Peace Talks

by Jim Butcher

  “You don’t feel it at all, do you?” she asked. “Ugh. It’s … You know that feeling, when you’re dreaming, and you realize that you’re in a nightmare?” She nodded toward the island. “It’s that. In IMAX.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Well, it’s not supposed to be a place where visitors are welcome.”

  “I worry about you, when you’re out here,” she said. “What it’s doing to you.”

  “It’s not doing anything to me,” I said. “I’m the Warden.”

  “Maybe,” she said. “Or maybe it’s something you can’t feel happening to you. Something else.”

  A disturbing thought.

  But not one I hadn’t had before.

  “You’re just going to have to trust me.”

  “Yeah. That’s why I’m standing here.”

  I brought the ship in carefully to the dock and Freydis leapt like a doe down from the ship and started making her fast.

  “Is the cabin still livable?” Karrin asked. “It has supplies?”

  “Everything we need,” I said. I cut the motor and headed out of the wheelhouse. “I’ll check on Thomas.”

  I cracked a fresh light and took it down belowdecks with me, to the boat’s little living compartment, and into a tableau from some kind of Renaissance painting.

  The boat had a couple of bunks, nothing fancy, generally covered in white sheets and heavy red plaid blankets. Thomas and Lara were reclining on one of them. She sat up at the head of the bunk, and he was sprawled back, his shoulders across her upper body. Both were naked, and there was nothing sexual in the moment at all. One of her hands held his broken ones upon his chest. The other simply cupped his cheek. Her head was bowed, as if in exhaustion, and her shoulders sagged. Her hair spilled across her face, hiding all but a bit of her profile, and brushed across his forehead.

  My brother’s eyes were open, unfocused. They had acquired faint hints of grey among the silver in his gaze.

  He looked like some poor broken knight, being gathered into the gentle arms of an angel of death.

  “What the hell?” I asked.

  Lara lifted her gaze to me, her eyes flickering with bits of mirror-bright silver that shifted even as I took note of them, sending the eerie light of the chemical stick dancing about them in fluttering, kaleidoscope changes of all shades of otherworldly green… .

  I tore my eyes away before something bad happened.

  “Lara. What are you doing?”

  It took her a moment to speak. Her voice came out furry and delicious. “I’m giving him the energy I took earlier. It’s … slowing down the damage his Hunger is inflicting. But it’s very bad. And I’m almost …”

  She licked her lips. The sight of it made me want to rip off my shirt and start boasting of my many manly deeds.

  “… empty.” She made the word sound like a sin. “I’ll need to feed if I’m to give him more.”

  “Not really an option,” I said. I had to clear my throat in the middle. “We’re here.”

  She looked up at me, her silver eyes sharp and clear. “And you’re sure you can protect him here? Even from his own Hunger?”

  “Everything we need,” I said. “Give him to me.”

  She nodded and said, “Take him.”

  She transferred Thomas to me, wrapped in a blanket. The air around her was cold. Like, gorgeously cold. Like, I wanted to take my shirt off and stretch out in it and cool off. And the Winter mantle let out a low growl in my mind that suggested that a number of terrible ideas were in fact the most interesting concepts I had ever considered.

  “Dammit, Lara,” I snapped in irritation. “We’re working.”

  She blinked at me for a moment at that, as I wrapped a blanket around him and gathered Thomas up like a child. Then she said, “Involuntary. Honestly. We can always choose to use the Hunger. We can’t always choose not to.”

  “Well, it’s annoying,” I said grumpily.

  She lifted her hand and quickly covered a smile. “Oh. You know, I’ve … never been told that before. Not once.”

  I rolled my eyes and said, “I believe you.” It would be a trick to carry my brother up the narrow stairwell to the deck, but whatever. I growled in irritation and toted him out. He was still barely conscious, and he felt entirely too light.

  Stupid svartalves.

  Stupid vampires.

  Stupid Titans.

  Stupid Thomas. Why in the hell had my brother gotten himself into this mess?

  I got him up on the deck and Freydis was there to steady me. The redheaded Valkyrie eyed me in the light and nodded toward the island. “Not much here.”

  “Everything we need,” I said. “Don’t step off the dock. I’m not sure what would happen to you.”

  Freydis looked at me and shuddered. “I won’t.”

  I brushed past her and carried my brother down the dock toward the island itself. No one stopped me. Everyone was too worried about what was happening back in Chicago. Which was just as well.

  I had told everyone Thomas would be safe on the island. I hadn’t yet told them where he’d be staying.

  See, the thing about keeping people safe is that, in the end, if you really want to keep someone truly protected, your only option is to lock them up. Fortresses are prisons.

  And vice versa.

  I started up the dock and stepped onto the rough ground of the island, walking with perfectly sure footing, my intellectus of the place making it impossible to slip or fall. I knew Demonreach, every tree and stone, as thoroughly as I knew my own body.

  I had taken fewer than a dozen steps onto the stones of the island before there was a massive movement in the trees. I came to a halt, waiting, as the figure came gliding out of the darkness. It was enormous, as tall as the Titan, and far broader, a menacing shape in a billowing, shadowy cloak and hood that hid its form from the human eye. A pair of green flames burned somewhere back in the hood, supernaturally bright eyes that were currently narrowed in something like concern.

  The vast figure drifted out to a halt in front of me and bowed slowly, formally, from the waist.

  “WARDEN,” it said. Its voice was a grating rumble of stone and tearing earth, heard as much inside my head and chest as with my ears. “YOU HAVE RETURNED.”

  “Alfred,” I said. “We’ve got trouble right here in River City.”

  The genius loci of the island regarded me in stillness for a moment before it said, “THE ISLAND IS IN A LAKE.”

  The supernatural crowd is not generally up on any cultural reference that has occurred since the Renaissance. “Human reference, Alfred. Pay it no mind.”

  “AS YOU COMMAND, WARDEN.” The enormous hood tilted to one side, verdant gaze fixing on my brother’s unmoving form. “YOUR BLOOD KIN IS DYING.”

  “I know,” I said. “We’re going to help him.”

  “I AM NOT MADE TO HELP,” Alfred said. There wasn’t any passion to the statement. There was no mercy, either. Alfred was … the spirit of the prison itself, a place constructed to contain magical threats too dangerous to be permitted to roam the world. Over the millennia, more than six thousand beings of terrible power had been consigned to the oubliette tunnels beneath the island: They were a legion of nightmares, the least of which made me shudder in a very real fear I could never quite shake.

  Alfred was the being created to maintain their isolation. He wasn’t what you call easygoing.

  “Right,” I said. “We’re going to place him in stasis.”

  Alfred’s eyes blazed several shades brighter with eagerness. “IT HAS BEEN OVERLONG SINCE THE LAST FOULNESS WAS CONSIGNED TO MY EVERLASTING CARE,” it said. “THIS PARASITE-RIDDLED VERMIN SCARCELY QUALIFIES FOR MINIMUM SECURITY.”

  “I want him held,” I said. “I want his Hunger held helpless as well, until such time as I return to release him.”

  “WHICH PENITENCE PROTOCOL SHALL HE SUFFER, WARDEN?”

  There were several that could be inflicted on the inmates of the prison. Some were bound in darkness. Some
in torment. Some in simple confinement. The various Wardens of Demonreach had tinkered with the cells for a very, very long time. Some of the protocols had been developed before civilization had been more than a few collections of huts and fires in the darkness, and they were not kind.

  There was one prisoner held below in a kind of unique stasis, something that could most closely be considered sleep, though he could also awaken and perform limited communications for short periods of time. It was, as best as I could understand, the only protocol with sanitysaving sleep built into it.

  The prison had never been meant for something as frail and nearly mortal as my brother.

  Thomas made a soft, ugly little sound, as if only his utter exhaustion was holding him back from screaming in pain.

  “Contemplation,” I responded quietly. “He is to be shielded from any communication with other prisoners not enduring the same protocol. Give me the crystal.”

  The great spirit bowed again. When it straightened, a shard of crystal about the length of a socket wrench, like quartz but pulsing with a quiet green light, lay shimmering upon the earth.

  I lowered my brother to the ground. He groaned as I settled him down. The grey in his eyes had faded again, as his Hunger apparently renewed its assault on his life force. He had slowly begun to show signs of helpless agony as whatever palliative energy Lara had given him began to fade.

  “Hey, man,” I said. “Can you hear me?”

  He might have focused his eyes on me for a second. Only sounds of pain came out of his mouth.

  “Look,” I said quietly. I drew a pocketknife I’d stuffed in my suit pants before leaving and used the needle point to pink the pad of flesh between thumb and forefinger. After a second, droplets of blood welled up, and I smeared the blade of the pocketknife over them, staining its length with a shade of scarlet just a little too pale to be human. “I can keep your demon from hurting you. Keep you alive. But going in will be rough.”

  One of his ruined hands landed on my arm. He squeezed weakly. It was barely there, but it was there. He’d heard me.

  “Part of the process of being taken into the cells is …” I took a deep breath. “You suffer the pain you’ve inflicted on others,” I said. “It was meant to get through to the most alien of beings, why they were being imprisoned. It’s not fair. It’s not meant for people. It could hurt you. But if I don’t do it, you’re going to die.”

  My brother forced his eyes open and tried to find me. “J … J …”

  “Justine,” I said. “I know. I’m on it.”

  He sobbed. That was all he had left in him.

  I stood away from him, leaving him within the light of the crystal. Alfred loomed over Thomas. “YOU HAVE THE CAGE. YOU HAVE THE BLOOD. DRAW THE CIRCLE AND SPEAK THE WORDS, WARDEN.”

  My instincts twitched. I looked back over my shoulder.

  Freydis stood at the very edge of the dock, staring up the slope at me. Even as I watched, she turned and rushed back to the ship, leaping up onto the deck and vanishing into the hold.

  There wasn’t much time. My brother was fading, being devoured by his own demon.

  I rose and drew in my will, while I used my staff to gouge a circle into the earth around my brother. Once that was done, I bent over, touched the little trench with my fingers, and raised the circle by unleashing a tiny amount of energy into it. It snapped up in an invisible screen around my fallen brother and began to gather and focus magical energy.

  Then I raised the pocketknife overhead in one hand.

  “Bound be Thomas Raith,” I hissed. I felt resistance against my will begin to rise, the reluctance of this world to open a passage to another. “Bound be my wounded brother,” I growled, forcing my will into my voice, making it ring from the stones and trees and water. “Fallen warrior, father-to-be, I name him bound, consigned to thee.”

  I heard a brief cry from behind me.

  I released my will with the third repetition of the binding.

  And Demonreach went to work.

  I didn’t have the kind of power it would have taken to do what the genius loci did. The energy I’d had to pour into the incantation had simply been to release a portion of the spirit’s power—like turning the key in an enormous, stiff, stubborn lock. Demonreach was not meant to be used by the weak-minded or the uncertain, and the effort it had taken to set it into motion was not one I would care to repeat on a regular basis for exercise.

  The crystal flared with light. It bathed Thomas so brightly that I could see his bones through his skin.

  And then my poor, battered brother began to scream. It was a thin, shrieking sound, a sound that embraced more emotion, more agony, than his broken body could possibly bear. It ripped at me, that sound, causing me pain that the Winter mantle could do absolutely nothing about. I had just condemned my brother to a punishment that I would have been terrified to face myself.

  Thomas screamed and screamed, and the vast form of the genius loci towered over him, bending down.

  And then the screams ended.

  The light vanished.

  I stood alone on the cold stones.

  Where my wounded brother had been, there was nothing but a very faintly glowing cloud of green mist, dispersing rapidly, sinking into the stone and earth of Demonreach.

  I sagged, dropping down to one knee and bracing my arms on the ground.

  Stars and stones.

  What I had just done … there had been no choice, especially not now.

  But my brother.

  I heard a single low cry, raw and ugly with pain.

  I turned to see Lara land on the dock and rush toward me, a pale blur of supernatural speed, something that gleamed and caught the moonlight in her hand.

  35

  Lara Raith didn’t like to fight—it was what made her such a deadly opponent when she had to do it. Once the knives were out, she didn’t let pride come into it at all. If she decided to kill you, it was going to happen as quickly and efficiently as she could arrange, and that would be that.

  I had personally seen her walk through a battlefield full of ancient foes armed with nothing but a pair of long knives. She hadn’t just beaten them—she’d made it look easy. She was older than my brother, and she’d taught him to fight. Thomas had walked into a svartalf fortress and damn near assassinated its chief executive, through all the security, all by himself. Lara was faster than my brother, stronger than him, and more experienced.

  And now she was coming for me.

  I got it. I mean, this was the only place on the planet I was sure Thomas would be safe, but if she’d known the details she’d have fought me on it, and there just hadn’t been time. For all she knew, I’d just disintegrated her brother. If I’d been in Lara’s shoes, I’d have been freaking out, too.

  She probably didn’t realize she’d chosen her ground even more poorly than my brother had.

  Demonreach had been constructed by Merlin. The Merlin, the original, Camelot and Excalibur, that Merlin. He’d broken at least one of the Laws of Magic to build the place, romping about through time in order to lay a foundation strong enough to bear the supernatural weight of the prison. As a result, the island absolutely seethed with power—and if one knew the layout of the defenses, and the painstaking geomancy that had gone into laying all that energy into usable patterns, it was possible to use that energy at almost no cost to one’s own store of personal power.

  Behind Lara, Freydis and her shotgun vaulted off the ship and onto the shore, the Valkyrie following her boss into battle.

  Except it wasn’t a battle.

  It wasn’t even close.

  I made a gesture, hissed part of a word, and the soft ground beneath Lara’s feet abruptly gave way and then snapped back, sending her into a sprawl in the air. She hit the ground, and the brush and grass of the island wrapped her swiftly and completely.

  I made a swatting gesture with my right hand, sent out a mental command to utilize some of the waiting energy of the island, and a hickory tree t
hat towered above the landing site abruptly swept down like an angry giant and slammed an enormous branch into the ground a few feet in front of Freydis. The impact knocked the Valkyrie from her feet—and at a second gesture the tree hit her hard enough to send her flying back into the water of the lake.

  I turned back to find Lara tearing her way wildly out of the grass and brush, and I had to lift both hands and expend a mild effort of will to have the ground simply swallow her to the neck.

  Lara struggled briefly, savagely, and silently, her silver eyes bright. It took her about half as long as it would have taken me to realize the hopelessness of her position. The struggle ceased then, and she went cold and so still that her head might have been something severed from a statue rather than part of an actual near-human being. Only her eyes moved, tracking me. There was nothing playful in her expression now. It was like looking at the eyes of a big cat. An angry one.

  “That wasn’t necessary,” I said, turning to track Freydis’s progress in the water. My intellectus was a little fuzzier out there, like peering through smudged glass, which was probably the penalty for my merely human brain struggling to be aware of the constant shifting of every individual molecule of water in the area.

  I found Freydis just as she kicked off the bottom of the lake, churning the water into swirling helixes with the power of her limbs as she stroked for the surface, and flew out of it with enough momentum to clear the railing of the Water Beetle—and collide with Murphy on the deck.

  “No!” I shouted, and with an effort of will and another flick of my wrists, a pair of trees bent and reached for the ship, wood straining, limbs creaking with threat.

  Freydis was fast as hell—and Murphy didn’t even try to fight her. The Valkyrie got behind Murphy, close, one hand on her waist and another on her throat. I knew how strong she was—she could just rake a pound of meat out of Murphy’s neck with a flick of her wrist. Freydis’s eyes were bright and cold. “Back off!” she screamed.

  The power of Demonreach was vast and terrible—and not much good for surgery. The only chance I’d have would be something that killed Freydis so fast that she didn’t have time to react, and the Valkyrie was damned quick. I’d be aiming trees (for God’s sake, I should have practiced smashing things with trees) at targets on a floating, bobbing platform, and an inch’s difference in any direction could mean Murphy’s life or death.