by Jim Butcher
That should have been it. The old man should have fallen into the lake, become immersed in deep water, and had the lion’s share of his power washed away for a time. But instead, he barked a pair of words, hurling a blast of force at the surface of the lake that pushed back just as hard against him. He was flung to one side, falling toward the dock. He hurled a second, weaker blast at the dock, slowing his fall without shattering it, and landed with one foot stomping down so hard that I heard the board crack, dropping to one knee for balance, his staff still held in his hands, his pate gleaming, his eyes bright.
Hell’s bells, was he better than me.
That was Ebenezar McCoy, the Blackstaff, the most feared wizard on planet Earth.
Without pause the old man’s staff struck the boards of the dock, and they bowed up in a straight line coming toward me, as if an enormous shark was swimming toward me beneath the dock, its dorsal fin bumping up the wood.
I slammed my staff down and vaulted over the oncoming wave of energy as it passed, and as I came down, I beckoned the winds, focused my will, shouted, “Ventas arctis!”
At my command the air stirred, and gale winds suddenly lashed the surface of the lake with vicious, frozen spite. A miniature cyclone of spraying ice and water engulfed the end of the dock around the old man, clouding him from sight as fog billowed out from the sudden temperature change in the sullen night air, and while it blinded him, I did the last thing wizards generally do in a duel.
I sprinted right at him.
I crashed through the sleet and frozen air and ice as if they weren’t there at all, spotted the old man when I was five feet away, and let him have it with a swift, speeding thrust of my quarterstaff, aiming for his gut.
But the old man had learned his quarterstaff in Britain, long enough ago that it had still been a common weapon in widespread use, and his teachers had been masters. His own staff caught mine in a parry, and he followed up with an advance and a circling sweeping motion that would have taken my weapon out of my hands if I hadn’t disengaged properly.
He came at me in a blur of attacks. If we’d been on solid ground, he’d have knocked my punk ass out cold. But now we were standing on intermittent patches of sleet and ice, and while his feet slipped and faltered, mine just seemed always to find the ideal footing. The conditions provided just enough hesitation in his forward motion that I was able to retreat a little faster, until I could use my reach to good advantage, stop his advance, and, with a quick, snapping combo Murphy had taught me, put him on his back foot.
He shifted his grip on the staff, both hands at shoulder width, and raised it defensively as he came in on me like a bull. He didn’t have any choice. He could probably defend against me forever, but as long as I had the footwork advantage, I’d be able to swing at him while he couldn’t reach me in reply. If he diverted his attention to summon the energy for a spell, I’d be able to feel it coming, and I’d brain him. So his only option was to come at me hard.
I had a brief shot at his head when his foot slipped a little, but I was too slow to take it.
Or maybe I just didn’t want to.
He caught it on his upraised staff, and then there was a whirlwind of blows coming at me from both sides and all angles.
I defended. Barely. If my foot had slipped once, the old man would have made me pay for it. He almost nailed me twice, anyway, and only the treacherous footing he had to endure gave me time enough to manage a defense.
You know. Or maybe he just didn’t want to, either.
But he drove me back up the dock, forcing me out of the miniature freeze I’d laid on him. Once he had his feet under him again, I wasn’t going to do very well. I checked the progress of the Water Beetle as it chugged out of the harbor. It had a hundred yards’ lead now.
So, yeah. This was the right time.
Ebenezar’s foot slid off the last patch of ice, and he promptly threw a stomp kick at the bridge of my left foot as he came in. I avoided that, but it put me off-balance, and the old man’s staff hit my shoulder with enough force to shatter concrete.
Molly did good work. There was a flash of light from the spider-silk suit, the scent of something putrid burning, and instead it merely felt like getting smacked by a particularly proficient Little Leaguer.
I cried out in pain and staggered back.
“Don’t make this anything it doesn’t have to be, Hoss,” my grandfather said, his voice hard. His next blow hit my right foot, and evidently Molly hadn’t specifically enchanted the shoes. Which the old man had probably been able to sense. The strike wasn’t as strong as it could have been, but it broke toes, flashes of vicious, stabbing heat that quickly vanished into the rippling chill of the Winter mantle, and I staggered to a knee.
The old man stomp-kicked me in the center of the chest, driving the wind out of my lungs with a sickly gasp and slamming my shoulder blades and the back of my skull against the dock.
Ebenezar shoved the end of his staff against my Adam’s apple with a snarl and said, “Yield!”
“No,” I croaked.
The old man’s eyes widened. “Dammit, boy, you are about to make me angry.”
“Go ahead,” I said, baring my teeth. “Do it. Kill me. Because that’s what it’s going to take.”
His jaw clenched, and he slowly bared his teeth. “ You … arrogant … foolish, egomaniacal drama queen!”
“I’m not the one who flew in on a baby mountain!” I complained.
He shoved the staff a quarter inch forward.
“Glurk,” I said.
His face was red. Too red. The veins stood out sharply in his head, his neck.
And the ground was shaking. I could feel it through the dock.
When he spoke, his voice came out in a register so calm and measured that it completely terrified me. If he was doing that, it was because he was employing mental discipline techniques to contain his, gulp, rage.
“I will ask you a question,” he said. “You will answer me, clearly and honestly. Nod if you understand.”
I nodded. Glurk.
“How did they get to you, boy?” he asked, his voice still unnaturally calm. “What do they have on you? It can’t be so bad that I can’t help you get out of it.” His eyes softened for just a second. “Talk to me.”
I glanced down at the end of his staff.
“Ah,” he said, and took the pressure off.
I swallowed a couple of times. Then I croaked, “They don’t have anything on me.”
His eyes went furious again, and …
And tears formed in them.
Oh God.
“Then why?” he demanded. The calm in his voice was fraying. “Why are you doing this? Why are you destroying yourself for that thing?”
I knew exactly what I was about to do.
But he deserved the truth. Had to have it, really.
“Because I’ve only got one brother,” I said. “And I’m not going to lose him.”
The old man went very still.
“Mom,” I said in a dull, flat voice. “She gave each of us one of her amulets, with a memory recorded on them, so we’d know each other.”
Ebenezar’s mouth opened and closed a few times.
“Half brother, technically,” I said. “But blood all the same. He’s got my back. I’ve got his. That’s all there is to it.”
The old man closed his eyes.
“You’ re … saying … that pig, Raith … with my daughter.”
The ground shook harder. The surface of the lake began to dance, droplets flying up.
“Sir,” I said, trying to keep my voice calm, “you have a second grandson.”
If I’d punched him, I don’t think I could have staggered him more. He fell back a step. He started shaking his head.
I sat up. “Look, whatever happened, it’s over now. Thomas didn’t have anything to do with that. But he has saved my life on multiple occasions. He is not your enemy, sir.” I blinked my eyes a couple of times. “He’s family.”
“Family,” came the old man’s voice, a primordial growl lurking in it. “One. Of those things.”
He whirled toward the retreating boat, barely visible from the shore by now, and his staff burst into incandescent blue flame as he lifted it in his right hand, the hand that projects energy, drawing it back.
“No!” I shouted, and lurched toward him.
He spun, eyes surrounded by white, his face scarlet, his teeth bared in a snarl, snapping his staff out …
And what looked like a comet about the size of a quarter, blazing like a star, leapt from the staff, like some kind of bizarre random static spark, and plunged into my ribs and out my spine.
I tumbled down to the dock on my back, the stars suddenly unusually bright above me.
I tried to breathe.
Nothing much happened.
“Ach, God,” the old man whispered, his breath creaking.
His staff clattered to the dock. It sounded like it came from very far away.
“Harry?” he said. “Harry?”
His face appeared at the end of a little black tunnel.
“Oh, lad,” he said, tears in his eyes. “Oh, lad. Didn’t think you were going to come at me again. Didn’t think it would trigger.”
I could feel his hands on my face, distantly.
“That’s why you were so big on teaching me control,” I slurred dully. “You’re barely holding it together yourself.”
“I’m a hotheaded fool,” he said. “I’m trying to help you.”
“You knew you were losing it,” I said weakly. “And you kept going anyway. You could have backed me up.” Blood came out of the hole in my chest in rhythmic little spurts. “And instead it ends like this.”
Shame touched his eyes.
And he looked away from mine.
The pain we feel in life always grows. When we’re little, little pains hurt us. When we get bigger, we learn to handle more and more pain and carry on regardless.
Old people are the hands-down champions of enduring pain.
And my grandfather was centuries old.
This pain, though.
This hurt him.
This broke him.
He bowed his head. His tears fell to the dock.
Then he paused.
Then his expression changed.
He looked up at me. His eyes widened, and then his face twisted into rage and disbelief. “Why, you sneaky—”
“Good talk,” I said, “Wizard McCoy.”
And I let go of the Winter glamour Lady Molly had crafted for me.
I felt my consciousness retreating back down that black tunnel, down to where I had laid Molly’s opal pinky ring on the dock, while I felt the ultimate construct of glamour, my doppelgänger, collapsing and deflating into ectoplasm behind me. My awareness rushed into the stone in the ring, found the thread of my consciousness I’d bound to it, and then went rushing swiftly back toward my body.
My eyes flew open and I was on the deck of the Water Beetle, on the far side of the cabin from where Ebenezar had been, where I’d taken cover after dropping the ring and beginning the illusion. Once I’d activated the ring, the veil around me had let me slip aboard the Water Beetle, take cover, and then project my consciousness back into the construct.
I’d blown up my relationship with my grandfather by remote control.
But at least I hadn’t taken a comet to the lung.
As I came all the way back into my body, I was gripped by a weariness so intense that it was its own entirely new form of pain. I could feel myself thrashing in spasms. Murphy had one of those face masks with a rubber pump over my mouth and was forcing air in. Freydis was trying to hold me down.
I fought for control of my body and eventually reasserted it, sagging down to the deck in utter weariness. Freydis lay half across me, panting. Murphy, all business, peeled back one of my eyelids and shone a light on my eye. “Harry? Can you hear me?”
“Yeah,” I said, and brushed the mask off my face. “Ugh.”
“Od’s bodkin, seidermadr,” Freydis breathed. She rose off me wearily. “You cut that one close.”
“What the hell is she talking about?” Murphy asked.
“A construct,” I said. “For the illusion. Um. Molly made a really, really good ectoplasmic body for me, stored the pattern for it in the ring, and linked it to me. Everything you need to drop a fake double of yourself in place as a decoy and simultaneously make yourself unseen. Then I … kind of possessed the construct. Projected my awareness into it. Sent all that energy into it, all the way from here, which is exhausting as hell. Had a wonderful chat with McCoy.”
Murphy helped me sit up, staring at my face intently. “What happened?” she asked.
I looked at her and said in a lifeless voice, “I won.”
“Oh my God,” she said. “Is he …”
“Pissed,” I said, with drawn-out, heavy emphasis.
She frowned and touched my temple with one hand for a moment. “He hurt you.”
I closed my eyes. “You should see the other guy.”
“You two are just precious,” the Valkyrie quipped.
“Freydis,” Murphy said, not unkindly, “fuck off.”
Freydis looked back and forth between us, frowned, and said, “Fucking off, ma’am.” And she left us as much privacy as she could on the little ship as the Water Beetle chugged forward.
“Harry,” Murph said gently.
I kept my eyes closed. They were overflowing anyway.
“He’s … he’s not …”
“Not quite the hero you thought he was?”
I pressed my lips together.
“Yeah,” she said. She leaned down and lifted my head into her lap. “He’s human. What a shock.”
“I told him,” I said. “About Thomas.”
“Seems like he reacted a little,” she said.
“He killed me,” I said quietly. “The fake me, I mean. If the fake me had been me me, I would now be dead me. He didn’t mean to do it. But it happened. And he’s not who I thought he was. He was out of control.”
My voice kind of choked on the last sentence. My chest felt like it should have had knives sticking out of it. I leaned my shoulders back against the bulkhead of the wheelhouse and clamped my left hand over my eyes while I sat on the deck. “He was out of control.”
“Oh God, Harry,” Murphy said, her voice full of pain.
“It hurts,” I said quietly. “Oh God. It hurts.”
She put her hand on my forehead, stroking. I lowered my hand and leaned down toward her. And I cried.
That went on until it was quiet.
Then she said, “I heard the beginning of the conversation. And you’re both wrong about each other, you know. You don’t really know who he is. Not yet. And he doesn’t know you. And you both hurt each other terribly, because you’re family. Because what you say and do matters so much more than anyone else.” She leaned down and put her cheek against my forehead. “Listen to me. I know it hurts right now. But the reason it hurts so much is because you care about each other so much. And that pain will eventually fade. But you’ll both still care.”
She was right. I did hurt. The kind of pain a magical mantle can’t do jack about. The real pain, of the heart, the kind that can kill you in about a million ways.
Damn the stubborn old fool.
“I know this is hard, Harry. I remember when I first realized my dad was just human,” she said. “When he shot himself.”
She let that hang in the air for a while.
Then she straightened, framed my face with her hands, and stared out over the darkened lake, her eyes filled with tears. “You can still talk to him, Harry. Something I never got to do. I want you to promise me, for my sake, that you’ll talk to him when tempers have cooled.”
“Karrin,” I said.
She gave one of my cheeks a little slap, annoyed. “Did that sound like a request? Do it. If my advice means a goddamned t
hing, do it right now. That’s how important this is.”
“What if …” I swallowed. “What if that’s me, one day? What if that’s what I’m like?”
“There’s a difference between you and him,” Murph said.
“Yeah?”
She moved a bit, leaned down, and kissed my forehead. “Yeah. You’ve got me.”
And … something little and warm kindled in my heart. It didn’t stop the pain. Oh God, did it not stop the pain.
But it told me the pain wouldn’t be there forever.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll talk to him.”
I made a weary X over my heart.
She patted my cheek approvingly and said, “Good man.”
And I reached for her hand, closed my eyes, and spent a few minutes with tears less bitter.
Chapter
Thirty-three
I pulled myself together after a bit. There was a cabinet in the wheelhouse where I kept a bunch of long-term-storage snacks. Nuts and beef jerky, mostly, plus bottled water. Nothing fancy, but projecting your consciousness was an exhausting activity, and my body needed the calories so badly that the stale nuts and dried jerky tasted freaking delicious. I chomped and guzzled.
It took most of an hour to get to the island on a normal trip, but I opened the throttle all the way, so we would get there in slightly less than most of an hour.
Murphy limped into the boathouse and kept me company in steady silence, watching my face. After about ten minutes of that, she said, “You’re scared.”
I shot her a glance. Shrugged a shoulder.
“That bad?”
I thought about it for a moment, while trying not to think about how sick I felt, how worried. Then I said, “I can do things. You know? I can burn down buildings if I want to. I can blow up cars. Call up things from the Nevernever.”
She nodded.
“Right now, right under my feet, my brother is dying. And maybe the people who want to kill him are already on the way and we won’t even get him to the island. And what’s about to start happening back in town …” I didn’t quite manage to suppress a shudder. “I feel very small.”
Murphy looked at me evenly for a moment. And then her face twisted and she choked down chortling laughter.