by Jim Butcher
Gard stopped in her tracks and faced me, her pale blue eyes frozen with glacial rage. Her voice turned harsh. “But not everybody impregnates women with spawn that will rip its own way out of its mother’s womb, killing her in the process.”
See, another answer. It was harsher than I would have preferred.
I stopped singing and felt sort of insensitive.
“They’re solitary,” Gard continued in a voice made more terrible for its uninflected calm. “Most of the time, they abduct a victim, rape her, rip her to shreds, and eat her. This one has more in mind. There’s something in mead that makes the grendelkin fertile. It’s going to impregnate her. Create another of its kind.”
A thought occurred to me. “That’s what kind of person still has her instructions taped to her birth control medication. Someone who’s never taken it until very recently.”
“She’s a virgin,” Gard confirmed. “Grendelkin need virgins to reproduce.”
“Kind of a scarce commodity these days,” I said.
Gard snapped out a bitter bark of laughter. “Take it from me, Dresden. Teenagers have always been teenagers. Hormone-ridden, curious, and generally ignorant of the consequences of their actions. There’s never been a glut on the virgin market. Not in Victorian times, not during the Renaissance, not at Hastings, and not now. But even if they were ten times as rare in the modern age, there would still be more virgins to choose from than at any other point in history.” She shook her head. “There are so many people, now.”
We walked along for several paces.
“Interesting inflection, there,” I said. “Speaking about those times as if you’d seen them firsthand. You expect me to believe you’re better than a thousand years old?”
“Would it be so incredible?” she asked.
She had me there. Lots of supernatural critters were immortal, or the next-best thing to it. Even mortal wizards could hang around for three or four centuries. On the other hand, I’d rarely run into an immortal who felt so human to my wizard’s senses.
I stared at her for a second and then said, “You wear it pretty well, if it’s true. I would have guessed you were about thirty.”
Her teeth flashed in the dim light. “I believe it’s currently considered more polite to guess twenty-nine.”
“Me and polite have never been on close terms.”
Gard nodded. “I like that about you. You say what you think. You act. It’s rare in this age.”
I kept on the trail, quiet for a time, until Mouse stopped in his tracks and made an almost inaudible sound in his chest. I held up a hand, halting. Gard went silent and still.
I knelt down by the dog and whispered, “What is it, boy?”
Mouse stared intently ahead, his nose quivering. Then he paced forward, uncertainly, and pawed at the floor near the wall.
I followed him, light in hand. On the wet stone floor were a few tufts of greyish hair. I chewed my lip and lifted the light to examine the wall. There were long scratches in the stone—not much wider than a thumbnail, but they were deep. You couldn’t easily see the bottom of the scratch marks.
Gard came up and peered over my shoulder. Amid the scents of lime and mildew, her perfume, something floral I didn’t recognize, was a pleasant distraction. “Something sharp made those,” she murmured.
“Yeah,” I said, collecting the hairs. “Hold up your ax.”
She did. I touched the hairs to the edge of the blade. They curled away from it as they touched it, blackening and shriveling, and adding the scent of burned hair to the mix.
“Wonderful.” I sighed.
Gard lifted her eyebrows and glanced at me. “Faeries?”
I nodded. “Malks, almost certainly.”
“Malks?”
“Winterfae,” I said. “Felines. About the size of a bobcat.”
“Nothing steel can’t handle, then,” she said, rising briskly.
“Yeah,” I said. “You could probably handle half a dozen.”
She nodded once, brandished the ax, and turned to continue down the tunnel.
“Which is why they tend to run in packs of twenty,” I added, a couple of steps later.
Gard stopped and gave me a glare.
“That’s called sharing information,” I said. I gestured at the wall. “These are territorial markings for the local pack. Malks are stronger than natural animals, quick, almost invisible when they want to be, and their claws are sharper and harder than surgical steel. I once saw a malk shred an aluminum baseball bat to slivers. And if that wasn’t enough, they’re sentient. Smarter than some people I know.”
“Od’s bodkin,” Gard swore quietly. “Can you handle them?”
“They don’t like fire,” I said. “But in an enclosed space like this, I don’t like it much, either.”
Gard nodded once. “Can we treat with them?” she asked. “Buy passage?”
“They’ll keep their word, like any fae,” I said. “If you can get them to give it in the first place. But think of how cats enjoy hunting, even when they aren’t hungry. Think about how they toy with their prey sometimes. Then distill that joyful little killer instinct out of every cat in Chicago and pour it all into one malk. They’re to cats what Hannibal Lecter is to people.”
“Negotiation isn’t an option, then.”
I shook my head. “I don’t think we have anything to offer them that they’ll want more than our screams and meat, no.”
Gard nodded, frowning. “Best if they never notice us at all, then.”
“Nice thought,” I said. “But these things have a cat’s senses. I could probably hide us from their sight or hearing, but not both. And they could still smell us.”
Gard frowned. She reached into her coat pocket and drew out a slim box of aged, pale ivory. She opened it and began gingerly sorting through a number of small ivory squares.
“Scrabble tiles?” I asked. “I don’t want to play with malks. They’re really bad about using plurals and proper names.”
“They’re runes,” Gard said quietly. She found the one she was after, took a steadying breath, and then removed a single square from the ivory box with the same cautious reverence I’d seen soldiers use with military explosives. She closed the box and put it back in her pocket, holding the single ivory chit carefully in front of her on her palm.
I was familiar with Norse runes. The rune on the ivory square in her hand was totally unknown to me. “Um. What’s that?” I asked.
“A rune of Routine,” she said quietly. “You said you were skilled with illusion magic. If you can make us look like them, even for a few moments, it should allow us to pass through them unnoticed, as if we were a normal part of their day.”
Technically, I had told Gard I was familiar with illusion magic, not skilled. Truth be told, it was probably my weakest skill set. Nobody’s good at everything, right? I’m good with the kaboom magic. My actual use of illusion hadn’t passed much beyond the craft’s equivalent of painting a few portraits of fruit bowls.
But I’d just have to hope that what Gard didn’t know wouldn’t get us both killed. Elizabeth didn’t have much time, and I didn’t have many options. Besides, what did we have to lose? If the bid to sneak by failed, we could always fall back on negotiating or slugging it out.
Mouse gave me a sober look.
“Groovy,” I said. “Let’s do it.”
A GOOD ILLUSION is all about imagination. You create a picture in your mind, imagining every detail; imagining so hard that the image in your head becomes nearly tangible, almost real. You have to be able to see it, hear it, touch it, taste it, smell it, to engage all your senses in its (theoretical) reality. If you can do that, if you can really believe in your fake version of reality, then you can pour energy into it and create it in the minds and senses of everyone looking at it.
For the record, it’s also how all the best liars do business—by making their imagined version of things so coherent that they almost believe it themselves.
I’m n
ot a terribly good liar, but I knew the basics of how to make an illusion work, and I had two secret weapons. The first was the tuft of hair from an actual malk, which I could use to aid in the accuracy of my illusion. The second was a buddy of mine, a big grey tomcat named Mister who deigned to share his apartment with Mouse and me. Mister didn’t come with me on cases, being above such trivial matters, but he found me pleasant company when I was at home and not moving around too much, except when he didn’t, in which case he went rambling.
I closed my eyes once I’d drawn my chalk circle, gripped the malk hair in my hand, and started my image on a model of Mister. I’d seen malks a couple of times, and most of them bore the same kinds of battle scars Mister proudly wore. They didn’t look exactly like cats, though. Their heads were shaped differently, and their fur was rougher, stiffer. The paws had one too many digits on them, too, and were wider than a cat’s—but the motion as they moved was precisely the same.
“Noctus ex illuminus,” I murmured once the image was firmly fixed in my thoughts, that of three ugly, lean, battle-marked malks walking through on their own calm business. I sent out the energy that would power the glamour and broke the circle with a slow, careful motion.
“Is it working?” Gard asked quietly.
“Yeah,” I said, focused on the illusion, my eyes still closed. I fumbled about until I found Mouse’s broad back, then rested one hand on his fur. “Stop distracting me. Walk.”
“Very well.” She drew in a short breath, said something, and then there was a snapping sound and a flash of light. “The rune is active,” she said. She put her hand on my shoulder. The malks weren’t using any light sources, and if a group of apparent malks tried to walk through with one, it would kind of spoil the effect we were trying to achieve. So we’d have to make the walk in the dark. “We have perhaps five minutes.”
I grunted, touched my dog, and we all started walking, trusting Mouse to guide our steps. Even though it was dark, I didn’t dare open my eyes. Any distraction from the image in my head would cause it to disintegrate like toilet paper in a hurricane. So I walked, concentrating, and hoped like hell it worked.
I couldn’t spare any brain-time for counting, but we walked for what felt like half an hour, and I was getting set to ask Gard if we were through yet, when an inhuman voice not a foot from my left ear said in plain English, “More of these new claws arrive every day. We are hungry. We should shred the ape and have done.”
I nearly fell on my ass, it startled me so much, but I held on to the image in my head. I’d heard malks speak before, with their odd inflections and unsettling intonations, and the sound only reinforced the image in my head.
A round of both supporting and disparaging comments rose from all around me, all in lazy, malk-inflected English. There were more than twenty of them. There was a small horde.
“Patience,” said another malk. The tone of voice somehow suggested this was a conversation that had repeated itself a million times. “Let the ape think it has cowed us into acting as its door wardens. It hunts in the wizard’s territory. The wizard will come to face it. The Erlking will give us great favor when we bring the wizard’s head.”
Gosh. I felt famous.
“I’m weary of waiting,” said another malk. “Let us kill the ape and its prey and then hunt the wizard down.”
“Patience, hunters. The wizard will come to us,” the first one said. “The ape’s turn will come, after we have brought down the wizard.” There was an unmistakable note of pleasure in its voice. “And his little dog, too.”
Mouse made another subvocal rumble in his chest. I could, just barely, feel it in his back. He kept walking, though, and we passed through the stretch of tunnel occupied by the malks. It was another endless stretch of minutes and several turns before Gard let out her breath between her teeth and said, “There were more than twenty.”
“Yeah, I kind of noticed that.”
“I think we are past them.”
I sighed and released the image I’d been holding in my head, calling forth dim light from my amulet. Or tried to release the image, at any rate. I opened my eyes and blinked several times, but my head was like one of those TVs at the department store, when one image has been burned into it for too long. I looked at Mouse and Gard, and had trouble shaking the picture of the savage, squash-headed malks I’d been imagining around them with such intensity.
“Do you have another of those rune things?” I asked her.
“No,” Gard said.
“We’ll have to get creative on the way out,” I said.
“There’s no need to worry about that yet,” she said, and started walking forward again.
“Sure there is. Once we get the girl, we have to get back with her. Christ, haven’t you read any Joseph Campbell at all?”
She shrugged one shoulder. “Grendelkin are difficult opponents. Either we’ll die, or it will. So there’s only a fifty-fifty chance that we’ll need to worry about the malks on the way out. Why waste the effort until we know if it will be necessary?”
“Call me crazy, but I find that if I plan for the big things, like how to get back to the surface, it makes it a little simpler to manage the little things. Like how to keep on breathing.”
She held up a hand and said, “Wait.”
I stopped in my tracks, listening. Mouse came to a halt, snuffling at the air, his ears twitching around like little radar dishes, but he gave no sign that he’d detected lurking danger.
“We’re close to its lair,” she murmured.
I arched an eyebrow. The tunnel looked exactly the same as it had for several moments now. “How do you know?”
“I can feel it,” she said.
“You can do that?”
She started forward. “Yes. It’s how I knew it was moving in the city to begin with.”
I ground my teeth. “It might be nice if you considered sharing that kind of information.”
“It isn’t far,” she said. “We might be in time. Come on.”
I felt my eyebrows go up. Mouse had us both beat when it came to purely physical sensory input, and he’d given no indication of a hostile presence ahead. My own senses were attuned to all kinds of supernatural energies, and I’d kept them focused ever since we’d entered Undertown. I hadn’t sensed any stirring of any kind that would indicate some kind of malevolent presence.
If knowledge is power, then it follows that ignorance is weakness. In my line of work, ignorance can get you killed. Gard hadn’t said anything about any kind of mystic connection between herself and this beastie, but it was the most likely explanation for how she could sense its presence when I couldn’t.
The problem with that was that those kinds of connections generally didn’t flow one-way. If she could sense the grendelkin, odds were the grendelkin could sense her right back.
“Whoa, wait,” I said. “If this thing might know we’re coming, we don’t want to go rushing in blind.”
“There’s no time. It’s almost ready to breed.” There was a hint of a snarl in her words as the ax came down off her shoulder. Gard pulled what looked like a road flare out of her duffel bag and tossed the bag aside.
Then she threw back her head and let out a scream of pure, unholy defiance. The sound was so loud, so raw, so primal, it hardly seemed human. It wasn’t a word, but that didn’t stop her howl from eloquently declaring Gard’s rage, her utter contempt for danger, for life—and for death. That battle cry scared the living snot out of me, and it wasn’t even aimed in my direction.
Gard struck the flare to life with a flick of a wrist and shot me a glance over her shoulder. Eerie green light played up over her face, casting bizarre shadows, and her icy eyes were very wide and white-rimmed above a smile stretched so tightly that the blood had drained from her lips. Her voice quavered disconcertingly. “Enough talk.”
Holy Schwarzenegger.
Gard had lost it.
This wasn’t the reaction of the cool, reasoning professional I’d seen wo
rking for Marcone. I’d never actually seen anyone go truly, old-school berserkergang, but that scream . . . It was like hearing an echo rolling down through the centuries from an ancient world, a more savage world, now lost to the mists of time.
And suddenly I had no trouble at all believing her age.
She charged forward, whipping her ax lightly around with her right hand, holding the blazing star of the flare in her left. Gard let out another banshee shriek as she went, a wordless cry of challenge to the grendelkin that declared her intent as clearly as any horde of phonemes: I am coming to kill you.
And ahead of us in the tunnels, something much, much bigger than Gard answered her, a deep-chested, basso bellow that shook the walls of the tunnel in answer: Bring it on.
My knees turned shaky. Hell, even Mouse stood with his ears pressed against his skull, tail held low, body set in a slight crouch. I doubt I looked any more courageous than he did, but I kicked my brain into gear, spat out a nervous curse, and hurried after her.
Charging in headlong might be a really stupid idea, but it would be an even worse idea to stand around doing nothing, throwing away the only help I was likely to get. Besides, for better or worse, I’d agreed to work with Gard, and I wasn’t going to let her go in without covering her back.
So I charged headlong down the tunnel toward the source of the terrifying bellow. Mouse, perhaps wiser than I, hesitated a few seconds longer, then made up for it on the way down the tunnel, until he was running a pace in front of me, matching my stride. We’d gone maybe twenty yards before his breath began to rumble out in a growl of pure hostility, and he let out his own roar of challenge.
Hey, when in Cimmeria, do as the Cimmerians do. I screamed, too. It got lost in all the echoes bouncing around the tunnels.
Gard, running hard ten paces ahead of me, burst into a chamber. She gathered herself in a sudden leap, flipping neatly in the air, and plummeted from sight. The falling green light of the flare showed me that the tunnel opened into the top of a chamber the size of a small hotel atrium, and if Mouse hadn’t stopped first and leaned back against me, I might have slid over the edge before I could stop. As it was, I got a really good look at a drop of at least thirty feet to a wet stone floor.