Battle Ground

by Jim Butcher

  River Shoulders growled. It was a sound so low that I couldn’t hear it so much as feel it vibrating the bones of my skull. “Where you want me?”

  “No time to get fancy,” I said. “Get behind them. You get two minutes. Then we’ll go right at them from this side, make plenty of noise, and draw their fire. Once we have their attention, you get in, get their sacrifice out. Then . . .” I brought my hands together in a silent clap.

  “Simple is good,” River Shoulders said.

  Then he gave himself a little shake, bounded maybe four feet into the air off one massive foot, shimmered, and turned into a goddamned owl with a wingspan as long as a freaking car. The massive owl glided out over the tombstones, arcing to one side, and vanished into the night.

  “Jesus Remington Winchester Christ,” Wild Bill blurted in a strangled voice. “He’s a wizard?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Taught old Listens-to-Wind, the way I hear it.”

  “Huh,” Bill said. “Now, that just ain’t fair.”

  “Don’t complain. He’s on our side.”

  “I’ll take two,” Wild Bill said.

  I’d been counting in my head. When I got to a hundred, I said, “Okay, folks. Just like the old days. Chandler, you know the drill?”

  “I may have been in the field once or twice,” Chandler said.

  “Groovy.”

  The team of young Wardens stacked up behind me, walking in close order, hands on shoulders in the dark to guide one another, and I headed out.

  Warden fire teams work much like any soldiers. Any one of us can put out enough firepower to kill every one of us if we’re careless or stupid, and working together means developing trust and respect in one another’s skills. I’d go first and make the call about when the fight started. If necessary, my shield would cover the entire team—who could then fan out, Hydra-like, and take out the source of any threat.

  Granted, if I stepped on a land mine or something on the way there, we were all dead together. But that wasn’t how most supernatural types tended to think.

  I took long, striding steps in time with the drum, and as we approached the necromancers’ position, I felt Ramirez’s veil wrap us in a cloak of less-than-visibility. Yoshimo did something to the air that made us less-than-audible. They’d cover us until we got into place.

  Wild Bill whispered something to the lever-action rifle he carried instead of a staff these days and plucked a rune-inscribed brass shell from his belt and slid it carefully into the rifle’s loading port before closing the action with a cautious, precise movement. My leather coat creaked, and I sweltered in the summer heat, within its smothering protection.

  My shield was by far the noisiest and most obvious active spell we had among us, magically speaking, and would be the last to go up. I waited until we rounded the corner of the last mausoleum blocking our line of sight to shake out the bracelet and ready my defenses.

  But first things first. We had two major problems to overcome.

  One, the bad guys were standing inside a ritual circle. We could throw as much power as we wanted at them—it would splash uselessly on that thing until someone took the circle down. So we’d have to do that before we could really come to grips with them.

  Second, if you want to control the dead, you’ve got to drop a beat on them. End that beat, end any possibility of summoning and controlling the undead. I drew my revolver, with its boring old regular, entirely mundane rounds, stepped around the corner, and raised the pistol, sighting on the drummer.

  Swear to God, on a normal day, I barely shoot competently. But with the Winter mantle guiding my hand, I lifted my arm and made a one-handed shot in the dark at maybe twenty yards that drilled the drummer in the back with a thunderous report.

  Two things happened immediately.

  First, the round passing through the plane of the circle, sent there by my hand and will, disrupted the essential magical screen of the ritual circle. Stealthy the working might have been, but nothing works right when it’s falling to pieces, and it shattered away in flickers and shards of scarlet light.

  Second, the round tore right through where the drummer’s liver should have been.

  The hooded head whipped around, owl-like, nearly one hundred and eighty degrees, with such unnatural speed that the hood was flung back.

  In the scarlet light of the disintegrating circle, I could see a ruined, desiccated face. The skin was drawn tight over the bones of the drummer’s face, withered and weathered like a corpse exposed to the sky. The eyes were milky white; the lips were leathery strips of jerky partly covering yellowed old teeth. Hair hung on to the scalp in clumps of soiled tangles, but much of it was bald and grey-white.

  A vampire of the Black Court. And I knew her.

  “Mavra of the Black Court!” I snarled. “You got a permit for raising zombies in my town?”

  “Oh,” Mavra said. Her body turned to match the facing of her head, the motion weirdly liquid and mechanical at the same time. “It’s you.”

  Five of the other six figures turned to face us, hoods coming down.

  Black Court vampires. All of them. I didn’t recognize any of the others—but it seemed pretty clear that Mavra, as the drummer, was the least among them. The Black Court had been all but exterminated, thanks to a really underhanded move by Lara’s people a century and change back. The only ones who were still alive—well, who continued to exist—were the oldest, wiliest, most vicious, and most powerful of their kind.

  These vampires were old-school, the real deal, nightmares of the Old World. A Black Court vampire was a match for any dozen counterparts in the Red or White Court.

  And we had seven of them.

  “My lord,” Mavra said. “May I suggest violence.”

  The last and tallest of the hooded figures straightened his shoulders, turned, and lowered his hood with one hand. In the other, he held a ritual athame, an ancient knife of rough iron. He stood over the bound figure on the ground. His face was not like those of the other vampires present. No rotted corpse he; his face had the severe, angular regularity of a marble statue’s, beautiful in the severe fashion of frozen mountains and crackling ice. Thick black hair swept back from his face and down his back. His hands were long and white, the fingers fine like an artist’s.

  But his eyes.

  Dark.

  Black.

  Empty as the soul of hell.

  I had just looked toward them, and they’d nearly sucked me in. Hell’s bells. I shored up my mental defenses with as much focus as I dared spare from my environment and kept my eyes away from his face.

  “So,” he said. His voice was . . . pure, smooth whiskey, touched with a soft, throaty accent. “This is the city’s wizard.”

  “I’m in the phone book and everything,” I said. “In the name of the city of Chicago, and by the authority of Cook County and the state of Illinois,” I said, loudly, hoping to give River that much more of a distraction, “I order you to cease any and all supernatural activity and return forthwith to your place of origin or to the next convenient parallel dimension.”

  Ramirez choked.

  “Welp,” Wild Bill drawled. “That oughta do it. Thanks, Harry.”

  “Who is that?” breathed Yoshimo.

  “That,” said Chandler in a low, shaking voice, “is Drakul.”

  Okay.

  My eyes might have gotten a little wider.

  I might have had trouble swallowing.

  “Oh boy,” I breathed.

  And Drakul smiled, as if genuinely delighted, and said, “Wise enough to know, but not wise enough to run. Wizards. Arrogant. Take them, my children.”

  Chapter

  Twelve

  Elders of the Black Court do not screw around.

  Before Drakul had entirely finished his sentence, the air sizzled and spat with magical energy, as five e
lders of the Black Court unleashed a tsunami of sorcery.

  I lifted my shield bracelet and stepped forward to meet it.

  Once upon a time, that gesture would have been futile. Defensive shields were a fairly standard working of magic, but they had limits. The more kinds of energy you want to defend against, the more layers of shielding it takes—and the more power you have to put into it. Back when, my shield had been handy for stopping objects that were moving very quickly and not much more.

  But times had changed. I was older now. I’d learned lessons the hard way and had the scars to prove it.

  So five heavyweights hit me all at once: A couple of lances of white-hot energy, a sputtering globule of some kind of horrible-smelling acid, a crackling bolt of lightning, and what looked like a ghostly tentacle made of translucent green mist hit the shield like five separate speeding automobiles. My rough shield bracelet dribbled green-gold sparks and grew uncomfortably hot in seconds. The shield itself flared out in a quarter dome of blue-white, nearly coherent light, a barrier of raw, stubborn will.

  Maybe if it had happened somewhere else, at a different time, I might not have been able to stop them all. Maybe if it had just been me, it would have gone badly. But tonight, my city was under siege. Tonight, millions of terrified people were going to die unless they got help from people like me. Tonight, their fear rode the air, an inflammable mist that only needed a magical spark to roar into reality.

  Tonight, Chicago fought for its life.

  And my shield held against them all. Though it scorched my wrist, though my feet were driven six inches back across the green grass, I stopped them.

  All of them.

  Meanwhile, my companions had not been standing around with their fingers up their anatomies. Yoshimo’s arms swept out and whirled in circles, and within a second she sent a slender column of whirling air arching up over my shield and down among the Black Court. When the white column touched the earth, it roared up into a whirling dervish of dirt and flying grass, blinding the foe and disrupting their evocations.

  Ramirez’s hand came down on my shoulder and he said, “Now!”

  I dropped the shield.

  Now, don’t get me wrong. What the elders of the Black Court had dished out at us was enough energy to put us all in the ground and then some. But on the White Council, we call people with talent like that “sorcerers.” And we sneer when we say it, for a reason. Yeah, maybe they can throw the raw magical strength around. But magic is about a hell of a lot more than simply power—and though they might have been young, the people backing me up were wizards of the White Council, and each and every one of them had cut their teeth on war.

  I checked over my shoulder to see Chandler standing calmly with both hands planted on the handle of his cane. A dozen stones the size of my head floated in a small cloud around his shoulders, and as my shield came down, the stones began to leap forward as if fired from a cannon, hissing toward their targets. Not to be outdone, Wild Bill murmured something to his old lever-action rifle and the old steel of the weapon suddenly pulsed with threads of scarlet fire in the shape of some kind of primitive pictograms. As my shield dropped, he raised the rifle to his shoulder, sighted on the nearest vampire, and with a word sent a rod of semisolid fire the thickness of my wrist right through the vampire’s belly and one of the huge headstones behind it alike, splitting the air with the thunder of sundered stone.

  The vampire let out a scream that ripped and slashed the air it passed through and . . . was apparently pulled back and away from us by some unseen, horribly fast force.

  Ramirez cast a beam of pale light at the vampire whose strike had gone all hentai on us. That one was a large male, or what was left of one, and he swung both arms dramatically and sent his ghostly tentacle smashing into Ramirez’s disintegration ray. The collision of forces was enough to turn the whole thing into a thrashing mess that spewed ectoplasm in every direction.

  Two of the vampires who might have been twins, or similarly sized siblings, before all the decay had set in, blurred and became a pair of great, greasy-furred grey wolves the size of ponies. Both shot in opposite directions in great, bounding leaps.

  “Flankers!” I shouted. “Yoshimo, Bill!”

  Yoshimo bounded a step into the air and the wind itself seemed to gather beneath her feet and springboard her with silent grace to the top of the nearest mausoleum. She began to bound in twenty-foot steps, her toes barely coming down to touch the tops of grave markers, statues, and marble tombs, moving as if weightless to intercept one of the great wolves.

  Bill immediately swung away from his target—a move that took no small amount of discipline—to begin tracking the second wolf with his rifle as it swung wide around us, a flicker among the smoke and shadows. Bill was an old-school shooter. He welded his cheek to the stock of the weapon, sighting carefully, and went almost entirely still as the barrel tracked the enemy and Wild Bill waited for his shot.

  I was keeping my eyes on Drakul.

  The pale figure watched the fight with keen interest, eyes like a pair of black holes, drawing in everything and giving nothing in return. He watched the opening exchange with the interest of a general observing children at chess, lips pursed thoughtfully. Then he took a step to the left and . . .

  . . . and just freaking vanished. I don’t mean that he went behind a veil, or teleported, or opened a portal to the Nevernever. I can do those things, if I have to. This guy took a step and just up and up went away, as if stepping behind a telephone pole and never appearing on the other side. Gone. Just gone.

  Except that in this case, “gone” turned out to be six inches behind me.

  My ears suddenly twinged hard, like when the pressure shifts in an airplane, and the empty space behind me wasn’t empty anymore. I whirled, drawing my revolver, raising it—

  —too late. Drakul caught the weapon’s barrel in the pale fingers of one hand and simply crushed it shut.

  His other arm swept out and clubbed Ramirez into a tombstone and to the ground as if Drakul’s flesh had been made from cold, heavy marble. Drakul whirled toward Wild Bill, who flung himself into an evasive dive without ever looking back from his gun. It wouldn’t have been fast enough to save him, except that Chandler sent a quick trio of stones zipping into Drakul’s kidneys, wham, pow, crunch, with each stone exploding into gravel from the force of its impact.

  Drakul turned to Chandler, muttered a word, and flicked an annoyed wrist.

  The air behind the young Warden split with a howl of frozen wind, and a circle of pitch-black absence of light maybe four feet across appeared behind him. A stone seemed to turn beneath his foot. Chandler’s balance wavered and he stumbled a step back, into the circle.

  The air somehow unscreamed, and the void black circle vanished.

  Chandler went with it.

  Drakul’s black-hole eyes swept back to me, and suddenly I was being crushed to the ground by the weight of the universe itself. The very thought that I could have done something against a power like that was laughable—but I’d felt this kind of raw, universe-bending will before, in Chichén Itzá. Drakul, whatever he was, had considerably more personal power than the Lords of Outer Night had ever managed to show me.

  But I had hoisted those Red Court losers on their own petard, when everything was said and done. I would be damned if I rolled over for Dracula’s less famous dad.

  I ground my teeth and fought back against the power crushing me, not with my muscles but with my mind. I pictured Drakul’s will as a great, dark hand pressing me down—and mine as my own hand, rising to force it away. I poured my will into the image, a couple of decades of discipline, experience, and focus, investing it with power, with reality, with life.

  Gasping, one inch at a time, I lifted my hand until my right palm faced Drakul and steadied. I couldn’t stand—but I got an elbow underneath me and snarled silent defiance up at him, my righ
t hand raised against his power.

  An expression touched Drakul’s face for the first time—a small smile that showed cruelly curved, sharpened canine teeth.

  “Ah,” he said, raising the knife he’d been planning to use for a blood sacrifice. “If only my own heir had been possessed of such determination.”

  It took a lot of concentration to free up enough mental cycles to make word sounds with my mouth, but I wasn’t going to sit there and take it quietly. “Guess you’re Ethniu’s bitch now,” I gasped.

  The smile again. “It cost little enough to support her. Minor squabbles like this are a good place to take stock of the field.”

  “Field?”

  “Oh, wizard,” Drakul chided me. “Their immaculate beardlinesses have you in the dark even now? As one starborn to another, I must say it seems unseemly in the extreme.”

  I stared at him hard. “What does it mean?”

  Drakul’s smile widened into something genuinely merry. Except for those empty eyes. Any expression that had those eyes in it could be nothing but a mask. “You’ll never value information that comes to you easily.”

  “Thanks, Dad.”

  Something ugly flickered in that smile for a few beats. Then Drakul shook his head. “I would tell you to ask of your own White Council what they aren’t telling you, what they bred you for, and what they expect you to do.” He considered. “Well. Except that it seems unlikely you’ll have the chance on this side of the veil, I’m afraid.”

  “Chump like you?” I gasped. “Tonight, you’re the warm-up act.”

  Drakul regarded me for a second. Then he made an exasperated little sound and put one hand on his hip. “I’ll be open with you, starborn. At this point of conversations like this one, I often offer the dark gift of immortality to someone in your position. It’s occasionally a way to obtain a useful tool, but mostly I just want to see how they react. One sees people for who they truly are when they face death . . . but, honestly, five minutes of you in my life has been quite enough. You’ve no . . . gravitas. No decorum. No style at all.” He knelt over me and lifted the knife toward my throat. “But I suppose your blood will call to the dead as well as anyone’s.”