I slapped him again. "I will live forever, Calvin. Forever." I smiled. "I know the spell, the biludha. You know this word, biludha?"
He shook his head.
"That is your first Word, then. It means 'ritual.' It means 'big spell.' The one I know, when I cast it, it will make me live forever."
Little Calvin blinked at me. "Forever?"
I nodded. "I will bond you. I will bond you as my apprentice, and I will teach you everything I know. I will teach you every spell I have. You will become more powerful than any other person in the world, in history."
His beautiful face lit up, greedy and covetous.
"But," I said, "I will not teach you this final spell. I will not teach you how to live forever. That spell you must take from me." I cocked my head and studied his face. "You want? You bleed."
His tiny, beautiful face hardened, and I knew. I knew he would kill me, someday, as any good urtuku, apprentice, would.
3.
He comes in with my lunch. I watch him from the corner of the room. Is it poison? It will not be poison, because that is too obvious, too easy. And he has not learned everything from me, not yet. He is the second-most powerful mage in the world. But even confined to my bed and unable to lift my limbs, I am still the most powerful, and he knows that.
He feeds me soup. He feeds me puree. Later he will go down to the library and search it for hidden grimoires. I have left a terrible surprise for him, as one of the antique books is a trap, a book that appears to be filled with ancient spells and lore but is covered with invisible wards and runes that will compel him to read incessantly, forever, until he dies of starvation and thirst. Someday he might find it, and if he is not as strong as he should be and fails to save himself, then I will need a new urtuku.
In ancient times, ustari were more poetic. Most mages today learn their spells in an oral tradition, passed down from master to apprentice. There was a time when they were written down more routinely, and in those old days there was more poetry to the spells. More wasted time and space. These days the focus is always on speed, efficiency, war spells that cut out all unnecessary verbiage to gain a second's casting time. But older spells gloried in the unnecessary, often including lines that were simply beautiful, or that conveyed a thought or observation. When I was a young girl, just learning, I loved discovering these moments. They had no effect on the spell. They were wasted time. But I loved discovering them.
In many old grimoires you encounter the phrase nigsu ga tesgu. It is meaningless for the spell itself. It accomplishes nothing. It means, loosely, "everything I have is devoured," and old-time mages used to close out their spells with it to signal they'd given their all to the spell, every idea, every drop of blood.
I've always loved the phrase, from the moment I stumbled across it in my studies under my old gasam. I loved it because it described us, the ustari, the small number of people who saw through the veil and knew how the universe worked. Who knew how to bleed others and speak the Words and summon the forces of the universe to our bidding. It described how we devoured the world, bleeding it dry. And it described the relationship between a gasam and their urtuku, a master and their apprentice. The apprentice devoured--they enslaved themselves to you for your knowledge. They gobbled it up, sucking you dry, and when everything you had was devoured, they destroyed you and took your place as the master.
Cal Amir has grown great under me. And he will devour me, if I give him the chance.
There is another tedious meeting with my fellow enustari. With the exception of perhaps Evelyn Fallon, none of them deserve the title. Those lower down in my order, the saganustari and ustari, are such star-fuckers. If you bleed a room full of people, they call you enustari, Archmage, even if the spell is shit, even if it does nothing or does nothing well. It is a title of acclamation, after all, and if the people doing the acclaiming are idiots, what does their praise mean?
Calvin dutifully wheels me to the car, humming. He smells clean and leathery, a musky scent he has custom-made. His Italian shoes creak pleasingly as he pushes me. His entire presence is calibrated for effect: the way he fills out his suit; the way he smells; the precise sheen of his hair, dark and lustrous. He is one of the most handsome m
en I have ever seen, and it is all without trickery, without illusion.
My own illusion walks ahead of us, swaying, immaculate, expensive.
I am incurable, as far as I have been able to tell. I am incurable because my affliction is not physical, it is magical; I have been cursed. A curse of slow erosion, incremental consumption. Pieces of me, consumed, completely destroyed. Annihilated. Not merely burnt, or eaten, or dissolved into their component molecules--made so as to have never existed. It is a complex spell that took many years of study and work to compose, a complex spell that skirts causality and comes dangerously close to undoing reality itself.
Many, many people were bled white to cast this spell upon me.
If the curse had been designed to take effect all at once, the universe would have collapsed--assuming the spell had access to enough sacrificial blood to fuel it, which would not be easy to attain. Changing reality is difficult. But the curse is ingenious, as it annihilates small parts of me slowly, allowing the fabric of reality to heal itself. And it had run its course for some time before I realized what had been done to me, that I was being devoured one cell at a time.
The curse is by far Cal Amir's greatest work.
From the moment I saw the curse clearly, I knew it was my apprentice who had afflicted me. Who else? I did not leave enemies behind; it is cleaner by far to kill and destroy than to show mercy. Few ustari could even possibly write such a spell, much less devise ways to fuel it. And the hatred behind it, the despite that drives such a concept, is unmistakably that of an urtuku seeking to destroy his master.
There is no cure. He has fixed that. There are solutions but no cures. A massive Artifact, a magically operated mechanism, could be built to manipulate reality directly. I have no facility with Artifacts, and there are few true Fabricators left in the world. But if it were constructed, it could counteract the curse very effectively. I could in fact change the moment in time so that Calvin did not inflict it on me at all, or even remove Calvin from my service. From existence itself.
But the Fabrication remains out of reach, even for me. The spell, the massive biludha that conveys immortality--true, unending life--would cancel out the effects of the curse; not cure me, per se, but prevent the curse from devouring me entirely. I would live on, much as I do now, crippled, nearly silent, able only to cast and to plot.
But the sacrifice required for the biludha is enormous.
Calvin knows that it can be cast only once in a millennium, owing to its requirements for fresh blood. If I cast it, I leave him behind to rot and ruin, to dust and putrefaction, even if I bring him through the ritual safely. Amir wishes to learn the secret, but he has miscalculated. He has cursed me, and I may perish and be erased before he discovers it.
I feel my mouth try to pinch it into a smile.
Calvin is very dutiful. He inspects the interior of the car before lifting me into it. He does not cast to move me, as that would be disrespectful. He sets me gently in the backseat, and my Glamour, the illusion of me, hovers outside, placid, patient, smiling. She is beautiful. When he pauses, briefly, next to her they form a perfect couple, the sort of pair who stop conversations in hotel lobbies, the sort of couple people hate on sight for no reason they can articulate beyond the raging maw of jealousy inside them. My Glamour and my apprentice appear destined for each other.