by Butcher, Jim
Slate’s body jerked, his back arching violently. Thunder tore the air apart as the bolt of lightning struck home, throwing Slate into the air and hurling him violently to the ground. The shock wave of the thunder knocked me down, together with everyone else in the immediate area.
Everyone except Talos.
The Lord Marshal of Summer braced himself against the concussion, lifting one hand before his eyes as if it had been a stiff breeze. Then, in the deafening silence that came after, he lifted his sword and came straight toward me.
I reached for my blasting rod, on the ground not far away, lifted it, and threw a quick lash of fire at Talos. The Sidhe lord didn’t even bother to gesture it aside. It splashed against him and away, and with a sweep of his sword he sent my blasting rod spinning from my grasp. I lifted my staff as a feeble shield with my left hand, and he struck that away as well.
Some of my hearing returned, enough for me to hear him say, “And so it ends.”
“You’re damned right,” I muttered. “Look down.”
He did.
I’d drawn my .357 in my right hand while he’d knocked the staff out of my left. I braced my right elbow against the ground and pulled the trigger.
A second roar of thunder, sharper than the first, blossomed out from the end of the gun. I don’t think the bullet penetrated the dark faerie mail, because it didn’t tear through Talos like it should have. It hit him like a sledgehammer instead, driving him back and toppling him to the ground. He lay there for a moment, stunned.
It was cheap, but I was in a freaking war and I was more than a little angry. I kicked him in the face with the heel of my boot, and then I leaned down and clubbed him with the heavy barrel of the .357 until his stunned attempts to defend himself ceased and he lay still, the skin of his face burned and blistered where the steel of the gun’s barrel stuck him.
I looked up in time to see Lloyd Slate, his right arm dangling uselessly, swing the broken haft of a spear at my head. There was a flash of light and pain, and I fell back on the ground, too stunned to know how badly I’d been hit. I tried to bring the gun to bear again, but Slate took it from my hand, spun it around a finger, and lowered the barrel toward my head, already thumbing the hammer back. I saw the gun coming down and saw as well that Slate wasn’t going to pause for dramatic dialogue. The second I saw the dark circle of the barrel, I threw myself to one side, lifting my arms. The gun roared, and I waited for a light at the end of what I was pretty sure would be a downward sloping tunnel.
Slate missed. A ferocious, high-pitched shriek of fury made him whip his head to one side as a new attacker entered the fray.
Fix brought his monkey wrench down in a two-handed swing that ended at Lloyd Slate’s wrist. There was a crunch of impact, of the delicate bones there snapping, and my gun went flying into the water. Slate let out a snarl and swung his broken arm at Fix, but the little guy was quick. He met the blow with the monkey wrench held in both hands, and it was Slate who screamed and reeled from the blow.
“You hurt her!” Fix screamed. His next swing hit Slate in the side of his left kneecap, and dropped the Winter Knight to the ground. “You hurt Meryl!”
Slate tried to roll away, but Fix rained two-handed blows of the monkey wrench down on his back. Evidently, whatever power it was that let Slate shrug off a bolt of lightning had been expended, or else it couldn’t stand up to the cold steel of Fix’s weapon. The little changeling pounded on Slate’s back, screaming at him, until one of the blows landed on the back of his neck. The Winter Knight went limp and lay utterly still.
Fix came over to me and helped me up. As he did, wolves surrounded us, several of them bloodied, all of them with teeth bared. I looked blearily over them, to see the Sidhe warriors regrouping, dragging a couple of wounded. One horse lay on the ground screaming, the others had scattered, and only one warrior was still mounted, another slender Sidhe in green armor and a masked helm. Weapons still in hand, the Sidhe prepared to charge us again.
“Help me,” Fix pleaded, hauling desperately at Meryl’s shoulder. I stepped up on wobbly legs, but someone brushed past me. Billy, naked and stained with bright faerie blood, took Meryl under the shoulders, and dragged her back behind what protection the pack of werewolves offered.
“This is going to be bad,” he said. “We had an edge—their horses were terrified of us. On foot, I don’t know how well we’ll do. Almost everyone’s hurt. How’s Harry?”
“Dammit,” Meryl growled thickly. “Let me go. It isn’t all that bad. See to the wizard. If he goes down none of us are going home.”
“Meryl!” Fix said. “I thought you were hurt bad.”
The changeling girl sat up, her face pale, her clothing drenched in blood. “Most of it isn’t mine,” she said, and I knew she was lying. “How is he?”
Billy had sat me down on the ground at some point, and I felt him poking at my head. I flinched when it got painful. Sitting down helped, and I started to put things together again.
“His skull isn’t broken,” Billy said. “Maybe a concussion, I don’t know.”
“Give me a minute,” I said. “I’ll make it.”
Billy gripped my shoulder, relief in the gesture. “Right. We’re going to have to run for it, Harry. There’s more fight coming toward us.”
Billy was right. I could hear the sounds of more horses, somewhere nearby in the mist, and the hammering of hundreds of goblin boots striking the ground in step.
“We can’t run,” Meryl said. “Aurora still has Lily.”
Billy said, “Talk later. Here they come!” He blurred and dropped to all fours, taking his wolf-form again as we looked up and saw the Sidhe warriors coming toward us.
The waters behind them abruptly erupted, the still surface of the river boiling up, and cavalry, all dark blue, sea green, deep purple, rose up from under the waves. The riders were more Sidhe warriors, clad in warped-looking armor decorated in stylized snowflakes. There were only a dozen of them to the Summer warriors’ score, but they were mounted and attacking from behind. They cut into the ranks of the Summer warriors, blades flickering, led by a warrior in mail of purest white, bearing a pale and cold-looking blade. The Summer warriors turned to fight, but they’d been taken off guard and they knew it.
The leader of the Winter attack cut down one warrior, then turned to another, hand spinning through a series of gestures. Cold power surged around that gesture, and one of the Summer warriors simply stopped moving, the crackling in the air around him growing louder as crystals of ice seemed simply to erupt from the surface of his body and armor, frozen from the inside out. In seconds, he was nothing but a slowly growing block of ice around a gold-and-green figure inside, and the pale rider almost negligently nudged the horse into a solid kick.
The ice shattered into pieces and fell to the ground in a jumbled pile.
The pale rider took off her helmet and flashed me a brilliant, girlish smile. It was Maeve, the Winter Lady, her green eyes bright with bloodlust, dreadlocks bound close to her head. She almost idly licked blood from her sword, as another Summer warrior fell to one knee, his back to the water, sword raised desperately against the riders confronting him.
The waters surged again, and pale, lovely arms reached out, wrapping around his throat from behind. I caught a glimpse of golden eyes and a green-toothed smile, and then the warrior’s scream was cut off as he was dragged under the surface. The Summer warriors retreated, swift and in concert. The rest of the mounted Winter warriors set out in pursuit.
“Your godmother sends her greetings,” Maeve called to me. “I’d have acted sooner, but it would have been a fair fight, and I avoid them.”
“I need to get to the Table,” I called to her.
“So I have been told,” Maeve said. She rode her horse over to Lloyd Slate’s unmoving form, and her lovely young face opened into another brilliant smile. “My riders are attacking further down the river, drawing Summer forces that way. You should be able to run upstream.” She leaned
down and purred, “Hello, Lloyd. We should have a talk.”
“Come on, then,” grunted Meryl. “Can you walk, wizard?”
In answer, I pushed myself to my feet. Meryl stood too, though I saw her face twist with pain as she did. Fix hefted his bloodied monkey wrench. I recovered my staff, but my blasting rod was nowhere to be seen. The black doctor bag lay nearby, and I recovered it, taking time to check its contents before closing it again. “All right, people, let’s go.”
We started along the stream at a jog. I didn’t know how far we had to go. Everything around us was chaos and confusion. Once a cloud of pixies flew past us, and I found another stretch over the river where spiders as big as footballs had spun webs, trapping dozens of pixies in their strands. A group of faerie hounds, green and grey and savage, went past hot on the heels of a long panther like being headed for the water. Arrows whistled past, and everywhere lay the faerie dead and dying.
Finally, I felt the ground begin to rise, and looked up to see the hill of the Stone Table before us. I could even see Korrick’s hulking form at the top, as the centaur backed away from the stone figure of Lily, evidently just set upon the table. Aurora, dismounted, was a slender, gleaming form, looking down upon us with anger.
“Lily!” Meryl called, though her voice had gone thready. Fix whirled to look at her, his eyes alarmed, and Meryl dropped to one knee, her ugly, honest face twisting in pain. “Get her, Fix. Save her and get her home.” She looked around, focusing on me. “You’ll help him?”
“You paid for it,” I said. “Stay here. Stay down. You’ve done enough.”
She shook her head and said, “One thing more.” But she settled down on the ground, hand pressed to her wounded side, panting.
Aurora said something sharp to Korrick. The centaur bowed his head to her and, spear gripped in his hand, came down the hill toward us.
“Crap,” I said. “Billy, this guy is a heavy hitter. Don’t close with him. See if you can keep him distracted.”
Billy barked in acknowledgment, and the werewolves shot forward as the centaur descended, fanning out around him and harrying his flanks and rear while their companions dodged his hooves and spear.
“Stay with Meryl,” I told Fix, and scooted around the werewolves’ flanks, heading up the hill toward the Stone Table.
I got close enough to the top to see Aurora standing over the statue of Lily. She held Mother Winter’s Unraveling in her fingers, pressed against the statue, and she was tugging sharply at the strands, beginning to pull it to pieces. I felt something as she did, a kind of dark gravity that jerked at my wizard’s senses with sharp, raking fingers. The Unraveling began to come apart, strand by strand and line by line, under Aurora’s slender hands.
I stretched out my hand, adrenaline and pain giving me plenty of fuel for the magic, and called,“Ventas servitas!” Wind leapt out in a sudden spurt, seizing the Unraveling and tearing it from Aurora’s fingers, sending it spinning through the air toward me. I caught it, stuck my tongue out at Aurora, yelled, “Meep, meep!” and ran like hell.
“Damn thee, wizard!” screamed Aurora, and the sound raked at me with jagged talons. She lifted her hands and shouted something else, and the ground itself shook, throwing me off my feet. I landed and rolled as best I could down the hill until I reached the bottom. It took me a second to drag in a breath, then I rolled to my back to sit up.
Sudden wind slashed at me, slamming me back down to the earth, and tore the Unraveling from my hands. I looked up to see Aurora take the bit of cloth from the air with casual contempt, and start back up the hill. I struggled to sit up and follow, but the wind kept me pinned there, unable to rise from the ground.
“No more interruptions,” Aurora spat, and gestured with one hand.
The ground screamed. From it, writhing up with whipping, ferocious motion, came a thick hedge of thorns as long as my hand. It rose into place in a ring around the waist of the hill, so dense that I couldn’t see Aurora behind it.
I fought against Aurora’s spell, but couldn’t overcome it physically, and I didn’t even bother to try to rip it to shreds with sheer main magical strength. I stopped struggling and closed my eyes to begin to feel my way through it, to take it apart from the inside. But even as I did, Fix started screaming, “Harry? Harry! Help!”
One of the werewolves let loose a high-pitched scream of agony, and then another. My concentration wavered, and I struggled to regain it. Those people were here because of me, and I would be damned if I would let anything more happen to them. I tried to hang on to the focus, the detachment I would need to concentrate, to unravel Aurora’s spell, but my fear and my anger and my worry made it all but impossible. They would have lent strength to a spell, but this was delicate work, and now my emotions, so often a source of strength, only got in the way.
Then hooves galloped up, striking the ground near me. I looked up to see the warrior in green armor, the only rider of those original Sidhe cavalry to stay mounted, standing over me, horse stamping, spear leveled at my head.
“Don’t!” I said. “Wait!”
But the rider ignored me, lifted the spear, its tip gleaming in the silver light, and drove it down at my unprotected throat.
Chapter Thirty-three
The spear drove into the earth beside my neck, and the rider hissed in an impatient female voice, “Hold still.”
She swung down from the faerie steed, reached up, and took off the masked helm. Elaine’s wheat-brown hair spilled down, escaping from the bun it had been tied in, and she jerked it all the way down irritably. “Hold still. I’ll get that off you.”
“Elaine,” I said. I went through a bunch of heated emotions, and I didn’t have time for any of them. “I’d say I was glad to see you, but I’m not sure.”
“That’s because you always were a little dense, Harry,” she said, her voice tart. Then she smoothed her features over, her eyes falling half closed, and spread her gloved hands over my chest. She muttered something to herself and then said, “Here.Samanyana .”
There was a surge of gentle power, and the wind pinning me to the ground abruptly vanished. I pushed myself back to my feet.
“All right,” she said. “Let’s get out of here.”
“No,” I said. “I’m not done.” I recovered my valise and my staff. “I need to get through those thorns.”
“You can’t,” Elaine said. “Harry, I know this spell. Those thorns aren’t just pointy, they’re poisonous. If one of them scratches you, you’ll be paralyzed in a couple of minutes. Two or three will kill you.”
I scowled at the barrier and settled my grip on my staff.
“And they won’t burn, either,” Elaine added.
“Oh.” I ground my teeth. “I’ll just force them aside, then.”
“That’ll be like holding open a screen door, Harry. They’ll just fall back into place when your concentration wavers.”
“Then it won’t waver.”
“You can’t do it, Harry,” Elaine said. “If you start pushing through, Aurora will sense it and she’ll tear you apart. If you’re holding the thorns off you, you won’t be able to defend yourself.”
I lowered my staff and looked from the thorns back to Elaine. “All right,” I said. “Then you’ll have to hold them off me.”
Elaine’s eyes widened. “What?”
“You hold the thorns back. I’ll go through.”
“You’re going to go up against Aurora?Alone? ”
“And you’re going to help me,” I said.
Elaine bit her lip, looking away from me.
“Come on, Elaine,” I said. “You’ve already betrayed her. And I am going through those thorns, with your help or without it.”
“I don’t know.”
“Yeah, you do,” I said. “If you were going to kill me, you’ve already had your chance. And if Aurora finishes what she’s doing, I’m dead anyway.”
“You don’t understand—”
“I know I don’t,” I snapped. “I d
on’t understand why you’re helping her. I don’t understand how you can stand by and let her do the things she’s done. I don’t understand how you can stand here and let that girl die.” I let that sink in for a second before I added, quietly, “And I don’t understand how you could betray me like that. Again.”
“For all you know,” Elaine said, “it will happen a third time. I’ll let those thorns close on you halfway through and kill you for her.”
“Maybe so,” I said. “But I don’t want to believe that, Elaine. We loved each other once upon a time. I know you aren’t a coward and you aren’t a killer. I want to believe that what we had really meant something, even now. That I can trust you with my life the way you can trust me with yours.”
She let out a bitter little laugh and said, “You don’t know what I am anymore, Harry.” She looked at me. “But I believe you. I know I can trust you.”
“Then help me.”
She nodded and said, “You’ll have to run. I’m not as strong as you, and this is brute work. I won’t be able to lift it for long.”
I nodded at her. Doubt nagged at me as I did. What if she did it again? Elaine hadn’t exactly been sterling in the up-front-honesty department. I watched as she focused, her lovely face going blank, and felt her draw in her power, folding her arms over her chest, palms over either shoulder like an Egyptian sarcophagus.
Hell, I had ten million ways to die all around me. What was one over another? At least this way, if I went out, I’d go out doing something worthwhile. I turned and crouched, bag and staff in hand.
Elaine murmured something, and a wind stirred around her, lifting her hair around her head. She opened her eyes, though they remained distant, unfocused, and spread both hands to her sides.
Wind lashed out in a column five feet around and drove into the wall of thorns. The thorns shuddered and then began to give, bending away from Elaine’s spell.
“Go!” she gasped. “Go, hurry!”
I ran.
The wind almost blinded me, and I had to run crouched down, hoping that none of my exposed skin would brush against any thorns. I felt one sharp tug along my jacket, but it didn’t pierce the leather. Elaine didn’t let me down. After a few seconds, I burst through the wall and came out in the clear on top of the hill of the Stone Table.