by Jim Butcher
“How did you know?” Michael asked, panting. “How did you know they would break if we charged them?”
“You don’t survive two thousand years in a game like this one without predator reflexes,” I replied. “Any predator in the world reacts the same way to a loud noise, a bright flash, and a noisy and unexpected charge. They get the hell out of the way. Can’t really help themselves. Habit of a couple millennia is a bitch to break.”
Sanya calmly shot another beast.
I shrugged. “Nicodemus and company thought that they knew how things were going to proceed, and when they didn’t go the way they expected, they got flustered. So the Nickelheads got clear.” I pursed my lips. “Of course, they’re going to be back in a minute. And very upset. Hey, there, Marcone.”
“Dresden,” Marcone said, as if we’d passed each other outside the coffee shop. He sounded a little tired, but calm. All things considered, that was probably an indicator of exactly how much moxie the crime lord had. “Can you help the child?”
Dammit. That’s the thing I hate most about Marcone. Every once in a while he says or does something that makes it difficult to label him “scum, criminal” and file him neatly away in a drawer somewhere. I glared at him. He returned the glare with a faint, knowing smile. I muttered under my breath and turned to study the elaborate circle, while Sanya finished the last of the beasts.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Michael said quietly, staring.
I didn’t blame him. Even among professionals this circle was impressive. Lots of luminous, glowing lines and swirls involved, and that always looks fantastic, especially at night. The gold and silver and precious stones didn’t hurt things, either. The light and music show being put on by the chimes and crystals added a wonderful little eerie edge to it all, especially given the grotesque art that framed the interior magical symbology. “This is some upper-tier stuff,” I said quietly. “It will be another century, maybe two, before I’m good enough to come close to this level of work. It’s delicate. One single thing a fraction of an inch out of place and the whole thing goes kablooie. It’s powerful. When you’re putting this together, if any one of a couple of dozen of the power flows slips for even an instant, the whole thing goes out of balance and could go up with enough force to blow the top off of this whole hillside. It took a freaking genius to put this together, Michael.”
I hefted my staff.
“Fortunately,” I said, and took a two-handed swing at the nearest stand of slender, delicate crystal. It shattered with gratifying ease, and the encasing light around the greater circle began to waver and dissipate. “It only takes a monkey with a big stick to take it apart.”
And I waded into the circle, smashing things with my staff. It was therapeutic. God knows how many times the bad guys had destroyed the careful work of lifetimes when they’d robbed people of homes, of loved ones, of life itself. It felt sort of nice to bring a little cup of Shiva D into their lives for a change. I shattered the crystals that bent light into a cage to hold the Archive prisoner. I bent and mashed the tuning forks that focused sound into chains. I crushed the depictions of bondage and imprisonment meant to restrain the very idea of freedom, and from there I went on to break ivory rune sticks, to crush glyph-scribed gems, to pound into illegibility golden plates inscribed with sigils of imprisonment.
I’m not sure at which point I started screaming in outrage. Somewhere along the line, though, it hit me that these people had taken magic, the power of life, of creation, a force meant to create and protect, to learn and preserve, and they had bent and twisted it into a blasphemy, an obscenity. They had used it to imprison and torment, to torture and maim, all in an attempt to enslave and destroy. Worse, they had turned magic against the Archive, against the safeguard of knowledge itself—and still worse, against a child.
I didn’t stop until I had shattered their expensive, elaborate, elegant torture chamber, until I could deliberately drag my staff across the last, smooth golden circle at the innermost point of the design, marring it all the way across its surface, breaking the last remaining structure of the spell.
The energies of the prison let loose with an outraged howl, sailing straight up into the air overhead in a column of furious purple light. I thought I could see faces twisting and spinning inside it for a few seconds, but then the light faded, and Ivy fell limply to the cold ground, just a naked little girl, bruised and scratched and half-unconscious with cold.
Michael was at my side at once, removing his cloak. I took it and wrapped Ivy in it. She made whimpering sounds of protest, but she wasn’t really conscious. I picked her up and held her close to me, getting as much of my own coat around her as I could.
I looked up and found Marcone watching me steadily. Sanya had cut him free from the wall and evidently given the crime lord the cloak off his back. Marcone now hunched against the sleet in the white cloak, holding one of the chemical warming packs between his hands. He stood just a bit over average height and was of medium build, so Sanya’s cloak covered him like a blanket. “Will she be all right?” Marcone asked.
“She will,” I said with determination. “She damned well will.”
“Down!” barked Sanya.
Bullets raised sparks off the inside of the lighthouse and rattled wildly around its interior. Everyone got down. I made sure I had my body and my duster between Ivy and any incoming rounds. Sanya leaned out for a second and squeezed off a couple of shots, then hurriedly got back under cover again. The volume of fire from the outside grew.
“They’re bringing up reinforcements from down the hill,” Sanya reported. “Heavier weapons, too.”
Marcone glanced around the featureless interior of the ruined lighthouse. “If any of them have grenades, this is going to be a relatively brief rescue operation.”
Sanya leaned out and snapped off another pair of shots, barely getting back before return fire started chewing at the stone where he’d been. He muttered under his breath and changed magazines on his rifle.
The enemy gunfire suddenly ceased. There was silence on the hilltop for twenty or thirty seconds. Then Nicodemus’s voice, filled with anger, came through the air. “Dresden!”
“What?” I called back.
“I’m going to give you one chance to survive this. Give me the girl. Give me the coins. Give me the sword. Do that, and I’ll let you walk away alive.”
“Hah!” I said. It was possible that I didn’t feel quite as confident as I sounded. “Or maybe I’ll just leave from here.”
“Cross into the Nevernever from where you’re standing?” Nicodemus asked. “You’d be better off asking the Russian to put a bullet through your head for you. I know what lives on the other side.”
Given that they’d chosen this location for the greater circle precisely because it was a source of intense dark energy, I had no trouble believing that it connected to some nasty portions of the Nevernever. There was every chance that Nicodemus was not bluffing.
“How do I know that you won’t kill me the minute you get what you want?” I called back.
“Harry!” Michael hissed.
I shushed him.
“We both know what my word is worth,” Nicodemus said, his voice dry. “Really, Dresden. If we can’t trust each other, what’s the point in talking at all?”
Heh. Gaining enough time to await the second half of what those Fireballs were supposed to accomplish, that’s what.
The twin two-hundred-fifty-foot jets of fire had briefly blinded our enemies, true.
But they’d done something else, too.
Marcone tilted his head to one side for a moment and then murmured, “Does anyone else hear…strings?”
“Ah,” I said, and pumped my fist in the air. “Ah-hahahah! Have you ever heard anything so magnificently pompous and overblown in your life?”
Deep, ringing French horns joined the string sections, echoing over the hilltop.
“What is that?” Sanya murmured.
“That,
” I crowed, “is Wagner, baby!”
Never let it be said that a Chooser of the Slain can’t make an entrance.
Miss Gard brought the reconditioned Huey up from the eastern side of the island, flying about a quarter of an inch over the treetops, blasting “The Ride of the Valkyries” from loudspeakers mounted on the chopper’s underside. Wind, sleet, and all, still she flew flawlessly through the night, having used the twin jets of the Fireball rounds, visible for miles over the pitch-black lake, to orient herself as to where to arrive. The Huey turned broadside as it rose over the hilltop, music blaring loud enough to shake snow from the treetops. The side door of the chopper was open, revealing Mister Hendricks manning a rotating-barreled minigun fixed to the deck of the helicopter—completely illegally, of course.
But then, I suppose that’s really one major advantage to working with criminals. They just don’t care about that sort of thing.
The barrels began to spin, and a tongue of flame licked out from the front of the gun. Snow and earth erupted into the air in a long trench in front of the cannon. I risked a peek and saw men clad in dark fatigues leaping for cover as a swath of devastation slewed back and forth across the open hilltop and pounded the mound of stones into a mound of gravel.
“There’s our ride!” I said. “Let’s go!”
Sanya led the way, firing off more or less random shots at anyone who wasn’t already lying flat in an effort to avoid fire from the gun on the helicopter. Some of Nicodemus’s troops were crazier than others. Several of them jumped up and tried to come after us. That minigun had been designed to shoot down airplanes. What the rounds left of human bodies was barely recognizable as such.
There was no place for the chopper to land, but a line came down from the other side, lowered by a winch while the aircraft hovered above us. I looked up to see Luccio operating the winch, her face pale, but her eyes glittering with excitement. She was how Gard had been able to know where to look for the signal—I’d given Anastasia a couple of my hairs to use in a tracking spell, and she’d been following me ever since I left to meet Rosanna for the trade.
The line came down with a lift harness attached to it. “Marcone,” I shouted over the sound of the rotors and the minigun—which is to say, I was more or less mouthing it exaggeratedly. “You first. That was the deal.”
He shook his head and pointed his finger at Ivy.
I snarled and pushed the girl into his arms, then started slapping the harness over him. He got it after a second, and in a couple more we had him secured in the harness and holding the semiconscious Ivy tight against him. I gave Luccio the thumbs-up, and Marcone and Ivy went zipping gracefully up the line to the chopper, wrapped in the white cloak, the scarlet crosses on it standing out sharply in the winter light. Luccio helped haul them in, and a second later the empty harness came down again.
“Sanya!” I said.
The Russian passed me the Kalashnikov and slipped into the harness, then ascended to the helicopter. Again the empty harness came down—though now there were occasional bursts of heavier rounds coming from down the slope of the hillside, as evidenced by tracer fire that would sometimes go tumbling by in the night. It would be immediately answered by the far heavier fire of the minigun, but Gard couldn’t possibly keep the chopper there for long.
“Harry!” Michael said, offering me the harness.
I was about to take it, but by chance I looked up and saw Gard looking down at us through the Plexiglas bubble around the pilot’s seat—looking at Michael with an absolutely unnerving intensity that I had seen on her face once before, and my heart started hammering in terror.
The last time she’d looked like that, I’d been in an alley outside Bock Ordered Books back in Chicago, and a necromancer named Corpsetaker and a ghoul named Li Xian had been about to murder me. A few minutes later Gard had told Marcone that she had seen that it was my fate to die then and there. The only reason that I survived it was that Marcone had intervened.
But even if I’d never seen that look on her face before, I figured that anytime a Valkyrie hovering over a battlefield suddenly gets real interested in a particular warrior, it ain’t good.
I’d made the grasshopper a promise. If things were about to get hairy for whoever was left on the ground, it wouldn’t be Molly’s dad that had to deal with it.
“You first,” I said.
He started to argue.
I shoved the harness into his chest. “Dammit, Michael!”
He grimaced, shook his head at me, and then sheathed Amoracchius. Still holding Fidelacchius in his hand, he shrugged quickly into the harness. I gave Luccio the thumbs-up, and Michael began to rise. Gard frowned faintly, and some of my screaming tension started to ease.
Tessa and Rosanna came out from behind veils that were as good as anything Molly could have done, and I didn’t have to be Sherlock to deduce who had done the lion’s share of the work on the greater circle that had contained the Archive. I had half a second to act, but I got tangled in the strap of Sanya’s gun, which he’d handed me so that I could defend myself in case I was suddenly attacked. Thank you, Sanya.
Tessa, her pretty human face showing, her eyes gleaming with manic glee, swept a mantis claw at my head, and I at least managed to interpose the rifle before she ripped my head off. Only instead of smashing the gun, as I’d expected, she ripped it out of my hand, just as easily as taking candy from a baby and spun away from me.
Then she winked at me, blew me a kiss, and opened fire on Michael with the Kalashnikov on full automatic from no more than ten feet away.
My friend didn’t scream as bullets tore into him. He just jerked once in a spray of scarlet and went limp.
Fidelacchius tumbled from his fingers and fell to the ground.
Sparks flew from the Huey as the bullets tore into it, too, and a burst of flame and smoke poured from a vent on one side of its fuselage. It dipped sharply to one side, and for a second I thought it was simply going to roll over and into the ground—but then it recovered, drunkenly, gathering momentum like a car sliding down an icy hill, still dragging my friend’s unmoving body on the trailing cable like a baited hook at the end of a fishing line, and vanished into the darkness.
Chapter Forty-four
Even as some part of me noted all of that happening, the rest of me started screaming in raw, red rage, in agony, in denial.
I was pretty sure I had worked out who had taken my blasting rod away. I was pretty sure I knew why they’d done it. I even thought that, looked at from a certain point of view, it might not have been an entirely stupid idea.
But as of now, I officially did not care.
I didn’t have my blasting rod with me, and I was not sure that my raw power, no matter how furious, would be enough to hurt Tessa through the defenses the Fallen gave her. I had never been able to attain the kind of precision I would need without artificial aid.
As of right now, I officially did not care about that, either.
I focused my rage, focused my anger, focused my hate and my denial and my pain. I blocked away everything in the entire universe but the thought of my friend’s bloody body hanging from that rope, and a spot two inches across in the center of Tessa’s chest.
Then I drew in a breath, whirling a hand over my head and bellowed through my ragged throat, so loudly that it felt like something tore, “Fuego, pyrofuego!” I stabbed the first two fingers of my right hand forward as I did, unleashing my fury and my will. “Burn!”
A bar of blue-white fire so dense that it was nearly a solid object lashed across the distance from me to Tessa and slammed into her like an enormous spear.
The mantislike Denarian threw back her pretty face and screamed in agony as the shaft of fire bored cleanly through her, melting a wide hole that burned wider still before searing itself shut. She went down, howling and thrashing, burned by fire far deadlier and more destructive than any I had ever called before, with a blasting rod or without one.
I sensed something moving
toward me from the side and rolled out of the way just as one of Rosanna’s cloven hooves slashed through the air where my thigh had been an instant before. If she’d struck she would have opened the flesh to the bone. I whipped my staff at her face, forcing her to duck away, and followed with a surge of will and a shout of, “Forzare!” It wasn’t my best kinetic strike, but it was a blow heavy enough to throw her a dozen feet through the air and into a tumble over the ground.
I seized the hilt of Fidelacchius from where the Sword had fallen. As my fingers closed around the weapon I realized several points of cold logic, as if having them explained to me by a calm, rational, wise old man who was utterly unperturbed by my rage.
First, I realized that I was now alone on an uncharted island in the middle of Lake Michigan, with nothing but madmen and fallen angels for company.
Second, that I still had the coins and the Sword that Nicodemus had been after—and that he was still going to be after them.
Third, that the Denarians were sure to be really ticked off, now that I’d taken their real prize from them.
Fourth…
The ground shook, as if with the impact of a heavy foot.
Fourth, that since I had confounded Summer’s attempt to track me via use of the little oak leaf pin, Eldest Brother Gruff had probably been waiting for me to use fire magic in battle—the same magic that I had entwined with the power of the Summer Lady two years ago at Arctis Tor. It was the most probable reason why Mab, the most likely suspect for messing with my head, would have taken my blasting rod and my memories of how to use fire magic in battle—to prevent me from inadvertently revealing my position to Summer every time I got into a tussle.
Only now that I had, Eldest Gruff was probably on his way to visit.