by Jim Butcher
The svartalf rubbed a few fingers wearily at his forehead, clearly irritated, and glanced up at me. “Harry Dresden,” he said. “You have been a guest and friend to my people. You were friends with Austri. Can this person be trusted?”
I eyed Lara and then turned back to Etri. “If she gives you her word, she’ll keep it.”
Which … wasn’t exactly a lie. Lara was good to her word. So was Mab. So was Etri. And I didn’t particularly trust any of them, beyond that.
But then, when you get right down to it, what else is there? And what more can you really ask for?
Etri studied me for a moment and then nodded, and I got the impression that he had intuited my exact meaning. His mouth set in a line that said he clearly didn’t enjoy the prospect, but that he was also clearly resolved to treating his peers with courtesy. “Very well. Lady Lara, if you would please join us. May I send for a drink?”
Lara smiled warmly at me and settled down in a chair one of Etri’s people carried over for her, to leave her, Etri, and Cristos seated at the points of a triangle. “Thank you, Warden Dresden, for the introduction.”
“Sure,” I said.
“Please,” Cristos said, his voice mellow, his gaze annoyed, “do not let us keep you from your duties any longer, Warden.”
“Yep,” I said to Cristos, in a voice that was louder and more nasal than it had to be. “Okay. Bye-bye.”
I shot Yoshimo with my forefinger and strode away. There was a buffet over in one corner of the hall. My nose caught a whiff of something delicious and reported to my stomach, which instantly started growling. I realized I had been too distracted to have a meal today, which really seemed like something I should grow out of at some point.
Well. There was no sense in going hungry if I didn’t have to, and I suspected that the more time I spent with my mouth full of food, the less time I would have to screw up at this stupid party. I went for the food.
The room was getting even fuller. Under a sickly green banner of cloth sat the LaChaise clan’s representatives, centered on a ruddy-faced, burly man with big old muttonchops who looked like he enjoyed a lot of meat and potatoes. Carter LaChaise, leader of a large family of ghouls who ran a lot of supernatural business in Cajun country. They’d been seated at a table and were dining ravenously on steak tartare, I hoped, and looked weirdly like the painting of the Last Supper.
I considered setting them all on fire for a while, until I started getting looks from the table. It was only then that I noticed how widely I was smiling and moved along.
A black banner with black gemstones draped down into a semi-alcove shape, surrounding a single enormous chair in shadow. A very tall, very large man, apparently in his fifties, sat lazily in the chair, silently regarding the gathering. He held a pipe negligently in one hand, apparently unlit, but smoke trailed sinuously down from his nostrils with each breath, and his eyes reflected the light of the room like a cat’s. Ferrovax, the dragon, disguised in human form. The last time we’d met had been at an event like this, and he’d tossed me around like a chew toy. I avoided his eyes, and his lips curled into a smirk as he tracked me going by. Some of my antics a few months back had disturbed some of his treasures, held in Marcone’s vault. I had a feeling he was the type to take that personally.
I shivered at that. There was plenty of fallout from that job that was still due to come raining down, I was pretty sure.
There was a dizzying array of other delegations. The Summer Court of the Fae held the far corners of the room, in the complementary cardinal direction from the svartalves and the White Court, opposite the Winter Court on the other side. Both were centered around a single thronelike chair, but no principals were seated yet—only five of the Sidhe, in armor respective of their queens’ colors, deep blues and greens and purples for winter, with more springlike greens and golds for summer.
Other beings were all over the place. I recognized a naga from a mess I’d gotten into on a rough weekend a few years back, at the moment disguised as a woman with smoky skin in a lovely white evening gown, chatting with Ivy the Archive, who was startlingly older than the last time I’d seen her, and dressed to match in a black evening gown without jewelry or other accoutrements.
Should Ivy even have hips yet? I did some math, making an effort not to count on my fingers, and realized that, yes, it really had been that long since I’d seen her. Now she looked like a girl going to prom, only way more self-assured—and she was evidently there alone, absent the bodyguard I’d come to associate with her as surely as I did coffee with doughnuts. Where was Kincaid? I tried to make eye contact with Ivy as I went by, but either she was too involved in the conversation to notice or she ignored me.
I felt awkward. I was never much good at parties.
I went by a sky blue banner swirling with cloudy whites and flashing lines of gold, opposite Ferrovax’s cozy alcove, and exchanged a nod with Vadderung, CEO of Monoc Securities, seated in a comfortable stuffed chair that looked like it would be good for reading. Vadderung looked like a tall, muscular man in his early sixties who could probably bench-press a motorcycle. He wore a charcoal suit, his long wolf-grey hair and trimmed beard made rakish by a black eye patch on a leather thong. Like Ferrovax, he sat alone, without guards, with a rather large glass of wine in one hand and a smoldering pipe in the other.
I traded a nod with him as I passed, and he mouthed the word “Later” at me as I did.
I made it to the buffet without causing any major diplomatic incidents, which for me is remarkable. I picked up a plate and started with the platter of tiny tenderloin steaks. I mean, sure, they were meant to be little nothings, appetizers, but if you stacked a dozen of them together you had something that resembled a real steak.
I was moving on to look for something delicious to go with them when a hairy hand the size of a cafeteria tray, lumpy with scars and muscle, clamped down on my right shoulder.
I nearly flew out of my shoes as panic flashed through me, and my brain took me back to a few months before, when the owner of a hand like that had been stalking me through the burning ruins of one of the weapons vaults kept by the King of the Underworld, Hades himself. The Genoskwa had occupied more than the usual space in my nightmares since, and the sudden surge of adrenaline caused the Winter mantle to go berserk, readying my body for combat in an instant.
Only it was already too late. The fingers, thick as summer sausages, had already tightened down. It had me.
“Dresden,” growled an enormous, rumbling voice. “Good. Finally, I can pay you back properly.”
Chapter
Twenty-one
When someone has ahold of you, there’s a basic rule of thumb to follow, which Murphy had taught me a while back. I called it the Rule of Thumb. The idea is to twist whatever part they’ve got hold of toward their thumb in a circling motion. The basic principle is that it’s easier to overcome the power of one thumb than it is four fingers supported by the thumb. The Genoskwa’s grip was incredibly strong—but the Winter mantle gave me enough physical capability, at moments like this, that I wasn’t exactly a ninety-pound weakling, either.
His right hand was on my right shoulder. So I dipped suddenly, spinning clockwise and pulling sharply back and down, pitting the weight and power of my entire body against the monster’s single thumb.
I did it just right—and even so, only barely managed to break the grip and pull away. I also managed to jostle the buffet table, setting the serving trays to clanking, and nearly knocked the thing over with my ass as I crouched, dropping my plate to lift my arms in what would probably be a useless gesture of self-defense.
Only it wasn’t the Genoskwa.
Standing in front of me was a goddamned Sasquatch, a hairy humanoid figure a solid nine feet and change in height, layered with dark brown hair and muscle. He was wearing—I’m not even kidding —what looked like a Victorian-era tuxedo, tailored to his enormous size. He had spectacles across his broad, flat nose, their lenses the size of tea saucers,
and they still looked a little small on him. His hair, all of it that was visible, had been shampooed and conditioned, and for a second I thought I was looking at a Wookie.
“Hah,” rumbled the Sasquatch. His face spread into an uneasy smile that showed me broad teeth that looked like they could crunch through a fence post like it was a stalk of celery. “I heard you met my cousin.”
I blinked several times and then realized that everyone in the room nearby was staring at us. I’d dropped both my staff and my snack plate, and the servers behind the buffet table looked like they wanted to quietly vanish. I huffed out a breath, pushed away the Winter mantle’s scream to engage in bloody combat, and said, “Wow. River Shoulders? Is that you?”
“Ungh,” River Shoulders grunted in the affirmative. He gestured down at the tuxedo awkwardly. “Had to put on this monkey suit. Didn’t mean it to be a disguise.”
Strength of a River in His Shoulders was a shaman of the Forest People who had apparently been living right under everyone’s nose for hundreds of years. He’d hired me for some jobs in the past, and he was a decent guy. He also happened to be very large and very scary.
“What are you doing here?” I asked him.
He shrugged. His shoulders were a good five and a half feet across, so it was a fairly impressive motion. “After that mess in Oklahoma, I thought a lot about what you had to say, about my child. And you were right.” He pursed his lips briefly. “Out of line, arrogant, but right.”
I felt myself flash him a grin. “Seems about correct for a wizard.”
“Eh, for a human,” he agreed. “Called a council of my people. Told them to leave my son alone or I’d start breaking skulls. And then we decided to join the Accords.”
I tilted my head. “After lying low for so long?” I asked. “Why?”
River Shoulders glanced around the room, maybe a little nervously. “So I could get the chance to pay you back. What you did for me, for my family, was more than just work for hire. You cared. You chanced making me mad to show me I was being foolish when no one else would. Even when I got mad. Pretty good friend stuff, there. And you gave me my son.”
I cleared my throat and looked away. “Yeah, well. Okay.”
“I heard you went up against one of the Forest People and beat him.”
“Killed him,” I said.
River Shoulders eyed me and repeated, “Beat him.”
A little cold feeling went through me. “What?”
He nodded. “Big part of why I’m here. Wanted to warn you.”
“How?” I demanded. “There was nothing left but ketchup.”
River Shoulders shrugged again. “I don’t know how. But I saw him not a moon ago. Blood on His Soul won’t forget. Keep your eyes open, huh?” Once again, his eyes tracked nervously around the room. “Hey, does it feel hot in here to you?”
And suddenly I remembered Listens-to-Wind’s cryptic words. River Shoulders wasn’t a coward or anything, but it had to be tough to shift from a long lifetime of avoiding notice to showing up at a gathering of the most dangerous supernatural beings on the planet. “Oh, right,” I said. I turned to one of the staff behind the buffet and said, “Is there somewhere a little quieter we can go?”
The staffer was mostly staring up at River Shoulders, but he said, “Uh. Yeah. Sure.” He started to turn away.
River Shoulders put out a hand, rested fingertips lightly on the man’s shoulders, and said, “Hey, Einherjar.”
The man froze and turned to stare at River Shoulders, and then his hand, with hard eyes.
River nodded and withdrew his hand carefully. “Listen up. Grendel was a bad egg. Spawned mostly bad eggs. Most of my people thought he was a lunatic. So right now, the only quarrel you and me got is what you’re bringing with you.”
The man peered at River Shoulders and then at his tuxedo and spectacles. He gave a slow nod and said, “Yeah. Sir. Come up to the gym.”
I took a look around the room and noted how many red jackets were casually blending in among the crowd. Yeah. Marcone had plenty of people here.
We followed the Einherjar back through a set of doors to a short hall, up a flight of stairs, and into the gym I’d visited before, in spirit. It wasn’t big, but it had everything you needed, including a small boxing ring. There were a couple of lights on, but otherwise the place was dark and quiet. Our guide gave River Shoulders another thoughtful look and departed in silence.
River Shoulders let out a sigh and sank down to the stone floor, resting his back against a wall. He took the spectacles off and tucked them into a pocket.
“Why the glasses?” I asked.
“Make me look less threatening. Like that gorilla in the video game.” I arched an eyebrow. “You play video games?”
“I study human cultures,” River Shoulders said. “How you guys think about us, and creatures you think are like us. Video-game gorilla thought of better than King Kong, you know?” He shook his head. “Humans are scared of just about everything. Problem is, their first reaction to being scared—”
“Is to kill it,” I said, nodding. I considered my super-nice suit and decided that I didn’t much like suits anyway. I sat down on the ground next to River. “I’m familiar with the problem.”
“Hah,” the big guy said. He shook his head. “Thank you, getting me out of there.” He grimaced. “There’s just too much tension there. Too much hatred. Lust. Greed. Fear.”
I looked up at River for a moment and realized that he’d been frightened to be there. Exposed, in the midst of more noise and movement than he could adapt to readily. I knew River could wield Power in his own way, and if the poor guy was an empath, too, that room must have been torture. “Yeah, these parties are a hoot,” I said.
He grunted, took a deep breath, and exhaled. He sounded like a racehorse. “Einherjaren here, too. That’s always trouble.”
“How come?” I asked.
He scrunched up his nose, enormous brows beetling. “My people follow three paths,” he said. He gestured at himself. “Sky path, like me. We learn. We remember. Watch the stars. Read. Talk to you people, mostly on the rez. Think about things.” He sighed. “There’s not too many of us.”
I frowned and said, “You’re like wizards are to humans.”
He shrugged. “Not entirely the wrong way to see it. Why you and me get on pretty good, probably.”
“I’ll buy that. Okay.”
“Second path is the forest path. That’s most of us, maybe nine in ten. Forest path thinks that humans are good example of what not to do. That we should stay close to nature. Avoid contact. Fire. Tools. All that. Stay quiet and unseen mostly and live in harmony with the natural world.”
“And humans see them once in a while,” I said.
River nodded. “Though me and the guys on the rez watch those shows about you looking for them. Pretty darned funny. Little bit sad.”
I tilted my head and made a guess. “The Genoskwa. He’s on the third path.”
“War path,” River agreed. “He thinks our people are the first people. Thinks we should kill most of you. Make the rest into cattle and slaves.” He mused for a moment. “They’re assholes,” he said frankly. “Kind of stupid. But there’s not too many of them, either, so they can’t get what they want. Settle for hanging around national parks, making people disappear once in a while, when the sky path don’t stop them.”
“And the first Grendel was on the war path?”
River nodded. “Taught his tribe. They had numbers enough to make a go of it, back then. The other paths left them to their madness, walked over the ice, joined our people here. Grendel’s people drove the humans from some places. Humans were tied to their lands, their crops. Not much they could do about it.”
“What happened?”
“They picked a fight with the wrong humans,” River Shoulders said. “Vikings. Vikings had a champion. A teacher.”
“Beowulf?” I asked.
“Beowulf. Vadderung. He got a lot of names and face
s.” River Shoulders nodded. “Lived and fought like a mortal. Showed them how to have courage. Helped build a warrior culture. Fight the giants. Some of his people even came across the sea, found us, and didn’t waste any time on talk. But there were too many of us here, and they left.”
“So what was with confronting that guy before he brought us up here?”
River Shoulders shook his head. “Lot of the Einherjaren got to Valhalla fighting my people on the war path. They remember.”
“So, the Genoskwa …”
“Our word for the war path,” River Shoulders said. “Blood on His Soul is more arrogant than most. More dangerous, too. Thinks he is the ultimate genoskwa. A paragon.” He pursed his lips and mused. “Maybe he is.”
“He’s a lot bigger than you,” I noted.
“Yeah,” River said amiably. He yawned. It was innocent and terrifying. A volleyball could fit in his mouth with room to spare. “I’m kind of a pip-squeak.”
“Well, I know that was my first thought when I first saw you.”
He grinned. That also was terrifying. But I was starting to get accustomed to it. “You not real used to talking to people taller than you, are you?”
“Probably some truth to that,” I said. “How you feeling?”
“Better,” he said. “Listens-to-Wind is a good kid, was helping shield me from all that”—he lifted a hand and flicked it around the side of his head, as if having difficulty putting a concept into words —“noise. But he’s got duties of his own tonight.”
A good kid?
“How old are you, exactly?” I asked.
River Shoulders put on a serious expression, exaggerated his northern, Native American accent, and said, “Many moons.” He shrugged, returning to his usual tone. “Tough to keep track sometimes. Was born on the walk across the ice. Not much food at first. Probably why I grew up puny. Figure I’m about middle age.”