by Jim Butcher
I turned my gaze back to Nicodemus, who was about ten seconds from an ass kicking—
—and caught a little glimmer of something approximating satisfaction in his eyes that made my combat-readying reflexes cool off almost instantly.
Ivy’s treatment hadn’t been only about putting her in the proper frame of mind to manipulate her.
It had also been about manipulating me. It wasn’t even all that tough to understand why. After all, I’d been in a situation something like this before.
It wasn’t enough for the Denarians to simply acquire the Sword. They couldn’t break or smash or melt Fidelacchius, any more than the Church could smash or melt the thirty silver coins. The power of the Sword was more than merely physical, and as long as it was wielded by those of pure heart and intent, it would take more than mere physical means to undo it.
Of course, if you handed the Sword to, for example, a wizard who was known for playing it shady once in a while, and who was known for having a bad temper, and who was known for occasionally losing it, and maybe for burning down a building or two when he got angry, that could change the situation entirely. Put him in an intense situation, give him a really good reason to be angry, give him a mighty magical weapon near at hand, and he might well seize it and use it out of sheer outrage—despite the fact that he wouldn’t exactly be acting from entirely pure motives by doing so. After all, I had come here, ostensibly in peace, to offer up the Sword as a sacrifice for the life of a child. If I then took up that same weapon and used it to strike at Nicodemus and company instead, I, its rightful bearer, would be employing Fidelacchius, the Sword of Faith, in an act of treachery.
Once I’d done that, then the Sword would just be a sword, an object of steel and wood. Once I’d done that, then Nicodemus and his insane little family could destroy the weapon. They needed someone to make that mistake, someone to make that choice, in order to unmake the weapon, just as any bearer of a coin had to make the choice to give it up to be free of the Fallen inside. They needed someone with a right to the Sword to choose to abuse that right.
I’d made that mistake once already, on a stormy night much like this one, when Michael had asked me to carry Amoracchius for him. I’d used the Sword of Love to try to save my ass from the consequences of my own bad decisions and nearly gotten it destroyed as a result. It would have been unmade, in fact, if not for the intervention of my brother—even if I hadn’t known about our kinship at the time. Thomas had. He’d been looking out for his little brother even then.
Don’t get me wrong: At times I can be a little thick—particularly when there’s a woman involved. There’s just no way I’m stupid enough to make a mistake quite that enormous twice.
But…
Nicodemus didn’t know that I’d made it even once, now, did he?
Oh, he knew me pretty well. He knew how angry his actions had made me, how I would react to the sight of what they’d done to Ivy—and he was counting on me to react according to my nature, in order to help him unmake Fidelacchius.
This was going to be a dangerous game, going up against an opponent who had been around as long as Nick had, but I couldn’t win if I didn’t play—and I needed to buy a little more time and make sure that both of our prizes were on hand before we started the fireworks.
So I gave him what he wanted.
I slammed the end of my staff down onto the ground with my left hand, reached up to seize the hilt of Fidelacchius with my right, and snarled, “Get her the hell out of that thing, Nicodemus. Right now.”
They laughed at me, all of them together, relaxed and insulting. It would have sounded rehearsed if it were any less well coordinated. Instead, it came off like something they’d done so often over the years that it simply came naturally now. “Look at his face,” Tessa murmured, a little-girl giggle in her voice. “It’s all red.”
I clenched my jaw as hard as I could. It wasn’t much of a stretch to keep pretending to be angry, but I tried to go all Method actor on them. Eat your heart out, Sir Ian. I jerked the Sword a couple of inches from its sheath. “I’m warning you,” I said, trying to get a good look around. “Let the girl go before this gets ugly.”
I must have been doing a pretty good job with the acting. Michael’s voice, high-pitched with alarm, came from behind me. “Harry,” he said, urgently, “wait.”
I took two steps forward, ignoring Michael, and drew the Sword from its sheath. Fidelacchius was a classic, chisel-tipped katana, encased in what looked like an old wooden walking cane. I’d kept the blade clean and oiled while it was in my care. It came free of its casing without a sound and gleamed coldly in the violet light of the fire. “I brought the Sword,” I told Nicodemus, throwing some taunt into my tone. “See? You wanted this, right? In exchange for the girl?”
His eyes narrowed as he stared at the blade, and I noticed, for the first time, that he wore a sword of his own at his hip—as did Tessa, for that matter. Super. I made a mental note not to try fencing any of them. I’m tall and quick, and I’ve got a lunge that can hit from halfway across the county, but when it comes to deadly swordplay, I’m a piker compared to the serious swordsmen, like Michael—and Michael considered himself barely more than a mild challenge to Nicodemus.
“What on earth makes you think he’s going to go through with the deal, wizard?” Tessa asked me, her voice a purr. “Now that you’re here, the Sword is here, the coins are here?”
“Maybe it escaped your notice, bitch,” I snarled, “but the Sword is here. And the other two are as well. Maybe you want to think twice before making a fight of it.”
Thorned Namshiel let out a croaking laugh. “You think six of us fear facing two Knights?”
“I think there’s about five and a half of you, stumpy,” I shot back, taking another step toward them. I could see a little more of the tower’s interior from there. “And for all you know, you’re facing three Knights.”
Nicodemus smiled, showing teeth. “And for all Michael and Sanya know, Dresden, the two of them are facing seven Denarians, not six. You did lead them here, after all.”
“Harry,” Michael said again, his tone tense.
“Shut up!” I half screamed at Nicodemus, taking several steps closer. Almost.
Magog let out a snorting rumble and shuffled a yard closer to me, scraping at the ground with his feet and knuckles, shaking his shaggy, horned head threateningly.
I hefted the Sword and bared my teeth in a snarl. “Oh, you want some of this, Magilla?” I taunted, taking two more steps forward. “Come get some; I’ll show you what keeps happening to Kong.”
There! At the base of the tower wall, a crumpled human form, bloodied, bruised, half-frozen, but alive. He lifted his face as I came into sight and I met the gaze of Gentleman Johnnie Marcone.
They’d tied him to the wall with ropes—something of a mercy, since metal chains would probably have killed him, given the weather over the past few days. One side of his face was puffy with bruises, but both eyes were open. He had a lot of blood on one side of his head. In fact…
Hell’s bells. Something had ripped off the top half of his left ear. Not neatly, either. The flesh had been raggedly torn. The knuckles of his right hand were thickly crusted with blood. Marcone had torn them open on something before he’d been bound. He’d fought them.
I stopped talking trash and started backpedaling toward Michael and Sanya immediately.
Magog froze, his head tilted comically to one side, his expression confused.
Nicodemus sat up in place on the throne, sensing that the plan he’d thought was going along so swimmingly had begun to fall apart.
“Michael!” I said, and tossed Fidelacchius into the air behind me.
“Kill them!” Nicodemus snapped, his voice ringing over the hilltop. “Kill them now!”
Tessa let out a scream that sounded almost orgasmic, and sections of scarlet-and-black chitin seemed to simply rip their way out of her flesh, her body stretching and distending into her mantis sha
pe. Deirdre hissed and arched her back in a kinetic echo of her mother, her hair lengthening into steely blades, her skin darkening. Rosanna howled, and called fire—specifically Hellfire—into her spread hands, while Thorned Namshiel lifted his hand into the air and gathered flickers of green lightning between his fingertips.
Magog simply bellowed and charged, and with howls of hunger and rage a dozen hairless beasts bounded from the shadows all around us and flung themselves at us with bloodthirsty disregard for their own lives. And, as if all of that weren’t enough, half a dozen points of brilliant red light, the emanations of laser sights of hidden gunmen, flashed at us through the mist and sleet.
Oh, yeah. Super plan, Harry.
I had them right where I wanted them.
Chapter Forty-three
I didn’t stop to see what happened to the sword I’d just thrown toward Michael. I plunged my hand into my duster and came out with the sawed-off shotgun. I dropped my staff, lifted the gun in both hands, turned my face away, and shouted, “Fire in the hole!” a second before I pulled the trigger.
Once upon a time I’d seen Kincaid use Dragon’s Breath rounds against Red Court vampires in a fight at Wrigley Field. It had been impressive as hell watching those shotgun rounds belch out jets of flame forty feet long. Since then I’d done a bit of research on fun things you can fire out of a shotgun, and as it turns out, there’s all kinds of interesting stuff you can shoot at people. It’s astonishing, really, the creativity that goes into the design of all the different specialized ammunition available on the market today.
My personal favorite: a round known as the Fireball.
It fires out a spray of superheated particles of metal—tiny, tiny bits of metal blazing away at a temperature of over three thousand degrees. They spread out into an enormous cone of fire and light more than two hundred and fifty feet long, brighter and hotter than any fireworks you’ve ever seen. Forestry services use them to start backfires, and special weapons units use them to create enormous, eye-catching diversions.
I unleashed two Fireball rounds simultaneously, straight up into the air, and for an instant turned that weirdly firelit hilltop as bright as a midsummer noon.
Even with my eyes closed and my face turned away, the world turned bright pink through my eyelids. I heard gunfire from the direction of the cottage, and more from the tree line off to the left, but whatever gunmen Nicodemus had positioned there had been blinded by the flash, and it would take time for their night vision to recover.
That had been half the point of using the Fireball rounds, there in the dark. It wouldn’t give us much time to act, no more than a handful of seconds—but a lot can happen in a handful of seconds, if you’re willing to use them well.
I dropped the shotgun, grabbed my staff, and charged forward, screaming like a madman.
Michael and Sanya came hard on my heels. Michael bore Amoracchius in his right hand and Fidelacchius in his left, and as he ran both blades suddenly became limned in a low, flickering silver light. One of the beasts that had been lurking behind the tower had bounded forward at Nicodemus’s command, even blinded by the flash, but it had the bad fortune to rush past me directly at Michael. The Knight of the Cross twisted his body left, then right, delivering a pair of slashes with each weapon. There were hiss-thumps of swift impact, a scream of pain from the beast, and Michael pounded on, barely even slowing his stride, leaving the still-twitching body of the beast on the ground behind him.
Then the air shook with the force of Magog’s battle roar, and I jerked my gaze around to find the huge Denarian thundering directly toward me. I’d already tested my will against Magog’s power, and I knew I could stop him if I had to do it. I also knew that it would take an enormous effort to manage it, and leave me vulnerable to one of his companions—so instead of trying to stop him, I called upon my will, and as the apelike creature bore down upon me, I swept my staff in an upcurving stroke, like the swing of a golf club, and cried, “Forzare!”
The unseen force of my will reached out, adding to the momentum of Magog’s charge and lifting him from the ground. With a howl Magog went flying over our heads and arched out into the air and over the steep, rocky hillside we’d just climbed. The animalistic howl broke out into savage words in some ancient-sounding tongue, interspersed with screams of fury and grunts of pain as the huge Denarian bounced down the stony, frozen hillside. He sounded more angry than injured, and I knew that I’d taken him out of the equation for only a moment, at most.
Hopefully, that would be enough.
Deirdre came down from the mound of stones, using all four limbs and individual blade-strands of her hair interchangeably for locomotion, so that she looked like some kind of bizarre, enormous spider—until Sanya raised his Kalashnikov and began firing at her. None of that spray-and-pray automatic fire, either. The Russian skidded to a stop and took swift aim. He bounced one round off a rock an inch to Deirdre’s left, put the second shot through her thigh, and raised a cloud of sparks from the steely blades of her hair near her skull with a third round. She let out a shriek of startled pain and fear, and scuttled sideways off into the shadows as swiftly as a roach caught out in the middle of the floor when the light comes on.
Gunfire came at us from both sides, still more or less blind and random, but no less lethal for that. Bullets are the damnedest things, going by. They aren’t dramatic. By themselves they sound almost like big bugs, like something that might buzz by you real fast out in the country on a hot, muggy summer afternoon. It’s almost hard to feel afraid of them, until it truly hits you exactly what they are. It’s kind of handy, actually, that moment of disconnection between the time your senses tell you that death is flicking around randomly a couple of feet away, and the time your mind manages to make you understand that moving around in it is an awful idea. It gives you time to act before you get so scared that you just find a shady spot and stay there.
“Go, go, go!” I called, still charging forward. Our only chance was to keep moving ahead, to rattle Nicodemus and company into jumping out of the way, and to get into the only shelter on that hilltop.
“Kill them!” Nicodemus roared, his voice furious, and then there was the sound of rushing wind from overhead. He must have taken to the sky, flying upon that shadow of his as if upon enormous bat wings.
More of the beasts had closed on Michael, and both Swords were at work again, striking out, silver light gleaming more brightly now from their blades. Sanya let out a shout, and more light flooded the hilltop, casting my own shadow out darker in front of me as Esperacchius joined the battle, and more of the beasts’ cries of pain shook the air.
In front of me Thorned Namshiel howled out in frustration and evident terror in some tongue I didn’t know, and I saw that both Tessa and Hellmaid Rosanna had pulled a vanishing act. Namshiel, his arm outstretched in the general direction of the far side of the stone throne, added, despair in his voice, “Come back!”
Then he turned toward me as he heard my feet churning through the wet snow. He still held a corona of green lightning in his spiny hand, and as his eyes focused on my general location he bared his teeth in a snarl of bitter hatred and flung out his hand, hurling a sphere of crackling emerald electricity at me.
My shield bracelet was ready to go, and I had terror and rage and determination in plenty to empower my defenses. I deflected the sphere at an angle and sent it rebounding harmlessly up into the sky.
“Amateur puppy,” Namshiel snarled, and began to gather more sickly green power at his fingertips. He made an odd little gesture and flicked his fingers, and suddenly five tiny threads of green light leapt toward me on five separate, spiraling paths.
I brought my shield around to intersect the new attack—and realized at the last second that each individual thread of energy was coming at me on a slightly different wavelength of the spectrum of magical energy, a variance of frequencies that my shield couldn’t stretch to cover. Not all at the same time, anyway. I countered three of them and nearl
y got the fourth, but it slipped by me, and I never even touched the fifth strand.
Something that felt like cold, greasy piano wire wrapped around my throat, and I couldn’t breathe.
“Insufferable, arrogant little monkey,” Namshiel hissed. “Playing with the fires of creation. Binding your soul to it, as if you were one of us. How dare you so presume. How dare you wield soulfire against me. I, who was there when your pathetic kind was hewn from the muck.”
It wasn’t so much being strangled to death that I objected to, or even the megalomaniacal monologue I was being subjected to in the process. I just wished that I knew what the hell he was talking about. Granted, I had busted him up pretty good with that silver hand thing, but he was taking it so freaking personally.
I lost track of what I’d been thinking. My head hurt. So did my neck. Thorned Namshiel was ranting about something. Practically foaming at the mouth, really—right up until Amoracchius flashed in a line of silver fire, and Thorned Namshiel’s head hopped up off his shoulders, tumbled twice, and fell into the snow.
Suddenly I took a deep breath and the world started sorting itself out again.
Michael stepped forward, took one look at Namshiel’s body, and hewed the right hand off at the wrist. He picked up the hand and dropped it into a pouch on his sword belt. Meanwhile, Sanya shouldered his rifle and dragged me to my feet.
“Go,” I choked out, barely able to get the words out through my half-crushed throat. I regained my own feet and waved Sanya off me, gesturing ahead. “The lighthouse. Fast.”
Sanya looked from me to the hollow tower and promptly sheathed his Sword to take up his rifle again. The big Russian advanced on the tower, the Kalashnikov at his shoulder, and began putting precise shots through the heads of each of the beasts that had been chained to the walls inside to torment Ivy, who still floated bound within the greater circle.
I followed Sanya as quickly as I could, wheezing in breaths through my aching neck. By the time Michael and I had gotten into the shelter of the mostly closed ring of the tower’s stones, the gunfire from around us had begun to close in on us again as the gunmen’s night vision returned. The tiny window of opportunity the flash of the Fireball rounds had created had waned.