I moved over to the child, and she flinched again. I knelt down in front of her. I didn’t try to touch her. I didn’t think I would be able to keep cool if I saw her recoil from my hand.
“Maggie,” I said quietly.
Her eyes flashed up to me, surprise evident there.
“I’m going to take you away from the mean people,” I said, keeping my voice as soft and gentle as I knew how. I didn’t know if she even understood English. “Okay? I’m taking you out of here.”
Her lip trembled. She looked away from me again.
Then I stood up and followed the priestess of the junkie god to face my enemy.
Outside, things had changed. The Red Court had filed down from the pyramid and were on the move, walking in calm, ordered procession to another portion of the ruins. My companions waited at the bottom of the stairs.
“Right,” I said, once I reached them. “Duel time.”
Sanya shook his head. “Mark my words. This will not be settled in a dueling circle. Things like this always go to hell.”
“The Accords are serious,” I said. “He’ll play it straight. If I win, I get the girl and we’re gone.”
Martin shook his head.
“What?” I asked him.
“I know them,” he said levelly. “None of us are leaving this place alive.”
His words had an instant effect on everyone. They hit Molly the hardest. She was already pale. I saw her swallow nervously.
“Maybe you know the monsters, Martin,” Murphy said quietly. “But I know the guy who stops them. And if they don’t return the girl, we’ll make them regret it.” She nodded at me and said, “Let’s go. We can watch Dresden kill the bitch.”
I found myself smiling. Murphy was good people.
Once the last of the half-mortal jaguar warriors had departed, we fell into step behind them, and followed them toward what looked like another temple, on the north end of the ruins.
As we went beneath the temple doorway, though, we found ourselves passing through it into the open space beyond—a swath of green grass at least a hundred and fifty yards long and seventy or eighty yards wide. Stone walls about thirty feet high lined the long sides of the rectangle, while the far end boasted a temple like the one we’d just entered.
“It’s a stadium,” I murmured, looking around the place.
“Ugh,” Molly said. “There are some pretty horrific stories about the Mayans’ spectator sports, boss.”
“Indeed.” Lea sighed happily. “They knew well how to motivate their athletes.”
Alamaya turned to me and said, “Lord, your retainers may wait here. Please come with me.”
“Keep your eyes open, folks,” I said. Then I nodded to Alamaya and followed her onto the field. Even as I started out, a woman began walking toward me from the opposite end. As she approached, I saw that Arianna had the same facial features, more or less, but she had traded in her pale skin for red-brown, her icy eyes for vampire black, and she’d dropped six inches from her height. She wore a simple buckskin shift and more gold jewelry than a Mr. T look- alike convention. Her nose was a little sharper, a little longer, but as we stopped and faced each other from about ten feet away, I could see the hate boiling behind her eyes. I had no doubt that this was the duchess.
I smiled at her and said, “I gotcha now.”
“Yes,” Arianna replied. Her eyes flicked up and around us in a quick circle, taking in the thousands of members of the Red Court and their retainers. “I may faint with the terror.”
“Why?” I demanded of her. “Why bring the child into this? Why not just come straight to me?”
“Does it matter at this point?”
I shrugged. “Not really. I’m curious.”
She stared at me for a moment and then she smiled. “You don’t know.”
I eyed her warily. “Don’t know what?”
“Dear boy,” she said. “This was never about you.”
I scowled. “I don’t understand.”
“Obviously,” Arianna said, and gave me a stunning smile. “Die confused.”
A conch horn moaned and Alamaya turned to bow toward the temple I’d just come through. I could see the Red King seated upon a throne made of dark, richly polished wood, decorated with golden filigree and designs.
Alamaya rose and turned to us. “Lord and lady, these are the limits within which you must do battle. First . . .”
I scowled. “Hey. This is an Accords matter. We abide by the Code Duello.”
The Red King spoke, and though he was more than two hundred feet away, I heard him clearly. Alamaya listened and bowed. “My lord replies that this is a holy time and holy ground to our people, and has been from time immemorial. If you do not wish to respect the traditions of our people, he invites you to return tomorrow night. Unfortunately, he can make no promises about the fate of his newest chattel should you choose to do so.”
I eyed the Red King. Then I snorted. “Fine,” I said.
Alamaya nodded and continued. “First,” she said. “As you are both wielders of Power, you will duel with Power and Power alone. Physical contact of any kind is forbidden.”
Arianna’s eyes narrowed.
Mine did, too. I knew that the Red Court had dabblers in magic—hell, the first Red Court vampire I’d ever met had been a full-blown sorceress by the time she’d been elevated to the Red Court’s nobility. Judging by Arianna’s jewelry, her proper place had been on the eleventh tier of the pyramid—the one directly below the Lords of Outer Night themselves. It stood to reason that even a dabbler could have accrued way too much experience and skill over the course of millennia.
“Second,” the mortal priestess said, “your persons and whatsoever power you use must be contained within the walls of this court. Should either of you violate that proscription, you will be slain out of hand by the wills of my lord and the Lords of Outer Night.”
“I have this problem with buildings,” I said. “Maybe you noticed the columns back the other way . . . ?”
Alamaya gave me a blank look.
I sighed. Nobody appreciates levity when they’re in the middle of their traditional mumbo jumbo, I guess. “Nothing. Never mind.”
“Third,” Alamaya said. “The duel will begin at the next sounding of the conch. It will end only when one of you is no more. Do you understand the rules as I have given them to you?”
“Yep,” I said.
“Yes,” said Arianna.
“Have you anything else to say?”
“Always,” I said. “But it can wait.”
Arianna smiled slightly at me. “Give my father my thanks, and tell him that I will join him in the temple momentarily.”
Alamaya bowed to us both. Then she retreated from the field and back over to her boss.
The night grew silent. Down in the stadium, there wasn’t even the sound of wind. The silence gnawed at me, though Arianna looked relaxed.
“So,” I said, “your dad is the Red King.”
“Indeed. He created me, as he created all of the Thirteen and the better part of our nobility.”
“One big bloodsucking Brady Bunch, huh? But I’ll bet he missed all the PTA meetings.”
The duchess studied me and shook her head. “I shall never understand why someone hasn’t killed you before now.”
“Wasn’t for lack of trying,” I said. “Hey, why do you suppose he set up the rules the way he did? If we’d gone by the Code Duello, there’s a chance it could have been limited to a physical confrontation. Really seems to be taking away most of your advantages, doesn’t he?”
She smiled. “A jaded person might consider it a sign of his weakness.”
“Nice spin on that one. Purely out of curiosity, though: Once you kill me, what comes next?”
She lifted her shoulders in a shrug. “I continue to serve the Red Court to the best of my ability.”
I showed her my teeth. “Meaning you’re going to knock Big Red out of that chair, right?”
“That is more ambitious than reasonable,” she said. “One of the Thirteen, I should think, will ascend to become Kukulcan.”
“Creating an opening in the Lords of Outer Night,” I said, getting it. “Murdering your father to get a promotion. You’re all class.”
“Cattle couldn’t possibly understand.”
“Couldn’t understand that Daddy’s losing it?” I asked. “That he’s reverting into one of your blood slaves?”
Her mouth twitched, as if she were restraining it from twisting into a snarl. “It happens, betimes, to the aged,” Arianna said. “I love and revere my father. But his time is done.”
“Unless you lose,” I said.
“I find that unlikely.” She looked me up and down. “What a . . . novel outfit.”
“I wore it especially for you,” I said, and fluttered my eyelashes at her.
She didn’t look amused. “Most of what I do is business. Impersonal. But I’m going to enjoy this.”
I dropped the wiseacre attitude. The growing force of my anger burned it away. “Taking my kid isn’t impersonal,” I said. “It’s a Kevorkianesque cry for help.”
“Such moral outrage. Yet you are as guilty as I. Did you not slay Paolo’s child, Bianca?”
“Bianca was trying to kill me at the time,” I said. “Maggie is an innocent. She couldn’t possibly hurt you.”
“Then you should have considered that before you insulted me by murdering my grandchild,” she hissed, her voice suddenly tight and cold. “I am patient, wizard. More patient than you could imagine. And I have looked forward to this day, when the consequences of your arrogance shall fall upon both you and all who love you.”
The threat lit a fire in my brain, and I thought the anger was going to tear its way free of my chest and go after her without me.
“Bitch,” I spat. “Come get some.”
The horn blew.
45
Both of us had been gathering up our wills during the snark-off, and the first instant of the duel nearly killed us both.
I called forth force and fire, both laced with the soulfire that would help reinforce its reality, making the attack more difficult to negate or withstand. It took the shape of a sphere of blue-white fire the size of an inflatable exercise ball.
Meanwhile, Arianna fluttered her hands in an odd, twisting gesture and a geyser of water erupted from the soil with bone-crushing force.
The two attacks met halfway between us, with results neither of us could prevent. Fire and water turned to scalding-hot steam in a detonation that instantly washed back over us both. My shield bracelet was ready to go, and a situation something like this one that had rendered my left hand into a horror prop had inspired me to be sure I could protect myself from this kind of heat in the future.
I leapt back and landed in a crouch, raising the shield into a complete dome around me as the cloud of steam swept down, its heat boiling the grass as it came. It stayed there for several seconds before beginning to disperse, and when it finally did, I couldn’t see Arianna anywhere on the field.
I kept the all-around shield in place for a moment, and rapidly focused upon a point a little bit above and midway between my eyebrows. I called up my Sight and swept my gaze around the stadium, to see Arianna, forty yards away and running to put herself in position to shoot me in the back. A layer of greasy black magic seemed to infest the air around her—the veil that my physical eyes hadn’t been able to see. To my Sight, she was a Red Court vampire in its true form, only even more flabby and greasy than the normal vamp, a creature ancient in power and darkness.
I tried not to see anything else, but there was only so much I could do. I could see the deaths that had been heaped upon this field over centuries, lingering in a layer of translucent bones that covered the ground to a depth of three or four feet. In the edges of my vision, I could see the grotesqueries that were the true appearance of the Red Court, every one of them a unique and hideous monster, according to his particular madness. I didn’t dare look directly up at the spectators, and especially not those gathered on the second floor of the little temple at the end of the stadium. I didn’t want to look at the Red King and his Lords unveiled.
I kept my gaze moving, as if I hadn’t spotted Arianna on the prowl, and kept turning in a circle, timing when my back was going to be exposed to her before I dropped the shield and rose, panting, as if I couldn’t have held it any longer than that. I kept on turning, and an instant before she would have released her spell, I whirled on her, pointed a finger, and snarled, “Forzare!”
Raw will lashed out and exploded against her chest just before the flickers of electricity she’d gathered could congeal into a real stroke of lightning. It threw her twenty feet back and slammed her against the ancient rock wall along the side of the ball court.
Before she could fall, I looked up at the top of the wall, seized a section of large stones in fingers of unseen will, and raked them out of their resting places, so that they plunged thirty feet down toward Arianna.
She was superhumanly quick, of course. Anyone mortal would have been crushed. She got away with only a glancing blow from one of the smaller stones and darted to the side, rolling a sphere of lurid red light into a ball between her hands as she went.
I didn’t want to be on the receiving end of that, whatever it was. So I kept raking at the wall, over and over again, bringing down dozens of the stones and forcing her to keep moving, while I ran parallel to her and kept our spacing static.
We were both slinging magic on the run, but she had more one-on-one experience than me. Like a veteran gunslinger in the Old West, she took her time lining up her shot while I flailed away at her with rushed actions that had little chance to succeed. All told, I must have dropped several dozen tons of rock down onto her as we ran, inflicting nothing worse than a few abrasions and heavy bruises.
She threw lightning at me once.
The world flashed red-white and something hard hit me in the back. My legs went wobbly and I sat there for a subjective hour, stunned, and realized that whatever she had packed her lightning bolt with, it had been sufficient to throw me twice as far as my heavy punch had thrown her. I’d bounced off the opposite wall. I looked down at myself, expecting to see a huge hole with burned edges—and instead found a black smudge on my overdone breastplate, and a couple of flaws in the gold filigree where the metal had partially melted.
I was alive.
My head came back together in a sudden rush, and I knew what was coming. I flung up my shield, shaping it not into a portion of a sphere, as I usually did, but into a lengthy triangle in the shape of a pup tent. I crouched beneath it and no sooner had I done so than stones from the wall above me, torn free by Arianna’s will, began to slam into the shield. I crouched there, rapidly being buried in grey stone, and tried desperately to get my impact-dizzied brain to think of a plan.
The best I came up with under the circumstances was this: What would Yoda do?
There was a tiny moment between one rock falling and the next and I dropped the shield. As the next rock began to fall, I stretched out my hand and my will, catching it before gravity could give it much velocity. Again I screamed, “Forzare!” and with an enormous effort of will I altered the course of the stone’s fall, flinging it as hard as I could at Arianna, abetted by gravity and the remnants of her own magic.
She saw it coming, but not until it was too late. She lifted her hands, her fingers making warding gestures as she brought her own defensive magic to bear. The stone smashed through it in a flash of reddish light, and then struck her in the hip, spinning her about wildly and sending her to the ground.
“Harry Dresden, human catapult!” I screamed drunkenly.
Arianna was back on her feet again in an instant: Her shield had bled enough of the energy from the stone to prevent it from smashing into her with lethal force, but it had bought me enough time to get out of the pile of rocks around me and away from the stadium wall. I smashed at her with more fire, an
d she parried each shaft deftly, congealing water out of the air into wobbling spheres that intercepted the bolts of flame and exploded into concealing steam. By the fifth or sixth bolt, I couldn’t see her with my physical eyes, but I did see energies in motion behind the steam as she pulled another dark sheath of veiling energy around her, and I saw her take off into an animal-swift sprint, again circling me to attack me from behind.
No. She couldn’t be trying the same thing twice.
Duels between wizards are about more than swatting each other with various forms of energy, just as boxing is about more than throwing hard punches. There is an art to it, a science to it, in which one attempts to predict the other’s attack and counter it effectively. You have to imagine a counter to what the opponent might do, and have it ready to fly at an instant’s notice. Similarly, you have to imagine your way around the strength of his defenses. A duel of magic is determined almost purely by the imaginations and raw power of those involved.
Arianna had obviously prepared against my favorite weapon—fire—which was only intelligent. But she had tried this backstabbing ploy on me once before, and nearly got burned doing it. A wizard of any experience would tell you that she would never have tried that one again, for fear that the enemy would exploit it even further.
Arianna was an experienced killer, but she hadn’t done a lot of dueling with nothing to rely on except her magic. She’d always had the cushion of her extraordinary strength and speed to fall back upon. Hell, it would have been the smart way to kill me—come straight in, shedding attacks and maybe taking some hits to get close enough to end it decisively.
Except here, she couldn’t. And she wasn’t adjusting well to the handicap. Flexibility of thought is almost never a strength of the truly ancient monsters of the world.
Instead of obliging her by standing in place, as I had last time she’d tried to give me the runaround, I darted forward, into the edges of the concealing steam. I got burned, and accepted it as the price of doing business. I clenched my teeth, focusing past my pain, and tracked Arianna’s energy with my Sight, waiting for my shot and hoping that she didn’t have the Sight as well.
Jim Butcher Page 40
