Changes df-12

by Jim Butcher

  Mouse stayed close at my side. His head was turned to the right, focused upon the trees and the darkness that way. A growl I felt more than heard came from deep in his chest.

  Susan stepped up to my side and looked at the crushed vampires with undisguised satisfaction, but frowned. “Esclavos de sangre,” she said.

  “Yes,” said Martin from somewhere behind me.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Blood slaves,” Susan said to me. “Vampires who have gone entirely feral. They can’t create a flesh mask. They’re almost animals. Scum.”

  “Cannon fodder,” I said, forcing my lungs to start taking slower, deeper breaths. “A crowd of scum at a top-end Red Court function.”

  “Yes.”

  It wasn’t hard to figure out why they’d been there. Mouse’s interest in whatever it was he sensed in the trees was deepening. “The Red Court was expecting company.”

  “Yes,” Susan said, her voice tight.

  Well. Nothing’s ever simple, is it?

  That changed everything. A surprise raid upon an unsuspecting, unprepared target was one thing. Trying to simply kick in the teeth of a fully armed and ready Red Court obviously expecting someone with my firepower was something else entirely. Namely, sheer stupidity.

  So.

  I had to change the game and change it fast.

  A gong began to clash slowly, a monstrous thing, the metallic roar of its voice something low and harsh that reminded me inexplicably of the roar Martin had produced earlier. The tension got thicker, and except for the sounds of the drum and the gong, there were no other noises, not of the creatures of the jungle or any other kind.

  The quiet was far more terrifying than the noise had been.

  “They’re out there,” I said quietly. “They’re moving right now.”

  “Yes,” said Lea, who had suddenly appeared at my left side, opposite Mouse. Her voice was very calm, and her feline eyes roamed the night, bright and interested. “That mob of trash was merely a distraction. Our own tactic used against us.” Her eyes narrowed. “They are employing veils to hide themselves—and they are quite skilled.”

  “Molly,” I said.

  “On it, boss,” she replied.

  “Our distraction was an illusion. It didn’t cost us any lives,” Murphy pointed out.

  “Neither did theirs, from their perspective, Sergeant,” Martin said. “Creatures who cannot control themselves are of no use to the Red King, after all. Their deaths simply reduced the number of useless, parasitic mouths he had to feed. He may think of humans as a commodity, but he’d rather not throw that wealth away.”

  “Harry?” Murphy asked. “Can you do that anvil thing again?”

  “Hell. I’m sorta surprised I got away with it the first time. Never done anything with that much voltage.” I closed my eyes for a second and began to reach down for the ley line again—and my brain contorted. Thoughts turned into a harsh explosion of images and memories that left long lacerations on the inside of my skull, and even after I had moved my mind away from those images, it took several seconds before I could open my eyes again. “No,” I croaked. “No, that isn’t an option. Even if they gave me enough time to pull it off.”

  “Then what are we going to do?” Thomas asked. He held a large pistol in his left hand, his falcata in his right, and stood at my back, facing the darkness behind us. “Stand here until they swarm us?”

  “We’re going to show them how much it will cost to take us down,” I said. “How’s it coming, padawan?”

  Molly let out a slow, thoughtful breath. Then she lifted one pale hand, rotated an extended finger in a circle around us, and murmured, “Hireki.”

  I felt the subtle surge of her will wash out and drew in my own as it did. The word my apprentice whispered seemed to flow out from her in an enormous circle, leaving visible signs of its passing. It fluttered leaves and blades of grass, stirred small stones—and, as it continued, it washed over several shapes out in the night that rippled and became solid black outlines, where before there was only indistinct darkness and shadow.

  “Not all that skilled,” Molly said, panting, satisfaction in her voice.

  “Fuego!” I snarled, and threw a small comet of fire from my right hand. It sailed forth with a howling whistle of superheated air and smashed into the nearest of the shadowed forms, less than a dozen yards away. Fire leapt up, and a vampire screamed in rage and pain and began retreating through the trees.

  “Infriga!” I barked, and made a ripping gesture with my left hand. I tore the fire from the stricken vampire—and then some. I sent the resulting fireball skipping over to the next form—and left the first target as a block of ice where the damp jungle air had emptied its water over the vampire’s body and locked it into place, rigid and very slightly luminous with the residue of the cold energy I felt in me, the gift of Queen Mab. Which was just as well—there were a dozen closing attackers in my immediate field of vision alone, which meant another fifty or sixty of them if they were circling in from all around us, plus the ones I couldn’t see, who may have employed more mundane techniques of stealth to avoid the eye.

  I wanted them to see what I could do.

  The second vampire fell as easily as the first, as did the third, and only then did I say quietly, “One bullet apiece, Martin.”

  Martin’s silenced pistol coughed three times, and the slightly glowing forms of the ice-enclosed vampires shattered into several dozen pieces each, falling to the ground where the luminous energy of Winter began to bleed slowly away, along with the ice-riddled flesh.

  They got the point. The vampires stopped advancing. The jungle became still.

  “Fire and ice,” murmured the Leanansidhe. “Excellent, my godson. Anyone can play with an element. Few can manipulate opposites with such ease.”

  “Sort of the idea,” I said. “Back me up.”

  “Of course,” Lea said.

  I stepped forward and slightly apart from the others and lifted my hands. “Arianna!” I shouted, and my voice boomed as though I’d been holding a microphone and using speakers the size of refrigerators. It was something of a surprise, and I looked over my shoulder to see my godmother smiling calmly.

  “Arianna!” I called again. “You were too great a coward to accept my challenge when I gave it to you in Edinburgh! Now I am here, in the heart of the power of the Red King! Do you still fear to face me, coward?”

  “What?” Thomas muttered under his breath.

  “This is not an assault,” Sanya added, disapproval in his voice.

  I ignored them. I was the one with the big voice. “You see what I have done to your rabble!” I called. “How many more must die before you come out from behind them, Duchess? I am come to kill you and claim my child! Stand forth, or I swear to you, upon the power in my body and mind, that I will lay waste to your strong place. Before I die, I will make you pay the price for every drop of blood—and when I die, my death curse will scatter the power of this place to the winds!

  “Arianna!” I bellowed, and I could not stop the hatred from making my voice sharply edged with scorn and spite. “How many loyal servants of the Red King must die tonight? How many Lords of Outer Night will taste mortality before the sun rises? You have only begun to know the power I bring with me this night. For though I die, I swear to you this: I will not fall alone.”

  I indulged in a little bit of melodrama at that point: I brought forth soulfire—enough to sheath my body in silver light—as my oath rolled out over the land, through the ruins, and bounced from tree to tree. It cast a harsh light that the nearest surviving vampires cringed away from.

  For a long moment, there was no sound.

  Then the drums and the occasional clash of the gong stopped.

  A conch shell horn, the sound unmistakable, blew three high, sweet notes.

  The effect was immediate. The vampires surrounding us all retreated until they were out of sight. Then a drumbeat began again, this time from a single drummer.


  “What’s happening?” Thomas asked.

  “The Red King’s agents spent the past couple of days trying to kill me or make sure I showed up here only as a vampire,” I said quietly. “I’m pretty sure it’s because the king didn’t want the duchess pulling off her bloodline curse against me. Which means that there’s a power play going on inside the Red Court.”

  “Your explanation isn’t one,” Thomas replied.

  “Now that I am here,” I said, “I’m betting that the Red King is going to be willing to attempt other means of undercutting the duchess.”

  “You don’t even know he’s here.”

  “Of course he is,” I said. “There’s a sizable force here, as large as any we’ve ever seen take the field during the war.”

  “What if it isn’t his army? What if he’s not here to run it?” Thomas asked.

  “History suggests that kings who don’t exercise direct control over their armies don’t tend to remain kings for very long. Which must be, ultimately, what this is all about—diminishing Arianna’s power.”

  “And talking to you does that how?”

  “The Code Duello,” I said. “The Red Court signed the Accords. For what Arianna has done, I have the right to challenge her. If I kill her, I get rid of the Red King’s problem for him.”

  “Suppose he isn’t interested in chatting?” Thomas said. “Suppose they’re pulling back because he just convinced someone to drop a cruise missile on top of us?”

  “Then we’ll get blown up,” I said. “Which is better than we’d get if we had to tangle with them here and now, I expect.”

  “Okay,” Thomas said. “Just so we have that clear.”

  “Pansy,” Murphy sneered.

  Thomas leered at her. “You make my stamen tingle when you talk like that, Sergeant.”

  “Quiet,” Sanya murmured. “Something is coming.”

  A soft lamp carried by a slender figure in a white garment came toward us down the long row of columns.

  It proved to be a woman dressed in an outfit almost exactly like Susan’s. She was tall, young, and lovely, with the dark red-brown skin of the native Maya, with their long features and dark eyes. Three others accompanied her—men, and obviously warriors all, wearing the skins of jaguars over their shoulders and otherwise clad only in loincloths and heavy tattoos. Two of them carried swords made of wood and sharpened chips of obsidian. The other carried a drum that rolled off a steady beat.

  I thought there was something familiar about the features of the three men, but then I realized that they weren’t personally familiar to me. It was the subtle tension of their bodies, the hints of power that hung about them like a very faint perfume.

  They reminded me quite strongly of Susan and Martin. Half vampires. Presumably just as dangerous as Susan and Martin, if not more so.

  The jaguar warriors all came to a halt about twenty feet away, but the drum kept rolling and the girl kept walking, one step for each beat. When she reached me, she unfastened her feathered cloak and let it fall to the ground. Then, with the twist of a piece of leather at each shoulder, the shift slid down her body into a puddle of soft white around her feet. She was naked beneath, except for a band of leather around her hips, from which hung an obsidian-bladed knife. She knelt down in a slow, graceful motion, a portrait in supplication, then took up the knife and offered its handle to me.

  “I am Priestess Alamaya, servant of the Great Lord Kukulcan,” she murmured, her voice honeyed, her expression serene. “He bids you and your retainers be welcome to this, his country seat, Wizard Dresden, and offers you the blood of my life as proof of his welcome and his compliance with the Accords.” She lowered her eyes and turned her head to the right to bare her throat, the carotid artery, while still holding forth the blade. “Do with me as you will. I am a gift to you from the Great Lord.”

  “Oh, how thoughtful,” the Leanansidhe murmured. “You hardly ever meet anyone that polite, these days. May I?”

  “No,” I said, and tried to keep the edge of irritation out of my voice. I took the knife from the girl’s hands and slid it into my sash, and let it rest next to the cloth sack I had made from a knotted inside-out Rolling Stones T-shirt. The shirt had been in my gym bag of contraband ever since it had been a gym bag of clean clothes for when I went to the gym. I had pressed the shirt (bah-dump-bump, ching) into service when I realized the one other thing I couldn’t do without during this confrontation. It was tied to my grey cloth sash.

  Then I took the young woman’s arm and lifted her to her feet, sensing no particular aura of power around her. She was mortal, evidently a servant of the vampires.

  She drew in a short breath as she felt my hand circle her wrist and rose swiftly, so that I didn’t have to expend any effort lifting her. “Should you wish to defile me in that way, lord, it is also well within your rights as guest.” Her dark eyes were very direct, very willing. “My body is yours, as is my blood.”

  “More than a century,” Murphy muttered, “and we’ve gone from ‘like a fish needs a bicycle’ to this.”

  I cleared my throat and gave Murphy a look. Then I turned to the girl and said, “I have no doubt about your lord’s integrity, Priestess Alamaya. Please convey us to his seat, that I may speak with him.”

  At my words, the girl fell to her knees again and brushed her long, dark hair across my feet. “I thank you for my life, wizard, that I may continue to serve my lord,” she said. Then she rose again and made an imperious gesture to one of the jaguar warriors. The man immediately recovered her clothing and assisted her in dressing again. The feather cloak slid over her shoulders once more, and though I knew the thing had to be heavy, she bore it without strain. “This way, lord, if you please.”

  “Love this job,” Sanya murmured. “Just love it.”

  “I need to challenge more people to duels,” Thomas said in agreement.

  “Men are pigs,” Murphy said.

  “Amen,” said Molly.

  Lea gave me a prim look and said, “I’ve not sacrificed a holy virgin in ages.”

  “Completely unprofessional,” muttered Martin.

  “Ixnay,” I said quietly, laying a hand on Mouse’s shoulders. “All of you. Follow me. And don’t look edible.”

  And, following the priestess with her lamp, we entered the city of Chichén Itzá.

  Chapter 43

  Chichén Itzá smelled like blood.

  You never mistake blood for anything else, not even if you’ve never smelled it before. We’ve all tasted it—if nowhere else, when we lose our baby teeth. We all know the taste, and as a corollary, we all know the smell.

  The main pyramid is known as El Castillo by most of the folk who go there today—literally, “the castle.” As we walked up out of the gallery of pillars, it loomed above us, an enormous mound of cut stone, every bit as large and imposing as the European fortifications for which it was named. It was a ziggurat-style pyramid, made all of square blocks. Levels piled one on top of another as it rose up to the temple at its summit—and every level of the pyramid was lined with a different form of guard.

  At the base of the pyramid, and therefore most numerous, were the jaguar warriors we had already seen. They were all men, all appealing, all layered with the lean, swift muscle of a panther. They all wore jaguar skins. Many of them bore traditional weapons. Many more wore swords, some of them of modern make, the best of which were superior in every physical sense to the weapons manufactured in the past. Most of them also carried a Kalashnikov—again, the most modern versions of the weapons, made of steel and polymer, the finest of which were also readily superior to the weapons of earlier manufacture.

  The next level up were all women, garbed in ritual clothing as Alamaya had been, but covered in tattoos, much as the jaguar warriors were. They, too, had that same subtle edge to them that suggested greater-than-mortal capability.

  Hell’s bells. If the numbers were the same on every side of the pyramid, and I had no reason to believe that they were
not, then I was looking at nearly a thousand of the jaguar warriors and priestesses. I am a dangerous man—but no one man is that dangerous. I was abruptly glad that we hadn’t tried a rope-a-dope or a forward charge. We’d have been swamped by sheer numbers, almost regardless of the plan.

  Numbers matter.

  That fact sucks, but that makes it no less true. No matter how just your cause, if you’re outnumbered two to one by a comparable force, you’re gonna have to be real creative to pull out a victory. Ask the Germans who fought on either front of World War II. German tankers would often complain that they would take out ten Allied tanks for every tank they lost—but the Allies always seemed to have tank number eleven ready to go.

  I was looking at an impossible numerical disadvantage, and I did not at all like the way it felt to realize that truth.

  And I was only on the second tier of the pyramid.

  Vampires occupied the next several levels. None of them were in their monstrous form, but they didn’t have to be. They weren’t going all out on their disguises, and the all-black coloration of their eyes proclaimed their inhumanity with eloquence. Among the vampires, gender seemed to have no particular recognition. Two more levels were filled with fully vampire jaguar warriors, male and female alike, and the next two with vampire priests and priestesses. Above them came what I presumed to be the Red Court’s version of the nobility—individual vampires, male and female, who clearly stood with their own retinues. They tended to wear more and more gold and have fewer and fewer tattoos the higher up the pyramid they went.

  Just before the top level were thirteen lone figures, and from what I could see they were taller than most mortals, seven feet or more in height. Each was dressed in a different form of traditional garb, and each had his own signature mask. My Mayan mythology was a bit rusty, but White Council intelligence reports said that the Lords of Outer Dark had posed as gods to the ancient Mayans, each with his own separate identity. What they didn’t say was that either they had been a great deal more than that, or that collecting worshipers had made them more than merely ancient vampires.