Peace Talks

by Jim Butcher

  “You haven’t seen him there,” I said. “You have no idea.”

  “Don’t play games with me, boy,” the old man spat. “I’m not one of your new Fae friends. And I’m not a lawyer.”

  “He’s working for me,” came a clear, calm voice.

  I glanced over my shoulder to see Lara Raith, still dressed in her party gown, standing on the Water Beetle’s deck, arms akimbo. I didn’t see any weapons on her. I didn’t see where the dress would have allowed her to hide any weapons. But she stood there like she was ready to draw and fire, and all things considered I would judge it the better part of valor to assume the implied threat was valid.

  “I worked with Mab on some visa issues some of her people were having,” Lara said. “She owed me a favor. He’s it.”

  The old man’s gaze remained on mine for a moment, growing harder and hotter and more hostile. I saw the rage gathering behind his eyes, before he moved them, slowly, to Lara.

  “Vampire,” he said, “the Accords are the only reason I haven’t relieved you of your arms and legs and kicked you into the lake. Your brother stands accused of murder. He’s going to answer for that.”

  The voice that came out of my grandfather when he said that … I’d heard it before.

  I’d been that voice before.

  I thought of ghouls buried to their necks in the earth. I thought of the savage satisfaction that had filled me while I did it. Because they had done wrong, and I had seen them do it. To children. And to deliver just retribution for that crime had been to be the right arm of the Almighty Himself, to be filled with pure, righteous, unarguably just hatred.

  My God, I knew how he felt. I knew how bright and pure that fire burned. But when it was happening, I hadn’t been able to feel it burning me.

  I just had to live with the scars afterward.

  The vampires of the White Court had hurt my grandfather to the heart. And he was determined that it would not happen again. And that they would pay for what they had done.

  If Mab had been standing there advising me, she would have said something like, It is his weakness. Use it against him.

  And she wouldn’t have been wrong.

  Ebenezar glared his hatred at Lara, and I realized with a sinking heart that there was only one way this was going to play out. His eyes were full of hate. It made him blind. There wasn’t room in them for anything else.

  “Cast off,” I said in a calm, firm voice, my eyes never leaving my grandfather. “Go ahead with the plan. I’ll catch up.”

  “Dresden?” Lara asked. “Are you sure?”

  “Dammit, Lara!” I said, exasperated.

  I checked over my shoulder in time to see Murphy step up beside Lara, catch her eye, and nod firmly.

  “Freydis,” Lara said.

  The Valkyrie moved for the ropes.

  “Do that,” Ebenezar called, “and I’ll sink this boat right now.”

  “No,” I said, calmly, firmly. I swallowed and faced the old man. “You won’t.”

  The old man’s brows furrowed, and the air suddenly became as brittle and jagged as broken glass.

  “If I let you do this,” the old man said to me, his voice desperate, “you’re out of the Council. You’re an outlaw. The svartalves won’t care about who hired who. They’ll know you prevented them from having justice. And they’ll kill you for it. It’s the only outcome their worldview will accept. Don’t you see, boy? You’ll be vulnerable, compromised. Mab, and this creature, they’re isolating you. That’s what abusers do.”

  My heart broke.

  “I think,” I said quietly, “that I’m just about done making my choices based on your mistakes.”

  He stared at me.

  “You don’t know me,” I said quietly. “Not really. You haven’t been there for most of it. And you don’t know Thomas.”

  Behind me were two quiet thumps, as lines were dropped on the deck of the ship.

  “I know enough to know a frog with a scorpion when I see one,” he replied. “You’ve been around them for a decade and change, and you think you know them. But I’ve dealt with their ilk for centuries. They’ll turn on you, frog. Even if it destroys them. They don’t get a choice about it. It’s what they are.”

  Lara stared at the old man with furious …

  … haunted …

  … eyes.

  Murphy strode into the wheelhouse and started the Water Beetle’s ancient engine. It was an old diesel, didn’t even have spark plugs. Hexes, EMP, none of it mattered. If a one-eyed, palsied squirrel was all you had to do maintenance, that engine would run until its molecules decayed into their component atoms.

  Ebenezar’s eye flickered to the ship and hardened.

  I sucked in a breath, ready to unleash Power.

  My God.

  Was this really about to happen? Was the old man really about to throw down with me?

  He wouldn’t listen. Stars and stones, I couldn’t get him to accept that a White Court vampire might be partially human. If I told him that Thomas was his grandson, he would … not receive the news well.

  The old man had a volcanic temper.

  That wasn’t a metaphor.

  If that happened … I really wasn’t sure what came next.

  The Water Beetle’s engine didn’t roar so much as sputter and cough loudly to life. Compared with the almost-silent murmur of the water against the docks and the ships, the sound was deafening in the unnatural silence over the city.

  Ebenezar McCoy snapped his staff across his body, held vertically—a duelist’s salute.

  My heart lurched into overdrive.

  I returned my grandfather’s salute with my own staff.

  And then me and the old man went to war.

  32

  Some free advice for you: Never fight an old man.

  They’ve been there, done that, written the book, made and starred in the movie, designed the T-shirt, and they’ve got no ego at all about how the fight gets won.

  And never fight family.

  They know you too well.

  Ebenezar slashed his hand down at the boulder beneath him with a word, and in the same spell a blade of unseen force slashed a three hundred-pound section of rock free of the boulder he stood on and sent it zipping toward my boat at several hundred feet per second.

  I wasn’t even going to try to stop it. It was just too much energy, too much momentum. It would be like lifting a medieval shield to block a descending war maul. Sure, you can do it, but if you do, you’re gonna wish you hadn’t.

  No. The smart thing to do is to give that war maul a single sharp lateral tap just as it begins its forward momentum. A few pounds of pressure in the right place, at the right time, are often more effective than expending heroic levels of energy.

  And besides. If I tried to match the old man swing for swing, he’d bury me. Not so much because he was stronger, although he was, but because he was better than me, more energy efficient, milking twice the efficacy out of every single spell while expending half the energy to do it. Wizard fights between the old and the young were a reverse image of mundane confrontations between the same. I was the one who was weaker, slower, limited in what moves I could attempt, and had to play it smart if I wanted to win.

  So as the old man sent the section of boulder at the Water Beetle, I lifted my staff, modifying the formula of my simple force-blow spell to send it in from the side instead of straight ahead, and smacked the projectile firmly in the flank as it got moving.

  It streaked forward at an angle, wobbling and tumbling as a result, and smashed into one of the boats farther down the dock, plunging through the hull and part of the deck, straight on through the hold and out the other side, with such force that water splashed a hundred feet.

  The old man brought his boulder around in a swooping arc, studying me through narrowed eyes, his voice bitter. “Now you learn that you don’t have to swing for the fences every time.”

  “Yeah,” I said, studying him right back. The cleave
mark where the boulder had been cut was a slightly darker grey than the surface—living rock, with water still inside, then. “Don’t tell anybody. You’ll ruin my maverick rep.”

  He looked from me to the Water Beetle, chugging out into the open lake. “But you still ain’t using your brain.”

  And he flicked a wrist and started sailing over me, out over the lake toward the boat.

  The second his eyes were off me, I unlimbered my blasting rod from the sewn pocket inside my suit coat, aimed for the damp stone of the boulder, and shouted, “Fuego!”

  Green-gold fire lanced from the blasting rod and smashed into the boulder—and I poured it on in a steady stream.

  The boulder beneath my grandfather’s feet began to let out a kind of hissing, whistling scream, and the old man flung himself off into open air half a second before the water in the stone began to boil and shattered it into dozens of pieces. Some plummeted into the lake, and some onto and through the decks of more of the boats parked in the marina.

  That should have been it. The old man should have fallen into the lake, become immersed in deep water, and had the lion’s share of his power washed away for a time. But instead, he barked a pair of words, hurling a blast of force at the surface of the lake that pushed back just as hard against him. He was flung to one side, falling toward the dock. He hurled a second, weaker blast at the dock, slowing his fall without shattering it, and landed with one foot stomping down so hard that I heard the board crack, dropping to one knee for balance, his staff still held in his hands, his pate gleaming, his eyes bright.

  Hell’s bells, was he better than me.

  That was Ebenezar McCoy, the Blackstaff, the most feared wizard on planet Earth.

  Without pause the old man’s staff struck the boards of the dock, and they bowed up in a straight line coming toward me, as if an enormous shark was swimming toward me beneath the dock, its dorsal fin bumping up the wood.

  I slammed my staff down and vaulted over the oncoming wave of energy as it passed, and as I came down, I beckoned the winds, focused my will, shouted, “Ventas arctis!”

  At my command the air stirred, and gale winds suddenly lashed the surface of the lake with vicious, frozen spite. A miniature cyclone of spraying ice and water engulfed the end of the dock around the old man, clouding him from sight as fog billowed out from the sudden temperature change in the sullen night air, and while it blinded him, I did the last thing wizards generally do in a duel.

  I sprinted right at him.

  I crashed through the sleet and frozen air and ice as if they weren’t there at all, spotted the old man when I was five feet away, and let him have it with a swift, speeding thrust of my quarterstaff, aiming for his gut.

  But the old man had learned his quarterstaff in Britain, long enough ago that it had still been a common weapon in widespread use, and his teachers had been masters. His own staff caught mine in a parry, and he followed up with an advance and a circling sweeping motion that would have taken my weapon out of my hands if I hadn’t disengaged properly.

  He came at me in a blur of attacks. If we’d been on solid ground, he’d have knocked my punk ass out cold. But now we were standing on intermittent patches of sleet and ice, and while his feet slipped and faltered, mine just seemed always to find the ideal footing. The conditions provided just enough hesitation in his forward motion that I was able to retreat a little faster, until I could use my reach to good advantage, stop his advance, and, with a quick, snapping combo Murphy had taught me, put him on his back foot.

  He shifted his grip on the staff, both hands at shoulder width, and raised it defensively as he came in on me like a bull. He didn’t have any choice. He could probably defend against me forever, but as long as I had the footwork advantage, I’d be able to swing at him while he couldn’t reach me in reply. If he diverted his attention to summon the energy for a spell, I’d be able to feel it coming, and I’d brain him. So his only option was to come at me hard.

  I had a brief shot at his head when his foot slipped a little, but I was too slow to take it.

  Or maybe I just didn’t want to.

  He caught it on his upraised staff, and then there was a whirlwind of blows coming at me from both sides and all angles.

  I defended. Barely. If my foot had slipped once, the old man would have made me pay for it. He almost nailed me twice, anyway, and only the treacherous footing he had to endure gave me time enough to manage a defense.

  You know. Or maybe he just didn’t want to, either.

  But he drove me back up the dock, forcing me out of the miniature freeze I’d laid on him. Once he had his feet under him again, I wasn’t going to do very well. I checked the progress of the Water Beetle as it chugged out of the harbor. It had a hundred yards’ lead now.

  So, yeah. This was the right time.

  Ebenezar’s foot slid off the last patch of ice, and he promptly threw a stomp kick at the bridge of my left foot as he came in. I avoided that, but it put me off-balance, and the old man’s staff hit my shoulder with enough force to shatter concrete.

  Molly did good work. There was a flash of light from the spider-silk suit, the scent of something putrid burning, and instead it merely felt like getting smacked by a particularly proficient Little Leaguer.

  I cried out in pain and staggered back.

  “Don’t make this anything it doesn’t have to be, Hoss,” my grandfather said, his voice hard. His next blow hit my right foot, and evidently Molly hadn’t specifically enchanted the shoes. Which the old man had probably been able to sense. The strike wasn’t as strong as it could have been, but it broke toes, flashes of vicious, stabbing heat that quickly vanished into the rippling chill of the Winter mantle, and I staggered to a knee.

  The old man stomp-kicked me in the center of the chest, driving the wind out of my lungs with a sickly gasp and slamming my shoulder blades and the back of my skull against the dock.

  Ebenezar shoved the end of his staff against my Adam’s apple with a snarl and said, “Yield!”

  “No,” I croaked.

  The old man’s eyes widened. “Dammit, boy, you are about to make me angry.”

  “Go ahead,” I said, baring my teeth. “Do it. Kill me. Because that’s what it’s going to take.”

  His jaw clenched, and he slowly bared his teeth. “ You … arrogant … foolish, egomaniacal drama queen!”

  “I’m not the one who flew in on a baby mountain!” I complained.

  He shoved the staff a quarter inch forward.

  “Glurk,” I said.

  His face was red. Too red. The veins stood out sharply in his head, his neck.

  And the ground was shaking. I could feel it through the dock.

  When he spoke, his voice came out in a register so calm and measured that it completely terrified me. If he was doing that, it was because he was employing mental discipline techniques to contain his, gulp, rage.

  “I will ask you a question,” he said. “You will answer me, clearly and honestly. Nod if you understand.”

  I nodded. Glurk.

  “How did they get to you, boy?” he asked, his voice still unnaturally calm. “What do they have on you? It can’t be so bad that I can’t help you get out of it.” His eyes softened for just a second. “Talk to me.”

  I glanced down at the end of his staff.

  “Ah,” he said, and took the pressure off.

  I swallowed a couple of times. Then I croaked, “They don’t have anything on me.”

  His eyes went furious again, and …

  And tears formed in them.

  Oh God.

  “Then why?” he demanded. The calm in his voice was fraying. “Why are you doing this? Why are you destroying yourself for that thing?”

  I knew exactly what I was about to do.

  But he deserved the truth. Had to have it, really.

  “Because I’ve only got one brother,” I said. “And I’m not going to lose him.”

  The old man went very still.

&
nbsp; “Mom,” I said in a dull, flat voice. “She gave each of us one of her amulets, with a memory recorded on them, so we’d know each other.”

  Ebenezar’s mouth opened and closed a few times.

  “Half brother, technically,” I said. “But blood all the same. He’s got my back. I’ve got his. That’s all there is to it.”

  The old man closed his eyes.

  “You’ re … saying … that pig, Raith … with my daughter.”

  The ground shook harder. The surface of the lake began to dance, droplets flying up.

  “Sir,” I said, trying to keep my voice calm, “you have a second grandson.”

  If I’d punched him, I don’t think I could have staggered him more. He fell back a step. He started shaking his head.

  I sat up. “Look, whatever happened, it’s over now. Thomas didn’t have anything to do with that. But he has saved my life on multiple occasions. He is not your enemy, sir.” I blinked my eyes a couple of times. “He’s family.”

  And the night went still.

  “Family,” came the old man’s voice, a primordial growl lurking in it. “One. Of those things.”

  He whirled toward the retreating boat, barely visible from the shore by now, and his staff burst into incandescent blue flame as he lifted it in his right hand, the hand that projects energy, drawing it back.

  “No!” I shouted, and lurched toward him.

  He spun, eyes surrounded by white, his face scarlet, his teeth bared in a snarl, snapping his staff out …

  And what looked like a comet about the size of a quarter, blazing like a star, leapt from the staff, like some kind of bizarre random static spark, and plunged into my ribs and out my spine.

  I tumbled down to the dock on my back, the stars suddenly unusually bright above me.

  I tried to breathe.

  Nothing much happened.

  “Ach, God,” the old man whispered, his breath creaking.

  His staff clattered to the dock. It sounded like it came from very far away.