by Jim Butcher
A dozen men in black tactical uniforms came pouring out of the back of the truck, holding suppressed semiautomatic carbines. They opened fire, the sound mostly a fuzzy cloud of clacks, hisses, and whumps.
It was over in maybe three seconds. None of the valets or staff survived. The ones still moving after they fell got bullets to the head.
“Holy shit,” Murphy breathed. Her gun had appeared in her hand.
“Don’t move,” I warned. “Don’t fire. Lara?”
The vampire’s voice was tense. “They aren’t mine.”
“Clear!” snapped one of the soldiers, and I recognized him with a surge of rage. His name was Listen. He was medium-sized, of innocuous build, his head was as smooth as a cue ball, and he had led the tactical aspect of the Fomor’s efforts here in Chicago—which was the polite way to say that he and his turtlenecks had spent years kidnapping minor magical talents and dragging them off to God knew what fate for his masters. He’d also killed or escaped from everyone who had tried to interfere with his mission.
I hate when the bad guys have good help.
Listen walked briskly back to the truck, bowed his head, and said, “Majesty, your will is done.”
“Excellent,” rasped a heavy, burbling voice. There was the sound of footsteps and a being descended from the truck. It stood nearly eight feet in height and reminded me of nothing so much as an enormous toad with an excellent tailor. He wore silk robes that were somehow reminiscent of Edo-style kimonos, but with the smooth lines subtly twisted. Between the design and the bizarre, disturbing imagery of the embroidery upon the sea-colored fabrics of each layer of robes, I was feeling a little queasy.
The guy wearing the robes was no looker, either. His face was too large and lumpy to be human. His mouth was so wide he could have eaten a banana sideways, and his lips were like rubbery, black, rotten fruits of the same variety. His skin was pocked and warty and a sickly blue-green where it wasn’t ghostly pale, and his eyes were huge, watery, protruding, and disturbing. He had hair like withered black seaweed, draping over his head and shoulders in uneven clumps. He moved with a kind of frantic, jerky energy, and my instincts sized him up as someone dangerous and not particularly sane.
King Corb of the Fomor, I presumed.
The Fomor monarch leered down at the corpses for a moment before raising his gaze to Listen again. “Bring us within, Captain.”
Listen snapped to attention and began barking orders to his “men.” The turtlenecks were human, technically, but the Fomor had messed with them, sculpting flesh to their liking. The members of this crew would be quicker, tougher, and stronger than any normal bunch of mortals, and they could be damnably tough to kill, like ghouls. They responded at once, lining up on either side of the doorway.
Corb descended from the truck, spun on his heel, and, with a surprising amount of poise and grace, fell to one knee at the foot of the ramp, his head bowed.
I felt my eyebrows go up.
Footsteps sounded on the ramp once more, heavier this time. A generally humanoid, generally feminine figure in a heavy, hooded cloak of some oddly metallic fabric descended the ramp a deliberate step at a time. Whoever she was, she was taller than Corb and had to unfold herself carefully from the truck. Her bare feet were visible, their proportions perfect, simply huge. They looked like she’d had them bronzed a long time ago, and the bronze had been covered with verdigris and then polished irregularly. It formed lumps and nodes over her skin like molten wax, but flexed and moved as if alive. Flickers of metallic and colored crystals were embedded in that bronze exoflesh.
She reached out a hand to touch Corb on the shoulder as she glided past him, showing more of the same metallic flesh. She was graceful despite her stature, her strides long and purposeful. Corb fell in at her side, a pace behind her. Without looking at him, she extended a hand. Corb reached into his robes and withdrew a length of chain maybe ten feet long from them. One end was attached to a steel band around the base of his throat, mostly concealed by his robes. He handed the other end to the Titanic woman.
She took it without breaking stride and strode into the castle, the soldiers falling in behind their leaders as they went in, weapons up.
“Stars and stones,” I breathed.
A hit was going down.
Wars had begun that way.
I was arrested by a hideous, nauseating apprehension that went deep enough for my toes to have a bad feeling about this.
“Harry,” Murphy hissed. “Get in.”
“I can’t,” I decided. “I’ve got to see what’s happening here.” I leaned down to look at Murphy. “Get them to the island.”
“Why?” Murphy demanded. “There’s no point to it if you aren’t there, too.”
“I’ll be along,” I said. “Cross my heart.”
Murphy’s eyes widened. “You’re scared.”
“I need you to trust me on this,” I said. “There’s no time.”
Murph looked like she wanted to argue, but instead she grimaced and put her gun away. “Goddammit.”
“Dresden, this is not the plan,” Lara said in a warning tone.
“No,” I said. “It isn’t. Get going and I’ll meet you once I know what’s happening.”
“If you’re caught—”
“I’ve still got the potion,” I said. “In and out, Miss Law. Like the wind.”
Lara looked from me to her brother, torn. The moment of indecision cost her. Murphy put the car in gear and accelerated smoothly eastbound, away from the castle.
I was left alone in the immediate vicinity of a number of ridiculously powerful supernatural beings and a small mound of bodies that seemed to promise that the night was young.
This showed every sign of working out very, very badly.
I swallowed and then set out to follow the murderous King of the Fomor and what was apparently the Power Behind the Throne into the peace talks.
Chapter
Twenty-nine
King Corb and company strode into the great hall like they owned the place.
They entered amid the chaos in the wake of my previous departure. Voices were raised in tension, a chatter of sound in the crowded hall, as each nation, seemingly by reflex, withdrew to its originally assigned area.
I checked the hall and made my way toward where Ramirez and the Wardens were standing in front of the Senior Council members. That also put me within a few long steps of the high seat at the rear of the hall, where Mab currently stood with Molly, the Redcap, and four other Sidhe.
Corb and his retinue seemed to enjoy giving everyone time to settle into an uncomfortable silence. Then he strode forward, his chain clanking, and pitched something into the air with a casual underhand toss.
There was a heavy clump as the thing, about the size of my fist, bounced and then rolled.
It came to a halt at the foot of the dais where the high seat stood.
It was a very small severed head. It had been a while since the head had been taken, the skin shrunken tight, patches here and there beginning to fall to decay.
I recognized the features.
It was Gwynn ap Nudd, King of the Tylwyth Teg, one of the larger subnations of Faerie. I’d done business against him once in the past, and he still sent me season tickets to Cubs games once in a while. He’d been responsible for the famous Billy Goat of the Unseelie Accords.
A gasp went through the room.
Mab stared down at the severed head for a solid three seconds. Silence stretched out into an endless crystalline moment.
The Queen of Air and Darkness lifted black, black eyes to King Corb. The temperature in the room plummeted. A film of frost crystals began to form over every metallic surface, and swirls of darkness appeared, spreading through Mab’s silver-white hair and continuing through into her gown.
She spoke in a whisper that was heard by every ear in the hall. “Explain yourself.”
The Fomor swaggered forward a step. “A peace gift,” he said. His tone was velvety, compl
etely sincere—and it was readily offset by the smile on his froggy face. His bugging eyes were coldly mocking, his sneer absolutely malevolent. “For an old woman past her time.”
Corb flicked his hand and his men moved. A dozen suppressed weapons coughed and clacked, and every caterer and server in the hall dropped.
Marcone came out of his seat. Hendricks slammed a hand down onto his boss’s shoulder, and Miss Gard stepped in front of him, her back to Marcone, her hand on her axe. A muffled cry of shock and horror went up from the guests.
Because they were guests.
Mab rose slowly, and by the time she stood, her hair and eyes and raven-claw nails were all black as pitch, her skin whiter than Death’s horse. “You dare. YOU DARE! YOU ARE A GUEST IN THIS HOUSE!”
“Read your own laws, woman,” Corb spat. “These hirelings were no members of a house, not vassals or lackeys. They’re chattel at best.” Corb turned to Marcone and with a contemptuous flick sent a velvet bag sailing through the air. It landed in front of Gard with an unmistakable metallic tinkle. “Your weregild, little man.”
The room grew colder yet. Anxious, quickened breaths began to plume in front of tension-tightened faces.
“Old woman,” Corb taunted. “I remember you as a bawling brat. I remember your pimply face when you rode with the Conqueror. I remember how you wept when Merlin cast you out.”
Mab’s face …
… twisted into naked, ugly, absolute rage. Her body became so rigid, so immobile, that it could not possibly have belonged to a living thing.
“Tell me,” Corb purred. “If he was yet among the living, do you think he would still love you? Would he be so proud of what you’ve become?”
Mab did not descend from her high seat so much as reality itself seemed to take a polite step to one side. One moment she was there; the next there was a trail of falling snow and frost-blanketed floor in a laser-straight line, and Mab stood within arm’s length of Corb. “Your maggot lips aren’t worthy to speak his name,” she hissed.
“There you are,” Corb said, his tone approving. “I knew you had to be inside all of that ice somewhere. Gather all the power you wish, old woman. You know who you are, and so do I. You are no one.”
Mab’s face twisted in very human-looking fury, and that scared me more than anything I’d seen in a good long while. Her lips lifted into a snarl and she began to speak—before her black eyes widened. Her focus shifted, her gaze swiftly tracking up the chain to the bronze-and-crystalline fist of the woman who held it.
Corb let his head fall back and let out a delighted, crowing cackle.
The cloaked figure moved every bit as quickly as Mab had. One moment she was ten feet behind Corb. The next, there was a sound like thunder.
There was no way to track what happened clearly. I think the cloaked figure lashed out with a kick. I had the sense that there were defensive energies beyond anything I could have managed around Mab, and that the kick went through them as if they had not existed. The thunder was followed almost instantly by a second sound, a roar of shattering stone.
I turned my head, feeling as if I had been encased in gelatin, and saw the pieces of the high seat flying out in a cloud. There was a ragged hole in the stone wall behind the seat about half the size of a coffin.
And the Queen of Air and Darkness was nowhere to be seen.
A stunned silence settled over the room.
The cloaked figure raised her hands in a very slow, deliberately dramatic gesture and slowly peeled back her hood.
The woman beneath the hood was made of bronze and crystal, and she was beautiful beyond mortal reckoning. Her hair, long and slick and close, as if she’d just emerged from water, looked like silk spun from silver.
It was her eyes that bothered me. Or rather, her eye. One of her eyes was a crystalline emerald green.
The other …
On that perfect bronze face, the mutilation of her eye stood out like a gallows in a public park. The orbital ridges around the socket were covered in white, granite-like scars, as if the biggest, ugliest cat you’d ever seen had scratched it out. It wasn’t sunken, though the lid was closed. That mangled eye bulged ever so slightly, as if it had been meant for a being considerably larger than she was.
There was, around her, a humming throb of energy unlike anything I had ever sensed before, a power so ancient and terrible that the world had forgotten its like. That power demanded my respect, my obedience, my adoration, my abject terror, and suddenly I knew what was happening.
I was standing in the presence of a goddess.
I could barely breathe.
I couldn’t have moved if I’d wanted to.
A moan went through the room, and I realized with a bit of alarm that one of the voices moaning was mine.
Some part of me noted that Vadderung and Ferrovax had both come to their feet, fists clenched—and they were not looking at each other any longer. Both stared hard at the woman.
The goddess swept her single-eyed gaze around the room, tracking from face to face. She gave the Winter Lady a look of pure contempt and delivered exactly the same expression to the rest of the gathered Accorded nations.
Her voice …
Oh God.
Her voice was sex and chocolate and hot soup and a bath on a cold, rainy night. It was a voice that promised things, that you could find yourself listening to with absolute intensity. It filled the room as if she’d been using a PA system, even though she wasn’t.
“Children, children, children,” she murmured, shaking her head in disapproval. “The world has gone to the children.” Her gaze reached Ferrovax and paused. One of her cheeks ticked. She looked from the dragon to Vadderung, and when she saw him her teeth showed white and perfect. “One-Eye. Are you that involved in the Game, still? Are you still that arrogant? Look how far you’ve fallen. Consorting with insects, as if you’re barely more than mortal yourself.”
No one moved.
No one spoke.
And then footsteps sounded on the stone floor.
Gentleman John Marcone stepped out from behind the unmoving Gard, impeccable in his suit. He didn’t look frightened, though he had to be. He simply stepped forward, clear of his guards, and said, “Good evening, madam. I am Baron John Marcone. This is my home. Might I have the pleasure of knowing how you wish to be addressed?”
The goddess narrowed her eyes, watching Marcone with the kind of revulsion that one normally sees reserved for a swarm of maggots. She shook her head, dismissing Marcone from her attention as she fixed her gaze on Vadderung again.
“This is your host?” she demanded. “You permit a mortal among you? Where is your dignity? Where is your pride?” She shook her head. “This world has gone astray. We have failed it. And I will no longer huddle fearfully in the seas and watch the mortals turn it into their filthy hive.”
The goddess walked forward, staring down at Marcone. She circled him, shaking her head in judgment—and still no one moved. She pointed a finger at Ferrovax without looking at him and said, “Introduce me to this ephemeral.”
For a few seconds there was silence. Then Ferrovax spoke in a ragged voice that sounded like it was being dragged out through his teeth. “This is Ethniu. Daughter of Balor. The Last Titan.”
Ethniu lowered her pointing finger. Ferrovax gasped and staggered, putting a hand on the back of his chair to balance himself as he breathed heavily.
“This world has manifestly failed,” she continued, now addressing the room. “You thought yourselves wise to band together. To live quietly. To embrace”—her lip lifted in a sneer—“civility. With the mortals that used to tremble at the sound of our footsteps.”
I was trembling pretty damned hard right about then. And I still couldn’t make a voluntary motion.
“I have stood by doing nothing for too much of my life,” Ethniu said, pacing slowly. “I have watched holy place after holy place fall to the mortals. Forest after forest. Sea after sea. They dare to walk where they were never me
ant to walk. And as they do, the divine retreats, withers, dies.” She paused for a moment, and that emerald eye landed on me like a truckload of lead, regarded me, and dismissed me all within half of a heartbeat. “They grow more numerous, more petty, more vicious, while they foul the world we helped to create with their filth, their noise, their buildings, and their machines.”
She came to a stop beside King Corb and laid a hand on his shoulder almost fondly. “This ends. Tonight.”
She turned and strode to Vadderung. She dropped to one knee in order to speak to him eye to eye. “I remember what you were. Because I respect you, I assume you have seen some redeeming value among these …” She waved a hand at the room. “Children. And because of that respect, I offer you something I was never given: a choice.”
She looked around the room. “I offer it to all of the divine here. At the witching hour tonight, we who you thought fallen, defeated, banished, and humbled march upon the mortal world—starting with this fetid hive around us.” She smiled, very slowly. “Finally.”
Vadderung spoke, as if someone had superglued his tongue to the back of his teeth. “Ethniu. Do not do this.”
She stared down at him for a moment with something almost like pity. “I remember that once you were great,” she said quietly. “For the sake of the being I remember, I offer you this one chance: Do not interfere. My quarrel is with the mortals. Stand aside and there need be no conflict.” She gestured at the hole in the wall behind the high seat. “That creature cannot protect you. Cannot enforce her justice. Each of the divine here must choose: abandon the mortal world—or burn with it.”
Her closed eye quivered, and suddenly there was a light behind the scarred eyelid, red and pulsing through the thin skin. She leaned back her head, took a breath, and opened that eye, the Eye, screaming.
The scream itself threatened to deafen me by sheer volume, but it was far, far more painful than that. I could feel it press against the vaults of my mind, emotion so violent and intense that it would tear my sanity to pieces if I let even a portion of it into my head.