by Jim Butcher
From somewhere up the stairs, I heard a terrified scream.
Molly.
Charity let out a cry and threw herself up the stairs.
“No!” I shouted. “Charity, wait!”
The doorway darkened as a fetch tried to come through. Murphy, her back flat against the wall beside the door, drew the long fighting dagger she had taken from Charity’s box of goodies. Just as its nose cleared the doorway, she whirled in a half circle and with all the power of her legs, hips, back, and shoulders drove the knife to its hilt in one of the thing’s white eyes.
The fetch went mad with agony. It slammed itself blindly against the inside of the doorway, more liquid fire erupting from the wound, and lurched back and forth until Thomas stepped up to it, lifted a boot, and kicked the fetch with crushing strength, hurling the mortally wounded faerie back out onto the courtyard.
“Go!” he cried. Another fetch began to press in, and Thomas went to work with his sword. His blows struck more burning wounds into the fetch, and its blood sizzled like grease on a stove when it touched the cold iron of his blade. Thomas dodged a return blow and pressed his attack with a sneer, driving the thing back from the doorway.
“Go!” he yelled again. “I’ll hold the door!”
A snakelike, whipping limb shot in along the floor, seized Thomas’s ankle, and hauled his foot out from under him. I clutched at him and kept him from being drawn into the open. “Murph!”
Murphy slid up, pointed her pistol out the door, and squeezed off several shots. A fetch screamed in pain and Thomas’s leg suddenly came free. I pulled him in and he lunged to his feet again.
“We’ll hold the door,” Murphy said, her voice sharp. “Get the girl!”
Molly screamed again.
Charity’s booted feet thudded unseen from the stairs above me.
I spat out an oath and sprinted after her.
Chapter Thirty-eight
The spiral staircase spun me in a steady, ascending circle. The low, ugly light within the walls swirled sickeningly, adding to my sense of motion sickness and disorientation. Below me, I could hear Thomas’s sharp, mocking laughter as he fought, together with the occasional report of Murphy’s gun. My aching body hated me for forcing it to run up the stairs—particularly my knees. Anyone my size is prone to that kind of thing.
But there was nothing to be done about it, so I ignored the pain and went on, Lily’s fiery butterfly keeping pace with me and lighting my way.
I had longer legs, and I caught Charity as she neared the top of the staircase. Molly screamed again, pure terror and anguish and pain, and her voice was very near.
“I’m coming, baby!” Charity gasped, panting. She was in great shape, but no one’s exercise program includes running up several hundred feet of spiral stairs in full mail and helmet carrying a big-ass hammer and a sword. Her legs had slowed, and she staggered a little when she reached the top stair and found herself in a short, level, low-ceilinged hall leading a few feet to another open archway. The cold light of winter night, moonlight on snow, shone in through the arch.
I managed to snag her arm and check her advance just as a heavy door slammed to cover the archway with tooth-rattling force. If I hadn’t delayed her, it would have hit her like a speeding truck. She recovered her balance, and while she did we heard a heavy bolt slide shut on the door. Charity shoved a hand at the door, which remained fixed. She kicked a booted foot at it, and failed to so much as rattle it in its frame.
Molly screamed again, still close, though muffled by the closed door. Her cry was weaker, shorter.
“Molly!” Charity screamed.
I thrust the spread fingers of my left hand against the door, and was instantly aware of the energy flowing through it, binding it, giving it strength beyond reason to resist being opened. I looked for a weakness, a soft spot in the adamant magic supporting the door, but there was none. The ward on the door was, simply put, flawless. It spread through the door’s substance as coldly and beautifully as crystals of ice forming on a window, the magic of Winter drawn up from the heart of the land. There was no way for me to unravel the subtle, complex faerie magic.
But then, it was faerie magic. I didn’t have to be subtle to counter it.
“Charity,” I snapped. “It’s faerie make! The hammer!”
She shot me a glance of comprehension and nodded. “Clear the door.”
I hurried back, leaving her room to swing.
“Please,” Charity whispered as she planted her feet and drew back the weapon. “Please, Father. Please.”
Charity closed her eyes and took a deep breath, focusing her concentration on delivering the most powerful blow she possibly could in the confines of the hallway. Then she swung the weapon back, golf-club style, cried out, and swung, stepping forward.
Maybe Charity was way more buff than I thought. Maybe that particular ward had a particular weakness to cold iron. Maybe it had nothing to do with magic, and Charity had somehow tapped into the strength available to all mothers when their young are endangered. Hell, maybe God was on her side.
Whatever happened, that siege door of adamant ice and malevolent, obdurate magic screamed and shattered at the blow from her hammer, shattered like delicate glass, shattered into pieces no larger than grains of sand. The whole tower rang with the power of the blow, the very black ice it was made of seeming to shriek and groan. The floor literally shook, and I had to crouch to keep from taking a tumble back down the stairs.
I heard Charity choke down a cry of pain. She had broken the door before us, but the spells running through it had backlashed against the hammer, and it too had shattered. A flying piece of fractured metal had cut across her hip and lodged in one of the rings of her mail. It glowed red-hot, and she frantically slapped it away even as it burned her. Other pieces of shrapnel from the hammer had struck the walls of the tower, burning their way into the black ice, sending a network of cracks of green-white light all through the tower around us like some sort of bizarre infection. Black ice melted away from the red-hot steel. The tower rumbled again like some vast, agonized beast.
Charity dropped the handle of the hammer. I could see that her right arm hung limp and useless, but it didn’t stop her from making an awkward left-handed draw of the sword at her hip. I slipped up beside her, staff held ready in both hands, and we stepped out onto the parapet of the tower of Arctis Tor together.
The parapet was enormous, a hundred feet across, twice as wide as the spire beneath us. It was a garden of sorts; a garden of ice.
Ice covered the parapet, somehow formed into ghostly trees and flowers. There were seats here and there in the garden, and they too were made of ice. A frozen fountain stood silent at the center of the parapet, a bare trickle of water sliding from the top of a statue so coated in layers and layers of ice that one could not readily identify its particulars. Replica rose vines and thorns spread all around the place, all ice, all cold and beautiful.
Upon the branch of a tree perched a cardinal, its bloodred feathers brilliant, though the bird itself was utterly still. I peered a bit closer, and saw that it was covered in a layer of transparent ice, frozen into a sculpture every bit as much as the rest of the place. Not far from it, a spider’s web spread between some tree branches, the spider at its center also transformed into ice sculpture. A swift look around showed me more beings entombed in ice, and I realized that this place was not a garden.
It was a prison.
Next to the fountain sat a lovely young girl in a Byzantine gown, hand entwined with that of a young man in similar historic costume. Not far from them, three females of the Sidhe, Mab’s kindred, the nobility of faerie kind, stood back-to-back, their shoulders touching in a triangle. The three looked so much alike that they might have been sisters, and they each held hands with the others, expressions of determination and fear frozen onto their faces.
The ice sculpture of a thick, dead-looking tree held a dead, naked man upon it, crucified on its branches as a grotesque wo
rk of art. Bonds of ice held him there, transparent enough to let me see the blackened flesh of his hands and feet, the gangrenous darkness spreading upward through the veins of his arms and legs. His hair was long, unwashed, and fell over his face as he hung limp within his bonds, his body coated with layers of crystalline frost.
Molly sat at the base of the same tree. Her artfully shredded clothes had been shredded in truth, and they hung from her as loose rags. Her cotton-candy hair hung in a limp mass, uncombed and tangled. She shuddered with cold, and her eyes stared at nothing. Her expression was twisted as if in effort, her mouth open. It took me a minute to realize that she had never stopped screaming. She’d damaged her throat, and no sound would emerge. But that didn’t stop her from trying.
Charity shifted her weight to hurry forward, but I cautioned her, “Wait. We’ll do her no good if we’re dead.”
She clenched her jaw, but heeded me, and we paused for a moment while I swept my gaze over the rest of the parapet. Some movement in the shadows behind the crucifixion tree drew my eye, and I reached back for the handle of my blasting rod, sticking out of my nylon backpack. I drew the magical tool and primed it with an effort of will. Red-white fire suddenly glowed at its tip. “There. Behind the tree,” I said.
A deep voice let out a rasping chuckle.
Then, from the darkness I couldn’t quite see into, the Scarecrow appeared.
This thing was no fetch, no changer of form and image and illusion. There was no shadowy mask over an amorphous form, no glamour altering its appearance, which my salve would have enabled me to see through. This thing was a whole, independent creature. Unless maybe it was a fetch so old and strong that it could transform itself into the Scarecrow in truth and not simply in seeming.
Red flame glittered in the carved-pumpkin head. Its limbs, all long, tough vines as thick as my wrists, were clothed in ragged tatters of black that looked more like a funeral robe than a farmer’s castoffs. Its long arms trailed almost to the ground, and one of them was stretched over to Molly. At the end of the arm, the vines tapered into dozens of slender, flexible tendrils, and the Scarecrow had them wrapped around Molly’s throat and sliding up into her hair.
We stood in silence, facing one another for a while. Wind moaned somewhere overhead, not far above the parapet. The sounds of hissing and screaming fetches drifted up as if from a great distance. Thomas and Murphy still held the door.
I took several steps to one side and gave the Scarecrow a little smile. “Hi,” I said. “Who the hell are you?”
“One who has served the Queen of Air and Darkness since before your kind can remember,” he replied. “One who has destroyed hundreds like you.”
“You know what, Captain Kudzu?” I asked. “I’m not here to play guessing games with you. Give me the girl.”
The bizarre creature’s face twisted in what might been amusement. “Or what follows?”
I wasn’t absolutely certain the thing was quoting Shakespeare, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t do it. “Bloody constraint,” I told him. “For should you try to hide the girl from me, even in your heart, there shall I rake for her.”
Maybe the Scarecrow wasn’t a Shakespeare fan. Its eyes flared with angry scarlet light. “Little man. Move an inch closer and I will crush her soft little neck.”
“Inadvisable,” I said, and raised my blasting rod to level it at the Scarecrow. “Because she’s the only thing keeping you alive right now.”
“I fear you not, wizard,” the Scarecrow said. The creature narrowed its eyes, focusing upon me intently—perhaps preparing the same defense that had shed my spells in our first encounter. “Bring your fire, if you think it may survive the heart of Winter. It will avail you against me this time no more than last.”
“You think I’d show up for round two without being prepared to finish what I started?” I asked him. I sidled a couple of more steps to one side. “The Council is already on the way here,” I said. “I’m here to make you an offer before things fall apart. Give me the girl and your word not to go near her again, and I let you live.”
The Scarecrow let out a laugh of pure scorn. “I shall enjoy killing you, mortal.”
I prowled a few steps more and planted my feet, then brandished my staff and rod. The Scarecrow crouched in response, eyes burning even brighter.
I had to be careful. If I spooked him too much, he’d kill Molly as a prelude to closing with me. “You know what your problem is?” I asked him.
He stared at me for a blank second of incomprehension. “What?”
I showed my teeth in a wolfish smile. “You underestimate people.”
While I’d drawn the Scarecrow’s attention and eye, Charity had slipped around behind it, silent as a puff of smoke. As I spoke, she lifted her sword and swept it down at the appendage holding her daughter. The steel blade hissed and flashed and seared its way through the limb holding Molly.
The Scarecrow reared its head back in a sudden howl of rage. Molly’s body bucked in panic as the severed limbs contracted on her throat. I lifted my staff and snarled, “Forzare!” Unseen force lashed out, caught up Molly as gently as I could manage it, and flipped her tail over teakettle away from the creature. No sooner had I moved her than its stumpy arm swung down to smash into the ground where the girl had been sitting.
The Scarecrow turned to grab at Molly, but Charity stepped into its path, cold steel gleaming, her eyes harder and colder than the black ice of Arctis Tor. She faced the thing squarely and snarled, “You will never touch my daughter again.”
The creature roared in fury and rushed Charity. I whipped up my blasting rod and snarled, “Fuego!” A lance of flame as thick as my wrist lashed out from the tip of the rod—and died two feet away from it, the burning energy of the magical strike swallowed by an unfathomable ocean of cold, cold power. I had hoped that I could get in a shot while the Scarecrow was distracted, but I had already decided on what to try next if I couldn’t.
I stuck the blasting rod through my belt, whipped my staff up to point the tip at the ground beneath the Scarecrow’s feet, and shouted, “Forzare!”
Invisible force lashed out and struck the black ice under the Scarecrow like a mortar round. It threw the creature ten feet into the air, spinning end over end. Deadly chips of black ice flew. As the spell’s energy roared out of me, I staggered and almost lost my balance. My vision tunneled for a second or two out of pure exhaustion. I’d been pushing too hard, for too long, with no rest. The magic I’d been using had drained my reserves entirely. The human body has limits that cannot be circumvented, and I had reached mine.
Charity rushed forward before the Scarecrow could rise. Her sword hacked down at it in elemental brutality, and the Scarecrow’s blood and woodlike flesh sizzled on her blade. But she didn’t kill it.
The Scarecrow regained its feet and lashed an arm at Charity. She swung her sword to meet it. Cold iron bit into faerie flesh, drawing forth another explosion of brilliant, liquid flame. The creature screamed, a sound louder than any living thing I’d ever heard, and its backswing slammed into Charity’s limp right arm. The impact tore a grunt of pain from her and flung her several feet through the air, but the Scarecrow paid for it. Coming into contact with Charity’s mail burned it again, and its furious howls redoubled.
It lifted a foot to stomp down on the helplessly writhing Molly, to flatten her like an aluminum can.
It was the kind of thing that draws suicidal levels of chivalry from me. I ran for the Scarecrow, ditching my blasting rod on the way. I took my staff in both hands, slammed it down like a pole-vaulter, and launched myself into the air, both feet aimed at the Scarecrow’s back. I hit the thing with considerable force, but I’d been too tired to manage it as precisely as I wished. The blow only staggered the creature, and I bounced off it and flopped onto the icy surface of the parapet.
I had bought time enough, though, for Charity to regain her feet and charge forward with her blade, diverting the Scarecrow’s attention from her daught
er.
Before I could regain my feet, the Scarecrow snapped a foot at me in a clumsy, unbalanced kick. It landed with only a fraction of the force it might have had. Even so, that was enough to send me sprawling ten feet away and maybe crack one of my ribs. Pain washed through me and I suddenly couldn’t get my lungs to take in enough air.
The Scarecrow stretched out an arm toward Charity, and ropy-looking vines shot from the ends of his arms, flickered across the ten feet between them like lightning, and wrapped her sword arm’s wrist. The tendrils tightened. The Scarecrow shook Charity violently. She screamed, and the sword tumbled from her fingers. More vines wrapped around her throat, and the creature simply hauled her up into the air. Its wounds were already closing, rebuilding themselves. It seized Molly in its other hand and lifted her as well, holding the pair of them face-to-face. There was a malicious eagerness in the creature’s stance.
“See,” it murmured to the fruitlessly struggling Charity. “Look at her. Watch your daughter die.”
Charity’s eyes widened with terror. Her face turned dark red. Molly, meanwhile, simply lay limp, her own face darkening as she was strangled.
“Not long now,” the Scarecrow purred. “There is nothing you can do to help her, mortal woman. Nothing you can do to stop me.”
It was a fetch, I was sure of it, a creature who had been given talent or power enough to exceed its former status, to become the embodiment of the icon of fear mortals called the Scarecrow, to draw power from that image—power enough to block out my strongest magic. That was why it tormented both Molly and her mother—to feed on their terror.
