by Jim Butcher
The old man lifted his right hand overhead and brought it down with another ringing word, and unseen force came smashing down on the cornerhound from overhead like an invisible pile driver. But as the magical strike slammed home, the cornerhound’s scales undulated in a nauseating wave, tentacles flickering. There was an enormous crushing, grinding sound, and in a circle around the terrible hound, the concrete was crushed to gravel, though the hound only staggered.
Before the Outsider could recover, the old man shoved the end of his staff to within six inches of its head, shouted a word, and unleashed a beam of fire no thicker than a thread and brighter than the noonday freaking sun.
The cornerhound rolled, and instead of cutting the creature in half, my grandfather’s spell sliced off the little tentacles upon the creature’s flank and two-thirds of its tail.
The Outsider’s tentacle cluster swept toward Ebenezar, quivering wildly, and though I couldn’t hear anything, the air shook like the speakers at a major concert, the air around them rippling with something that looked like summer heat waves on asphalt.
The edge of that cone of quivering air emanating from the Outsider’s tentacle face brushed against my grandfather. The old man sucked in a short huff of surprised breath, staggered, and collapsed.
Sudden terror for my grandfather crashed over me, mingling with my frustration and rage from moments before, like gasoline being mixed with petroleum jelly.
And the Winter mantle gleefully threw a lit match.
I thrust the end of my staff at the creature and shouted, “Forzare!”
Once again, the cornerhound crouched defensively, tentacles quivering—but the old man’s fire spell had seared half of them away, and on that side, my spell hammered into the hound like a runaway Volkswagen. There was a thump of impact, and the thousand-pound Outsider staggered several steps to one side, talons raking at the concrete in an effort to resist. The thing was incredibly powerful.
Right. See, the thing about supernatural strength is that to use it effectively, you’ve got to brace yourself against the ground or terrain or whatever—otherwise, all you do when you lob a supernaturally powerful punch or toss a tractor truck is throw yourself a ways back. Get something super-strong off its balance or off the ground, and it isn’t nearly as dangerous as it was a second before.
So while the cornerhound was still sliding across the concrete, I summoned my power, gathered it into a small point, focusing its purpose clearly in my mind, and shouted, “Forzare!” again, and flung the beastie straight up off of the ground. As it rocketed up, I gathered energy frantically again, waiting to line my shot up with the side of the creature Ebenezar had wounded as it tumbled back toward the ground, and then I focused forward and shouted again, unleashing even more energy.
This time, the telekinetic blow struck the thing like some kind of enormous batter swinging for the fences, and it flew down the alley, across the nearest side street, and out of sight. A moment later, in the distance, I heard the sound of something smashing against what sounded like a mostly empty municipal trash bin.
I staggered, suddenly dizzy and weary from throwing the three energy-intensive spells back to back. I stumbled and had to lean on my staff to keep from falling, but I made it to Ebenezar’s side and helped him sit up.
“What happened?” I asked him.
His voice came out rough. “Infrasonic attack. Like a tiger’s roar. Super-low-pitched notes, below what humans can hear, capable of making your organs vibrate. Can have a bunch of effects …” He blinked his eyes several times, owlishly, and then said, “Hell of a thing to try to stop. Help me stand up.”
I did, drunkenly. “How tough are these things?”
“Very,” he said. He planted his staff and blinked several more times, then peered around and nodded. “Very damned hard to kill.”
“Then we don’t have very long,” I said.
“Out of sight and clear of people,” he said.
“Parking garage less than a block off,” I said. “This w …”
My panting voice trailed off.
Because suddenly corners in buildings all around us had begun to glow with blue light.
“Stars and stones,” breathed the old man. “They’ve sent the whole pack.”
“We should get to my car,” I said.
“Your car got any right-angle corners in it?” Ebenezar said. “Because if it does, we’ll have those things coming at us out of the dashboard or through the backseat.” He shook his head. “Our only chance is to bind and banish them. Move, boy, get us to that garage.”
The buildings around us bulged and warped and deep bass-note sounds began to drop down below the range of human hearing all around us.
“Sooner’d be better than later,” the old wizard said.
“Right,” I said, and forced my weary body to start moving. “Come on.”
Chapter
Twelve
We ran, and the cornerhounds followed us.
I wasn’t sure how many of them had taken up our trail. It was more than half a dozen, but fewer than twenty. They made oddly light-sounding skittering noises and created small clouds of sparks when they moved on concrete, the result of those steel-hard claws striking the ground. They clung to the sides of buildings like giant spiders, those same talons biting into brick and concrete, easily supporting their weight.
I took us down the alley, in the direction opposite the one where I’d tossed the first cornerhound, across the street, a slight jog, and then down the alley beyond.
“They aren’t following real close,” I noted. All the cardio lately was standing me in good stead now. My heart was working and I was breathing hard and I barely noticed.
“They know we’re dangerous,” the old man panted. “They aren’t used to dealing with our reality, or with beings that can actually hurt them. Makes them hesitate.”
“Here,” I said, and turned into the opening of a parking garage, weaving around the wooden arm that would swing up to allow cars in. I slowed down enough to let the old man catch up to me. He wasn’t covering the ground as easy as I was.
Behind us, the cornerhounds … didn’t lope so much as scuttle, as if they had to stop to consider each burst of motion before committing to it. They were deathly swift when they moved, absolutely oily with speed—and when they stopped, they were statue still, except for the quivering of the little tentacles running down their flanks. On any one of them, it might have looked a little silly. By the time you spread the sudden, darting motions out to a baker’s dozen or so of them, it crossed the line to unnerving. There was something exceptionally primitive about the motion, something reptilian, even insectile about it. It would have been creepy if the hounds had been the size of beagles. When they were more the size of horses, it was downright terrifying.
“Fire’s best,” the old man continued, grimly keeping pace with me. “Anything magic they can shrug off to one degree or another. All-natural fire works just fine on ’em, though.”
“What’s the difference where the fire came from?” I asked.
“The difference is, anything we just make out of our will, they can slip most of the punch,” he said. “I ain’t got time to give you a graduate seminar on intention versus the natural operation of the universe until you’ve completed my ‘why it’s a damned stupid thing to trust vampires’ course.”
The parking garage was built under the apartment building above us, and the top level was mostly full. There wouldn’t be room to do much fighting in there, which meant there was only one way to go: down. As a rule, when you’re running from something, up or down tends to be a bad idea. The higher up or the farther down you go, the fewer and fewer ways there are out of the situation, and when something is chasing you, keeping your options open is another way of saying staying alive.
I gave the old man a worried glance as I headed down. He looked around and came to the same conclusion I had. “No help for it, Hoss. Head down.”
“No need to drag the White C
ourt into this,” I said to him as I led the way. “They aren’t involved yet.”
“You’re here in the first place because you think you’re protecting the vampire’s concubine,” the old man groused. “And for all you know, they summoned these things and sent them after you.”
I glanced back as the first couple or three cornerhounds slithered around the corner at the top of the ramp behind us and let out chest-shivering calls of discovery. Ahead of us, where walls and roof or floor formed a corner, sickly blue light began to glow.
“Not Lara’s style,” I panted, leading us down another level. “She does the cloak-and-dagger stuff for politics, but for her personal enemies, she’s reliable. If she wanted me dead, she’d come at me with a knife. She’s straightforward that way.”
“Until the one time she isn’t, and you’re too dead to complain about how reliable vampires ain’t,” Ebenezar growled.
We spilled out onto the bottom level of the parking garage. It was mostly empty. We were near the limit of how low solid ground could go in this part of the city: The lowest depressions in the concrete were full of water that had the dank smell of long-standing sources of mold and mildew. We had to have been at the water level of the lake, or a little under.
“Place like this isn’t going to react well to explosions and such,” I noted, looking around.
“And it don’t go quite low enough to get us enough water to get them immersed in it,” he added. “All right, boy. Time to start teaching you this starborn business.”
I blinked and almost tripped over my own feet. “Wait, what? You’re going to start talking about it … now?!”
He cuffed me on the shoulder irritably. “We got maybe half a minute. Do you want to take a walk down memory lane?”
“Freaking wizards,” I complained, rubbing at my shoulder. “Fine, tell me.”
“Every couple or three wizard generations,” Ebenezar said, “the stars line up just right, and what amounts to a spotlight plays over the earth for a few hours. Any child born within that light—”
“Is starborn. I get it,” I said. “What does it mean?”
“Power against the Outsiders,” the old man growled. “Among other things, that their minds can’t be magically tainted by contact with anything from Outside. Which means …”
My eyes widened. “Hell’s bells,” I breathed.
See, when it comes to entities from way outside everyday reality, there are only a few options for dealing with them. In the first place, they aren’t really here, in a strictly physical sense. They’re coming in from outside of the mortal world, and that means constructing a body from ectoplasm and infusing it with enough energy and will to serve as a kind of avatar or drone for the supernatural being, still safely in its home reality. That’s what the cornerhounds had done when they’d come to Chicago to mess with us.
Fighting something like that was often difficult. The bodies they inhabited tended to have no need for things like sensing pain, for example, and it took a considerable amount of extra energy to make a hit sink home. To fight them physically, you had to dismantle the machinery of the construct’s body, breaking joints and bones until they just couldn’t function anymore.
For any creature of the physical size and resilience of these corner-hounds, it was a far easier prospect to bind and banish them—to simply pit your will against their own and force them out of the bodies they inhabited when they came here. But that was sort of like rubbing your brain against a bus station toilet; you simply had no idea what you were going to pick up by doing it—and wizards who frequently tangled with Outsiders (or even the weirder entities from within our own reality) tended to go a little loopy due to the contamination of direct contact with alien, inhuman intelligences. That’s why there was a whole Law of Magic about reaching beyond the Outer Gates.
But if I was insulated against such influences …
Was that why Nemesis, for example, had revealed itself to me but had never actually attacked me in an effort to take control of my thoughts and actions? Because it actually couldn’t? It made sense, grouped with my previous experiences with Outsiders, where others had been disabled by their attacks while I had still been capable of taking action. It meant that not only could I resist their influences, but I could go up against these things, mind to mind, without fear of short-circuiting my brain along the way.
The old man meant for me to banish them, to trap them in a circle and will them straight out of reality.
“How are we going to get them into a circle?” I asked.
Ebenezar leaned his staff against his body, produced a pocketknife from his overalls, and said, “Bait.”
He dug the knife into his arm and twisted, and a small rivulet of blood began to pour out of the wound and patter to the ground. The first of the cornerhounds appeared at the top of the ramp behind us and let out a pitch-dropping moan, its tentacles quivering in time with the sound of falling droplets. It moved several feet toward us in an oily blur, then went still again, like some kind of bizarre deep-sea predator.
“So, here’s the exercise,” Ebenezar said, and passed me the knife. If he was in pain, it didn’t show up in his voice. “Defensive circle first. We go at the same time. The smell of the blood is going to drive them crazy, and they’re going to try to get at me. While they do, you’ll lay down a circle and activate it, then banish them.” He eyed me. “And just so I’m certain you haven’t missed the lesson, please also observe that every single point of the plan is vampire-free.”
The corners of the lowest level of the parking garage began to glow with a sickly blue light.
“Sir,” I growled, taking the knife. I bent over and walked around us in a quick circle, tip of the knife scoring the concrete as I went, until I had a closed shape that mostly looked like a circle. I stepped into it, touched the score mark, and made a minor effort of will, feeling the magical circle spring up around us like an invisible screen of energy. “There’s a time and a place for everything. This is neither.”
I offered him the knife back by the handle. The old man pumped his fist several times and made sure the blood kept dripping. Then he folded the pocketknife and put it away, taking up his staff and holding it upright and parallel to his spine with both hands, carefully keeping it inside the circle. Cornerhounds began to thrash and tear their way into our world. Half a dozen more joined the one coming down the ramp in erratic bursts of speed—then simply crouched and waited.
“You sure?” he asked. “How about we check with one of your stalwart vampire allies who are here in your hour of need?”
I glowered at him. “That’s a cheap shot and you know it.”
“Eleven, twelve,” the old man counted, “thirteen, aye. The whole pack is here. Now they’ll get serious.”
“You think these things are smart?” I said.
“Damned smart,” he said. “But so single-minded and alien you almost can’t tell.”
“They’ll try to stop me from laying down a circle, then,” I said. “We need a smoke screen—but they don’t even have eyes. Do they? They don’t have eyes at the backs of their throats or something, do they?”
“You don’t want to know,” said the old man.
Suddenly, three of the cornerhounds speed-slithered close to us, tentacles flailing. One of them struck against the boundary described by the circle. There was a flash of light, a cascade of angry fireplace sparks, and a shuddering bass note of pain, and then the three cornerhounds went still again. The one with a singed tentacle was no more than two feet away from me.
I swallowed and did a quick scan of the circle with my eyes. A magical circle was proof against beings summoned to the mortal world, Outsiders included, but if any solid object fell across the scratch in the concrete, the circle would lose integrity and collapse, and we’d be at the things’ mercy.
“But they run on audio?” I asked him.
“Like bats.”
The cornerhound near me rose onto its hind legs, tentacles probin
g, as if seeking a way around the curtain of force provided by the circle. There were sharp popping sounds as tentacle tips brushed against the circle and recoiled in little bursts of sparks and low rumbles of pain.
“No teeth,” I noted, my throat dry. “Out of morbid curiosity, what happens to us if they, uh … get us?”
“They take us into one of those corners,” Ebenezar said, “and drag us back to wherever they came from.”
I swallowed. “Then what?”
The old man looked faintly disturbed and said something that, for wizards, is akin to dropping an F-bomb. “I don’t know.”
I blinked at him and felt my eyes widening. “Oh.” I swallowed again and said, “These are major entities. Don’t know if I can take them all on at once.”
“There aren’t multiple entities there,” he said. “Just one, that happens to be running around in several different bodies. It’s a package deal, Hoss. You can’t banish one of them without banishing all of them.”
I looked past Ebenezar to where an old pickup had been parked, the only car down on this lowest level.
“Then we have to turn up the pressure,” I said, nodding at the old truck.
“Ring of fire?” he asked.
“Ring of fire,” I said. “Damn. Sure wish I had a buck—”
The sneeze took me completely off guard. It came out of nowhere and was louder than it had any right to be, my voice cracking halfway through. There was a surge of tension and energy, a dizzying burst of involuntarily expended magical energy, and way too much ectoplasm coming out of my nose.
There was also a clatter, and a galvanized five-gallon steel bucket fell to the ground at my feet and started rolling. Ebenezar spat a curse and stabbed his staff at the bucket, pinning it to the ground an inch or two before it could break the circle and get us both killed.