Peace Talks

by Jim Butcher

  “If I do what is right, they’ll throw me to the wolves, huh?”

  “Look in the mirror,” Ebenezar said harshly. “You are a wolf. That’s the point.”

  That one hit me like a punch in the gut.

  And everything went quiet.

  There was just the sound of me breathing, harshly.

  “When the Red Court took Susan,” I said finally, “the White Council thought I should have done nothing.”

  I’m not sure what I sounded like. But the old man looked at me with an expression I had never seen on his face before. And then he slowly, slowly ground in his heels, planting his feet, his eyes focused on the middle of my chest.

  “When they took Maggie,” I said, and my throat felt strange, “the White Council would have had me do the same.”

  “This is different,” Ebenezar said, his voice suddenly hard, a clear warning. “The vampire is no innocent. He has drawn first blood. The scales will be balanced. There is no escaping that.”

  I don’t remember calling up my shield, but my copper-band shield bracelet was suddenly drizzling green-gold sparks and ready to go. “He was used.”

  The old man shifted his shoulders, lifting his left hand, fingers spread. He didn’t bother to use the toys like I did, except for his staff. When the master brawler of the White Council wanted a shield, he willed it to be. No trinkets required. “This isn’t a place we have authority,” he pressed, as if trying to drill the words through my thick skull. “He’s not one of ours.”

  “He’s one of mine!” I shouted, slamming my own staff down, and fire sizzled out where it struck the ground, a flashing circle of flame that left a black ring scorched on the concrete.

  The old man glowered at me and thrust out his jaw. “Boy, tell me you ain’t dumb enough to try this.”

  The Winter mantle immediately bayed for blood, for defiance, for violence.

  I started drawing in power.

  The old man sensed it and did the same.

  The universe yawed slightly in his direction as he did, a subtle bending of light, a minor wobble of gravity, a shudder in the very ground as Ebenezar drank power from the earth itself. That’s how much more juice the old man was taking in than me.

  In my head, all I could hear was Maggie screaming. She had a lot of nightmares, of when the Red Court had come for her foster family. And he wanted to put the interests of the Council ahead of that? Of her?

  “Oh, I’m more than dumb enough,” I said through clenched teeth.

  And that was when every hair on my neck suddenly rose and stood on end, all the way down to my heels. Gooseflesh erupted over my entire body at once, and a primal, primeval wave of utter terror flickered through my lizard brain, utterly dislodging every rational thought in my head.

  For a wizard, that’s … less than ideal. Control of our own thoughts and emotions is vital. Otherwise, all kinds of horrible things can happen. The first lesson every practitioner learns is how to quiet and focus his or her mind. And in the face of that mindless fear, I ran to that first lesson, allowing emotions to slough away, seeking calm, patience, balance.

  I didn’t get any of those. But it was enough to let me shove the terror back and to start processing some degree of rational thought.

  That hadn’t been the result of some random eddy of energy. Terror that focused was nothing less than a psychic disruption, a mental attack, the psychic equivalent of an ear-piercing shriek, loud enough to burst eardrums—and whatever had done it wasn’t even in sight yet.

  In the sleeping city around me, hundreds or thousands of people had just been seized in the talons of nightmares of pursuit and mindless fear. Those who were awake and didn’t know what they were dealing with would interpret it as a brief, frightening hallucination or a migraine or simply a dizzy spell.

  The old man had recovered faster than me, and by the time I’d cleared my head, he was already staring out at the night, his jaw set.

  “Is that what I think it is?” I asked him, my voice shaking.

  “Outsiders,” he confirmed grimly. “Someone just whistled them in.”

  “Super,” I said. “Just once, I’d like to be wrong about these things.”

  The old man snorted. “Now, if you were an Outsider, what would you be doing in Chicago the night before a big peace conference?”

  The question was almost meaningless. Outsiders were creatures from beyond the borders of reality, from outside of our universe. They weren’t human. They weren’t anything close to human. They were hideous, and they were dangerous, and they … were just too alien to be understood. There are Outsiders who want to eat your face off, and then there are the rest of them, who don’t go in for that kind of namby-pamby cuddly stuff.

  Demons they might be. But demons summoned by mortals, the only way for them to get into our reality. They always have a mortal purpose, if not always a rational one.

  “Trying to interfere with it in some way,” I suggested. “If a senior member of the Council was torn apart by monsters, it would tend to tilt blame toward the Fomor.”

  “Definitely a poor way to begin negotiations,” Ebenezar agreed. “And I don’t think that we—”

  He suddenly froze and stared.

  I followed his gaze.

  In a corner of the alley, where one of the building’s cornices formed a shadowy alcove, blue lines of light had appeared at the intersection of the ground and the two walls.

  “Oh, Hell’s bells,” I breathed. “Is that what I think it is?”

  “Belike,” growled the old man, his eyes shifting around. “How well do you know this block?”

  “It’s Chicago,” I said.

  “Good. We need a place without people or much that can catch fire.”

  I eyed him and said, “It’s Chicago.”

  The light in the corner shifted weirdly, warped, spun into curlicues and spirals that should have existed only in Escher drawings. The stone of the building twisted and stretched, and then rock rippled and bubbled like pancake batter, and something started hauling itself out of the surface of the stone at the intersection of the three lines of light. My chest suddenly vibrated as if I’d been standing in a pool in front of an outflow pipe, and a surge of nausea nearly knocked me down.

  The thing that slithered into our world was the size of a horse, but lower, longer, and leaner. It was canine in shape, generally—a quadruped, the legs more or less right, and everything else subtly wrong. A row of short, powerful-looking tentacles ran along its flanks. A longer, thicker tentacle lashed like a whip where its tail should have been. The feet were spread out, wide, for grasping, kind of like an eagle’s talons, and where its head should have been was nothing but a thick nest of more of the tendrils. It had something like scales made of mucus, rather than fur, and flesh squelched on flesh.

  “Cornerhound,” Ebenezar said, his voice purely disgusted. “Damned things.”

  The old man looked weary and obdurate, like a stone that had been resisting the sea since the last ice age. His expression was annoyed.

  But then I noticed one of the more terrifying sights I’d seen in my life.

  Ebenezar McCoy’s hands were unsteady.

  The end of his staff quivered as they trembled.

  My mentor, my teacher, the most feared wizard on the planet, was frightened.

  He stepped between the hound and me and lifted his left hand as the thing stood there for a second, dripping slime onto the ground beneath it and seething. Dozens of little mouths lined with serrated teeth opened along its flanks, gasping at the thick summer air as though it was something that the creature found only partially breathable.

  Then the cornerhound crouched, its body turning toward us with serpentine fluidity. The cluster of tentacles around its head began to quiver and undulate in weird unison, the motion becoming more and more energetic, and a weird moaning sound erupted from the creature, descending swiftly down the scale of audible sound until the tentacles all undulated together in a single quivering movemen
t, and suddenly flew forward at the same instant, with a sound so deep I could feel it more than hear it.

  The old man lifted his hand with a single sharp word, and a wall of pure arcane power blazed into light between us, its surface covered in sigils and formulae and runes I had never seen before, a wall of such density and complexity that it made me feel young and clumsy for the first time in years.

  Something hit the wall with a visible impact, sending out ripples of energetic transfer through its surface, making it suddenly opaque with spreading concentric circles of light, and the ground quivered so sharply that it buzzed and tickled at the soles of my feet clear through my shoes.

  Ebenezar shouted, “Concentrated fire works best!”

  And then there was a flash of light and a huge sound and an invisible tsunami grabbed me and threw me off my feet.

  As I went down, I saw the old man’s shield wall shatter, as a thousand pounds of Outsider came crashing through it. Broken shards of light streaked in every direction as the cornerhound’s talons ripped the shield apart. The energies released were tremendous, and in their wake, runeshaped patches of fire burned on the cornerhound’s flesh—but the creature shook itself in a twisting shimmy as it landed, shedding the flame like water, and slashed an impossibly fast claw at the old man.

  I lay there stunned, but Ebenezar had been to this dance a few times before. The old man didn’t even try to pit his speed against the Outsider’s. He was already on the way out of talon range by the time the thing decided to attack, and it missed him by inches. The nest of tentacles sprouting from the thing’s neck snaked toward the old man, and the cornerhound’s body followed.

  The old man lifted his right hand overhead and brought it down with another ringing word, and unseen force came smashing down on the cornerhound from overhead like an invisible pile driver. But as the magical strike slammed home, the cornerhound’s scales undulated in a nauseating wave, tentacles flickering. There was an enormous crushing, grinding sound, and in a circle around the terrible hound, the concrete was crushed to gravel, though the hound only staggered.

  Before the Outsider could recover, the old man shoved the end of his staff to within six inches of its head, shouted a word, and unleashed a beam of fire no thicker than a thread and brighter than the noonday freaking sun.

  The cornerhound rolled, and instead of cutting the creature in half, my grandfather’s spell sliced off the little tentacles upon the creature’s flank and two-thirds of its tail.

  The Outsider’s tentacle cluster swept toward Ebenezar, quivering wildly, and though I couldn’t hear anything, the air shook like the speakers at a major concert, the air around them rippling with something that looked like summer heat waves on asphalt.

  The edge of that cone of quivering air emanating from the Outsider’s tentacle face brushed against my grandfather. The old man sucked in a short huff of surprised breath, staggered, and collapsed.

  Sudden terror for my grandfather crashed over me, mingling with my frustration and rage from moments before, like gasoline being mixed with petroleum jelly.

  And the Winter mantle gleefully threw a lit match.

  I thrust the end of my staff at the creature and shouted, “Forzare!”

  Once again, the cornerhound crouched defensively, tentacles quivering—but the old man’s fire spell had seared half of them away, and on that side, my spell hammered into the hound like a runaway Volkswagen. There was a thump of impact, and the thousand-pound Outsider staggered several steps to one side, talons raking at the concrete in an effort to resist. The thing was incredibly powerful.

  Right. See, the thing about supernatural strength is that to use it effectively, you’ve got to brace yourself against the ground or terrain or whatever—otherwise, all you do when you lob a supernaturally powerful punch or toss a tractor truck is throw yourself a ways back. Get something super-strong off its balance or off the ground, and it isn’t nearly as dangerous as it was a second before.

  So while the cornerhound was still sliding across the concrete, I summoned my power, gathered it into a small point, focusing its purpose clearly in my mind, and shouted, “Forzare!” again, and flung the beastie straight up off of the ground. As it rocketed up, I gathered energy frantically again, waiting to line my shot up with the side of the creature Ebenezar had wounded as it tumbled back toward the ground, and then I focused forward and shouted again, unleashing even more energy.

  This time, the telekinetic blow struck the thing like some kind of enormous batter swinging for the fences, and it flew down the alley, across the nearest side street, and out of sight. A moment later, in the distance, I heard the sound of something smashing against what sounded like a mostly empty municipal trash bin.

  I staggered, suddenly dizzy and weary from throwing the three energy-intensive spells back to back. I stumbled and had to lean on my staff to keep from falling, but I made it to Ebenezar’s side and helped him sit up.

  “What happened?” I asked him.

  His voice came out rough. “Infrasonic attack. Like a tiger’s roar. Super-low-pitched notes, below what humans can hear, capable of making your organs vibrate. Can have a bunch of effects …” He blinked his eyes several times, owlishly, and then said, “Hell of a thing to try to stop. Help me stand up.”

  I did, drunkenly. “How tough are these things?”

  “Very,” he said. He planted his staff and blinked several more times, then peered around and nodded. “Very damned hard to kill.”

  “Then we don’t have very long,” I said.

  “Out of sight and clear of people,” he said.

  “Parking garage less than a block off,” I said. “This w …”

  My panting voice trailed off.

  Because suddenly corners in buildings all around us had begun to glow with blue light.

  “Stars and stones,” breathed the old man. “They’ve sent the whole pack.”

  “We should get to my car,” I said.

  “Your car got any right-angle corners in it?” Ebenezar said. “Because if it does, we’ll have those things coming at us out of the dashboard or through the backseat.” He shook his head. “Our only chance is to bind and banish them. Move, boy, get us to that garage.”

  The buildings around us bulged and warped and deep bass-note sounds began to drop down below the range of human hearing all around us.

  “Sooner’d be better than later,” the old wizard said.

  “Right,” I said, and forced my weary body to start moving. “Come on.”

  12

  We ran, and the cornerhounds followed us.

  I wasn’t sure how many of them had taken up our trail. It was more than half a dozen, but fewer than twenty. They made oddly light-sounding skittering noises and created small clouds of sparks when they moved on concrete, the result of those steel-hard claws striking the ground. They clung to the sides of buildings like giant spiders, those same talons biting into brick and concrete, easily supporting their weight.

  I took us down the alley, in the direction opposite the one where I’d tossed the first cornerhound, across the street, a slight jog, and then down the alley beyond.

  “They aren’t following real close,” I noted. All the cardio lately was standing me in good stead now. My heart was working and I was breathing hard and I barely noticed.

  “They know we’re dangerous,” the old man panted. “They aren’t used to dealing with our reality, or with beings that can actually hurt them. Makes them hesitate.”

  “Here,” I said, and turned into the opening of a parking garage, weaving around the wooden arm that would swing up to allow cars in. I slowed down enough to let the old man catch up to me. He wasn’t covering the ground as easy as I was.

  Behind us, the cornerhounds … didn’t lope so much as scuttle, as if they had to stop to consider each burst of motion before committing to it. They were deathly swift when they moved, absolutely oily with speed—and when they stopped, they were statue still, except for the quivering of t
he little tentacles running down their flanks. On any one of them, it might have looked a little silly. By the time you spread the sudden, darting motions out to a baker’s dozen or so of them, it crossed the line to unnerving. There was something exceptionally primitive about the motion, something reptilian, even insectile about it. It would have been creepy if the hounds had been the size of beagles. When they were more the size of horses, it was downright terrifying.

  “Fire’s best,” the old man continued, grimly keeping pace with me. “Anything magic they can shrug off to one degree or another. All-natural fire works just fine on ’em, though.”

  “What’s the difference where the fire came from?” I asked.

  “The difference is, anything we just make out of our will, they can slip most of the punch,” he said. “I ain’t got time to give you a graduate seminar on intention versus the natural operation of the universe until you’ve completed my ‘why it’s a damned stupid thing to trust vampires’ course.”

  The parking garage was built under the apartment building above us, and the top level was mostly full. There wouldn’t be room to do much fighting in there, which meant there was only one way to go: down. As a rule, when you’re running from something, up or down tends to be a bad idea. The higher up or the farther down you go, the fewer and fewer ways there are out of the situation, and when something is chasing you, keeping your options open is another way of saying staying alive.

  I gave the old man a worried glance as I headed down. He looked around and came to the same conclusion I had. “No help for it, Hoss. Head down.”

  “No need to drag the White Court into this,” I said to him as I led the way. “They aren’t involved yet.”

  “You’re here in the first place because you think you’re protecting the vampire’s concubine,” the old man groused. “And for all you know, they summoned these things and sent them after you.”

  I glanced back as the first couple or three cornerhounds slithered around the corner at the top of the ramp behind us and let out chest-shivering calls of discovery. Ahead of us, where walls and roof or floor formed a corner, sickly blue light began to glow.