Peace Talks

by Jim Butcher

  “What game?” I asked him.

  He picked up a coin and held it in his palm where I could see it.

  “When someone is suspicious, they’re looking for things to notice,” he said. “Sometimes the best way to trick them is to give them something to notice. Once they’re focused on that, you know where they’re looking.”

  There was a loud crash and I jumped. The chair next to Dad had fallen backwards onto the floor.

  When I looked back, his hand was still there, but the coin was gone.

  “This example is pretty crude, but it works well enough. Once you know where they’re looking, you also know where they aren’t looking. That’s when you have room to make the illusion happen. It’s called misdirection. If I do it right, it looks like magic, and everyone is happy.”

  “What if you do it wrong?”

  He smiled and reached for my ear. I caught his wrist. I might have been little, but I knew some of his moves by then. He had the quarter tucked into the fold of skin on the back of his hand, between his thumb and forefinger.

  I grinned at him, took the coin, and pocketed it. That was the deal. If I ever was smart enough to catch him in the act, the coin was my reward, and I could put them in any video game I wanted.

  “If I do it wrong, then it looks to the audience like I’m incompetent, like I’m stupid, and like I think they’re stupid to be fooled by such a simple trick.” He gave me a wry grin. “People don’t react well to that.”

  Tough room, I thought to myself. Not sure you ever played to a crowd that could react with as much … manifest enthusiasm as this one, Dad.

  I needed to stop talking to ghosts.

  Showtime.

  I pushed open the door behind the buffet table and surveyed the room. It seemed simple enough. Cristos was on the little speaking stage now, and all the illustrious bigwigs were watching him.

  “… and I’m very pleased to announce that we have been contacted by King Corb of the Fomor, who will be arriving shortly. Matters of state required his immediate attention, but they have been resolved, and His Majesty will arrive within moments.”

  There was a round of polite applause, which Cristos acknowledged with a beaming smile. “Recent events among the supernatural nations may have caused a great deal of confusion and turmoil—but they could also be an opportunity to forge even stronger bonds between the various nations. It is my hope that, should we reach a successful treaty, our neighbors the Fomor will work hand in hand with the rest of the Accorded nations… .”

  It got dull after that, even for a black-and-white feature, despite Cristos’s excellent speaking presence, and if all the supernatural grown-ups found him as cloying as I did, they hid it a hell of a lot better than I would have. Granted, the misdirection hadn’t been specifically timed to interrupt Cristos and his speech.

  That was merely a happy accident.

  I took a second ampule, identical to the one I’d crushed on Ramirez, out of my suit’s inner pocket and crushed it in the same hand I had the first. I’d been careful not to clean that spot on my palm, and the potion in the fresh ampule mixed with the residue from the one I’d slapped on Ramirez.

  My hand quivered, clenched spasmodically once, and suddenly felt heavy, as if a large, slightly damp beach towel had been draped across it.

  “On me,” I whispered. “Here we go.”

  And then I spread my fingers out as if guiding a marionette, started wiggling them, and Lara and I started hauling Thomas out, Freydis close behind us.

  The potion I’d slipped onto Ramirez’s cloak had been half of the brew. The stuff currently on my hand was the other half. The two were magically linked by a drop of my blood, the most powerful agent for magical bindings known to reality. With that bond formed, it was a simple enough trick to send a pulse of energy from my hand over to poor Carlos’s cloak.

  The grey cloth abruptly flared, whipped wildly around as if in a hurricane wind, and promptly dragged the young Warden off his feet and across the floor—toward the back of the hall, in the opposite direction of the front door.

  People and not-people let out noises of distress. Several dozen security teams bolted for their primaries. A lot of folks got tackled to the floor by their own retainers. I caught a glimpse of Molly being surrounded by a group of Sidhe and hustled to one side of the room—and I recognized one of them, the goddamned Redcap. The murderous Sidhe assassin had traded in his baseball cap for a scarlet headband of a leather whose origins I shuddered to consider.

  We moved through the chaos as Carlos struggled with his cloak. He managed to unfasten it, and the damned thing promptly began flapping around like an enormous bat.

  And it worked. The room stayed black-and-white. Everyone’s paranoia was so focused on the potential threat that they didn’t have enough cognitive cycles left to be paranoid about us.

  The potion hadn’t been a very potent one—I’d spent most of my effort on the actual blending potion to keep us concealed—and it wouldn’t last long. The cloak’s batteries already looked like they were getting weaker, its movements less frantic. We might not have time enough to make it to the door, in fact. I hurried my pace a little, as much as I dared.

  And, halfway to the door, two figures abruptly flared into full color and looked right at us.

  I froze as the dragon Ferrovax, still sitting in his chair, smoke dribbling from his nostrils, stared right at me—and gave me a slow, toothy smile.

  Oh, Hell’s bells.

  If he raised the alarm, we were done.

  Ferrovax inhaled in preparation to call out.

  And, over the sounds of the room, I heard three sharp, quick raps of wood on stone.

  I whipped my head in the other direction to see Vadderung, also in full color, still seated, still faced off against Ferrovax. His black eye patch lent him a particularly sinister aspect. He held a stylish cane of silvery hardwood in his right hand. Some trick of the light cast a shadow three times the length of the cane on the wall behind him. Vadderung stared at Ferrovax without blinking. A tiny smile touched the corner of his mouth.

  Holy crap. The last time a dragon had been slain out here in the tangible, mortal world, it had been in a region called Tunguska. If Ferrovax decided to throw down in the middle of a city as large and as crowded as Chicago, the death toll could be the most catastrophic, concentrated loss of human life in history.

  And it would kind of be my fault.

  My heart began to pound. I looked back at the disguised dragon with wide eyes.

  Ferrovax didn’t look at me. I probably wasn’t worth noticing, by his standards. My only noticeable feature, as far as he was concerned, was my ability to set myself on full smartass before conversing with dragons. He regarded Vadderung for a moment with hooded eyes. Then his partly open mouth twitched into a smirk and closed. He exhaled the breath he’d been going to use to call me out through his nose, along with two heavy plumes of acrid-smelling smoke.

  I looked back at Vadderung. He didn’t take his gaze from the dragon. He just twitched one of his knees toward the exit.

  I gave him a tight nod and a wolfish grin, and we pressed on.

  We made it out of the great hall and into the passage beyond just as the energy animating Ramirez’s cape began to run out. From the entry antechamber, Childs appeared with his dog, and they both hurried toward us, and they both remained monochromatic as they passed us.

  I picked up the pace even more. We hurried out the front, and I hoped to God that Murphy had remembered to drink her portion of the blending potion as well.

  She had. She’d rented a car for the occasion, and Lara’s people had provided false plates. The lights of the luxury sedan came up and she pulled smoothly into the street, coming to a halt nearby.

  We hurried to the car. Murphy leaned out the window, and something in her eyes became easier when she saw me. “How’d it go?”

  I winked at her. “I think we’ll get away with it if we run fast enough,” I said.

  Lara g
ot into the backseat first, and I pushed Thomas after her. Between the two of us, we got him wrestled in. Freydis followed him, and I circled toward the passenger-side door.

  I had just opened it when a large truck rushed up toward us from the other direction, engine roaring, and I had a horrible flash of realization—the blending potion’s real problem was that it was just too damned strong. It was entirely possible that the driver of the vehicle hadn’t really noticed us or our car. The potion’s magic might have influenced their subconscious to tell them that we were a large cardboard box or something, just aching to be run over.

  But the truck swerved at the last minute, coming up onto the sidewalk with a couple of wheels, and screeched to a halt outside the Brighter Future Society.

  The external valets and staff stood around confused by this turn of events, except for one security guard who was fumbling for both his weapon and his radio, shouting into it in a high-pitched, terrified voice.

  He got a couple of words out before the doors to the truck rolled up and something that sounded like a broken piece of pneumatic machinery tore his torso to ribbons and sent a scarlet fan of blood onto the wall behind him. What hit the ground wasn’t a person for much longer.

  A dozen men in black tactical uniforms came pouring out of the back of the truck, holding suppressed semiautomatic carbines. They opened fire, the sound mostly a fuzzy cloud of clacks, hisses, and whumps.

  It was over in maybe three seconds. None of the valets or staff survived. The ones still moving after they fell got bullets to the head.

  “Holy shit,” Murphy breathed. Her gun had appeared in her hand.

  “Don’t move,” I warned. “Don’t fire. Lara?”

  The vampire’s voice was tense. “They aren’t mine.”

  “Clear!” snapped one of the soldiers, and I recognized him with a surge of rage. His name was Listen. He was medium-sized, of innocuous build, his head was as smooth as a cue ball, and he had led the tactical aspect of the Fomor’s efforts here in Chicago—which was the polite way to say that he and his turtlenecks had spent years kidnapping minor magical talents and dragging them off to God knew what fate for his masters. He’d also killed or escaped from everyone who had tried to interfere with his mission.

  I hate when the bad guys have good help.

  Listen walked briskly back to the truck, bowed his head, and said, “Majesty, your will is done.”

  “Excellent,” rasped a heavy, burbling voice. There was the sound of footsteps and a being descended from the truck. It stood nearly eight feet in height and reminded me of nothing so much as an enormous toad with an excellent tailor. He wore silk robes that were somehow reminiscent of Edo-style kimonos, but with the smooth lines subtly twisted. Between the design and the bizarre, disturbing imagery of the embroidery upon the sea-colored fabrics of each layer of robes, I was feeling a little queasy.

  The guy wearing the robes was no looker, either. His face was too large and lumpy to be human. His mouth was so wide he could have eaten a banana sideways, and his lips were like rubbery, black, rotten fruits of the same variety. His skin was pocked and warty and a sickly blue-green where it wasn’t ghostly pale, and his eyes were huge, watery, protruding, and disturbing. He had hair like withered black seaweed, draping over his head and shoulders in uneven clumps. He moved with a kind of frantic, jerky energy, and my instincts sized him up as someone dangerous and not particularly sane.

  King Corb of the Fomor, I presumed.

  The Fomor monarch leered down at the corpses for a moment before raising his gaze to Listen again. “Bring us within, Captain.”

  Listen snapped to attention and began barking orders to his “men.” The turtlenecks were human, technically, but the Fomor had messed with them, sculpting flesh to their liking. The members of this crew would be quicker, tougher, and stronger than any normal bunch of mortals, and they could be damnably tough to kill, like ghouls. They responded at once, lining up on either side of the doorway.

  Corb descended from the truck, spun on his heel, and, with a surprising amount of poise and grace, fell to one knee at the foot of the ramp, his head bowed.

  I felt my eyebrows go up.

  Footsteps sounded on the ramp once more, heavier this time. A generally humanoid, generally feminine figure in a heavy, hooded cloak of some oddly metallic fabric descended the ramp a deliberate step at a time. Whoever she was, she was taller than Corb and had to unfold herself carefully from the truck. Her bare feet were visible, their proportions perfect, simply huge. They looked like she’d had them bronzed a long time ago, and the bronze had been covered with verdigris and then polished irregularly. It formed lumps and nodes over her skin like molten wax, but flexed and moved as if alive. Flickers of metallic and colored crystals were embedded in that bronze exoflesh.

  She reached out a hand to touch Corb on the shoulder as she glided past him, showing more of the same metallic flesh. She was graceful despite her stature, her strides long and purposeful. Corb fell in at her side, a pace behind her. Without looking at him, she extended a hand. Corb reached into his robes and withdrew a length of chain maybe ten feet long from them. One end was attached to a steel band around the base of his throat, mostly concealed by his robes. He handed the other end to the Titanic woman.

  She took it without breaking stride and strode into the castle, the soldiers falling in behind their leaders as they went in, weapons up.

  “Stars and stones,” I breathed.

  A hit was going down.

  Wars had begun that way.

  I was arrested by a hideous, nauseating apprehension that went deep enough for my toes to have a bad feeling about this.

  “Harry,” Murphy hissed. “Get in.”

  “I can’t,” I decided. “I’ve got to see what’s happening here.” I leaned down to look at Murphy. “Get them to the island.”

  “Why?” Murphy demanded. “There’s no point to it if you aren’t there, too.”

  “I’ll be along,” I said. “Cross my heart.”

  Murphy’s eyes widened. “You’re scared.”

  “I need you to trust me on this,” I said. “There’s no time.”

  Murph looked like she wanted to argue, but instead she grimaced and put her gun away. “Goddammit.”

  “Dresden, this is not the plan,” Lara said in a warning tone.

  “No,” I said. “It isn’t. Get going and I’ll meet you once I know what’s happening.”

  “If you’re caught—”

  “I’ve still got the potion,” I said. “In and out, Miss Law. Like the wind.”

  Lara looked from me to her brother, torn. The moment of indecision cost her. Murphy put the car in gear and accelerated smoothly eastbound, away from the castle.

  I was left alone in the immediate vicinity of a number of ridiculously powerful supernatural beings and a small mound of bodies that seemed to promise that the night was young.

  This showed every sign of working out very, very badly.

  I swallowed and then set out to follow the murderous King of the Fomor and what was apparently the Power Behind the Throne into the peace talks.

  29

  King Corb and company strode into the great hall like they owned the place.

  They entered amid the chaos in the wake of my previous departure. Voices were raised in tension, a chatter of sound in the crowded hall, as each nation, seemingly by reflex, withdrew to its originally assigned area.

  I checked the hall and made my way toward where Ramirez and the Wardens were standing in front of the Senior Council members. That also put me within a few long steps of the high seat at the rear of the hall, where Mab currently stood with Molly, the Redcap, and four other Sidhe.

  Corb and his retinue seemed to enjoy giving everyone time to settle into an uncomfortable silence. Then he strode forward, his chain clanking, and pitched something into the air with a casual underhand toss.

  There was a heavy clump as the thing, about the size of my fist, bounced and then rolled.r />
  It came to a halt at the foot of the dais where the high seat stood.

  It was a very small severed head. It had been a while since the head had been taken, the skin shrunken tight, patches here and there beginning to fall to decay.

  I recognized the features.

  It was Gwynn ap Nudd, King of the Tylwyth Teg, one of the larger subnations of Faerie. I’d done business against him once in the past, and he still sent me season tickets to Cubs games once in a while. He’d been responsible for the famous Billy Goat of the Unseelie Accords.

  A gasp went through the room.

  Mab stared down at the severed head for a solid three seconds. Silence stretched out into an endless crystalline moment.

  The Queen of Air and Darkness lifted black, black eyes to King Corb. The temperature in the room plummeted. A film of frost crystals began to form over every metallic surface, and swirls of darkness appeared, spreading through Mab’s silver-white hair and continuing through into her gown.

  She spoke in a whisper that was heard by every ear in the hall. “Explain yourself.”

  The Fomor swaggered forward a step. “A peace gift,” he said. His tone was velvety, completely sincere—and it was readily offset by the smile on his froggy face. His bugging eyes were coldly mocking, his sneer absolutely malevolent. “For an old woman past her time.”

  Corb flicked his hand and his men moved. A dozen suppressed weapons coughed and clacked, and every caterer and server in the hall dropped.

  Marcone came out of his seat. Hendricks slammed a hand down onto his boss’s shoulder, and Miss Gard stepped in front of him, her back to Marcone, her hand on her axe. A muffled cry of shock and horror went up from the guests.

  Because they were guests.

  Mab rose slowly, and by the time she stood, her hair and eyes and raven-claw nails were all black as pitch, her skin whiter than Death’s horse. “You dare. YOU DARE! YOU ARE A GUEST IN THIS HOUSE!”

  “Read your own laws, woman,” Corb spat. “These hirelings were no members of a house, not vassals or lackeys. They’re chattel at best.” Corb turned to Marcone and with a contemptuous flick sent a velvet bag sailing through the air. It landed in front of Gard with an unmistakable metallic tinkle. “Your weregild, little man.”