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Trickster (The Ustari Cycle), by Jeff Somers
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From master storyteller Jeff Somers comes a gritty new urban fantasy series starring a pair of unlikely heroes: low-life blood mages caught up in a violent scheme not of their own making.
Praised by the Guardian for stories that are “exhilarating . . . powerful and entertaining,” Jeff Somers returns with a darkly original urban fantasy series featuring a cadre of mages operating just under the radar of human society.
Magic uses blood—a lot of it. The more that’s used, the more powerful the effect, so mages find “volunteers” to fuel their spells. Lem, however, is different. Long ago he set up a rule that lets him sleep at night: never use anyone’s blood but your own. He’s grifting through life as a Trickster, performing only small Glamours like turning one-dollar bills into twenties. He and his sidekick, Mags, aren’t doing well, but they’re getting by.
That is, until they find young Claire Mannice— bound and gagged, imprisoned in a car’s trunk, and covered with invisible rune tattoos. Lem turns to his estranged mentor for help, but what they’ve uncovered is more terrifying than anybody could have imagined. Mika Renar, the most dangerous Archmage in the world, is preparing to use an ocean of blood to cast her dreams into reality— and Lem just got in her way.
- Sales Rank: #1843660 in Books
- Published on: 2013-02-26
- Released on: 2013-02-26
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 6.75" h x 1.00" w x 4.13" l, .40 pounds
- Binding: Mass Market Paperback
- 384 pages
About the Author
Jeff Somers was born in Jersey City, New Jersey. After graduating college he wandered aimlessly for a while, but the peculiar siren call of New Jersey brought him back to his homeland. Visit him at JeffreySomers.com and WeAreNotGoodPeople.com, and on Twitter at @JeffreySomers.
Excerpt. � Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Trickster 1
There’s a girl in the tub,” Mags said.
I looked up at him. His hair was getting long. It was glossy and silky, a grand black forest of hair. His eyebrows almost met in the middle, giving him a permanently sinister expression. I could not actually pronounce his actual last name, and called him Pitr Mags because it was better than calling him Pitr the Indian Bastard.
“A fifty-year-old dead girl?” I asked, thinking bones and webs, a fine bed of off-white dust lining the tub beneath it.
He shook his head, pushing his bandaged fingers into his pockets. “Recent.”
I paused in the act of tearing up the carpet. We were broke again. The last seventeen dollars we’d possessed had been spent on Neilsson, passed over with a pinprick of gas to make it look like three hundred and forty in twenties, and all Mags and I had to our names was what was pumping in our veins.
We were fucking incompetent. In all things, we’d failed. We were wallowing in a nice, comfy pit of fucking spectacular failure, deep black and hermetically sealed, me and Mags bound together forever and ever with deep fishhooked ties of ruin.
I hauled myself to my feet. Fished in my jacket pocket, produced a fresh bandage, and began working the thin wrapper free, difficult due to the damp and soiled bandages that adorned all nine of my other fingers and the fresh slice oozing blood on my index finger. Faint sparks of pain flared from my fingertips as I worked at it.
I was careful not to let any blood drip anywhere, get smeared anywhere. Leave no mark, that was rule one. No trace of yourself. Blood was usable for only a few seconds, ten, twenty. After that, you couldn’t burn it away no matter how big the spell. Best not to take chances.
The apartment was supposed to have been a good score. We’d heard that Neilsson had a card up his sleeve, and the old drunk had a sheen of success about him. Despite floating around our social level, which should have been our first clue. Neilsson worked art, and thus had an aura of intellect and culture that was powerfully attractive to men like Mags and me, small minds drenched in blood and peasant fare. The codger spoke with an adorable accent and I never had gotten past the childish idea that all people with some sort of accented English must be fucking geniuses. When sober, Neilsson was a good operator and he’d made some decent kosh from time to time, so we took the rumor seriously. And decided to work him, the way only Mags and I could: a little bit of charm, a little bit of booze, a little bit of gas.
It took all fucking night to get it out of the old bastard. We could have bled more and settled some real voodoo on his shoulders and pushed, but Mags and me, we didn’t bleed anyone else, we relied solely on ourselves, so that would have left us too exhausted to do anything useful. So we used our usual tricks. Aside from the faked twenties—the manager would count out the drawer later and discover a stack of one-dollar bills—we used a couple of charmer Cantrips to make Neilsson like us, and then poured whiskey down his throat until, grinning with his pink lips buried under a forest of yellow-white beard, he’d crooked a finger at us and told us about a wonderful score he’d heard of: the Time Capsule.
I looked around the room, holding the candle we’d found in the kitchen—misshapen, fleshlike in texture, already claiming a starring role in my nightmares for years to come—out in front of me. The room was cluttered, the furniture all curves and satin, uncomfortable to look at. I could believe that no one had opened the door or a window in fifty years. It smelled like death, and I tried to take shallow breaths. I shot my cuffs, wriggling my toes inside my wing tips. They’d seen better days. There was a thin spot on the sole beneath the ball of my foot that was a week or so away from a hole. It was October and if we didn’t manage something substantial in short order I was looking at a winter spent with wet feet, snow crowding in from the street and making me numb.
“Let’s take a look,” I said.
I had no idea how to monetize a dead girl in a tub, but somehow it seemed like there had to be a way to do so. Why else would the universe construct such a complex contraption if it didn’t roar into life, belch black smoke into the air, and start producing something?
The place had been locked up forty-five years before, the story went. Neilsson telling us with a slurred, ruby-red tongue and a yellowed, blurred eye. The owner was a rich bastard whose parents had died, leaving this apartment on East Seventieth Street. He’d had it shuttered and gone to California. And never came back, the apartment sitting here like an unopened oyster, growing some unholy pearl in its center, a time capsule of old money. Now that we were here, breathing in decades-old dust and farting into the moldy cushions, it was ridiculous. What had we expected to find? Fucking piles of jewels? Pots of gold? A helpful guidebook pointing out the valuables?
Well, I reminded myself, maybe there was a safe. We could handle a safe. I could bleed a bit more before I got woozy.
I followed Mags. He walked like he was angry at the floor. After a short hallway wallpapered in hideous stripes, a few framed oil paintings that might have been something special hanging every three feet, we were in the master bedroom. It was a large room, no window but a small en-suite bath—which was unusual for an older apartment. A huge brown water stain had bloomed on the ceiling, the plaster dropped away and lying on the bedspread in a moldy pile. The room smelled terrible, and I figured if I pressed a hand against the ceiling it would be damp, a tiny, persistent leak, probably only when the tenants upstairs flushed their toilet. A trickle of water that had been invisible for years forming into just a damp spot at first and then just a big damp circle and then just a big damp circle turning black from mold and then one day five years ago the ceiling had crumbled onto the bed in a silent catastrophe.
I stood on the thick carpet that felt crusty and stiff under me, my throbbing fingers in my pockets, and hesitated. It was strange. No one had been in the apartment for decades, and you could feel it, the emptiness, the shock of movement forcing jellied air back into motion. The place looked like a museum, smelled like the back alley of a butcher shop, and my skin crawled.
There was nothing. Of course there was nothing. I was shaking a little, my fingers throbbing and my newest wound bleeding slowly, the bandage damp and clinging on by sheer determination. This had been our last, best idea.
There had to be something. There had to be something.
There was: a dead girl in the tub.
The bathroom was small, covered over with a black-and-white tile design made up of tiny little squares, dozens of which had popped from the walls. There was more water damage in here, a humid feel, the ceiling sagging downward as if filled with brackish, rusty liquid. The smell was bad, trapped in the tiny confines. There was an ornate pedestal sink with brass fixtures and a small, basic-looking toilet with a pull-chain flush, the water tank on the wall above it. The mirror had darkened, black spots clouding the silver, one on top of the other until it was a dark, phantom mirror, something that grudgingly reflected you but only after running you through smoke and clouds.
The tub was a big old claw-foot, the porcelain yellow, the brass fixtures matching the sink. There was no showerhead.
The girl was young and naked, lying on her side with her knees drawn up to her belly, her skin milky, blue veins visible. She had short dark hair and looked almost peaceful curled up on the bone-dry bottom of the tub. I looked around; the place appeared deserted, but someone had been here within the last few days to drop off a body. I stood there, listening, as it suddenly seemed entirely probable that someone had crept into the place behind us.
Mags knelt down and peered at her, cocking his head. “She’s been bled, Lem.”
I blinked and looked at him. The words were just sounds, and then meaning snapped into them and I stepped over to stand next to him, looking down at the girl. He was right. She had the translucent look to her, drained cleanly, every drop of blood sucked out. I knelt down next to him and reached in to push some of her short, dark hair aside, squinting down at the wound on her neck. It was clean and minimal, familiar.
Mags had the clean-slate cheer of the dim-witted. He crouched there serenely, certain that I would solve this little problem for us. That I would roll her over and discover some ancient cash, or jewels, or discover that she wasn’t dead at all. Mags’s faith in me was sometimes invigorating, more often exhausting. Mags could survive on rage and profanity; he didn’t need to eat. I thought of him as a pet sometimes, a monstrous kitten I’d picked up and let sleep in my pocket one night, and now—when I looked at his plump, blood-engorged face and twitchy, murderous hands, I felt a stab of horrifying affection—Mags was my responsibility.
I was twenty-nine years old and I was wearing the sum total of my worldly possessions, and recently decisions I’d made when I was fifteen didn’t seem so fucking bright anymore. We all thought we were special—all of us, every fucking Trickster all the way up to the fucking enustari, we all thought we had the edge. And maybe we did. But here I was, dopey from blood loss and begging the universe for a handout.
I stood up and fished my switchblade from my pocket, pressing the button and hearing the familiar, horrible snick of the blade flashing out.
“What—” Mags said, barking the word like he meant it as declarative: What!
I unfolded my left hand and drew the blade across my palm, just deeply enough to draw a thick, slow ooze of blood. The pain, as always, shivered through me like poison, and I sucked in breath, tensing. It never got easy. I’d cut myself millions of times. I had faint white scars on both hands, my arms, my legs, and even my stomach. And. It. Never. Got. Easier. I did it immediately and without thought, letting my underbrain run the show.
Blood dripped from my clenched fist as a hot, icy rash of fire spread over my palm. Closing my eyes I imagined the glow, saw the faint blue light in my mind, and on the beat of my heart I whispered the spell. The blood sizzled away midair, consumed, and my wound was dry and open, aching.
A wave of dizzy weariness swept through me. As a damp line of blood oozed into place on my palm, my hand was engulfed in a soft blue glow that made Mags look like he was made of shadows. Puke mounting in my throat, I knelt down and resisted the urge to put my forehead against the cool porcelain of the tub. I stretched out my arm to hold the eerie light over her. Instantly, a complex pattern of symbols, like invisible tattoos, faded into visibility on her skin, covering all of her. I knew without checking that they were under her hair, too, inside her earlobes, on the webby skin between her fingers.
“Fuck,” Mags breathed, the word now a plaintive exclamation. “She’s marked.”
I stared down at the runes for another second. They were complex, and I didn’t have time to pick through them and compare them to my memories, to what my gasam had taught me. I knew a few things right away: I knew the runes would warp other magic I might try to cast, resisting all but the most bloody and powerful spells, and I knew this meant she was part of something way out of my league.
I studied her face. Sixteen? Twenty? It was hard to tell. Curled up in the tub, she looked peaceful. Young. There were old bruises on her arms. A crust of snotty blood around one nostril. I looked at her feet. Was relieved she was barefoot. For a second I remembered canvas tennis shoes, pink marker. The sound of a girl shivering, her bare arms bruised just like that.
I pushed the memory away, angry at myself. I hadn’t bled this girl. I hadn’t done anything.
I looked at Mags. His big flat face was crunched up in thought, and I knew I had to get him out of there before whoever had done this came back. I snapped my hand out like I was throwing something and the blue light sizzled away, leaving us in the faint light of the candle. I reached down and dragged him up by his collar.
“Come on,” I said, pushing him toward the door. Mags could fold me into complex patterns and not break a sweat, but he was tame.
“What’s up, Lem?”
I kept pushing him, urging him to go faster, imagining the owner of that corpse walking in the door and finding us—and whoever had marked her was a fucking deep well of trouble for any Trickster.
We were not good people.
We rushed through the hall and back into the first room, as sealed and stultifying as ever, the candle guttering in front of us and throwing odd shadows everywhere. My heart was pounding as I urged the big cocksucker forward, almost throwing him through the door. I didn’t bother putting things back the way they’d come; the important thing was to not be there any more.
In the hall, I spun and pulled the door shut behind us, my fingers throbbing. I squeezed my sliced hand again and opened my palm to reveal a nice smear of greasy blood; I wrapped my hand around the doorknob, took a deep breath, and whispered a Cantrip to replace the wards we’d broken and not noticed in our haste to get inside, the syllables—not words, really, just sounds—welling up automatically from memory. It was all about patterns, rhythms. You could find ways to cut the Words down, just like any language. You could say Please pass me the salt or you could say Pass the salt and they meant the same thing. It was the same with magic. You could cast a spell with fifty words, you could cast the same spell with five words, if you knew what you were doing.
I’d always had a way with the Words.
Another wave of tiredness settled into my bones, and I staggered a bit, holding on to the doorknob. When I’d steadied again, I took my hand away. The door looked exactly as it had when we’d arrived. No one who walked by would ever notice anything out of the ordinary�.�.�. unless they had a trained eye and specifically knew to look for something.
I took a deep breath. My heart was ragged in my chest, and I felt shaky and light. I reached into my jacket and extracted an old, soiled handkerchief and started wrapping it around my hand.
“C’mon, Mags,” I said, turning for the stairs.
He hustled to walk beside me. “What’s the matter, Lem?”
I didn’t pause. I could hear thick leathery wings in my head, too close. “Deep magic, Mags,” I said, pushing open the door to the stairs. “Deep fucking magic.”
Most helpful customer reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
"Of Mice and Men" Meets Magic, and it's a Gas
By Pop Bop
This is a sneaky book and it doesn't really amp up until a quarter of the way through. Allow me to explain.
Our two heroes are Lem and Mags, two small time Tricksters. Lem is George to hulking slow witted Mags' Lenny. They just get by on small time magics, (glamouring ones into twenties), because real magic takes blood, (the "gas" that fuels the magical spells), and Lem has a hard and fast rule to never use any blood for magic except his own blood.
We follow the two around the fringes of the magic community, watching their small time antics, learning about how magic works and who the major players are, and every now and then glancing off of an unsettling clue or suggestion that big things may be in the works. You might be tempted to drift away from the book because it sometimes feels like it will just be a sad, (although often wryly funny), tale of marginal magical losers working some hustle. Wait.
A quarter of the way through, (MILD SPOILER ALERT), Lem and Mags stumble across the path of a major magical player, unintentionally mess up a big time magical scheme, and find themselves running from powerful enemies, trying to save innocent players, and calling in favors from trustworthy and not so trustworthy members of the magical community. This is a thriller that takes off like a rocket, and lots of little things you learned in the first part of the book start falling into place to form a larger and very involving picture.
The book has a realistic, gritty feel. It's urban noir, but it doesn't feel forced or arch. There is a natural feel to the magic and a realistic feel to the grifters who float around the edges. Small time losers feel right, the villains are merciless, and our heroes are from the classic hard-boiled decent school. It's dark and bloody and violent, but only in service to the magic that fuels the plot. It's a gas.
Please note that I received a free ecopy of this book in exchange for a candid review. Apart from that I have no connection at all to either the author or the publisher of this book.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Explosions. Blood sacrifice. Magical birds made of light.
By Lindie Dagenhart
Copy provided by the Publisher for an honest review.
Trickster follows two down on their luck minor magicians, Lem, who has a lot of potential but doesn't believe in stealing "gas" from others, and his "nonbreeding lifepartner" Mags. The two met in their late teens when Lem apprenticed and the giant, slow-witted Mags imprinted on him like a baby duck and started following him everywhere. Including out into the streets where the two of them owned only the clothes on their backs and have to resort to glamour and charm just to stay alive.
Enter the damsel in distress. The kind of damsel who has no problem with destroying private property and strangling police officers.
I truly enjoyed the magic system in this story. Power doesn't come easily, and the price for it is blood. A lot of blood. Want to cast even a minor spell? You better be willing to open a vein, yours or someone else's. Which leaves us with some severely scarred heroes, with Lem especially anemic for most of the story.
The story is quite gritty, as advertised, which I liked. Explosions. Blood sacrifice. Magical birds made of light. All good stuff.
At parts it felt a little repetitive in the magical explanation department. I understood the theory the first time around, I don't need it explained to me again three chapters later. What I did have trouble with was the vernacular used for describing the different levels of magic user. The words are too similar and without a better context of what they mean, I read the entire story and still can't remember which is which. But it doesn't really matter, the distraction was a small thing.
Not gonna lie, I was drawn in by the cover. I like that the first thing you see is the giant, hulking Mags, and then Lem looks kind of like an escaped mental patient and, oh, look, there's a girl too. It's pretty much how I am going to remember the story. Loyal to a fault Mags was my favourite, Lem was morally dodgy and, oh, look, there's a girl too.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
The Thin Red Line
By J. Finn
Trickster centers around Lem - one of the world's blood mages. . In this world there are two types of mages - those who use bleeders and those who supply their own blood for their magics. Lem is one of the latter a Trickster level mage soley by choice.
The title comes from how the low-ranking, barely enough skill for small magics, mages refer to themselves. They are a community of con artists, thieves and grifters. They survive using little spells like making a crumpled up one dollar bill appear as a twenty. Running small cons for small gains.They run their Magic on Gas ( freshly spilled blood) most like Lem use their own whether because like Lem they have a code or they just dont have the skill to work more dangerous and volitle spells that require the blood of others or even death. They're scraping by and for the most part ignore (and are ignored themselves) by the more powerful magic users of the world whose greater skills or matched for their disregard for human life. At least that's how it was for Lem before he found Claire Mannice tied up in the trunk of a car. Now Lem's in the thick of it and fighting just to keep himself and his friends alive.
Where the book is so interesting where it excels is in the morality, or lack of it, of Blood Magic. Lem has skills but is severly hampered by his own ethics the reasons for why this grifter and conman draws the line at bleeders and his struggles at keeping his code are some of the best parts of the story.In essence, as Lem says throughout the story Blood Mages are not nice people, and this story is driven by the struggles and differences between those small time con men, ,selfish , venal and of dubious morals and the Arch Mages, Blood Mages of staggering Power and almost complete Sociopaths. This book isnt so much about the struggle of good and Evil as it is, the struggle between not as Bad and Evil.
Dark but humourous, cool world building and a nice dash of romance , Trickster is worth checking out, it wont be to everyones taste, but for those willing to try they will find one of the best Urban Fantasys of recent years.
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