by Butcher, Jim
I offered him my hand and he shook it. “Be careful,” I said.
“Good hunting,” he replied.
I glanced at my three companions and called, “Ready?”
They were. We followed the burning butterfly through the snow. Without its protection from the elements, I doubt we would have made it, and I made it a point to remember to wear sufficient cold-weather gear in the event that I somehow survived this ongoing idiocy and was crazy enough to come back a second time. Even with the Summer magic to protect us, it was a pretty good hike over unfriendly terrain. I’d done worse in the past, with both Justin DuMorne and Ebenezar, and there are times when having long legs can be a real advantage on rough terrain. Charity seemed all right, too, but Thomas had never been much of an outdoors-man, and Murphy’s height put her at a disadvantage that the unaccustomed weight of her armor and cutlery exacerbated.
I traded a glance with Charity. I started giving Thomas a hand on rough portions of our climb. Charity helped Murphy. At first I thought Murphy might take her arm off out of wounded pride, but she grimaced and visibly forced herself to accept the help.
The last two hundred yards or so were completely open, with no trees or undulation of terrain to shield our approach from the walls of the fortress. I lifted a hand to call a halt at the edge of the last hummock of stone that would shelter us from view. Lily’s butterfly drifted in erratic circles around my head, snowflakes hissing to steam where they touched it.
I peered over the edge of a frozen boulder at Arctis Tor for a long time, then settled back down again.
“I don’t see anyone,” I said, trying to keep my voice down.
“Doesn’t make any sense,” Thomas said. He was panting and shivering a little, despite Lily’s warding magic. “I thought this was supposed to be Mab’s headquarters. This place looks deserted.”
“It makes perfect sense,” I said. “Winter’s forces are all poised to hit Summer. You don’t do that from the heart of your own territory. You gather at strong points near the enemy’s border. If we’re lucky, maybe there’s just a skeleton garrison here.”
Murphy peered around the edge of the stones and said, “The gate’s open. I don’t see any guards.” She frowned. “There are…there’s something on the open ground between here and there. See?”
I leaned next to her and peered. Vague, shadowy shapes stirred in the wind between us and the fortress, insubstantial as any shadow. “Oh,” I said. “It’s a glamour. Illusion, laid out around the place. Probably a hedge maze of some kind.”
“And it fools people?” she asked uncertainly.
“It fools people who don’t have groovy wizard ointment for their eyes,” I said. Then I frowned and said, “Wait a minute. The gate isn’t open. It’s gone.”
“What?” Charity asked. She leaned out and stared. “There is a broken lattice of ice on the ground around the gate. A portcullis?”
“Could be,” I agreed. “And inside.” I squinted. “I think I can see some heavier pieces. Like maybe someone ripped apart the portcullis and blew the gate in.” I took a deep breath, feeling a hysterical little giggle lurking in my throat. “Something huffed and puffed and blew the house in. Mab’s house.”
The wind howled over the frozen mountains.
“Well,” Thomas said. “That can’t be good.”
Charity bit her lip. “Molly.”
“I thought you said this Mab was all mighty and stuff, Harry,” Murphy said.
“She is,” I said, frowning.
“Then who plays big bad wolf to her little pig?”
“I…” I shook my head and rubbed at my mouth. “I’m starting to think that maybe I’m getting a little bit out of my depth, here.”
Thomas broke out into a rippling chuckle, a faint note of hysteria to it. He turned his back to the fortress and sat down, chortling.
I glowered at him and said, “It’s not funny.”
“It is from here,” Thomas said. “I mean, God, you are dense sometimes. Are you just now noticing this, Harry?”
I glowered at him some more. “To answer your question, Murph, I don’t know who did this, but the list of the people who could is fairly short. Maybe the Senior Council could if they had the Wardens along, but they’re busy, and they’d have had to fight a campaign to get this far. Maybe the vampires could have done it, working together, but that doesn’t track. I don’t know. Maybe Mab pissed off a god or something.”
“There is only one God,” Charity said.
I waved a hand and said, “No capital ‘G,’ Charity, in deference to your beliefs. But there are beings who aren’t the Almighty who have power way beyond anything running around the planet.”
“Like who?” Murphy asked.
“Old Greek and Roman and Norse deities. Lots and lots of Amerind divinity, and African tribal beings. A few Australian aboriginal gods; others in Polynesia, southeast Asia. About a zillion Hindu gods. But they’ve all been dormant for centuries.” I frowned at Arctis Tor. “And I can’t think what Mab might have done to earn their enmity. She’s avoided doing that for thousands of years.”
Unless, of course, I thought to myself, Maeve and Lily are right, and she really has gone bonkers.
“Dresden,” Charity said. “This is academic. We either go in or we leave. Now.”
I chewed my lip and nodded. Then I dug in my pockets for the tiny vial of blood Charity had provided, and hunted through the rocks until I found a spot clear enough to chalk out a circle. I empowered it and wrought one of my usual tracking spells, keying it to a sensation of warmth against my senses. Cold as it was, I would hardly mind anything that might make me feel a little less freeze-dried.
I broke the circle and released the spell, and immediately felt a tingling warmth on my left cheekbone. I turned to face it, and found myself staring directly at Arctis Tor. I paced fifty or sixty yards to the side, and faced the warmth again, working out a rough triangulation.
“She’s alive,” I told Charity, “or the spell wouldn’t have worked. She’s in there. Let’s go.”
“Wait,” Charity said. She gave me a look filled with discomfort and then said, “May I say a brief prayer for us first?”
“Can’t hurt,” I said. “I’ll take all the help I can get.”
She bowed her head and said, “Lord of hosts, please stand with us against this darkness.” The quiet, bedrock-deep energy of true faith brushed against me. Charity crossed herself. “Amen.”
Murphy echoed the gesture and the amen. Thomas and I tried to look theologically invisible. Then, without further speech, I swung out around the frozen stone cairn and broke into a quick, steady jog. The others followed along.
I passed the first bones fifty yards from the walls. They lay in a crushed, twisted jumble in the snow, frozen into something that looked like a macabre Escher print. The bones were vaguely human, but I couldn’t be sure because they had been pulverized to dust in some places, warped like melted wax in others. It was the first grisly memorial of many. As I kept going forward, brittle, frozen bones crunched under my boots, lying closer and thicker, and twisted more horribly, as we drew closer to Arctis Tor. By the time we got to the gate, I was shin-deep in icy bones. They spread out on either side in an enormous wheel of horrible remains centered on the gate. Whoever they had been, thousands of their kind had perished here.
Charity’s guess about the portcullis had been bang on. Pieces of it lay scattered about, mixed among the bones. Where the gate arched beneath the fortress walls, there were still more bones, waist-deep on me, and slabs of planed dark ice, the remains of the fortress gate, stuck out at odd angles. The walls of Arctis Tor had been pitted with what I could only assume had been an acid of some kind. There were larger gouges blown out of the walls here and there, but against their monolithic volume, they were little more than pockmarks.
I pushed ahead to the gate, plowing my way through bones. Once there, I caught a faint whiff of something familiar. I leaned closer to one of the craters blown o
ut of the wall and sniffed.
“What is it?” Thomas asked me.
“Sulfur,” I said quietly. “Brimstone.”
“What does that mean?” he asked.
“No way to tell,” I half lied. But my intuition was absolutely certain of what had happened here. Someone had thrown Hellfire against the walls of Arctis Tor. Which meant that the forces of the literal Hell, or their agents, were also playing a part in the ongoing events.
Way, way, way out of my depth.
I told myself that it didn’t matter. There was a young woman inside that frozen boneyard who would die if I did not burgle her out of this nightmare. If I did not control my fear, there was an excellent chance that it would warn her captors of my approach. So I fought the fear that threatened to make me start throwing up, or something equally humiliating and potentially fatal.
I readied my shield, gripped my staff, ground my teeth together, and then continued pushing my way forward, through the bones and into the eerie dimness of the most ridiculously dangerous place I had ever been.
Chapter Thirty-seven
The black ice walls of Arctis Tor were sixty feet thick, and walking through the gateway felt more like walking through a railroad tunnel.
Except for all the bones.
Every breath, every step, every rasp of bones rubbing against one another, multiplied into a thousand echoes that almost seemed to grow louder rather than fading away. The bones piled higher as I went, forcing me to walk atop them as best I could. The footing was treacherous. The deep green and violet, and occasionally red or green, pulses of luminance in the black ice walls did nothing to light the way. They only made the shadows shift and flow subtly, degrading my depth perception. I started feeling a little carsick.
If one of the fetches appeared at the far end of the tunnel and charged me, things would get nasty, and fast, especially given how ineffective my magic had been against them and how the bones had slowed my pace. That was more than a little spooky, and it was hard to keep myself from thrashing ahead more quickly out of pure fear. I kept a steady pace, held it in, and refused to allow it to control me.
I had been shielding my thoughts from Lasciel for a couple of years now. Damned if I was going to give a bunch of murderous faerie monsters the chance to paw through my emotions.
I checked behind me. Charity had trouble managing the awkward task of crawling over the bones while armored and holding that big old war hammer, but she stuck to it with grim focus and determination. Behind her, Murphy seemed to have far less trouble. Thomas prowled along at the rear, graceful as a panther in a tree.
I emerged from the gate into the courtyard. The inside of the fortress was bleak, cold, and beautiful in its simple symmetry. Rooms and chambers had either never been built or had been built into the walls and their entries hidden. Stairs led up to the battlements atop the walls. The courtyard was flat, smooth, dark ice, and at its center the single spire reared up from the ground, a round turret that rose to a crenellated parapet that overlooked the walls and the ground beneath.
The courtyard also held a sense of quiet stillness to it, as though it was not a place meant for living, moving, changing beings. The howl of the wind outside and overhead did not reach the ground. It was as silent as a librarian’s tomb, and each footstep sounded clearly on the ice. Echoes bounced back and forth in the courtyard, somehow carrying a tone of disapproval and menace with them.
Bones spilled out in a wave from the gate, rapidly tapering off after a few yards. Beyond that were only scattered groupings of bones. Thomas drifted over to one such and poked at it with his drawn saber. The blade scraped on a skull too big to stuff into an oil drum, too heavy and thick to look entirely human.
“What the hell was this?” Thomas asked quietly.
“Troll, probably,” I said. “Big one. Maybe fourteen, fifteen feet tall.” I looked around. Half a dozen other enormous skulls lay in the scattered collections of remains. Another six had fallen very close to each other, at the base of the spire. “Give me a second. I want to know what we’re looking at before we move ahead.”
Charity looked like she wanted to argue, but instead she took up position a few yards off, watching one way. Thomas and Murphy spread out, each keeping their eyes on a different direction.
Mixed in with the fallen trolls’ bones were broken pieces of dark ice that might have been the jigsaw-puzzle remains of armor and weapons. Each fragment bore the remnants of ornate engraving employing gold, silver, and tiny blue jewels. Faerie artistry, and expensive artistry at that. “Thirteen of them. The trolls were Mab’s,” I murmured. “I saw some of them outfitted like this a couple of years back.”
“How long have they been dead?” Murphy asked quietly.
I grunted and hunkered down. I stretched my left hand out over the bones and closed my eyes, focusing my attention on sharpening my senses, mundane and magical alike. Very faintly, I could scent the heavy, bestial stink of a troll. I’d only seen a couple of the big ones from up close, but you could smell the ugly bastards from half a mile away. There was a rotten odor, more like heavy mulch than old meat. And there was more sulfur and brimstone.
Below that, I could feel tremors in the air over the spot, the psychic residue of the troll’s violent death. There was a sense of excitement, rage, and then a dull, seldom-felt terror and a rush of sharp, frozen images of violent death, confusion, terror, and searing agony.
My hand flinched back from the phantom sensation of its own accord, and for just a moment the memories of my burning took on tangible form. I hissed through my teeth and held my hand against my stomach, willing the too-real ghost of pain away.
“Harry?” Murphy asked.
What the hell? The impression the death had left was so sharp, so severe, that I had actually gotten bits of the troll’s memories. That had never happened to me before. Of course, I had never tried to pick up vibes in the Nevernever, either. It made more sense that the substance of the spirit world would leave a clearer spiritual impression.
“Harry?” Murphy said again, more sharply.
“I’m all right,” I said through clenched teeth. The imprint had been more clear than anything I had ever felt in the real world. In Chicago, I would have thought it was only a few seconds old. Here…
“I can’t tell how old they are,” I said. “My gut says not very, but I can’t be sure.”
“It must have been weeks,” Thomas said. “It takes that long for bones to get this clean.”
“It’s all relative,” I said. “Time can pass at different rates in Faerie. These bones could have fallen a thousand years ago, by the local clock. Or twenty minutes ago.”
Thomas muttered something under his breath and shook his head.
“What killed them, Harry?” Murphy asked.
“Fire. They were burned to death,” I said quietly. “Down to the bone.”
“Could you do that?” Thomas asked.
I shook my head. “I couldn’t make it that hot. Not at the heart of Winter.” Not even with Hellfire. The remains of perhaps a thousand creatures lay scattered about. I’d cut loose once in the past and roasted a bunch of vampires—and maybe some of their victims with them—but even that inferno hadn’t been big enough to catch more than a tithe of the fallen defenders of Arctis Tor.
“Then who did it?” Charity asked quietly.
I didn’t have an answer for her. I rose and nudged a smaller skull with my staff. “The littler ones were goblins,” I said. “Foot soldiers.” I rolled a troll-sized thighbone aside with my staff. An enormous sword, also of that same black ice, lay shattered beneath it. “These trolls were her personal guard.” I gestured back at the gate. “Covering her retreat to the tower, maybe. Some of them got taken down along the way. The others made a stand at the tower’s base. Died there.”
I paced around, checking what the tracking spell had to say, and triangulated again. “Molly’s in the tower,” I murmured.
“How do we get in?” Murphy asked.
>
I stared at the blank wall of the spire. “Um,” I said.
Charity glanced over my shoulder and nodded at the spire. “Look behind those trolls. If they were covering a retreat, they should be near the entrance to the tower.”
“Maybe,” I said. I walked over to the tower and frowned at the black ice. I ran my right hand over its surface, feeling for cracks or evidence of a hidden doorway, my senses tuned to discover any magic that might hide a door. I had the sudden impression that the black ice and the slowly pulsing colors inside were somehow alive, aware of me. And they did not like me at all. I got a sense of alien hatred, cold and patient. Otherwise, I got nothing for my trouble but half-frozen fingers.
“Nothing here,” I said, and rapped my knuckles on the side of the tower, eliciting the dull thump of a very solid object. “Maybe the trolls just wanted to fight with their backs to something solid. I might have to go all the way around checking for—”
Without any warning at all the ice of the tower parted. An archway appeared, the ice that had hidden it flowing seamlessly into the rest of the tower. The interior of the tower was all shadows and slowly shifting lights that did little to provide any illumination. Inside was nothing but a spiral staircase, winding counterclockwise up through the spire.
I glanced from the archway to my chilled fingers and back. “Next time, I guess I’ll just knock.”
“Come on,” Charity said. She shifted her grip on the war hammer, holding it at something like high port arms, handle parallel to her spine, heavy head ready to descend. “We have to hurry.”
Thomas and Murphy turned to join us at the door.
An idle, puzzled sense of familiarity gave way to my instincts’ furious warning. Fetches were the masters of the sucker punch. Like the Bucky-fetch who had jumped us just as we opened the doors to the theater, they knew how to position themselves to attack just as their enemies focused their attention on some kind of distraction.