are anomalies; they are thin, gray things in burlap clothes. Where other enustari feed their Bleeders lavishly, Faber starves them on his little ranch. He makes up for this with numbers and has brought a gang of his skinnies to fuel his spells.
Faber does not approach the house. He has seen Alfonse bounce off my first line of defense and is smart enough to pause, to hesitate, to reassess. Faber appears to be a fat simpleton whose mind has softened from years of easy living in his Texas compound, tended by his magically Charmed followers, but his mind is as sharp as ever. He closes his eyes and speaks, casting. Behind him, several of his thin Bleeders stiffen and jerk, scrambling to cut themselves, their lifeblood pulled rudely from them, gulped and boiled off. It is an inelegant, wasteful way to gain Sacrifice, but then Faber is a man of appetites.
He vanishes. He has teleported himself.
Teleportation is not a difficult spell; rank amateurs can often imagine clever ways to move themselves. The direct approach runs against the physical laws of the universe, but there are cheats. Any ustari of experience knows at least one. To move yourself fifty feet so that you are inside a building instead of outside a building, thus avoiding all security, is not difficult.
It is so obvious a move that I have, of course, prepared for it.
One of my Glamours smiles slightly as I imagine Gottschalk being funneled into the tiny room I have prepared. He will have to crouch, hot and unable to breathe. He will seek threads of sacrifice in the air and find none. He will sweat and his enlarged, weakened heart will pound, and he will wonder how he was so easily trapped. And then he will slowly realize that to escape he will have to bleed himself. A man of Gottschalk's stature has not bled himself in decades. His skin is milky and smooth and untouched.
