by Paolo Chikiamco

 A “council”? Really? That’s what you’re going with?

You gonna wear brown robes too? Break out some shiny lights and talk to me about the Force? More like a farce, am I ri– 

Ow, muscle fiber that hurts! Quit it! You old ‘mangkeros have no sense of humor.

Huh? Well, that’s the closest you’re going to get. I can’t cuss, can’t swear. Not anymore. 

Oh, I used to, all the time. You ask Mr. Antrada over there, and he’ll tell you. No, I think you deserved every word you cranky old fudger. Oh, I know him well, he was my Dungan teacher. Proud to be one of those terror profs, aren’t you, old man? Except that teaching “style” has forest consequences when you’re teaching how to cause harm through sheer will. How many of your students ended up with the albularyos, flopping around boneless because you forked them up with a sumpa?

No– no I was a horrible student. He’ll tell you that himself. Didn’t have the willpower, he said, and who am I to argue? Gods know I haven’t amounted to much after graduation. Hedge, I won’t lie, I don’t even like magic. Don’t like how close the connection is between desire and deed. There’s got to be some distance there, as far as I’m concerned. Otherwise–See, magic makes you want things. Because it’s desire that makes the magic happen, and magic always wants to happen. It’s got to, or else the world forgets that it’s a way of doing things, and more of it fades away.

That’s what you were always telling us right? That it’s a salamangkero’s duty to perform salamangka, to– how did you put it again, Mr. Teves? To “keep the world conditioned to the arcane.” Magic for magic’s sake.

Frog all that.

Can’t really fault any of you, or the school. I just didn’t like the kind of person I was with the magic in me. Not that it ever leaves, much as I’d like it to, but desire can drown desire. There’s plenty of excess even without magic, your choice of hazes to lose yourself in. I’m not proud of what I did to get by, but things necessary for survival are like breathing – soon enough, you stop noticing you’re even doing it. In, then out.

Of what? What I did months ago? Crashing your little B-movie cult gathering? Please. If you wanted to keep it a secret, you shouldn’t have been actively recruiting freshmen. You think a tisoy from Manila, brain full of furby sorting hats, is going to be able to keep from blabbing about an invitation to a secret brotherhood of ‘mangkeros? All I had to do to get the date and place was gift him a “magic wand.” 

I don’t know what you had to offer to get my brother to apply. We were raised around magic, it’s got no novelty to us. It’s the family business is all, and after I burned out it fell to him. Maybe he just took to it better than I did. Maybe he wanted to make up for the shame I brought to the family name. I don’t know why he was so obsessed with getting stronger, but once he started walking that path it was inevitable he’d find his way to you. 

The hidden masters, the oldest of fraternities, the true order. 

Flood you.

My brother is dead because of you.

Some of you don’t even remember– it’s been three years after all. One thousand one hundred and eighty-six days. ‘laryo said it was poison, the kind you can’t get out of you without doing more harm than good. You asterisks made a bunch of seventeen-year olds roll around in igdalaut – in god-cursed poison! – for your approval. 

You killed my brother.  You made dying into a contest, and my brother never loses. So he sat in your poison, even when he lost feeling in his limbs; he swam in your poison, even when he was the only one left; he drowned in your poison to break some made-up record so that he could have the approval of people he thought were his betters! You egged him on until his skin sloughed off his face, and you have the gall to be offended that I cussed you out?

That’s all I did! You were all there! Look me in the eye and tell me I wasn’t justified. That it’s the least of what you deserved. But even then, I didn’t lay a hand on any of you, I didn’t use magic, didn’t use guns. 

You’re saying I’m sentenced to death– for what? Hurting your feelings?

Fork you.

Say what? I know nothin’ about that. You show me how I coulda done that just by cussing you out. All of you got protections against sumpa or mantala, and I sure as shale didn’t use usog. You show me how I coulda put a curse on you, when you’ve got anting against every sorcery known to man. 

You don’t even know if any of this is connected! Mr. Teves is forgetting things, Mr. Magalo has the runs, Mr. Antrada’s having nightmares, an– what? There’s a dozen of you, with a dozen different maladies, and nothing to connect them to each other or to me!

… Okay, fine, they all started after my little break-in but so what? I already took the lashes for that, and I still have the scars if you need a receipt. You’ve been having bad dreams, strange urges? Don’t look to me for sympathy. You people mess with hidden magic and tainted spirits when you think no one is looking. You plunge into the muck and look at me when you get dirty?

Behaving strangely how? Because I can’t cuss no more? I let it all out that day, three months ago. You think I had anything left after that? I was empty. You wouldn’t know how that feels. You’re the takers. You spill others out, so that your cup runs over, because you get your kicks out of wasting things that folks like me need to live. 

Vitriol? That’s a big one. Never said I was empty of anger, just of my favorite words to let that anger out. 

I’ve still got plenty of words left, but what have words ever done to the likes of you? I’m not like those kids you lure into your little secret society. I don’t think that what we’ve got here is a lack of understanding. That if the reality of what you’re doing gets through to you, you’d drop to your knees here like it was the road to Damascus.

I think you people know what you’re doing. I think you know that when you open your mouths it’s our flesh and blood that get shoved inside. I think that if you could see clearly the faces of those you feed upon, that you’d close your mouths and chew anyway. Smack your lips and burp behind your bloody handkerchiefs.

How could words ever hurt you?

So yeah, I said my piece but that was for me. For my brother. Didn’t expect it to make you blink, or reflect, or any of that. I did expect to be piled on, to be knocked around, to spend a few nights in the doghouse. The knife in the ribs was a fun little bonus, but I figured after that we were square. Yet here I am again.

*spits*
Heh. Good one. Hurting me isn’t going to make me give you answers I don’t have. 

I don’t know why you great men of the “Council” are having a rough few months. Maybe it’s a different kind of magic, yeah? Not the local kind. C’mere, I’ll give you a name. Ever heard of this Hindu concept of karm–
*spits*
Okay, that– now that fascist hurt you moving fungibles. I told you I don’t know sheets! If all it took to get past your protections was anger, you’d all be dead ten times over. No that’s not a threat you idiom– how many enemies do you think you’ve made? But you’re untouchable, yeah? That’s the point of you great men deigning to come together like this. The only thing you’d cooperate with your rivals on is a way to maintain the status quo, to keep everyone else– the poor, the riffraff– in line. What do you think someone like me can do to you?

Okay, once more, for the record– I sealed the words away. Away from me. They’d served their purpose, gotten out some of the poison that was inside me. I didn’t need them anymore, didn’t want them. No, no I didn’t make them an offering. This is no oracion, nothing to be gained from this loss, no spirit who would even want what I had to offer. They’re just words– last I used them, they entered your ears and were gone. 

What was that? You think I… A new kind of – Ahaha. Hahaha!
*spits*
Oh, c’mon, it was funny. A new kind of magic… Is this that Sherlock Holmes thing? Once you rule out the impossible, and all that? I mean, sure, it’s not impossible. But half of you here were my teachers – you really think that I, of all people, could invent a new system of magic?
Ahahaha!
I’m a drunk, an addict. I’ve forgotten the most basic parts of the Retablo, I know just enough to not put the betel nut in the wrong place, and I remember a grand total of two of the maxims of usik. And you think I, what, sliced open a new vein of da-ut? That I made new sorcery?

Why are you making it so hard on yourselves? You don’t need a justification to make me disappear. Better that than telling the world that you think someone like me could do what you couldn’t. Me, someone who makes up halfway plausible ghost stories for film fest entries. You folks love punching down, but to spend all this effort on a nobody like me? Makes the great Council look pretty desperate, in my opinion.

But, I suppose you are. Desperate, that is. Three months, you say? It just… it’s getting to you isn’t it? That feeling that something is wrong and not having the words for it. I make a living out of words, the mundane kind, and I can tell you now how useless they are for most things. They’re signs at most, pointing to truth, to lies, to meaning. Not much on their own – but I’ve come to realize a few things about them, in the familiarity of my contempt.

You notice words when they’re gone, see, just like your agents noticed I couldn’t swear anymore. They occupy space somehow, in a mind, in a memory. You can’t weigh them, but they have weight. Can’t feel them, but they can make you feel. Words ain’t nothing. They’re still something. Some thing. 

And one of the maxims I do remember… is that usik is the magic of putting things in people.

I don’t have the words.

I put them somewhere else, that’s all. 

Ah, you always were quick on the uptake, Mr. Magalo. But not quick enough.
You pig-nosed little shit.

*splurt!*

Oh man, that felt gooood. How did I live without even being able to say shit? I don’t even know what’s so bad about the word, it’s just a natural bodily–

Now, now, let’s not get hasty. You really think you can kill me before I get the words out? Heh, see what I did there? No?
Let me spell it out then. It ain’t new magic, it’s old magic. Magic you taught me. Just… defined differently.

See, the reason that magic is so dependent on words is because words are the only way to shape it, make it real. Change the shape, change the magic. All I did was use usik. Plain old usik, the neglected little sibling of barang. It’s always flashier to use living things, always makes for a more horrific shot to show bugs crawling beneath the skin.

Inanimate things don’t move. You have to draw ‘em out themselves. And that’s the second maxim I remember well. That with usik it doesn’t hurt when you put the thing in. What hurts–

Sit the fuck down.

*splat!*

–is when you take the thing out. 

So your antings won’t help you. You haven’t defined this yet, my way of using your magic. Gun’s the same, but the bullet is different. 

The bullet’s already in you.

It’s been there since I used those words on you. But I wasn’t sure how best to pull them out again– I’d never done it before, no one had. But I did know that words can, with time, take root in a mind, in a soul. So I waited. I wrote. And when I heard the specific troubles you were having… well. I knew then which words were in whom. And I knew that they’d gone deep enough that it would hurt when they came out.

No, it’s too fucking late to beg. You think I care about money now? You think it matters to me if your goons slit my throat in my sleep? You fucking killed my brother, and I could do nothing about it. 

I’m empty. All I have left is what is necessary.

In. And out.

Each of you has something of mine. 

And I’d like them back.You goddamn motherfucking dickless sons of bitches–

About the Author. Paolo Chikiamco is a Filipino writer of prose, comics, and interactive fiction. He is the editor of “Alternative Alamat: Myths and Legends from the Philippines” and his work has been published in anthologies such as “The Sea is Ours” and “The Best of Philippine Speculative Fiction.” In the field of comics, he’s the co-creator (handling the writing duties) of “Mythspace: Ignition”, and “A Sparrow’s Roar” and “Muros: Within Magical Walls.” He has also served as a judge for the Graphic Literature category of the National Book Awards and is the creator of the #RP612fic Twitter hashtag.