by Jim Butcher
I glowered at him and we both kept walking along grumpily, our staves hitting the ground at the same time.
We reached the map table, and Vadderung and the Erlking both looked up at us. Vadderung was still wearing his business suit. The Erlking was dressed in hunting leathers from somewhere before the Renaissance, under a suit of dark mail. He wore a hunting sword at his hip, and his usual horned helmet had been set aside. The king of the goblins, one of Mab’s major vassals, he had an asymmetric, scarred face that somehow managed to be roguishly handsome. The past few times I’d seen him, he’d been really big and really scary. Now he was more like regular human size: He could have passed for a particularly large and graceful professional athlete.
“Ah, the young wolf,” the Erlking said in a resonant basso as I approached. “I had not realized he was your pupil, Blackstaff.”
The old man nodded to the Erlking. “Oh, he was mostly a hired hand for a little while. Just had to learn a few things before he went off on his own.”
The Erlking tilted his head, frowning. “He wears the amulet of Margaret LeFay.”
“My mother,” I said.
Ebenezar gave me a sharp glance. The old man didn’t believe in giving away information for nothing, at least not between the nations. Which was probably going to make that talk with him a little more difficult to arrange and frustrating to attempt. Super.
The current master of the Wild Hunt lifted his eyebrows. He looked back and forth between us before he said, “Margaret’s child? Much is explained.” He shook his head wryly. “You’ve no idea how many headaches your mother caused me in her day. Your . . . visit to my realm makes a great deal more sense now.”
Vadderung had never looked up from the map. He cleared his throat and said, diffidently, “Gentlemen, to business?”
I bellied up to the table and squinted down at the map. It was well illuminated by chemical light sticks holding down its edges. It had been done on heavy yellowed vellum in sepia inks, all of it in the style of the old Scandinavian mapmakers, complete with Norse runic letters.
And it was moving. Even as I watched, several tiny blue blocks marked with an X glided slowly down streets marked on the map. They stood out against the old-timey artistry as sharply as if they’d been some kind of video game.
“A tactical map,” I noted. “Of my town.”
Vadderung glanced up at me with his one eye and then back down. “What of it?”
“Takes a lot of effort to make a construct like this,” I said. “And a lot of being in the place you’re making the map of.”
“I’ve had more time than most to be more places than most,” he said.
Ebenezar thumped a thick finger down on the map. “What does this represent?”
“Light infantry,” Vadderung replied. “Mostly what we have available to us. Marcone’s people here. The White Court’s people are there. The local Fae forces are there.”
They were spread out in three defensive positions along Lake Shore Drive so that they’d be able to respond to the enemy wherever they came ashore. Two large blue circles marked the map inland of them—one here, atop the castle, and the second hovering over the svartalf embassy.
“Our reserve positions,” Vadderung noted. “Heavy response forces have been positioned at each of these points, and they both stand as defensive positions.”
“You need to mark a couple more defensive emplacements,” I said. I pointed them out on the map. “There. St. Mary of the Angels.”
“A church?” the Erlking asked skeptically.
“The church,” I said. “At least here in Chicago. There’s real faith there. Believe it. If we need to fall back to it, they’ll open the doors.”
“And the second?” Vadderung asked.
I put my finger on the map. “Michael Carpenter’s house. The Knights of Hope and Faith are there. Both of them.”
“Two doughty foes,” the Erlking noted. “And armed with fell blades. But only two.”
“There’s a dozen guardian angels on duty there at any given time,” I said. “Part of Sir Michael’s retirement package.”
“We will not plan to use them,” Vadderung said in a tone of absolute certainty. “Not the angels, and not the Knights. Not in any way. The being you call Mister Sunshine would be quite annoyed at the intrusion.”
I arched an eyebrow at Vadderung. I was pretty sure I hadn’t ever mentioned my nickname for Uriel to him.
Vadderung gave me a very bland look. “We have lunch once a year.”
“Ah,” I said. “Well. If some bad guys just happened to walk a little too close, I’m pretty sure they’re going to get incinerated. Course, Mister Sunshine thinks a lot of the Accorded folks are bad guys, too.” And I agreed with him. And might have been one of them. I glowered in the direction of the ghouls. “But if we need to move people in a direction, we can send them that way and be pretty sure that the frogs are going to be real slow to chase them.”
Vadderung looked up at me sharply. A small, grim smile hit his face for an instant and was gone. “The frogs?”
“Fomor, whatever,” I said. “I mean, we can stop being diplomatic with these assholes now, right?”
The other men at the table huffed out low, nervous laughs.
“Frogs,” Ebenezar agreed.
“Frogs,” echoed the Erlking.
Vadderung’s eye gleamed. He shook his head but muttered something and touched the edge of the map, and blue circles blossomed around both indicated positions.
“Our main problem,” he noted, “is Ethniu. While she is not the only problem, so long as she stands, no victory is possible.”
“She wears Titanic bronze,” the Erlking said in a tone that suggested he had said it several times in the past couple of hours.
I held up a hand. “Question from the classroom floor. What is that, exactly?”
“A unique alloy of Olympian bronze and mordite,” Vadderung replied. “Kinetic weapons will be of very little use against her. Elemental energies will do little more. It will take a being of divine status to physically penetrate the armor.”
“Divine status,” I said. “Meaning what?”
“Your Knights, perhaps,” the Erlking mused. “Their power would seem to be of the proper origins.”
“Those angels you mentioned could do it,” Ebenezar said. “Mordite is condensed from the darkest, most evil stuff of the Outside. Once it’s alloyed, instead of devouring life it devours energy. Heat, force, lightning, what have you, all backed by the will of the being wearing it. Getting through that takes more than simple power.”
“It has to come from the proper source,” Vadderung agreed. “And be used for the proper reasons.”
Mab glided up to the table. “Sufficiently infernal power could manage the task as well,” she murmured. “I daresay Nicodemus Archleone might strike through Titanic bronze.”
“Assuming she just stands there and lets any of those beings attack her,” the Erlking pointed out. “In the first place, those assets are not under our command. In the second place, she won’t. She’ll do battle, and most likely kill them.”
Vadderung scowled up at the Erlking for a full five seconds before he said, “You’re gloomy.”
“Merely realistic,” the Erlking said.
“You’re saying that to get to her, we’d need a sponsor,” I said. “And that basically no one around here is strong enough or on the right frequency enough to sponsor that kind of thing.”
“Precisely,” Mab said.
Gulp.
“So we don’t have a tool that can break the armor,” I said.
“Probably not,” Ebenezar said. “This has to be done the hard way.”
Mab nodded. “We must find her if possible, or wait for her to reveal herself if not.”
“That means we have to react to her,” the Erlking objecte
d.
“Yes,” Mab said. “We must be adaptable, above all. Then we must confront her and force her to expend power against us.”
“Uh,” I said. “That’s . . . going to hurt, isn’t it?”
“I expect many to die,” Mab said. “Once we have engaged her we must grind her down and, when we have weakened her as much as possible, drive her to the water.” Her huge, luminous green-grey eyes turned up toward me. “Where we must hope that the will of my Knight is sufficient to contend with hers.”
I swallowed. “Yeah. What happens if I miss?”
Mab regarded me steadily. “I should think that the Last Titan will laugh and do precisely what she said she would do. Destroy this city and anyone who stands in her way.”
Hoo boy.
“So it’s all resting on me,” I said.
“We’ll do the heavy lifting for you, Hoss,” Ebenezar promised. “You just finish the job.”
“Yes,” Mab said. “Do not fail.”
I looked down at the map.
In one of those little blue circles, there was a little girl who was probably asleep by now, watched over by Knights and angels.
And by me.
My chest hurt a little and I carefully packed the feeling away, bottling it, ready to be used later. My terror for my child would not make me better able to defend her. Storing it up and using it to power spells that would destroy the things trying to hurt her would.
Damn right, Harry.
Do. Not. Fail.
“First things first,” I said. “I’m going to need pizza.”
Chapter
Seven
Getting pizza wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. There was plenty of frozen stuff in the freezers in Castle Marcone’s kitchens to feed hungry Einherjaren, and the gas was still working fine. So, in a little less than half an hour, I had several pizzas delivered to the roof.
In that time, twenty more assassin squid streaked across the sky. With the razor-wire canopy, they couldn’t dive straight down, so their runs weren’t as fast—but they were determined. One of them went for Childs, and one of Marcone’s people dived in the way to intercept. He took a tentacle across the throat and went down screaming.
An Einherjar with a medical kit came sprinting, but there was nothing to be done. Marcone’s gunman thrashed and flailed so hard that I could hear the snap and crackle of breaking bone and tearing cartilage. He emitted a single-tone, high-pitched scream that went on and on, growing rougher and rougher—until the venom in the myriad tiny wounds just dissolved the flesh of his throat and it erupted into a small fountain of gore.
And that was the first death of the night.
The Redcap proved handiest for this work. He stood by with a suppressed nine-millimeter, cat-pupiled eyes half-closed, standing in a perfectly relaxed posture, and waited. Rather casually, he brought down fourteen of the twenty or so assassin-beasts. The last squidward before the pizza came up slammed into Cristos’s back and clubbed him to the roof, but his suit was at least as heavily enchanted with defenses as my own—and Yoshimo’s sword cut the squid in half before it had bounced off Cristos and fallen to the floor. He hadn’t taken any of the venom, so he would still be in the fight.
Once the pizza got there, I had them take it to the far side of the battlements from where the White Council had set up shop. Then I strode over to Molly and tapped her on the shoulder.
Molly hadn’t changed into mail and was still wearing the dive suit she’d had on at the kraken fight. She sat cross-legged, her back straight, her palms resting on her knees. Winter Fae, pixie-sized, but more savage and vicious-looking than my crew, hovered in a cloud around her, darting in and away with messages as she coordinated the movement of troops, I assumed.
She turned to look at me and I froze in place for a moment. It took her a couple of seconds to focus on me, her expression settled in the liquid serenity of deep focus. She spoke, her voice rich and sleepy-sensual. “What is it, my Knight?”
Her eyes had changed.
They were a deep, glacial blue-green. And her pupils had changed shape. They had become feline, like most of the Sidhe.
She blinked several times, focusing on me by degrees, coming up out of the state of concentration she’d been in, and as she did her eyes changed color again, lightening to their natural sky blue, pupils shifting back to circles. “Give me a second, Harry. I’m . . . tracking about two dozen conversations. . . .” Then she exhaled, sighed, scratched at the end of her nose, and said, “What can I do you for?”
I hooked a thumb at the Redcap. “Need to borrow him for a few minutes. I’m going to do something about these squid things and I figure they might object.”
Molly arched an eyebrow. “You’d trust him?”
“I’d trust you.”
Molly eyed me and then nodded. “Sure. Go with him, Red. Guard him as you would me.”
The Redcap bowed his head deeply toward Molly and said, “My lady.” Then he turned to me, smiling diffidently. “Sir Knight, I am at your disposal.”
“If you were,” I said, “I would.”
“Bold words for a man about to trust me with his life,” the Redcap mused.
“Just making it clear where we stand,” I said.
The Redcap smirked. He . . . reminded me considerably of Thomas, now that I thought about it. Six feet and a little lean, dark-haired, and beautiful in the alien way of the Sidhe that would only have let him blend into the oddest of crowds. He was pantherine, slim with hard muscle, relaxed and flowing in his movements, and capable of tremendous speed and the effortless grace that I had witnessed nowhere so much as in the Sidhe at war.
Legend had it that his hat was red because he constantly dipped it in the blood of his victims to keep it nice and bright. He was one of the more prolific killers in the Winter Court, and his star had been in bloody ascendance ever since the death of the last Winter Lady.
I stared at him for a second and said, “Considering you were helping Maeve screw up the world the last time I saw you, you’ve done pretty well in your career path.”
“Is that what I was doing?” the Redcap asked, his tone guileless.
I stopped and stared at him for a second. Then I said, “Hell’s bells.”
“Ah,” the Redcap said, grinning. “The ape finally works it out.”
“You weren’t working for Maeve at all, were you?”
“Years late to the party,” the Redcap said, “but I suppose you got there eventually.” He tapped his pistol against his leg. “Mab had positioned me in Maeve’s court about thirty years before. I’d been feeding her information while I served her daughter.”
“And everything you did to me was meant to assist me.”
“Or keep my cover with Maeve, yes,” the Redcap said. “Or because it was amusing. I’d apologize for the wound, but hurting you at that time was all three. Honestly, we all thought you would realize the script and play along. But you bumbled your way through it more or less, I suppose.”
I just stared at him for a second. Then I said, “I don’t suppose it occurred to anyone to just talk to me.”
“How many feet higher do the letters need to be in order to spell it out for you, wizard?” the Redcap asked, amused. “Best you learn to read the subtext, if you wish to continue in this business. Besides. It’s not as if Mab can just hand the Wild Hunt to a mortal to play with.” He shook his head. “Strife between queens is a terrible thing for the rest of us. Each can lay commands upon us that we cannot refuse. If one is to hold to one’s loyalties, it requires a great deal of careful negotiation of circumstance and conversation to function at all.”
“So you were bodyguarding Maeve,” I said. “And you more or less betrayed her to her death.”
“It was necessary.”
“And now you’re bodyguarding Molly.”
“That is my privi
lege.”
“And if it becomes necessary to betray the Winter Lady again?”
“I should do so without hesitation,” he replied calmly.
“If you do,” I said, “there will be stories about what happens to you.”
The Redcap tilted his head and regarded me quizzically. “I don’t think you understand my position, wizard. The lady I now serve meets the highest criteria for my approval that I could reasonably expect from someone still so . . . mortal. She is attentive to her duty, efficient in her execution, and deals appropriately with her enemies. So long as she continues so, she will have my support.”
“And the moment she weakens?”
The Redcap gave me a small smile that showed sharp canines. “This is the Winter Court. One shudders to think what would happen to her.” His smile sharpened slightly. “Or you.”
I glowered at him.
“Just making it clear where we stand,” he said, in the most annoying way possible. “Honestly, I have no feelings for you personally either way. Excuse me.”
And he lifted his gun and sent a bullet about six inches past my left ear.
By the time I flinched, there was a splattering sound and one of the squid things flopped and contorted on the floor, coming to a halt and dying a leaking, broken little monstrosity, ichor making the stones of the castle spark and sizzle.
I rubbed furiously at my ear, which itched tremendously for no good reason at all, and scowled at the Redcap.
He lifted his pistol, smiled, and said, “As my lady commands. Proceed, wizard.”
I grimaced at him. Then I trudged over to the battlements where the pizza had been set up and crouched down in the corner, where I’d have cover from assassin squid from a couple of directions at least. The Redcap followed, coming to a halt about ten feet away from me and simply standing there, gun in hand, waiting.
I got down to business. A stick of chalk from my pocket and the pizza were all I really needed. Summonings were pretty straightforward affairs, magically speaking. It was the consequences of summonings that got complicated.