by Jim Butcher
The Erlking waved a hand. “Nay, nay. The Knight caught my words fairly. Guests they are, Lord Ordulaka, and I will not cheapen my honor by betraying that ancient compact.” He narrowed his eyes. “Mmmm. Guests they are. Perhaps I should treat them most courteously. Perhaps I should insist that you remain my guests, to be cared for and entertained, for the next century.” He gave me a chilly little smile. “After all, you are all but the first visitors to my realm. I could understandably find it greatly insulting were you not to allow me the opportunity to honor you appropriately.”
The Eebs looked at each other and then both bowed sinuously to the Erlking. “Generous host,” Esteban said, “you honor us greatly. We should be pleased to stay as your guests for whatever length of time you feel appropriate.”
“Harry,” Susan hissed, tensing.
She didn’t need to explain it to me. A delay of even a few hours might mean Maggie’s death.
“Honored host,” I said. “Such a path would be no less than your due, given the . . . unanticipated nature of our visit. But I would beg you only to consider my obligations to my Lady Mab. I pursue a quest that I may not lay aside, and which she has bidden me complete. It hinges upon things that occur in mortal time, and were you to insist upon your rights as host, it could compromise my own honor. Something I know that you, as mine host, would never wish to do.”
The Erlking gave me a look that blended annoyance with amusement and said, “Few Winter Knights have had swords as swift as your tongue, boy. But I warn thee: name your Lady a third time and you will not like what follows.”
I hadn’t even thought of that. Hell’s bells, he was right. Speaking Mab’s name here, in the Nevernever, could indeed summon her. At which point not only would she be an intruder in another ruler’s domain, perhaps vulnerable to his power or influence, but she would be extremely annoyed with one overtaxed wizard for having brought her. The clashing of such Powers in simple proximity could prove dangerous, even deadly.
I bowed my head again and said, “Of course, mine host.”
A goblin about five feet tall, and so slender that it looked like a stiff wind might blow him down, appeared from the shadows and diffidently took the Erlking’s helmet. He began to turn to carry it away, paused, and suggested, in a spidery, whispering, unpleasant voice, “We are all predators here, my lord. Let it be settled in a trial of blood.”
The Erlking spread his hands, as if he felt the suggestion should have been self-evident to everyone present. “Of course, Rafforut. Again, thou hast given excellent service.”
The wispy goblin bowed at the waist and retreated to the shadows, his mouth curling up in a small smile.
“Oh,” I said. “Oh, crap.”
“What?” Susan asked.
I turned to speak quietly to her in a whisper pitched to register only to her more-than-human hearing, and hoped that the goblins didn’t hear even better than that. “The Erlking can’t harm us, or allow us to come to harm while we are his guests. Ditto for the Reds. But since we have competing claims that must be settled, he can establish a trial by combat to see who is correct—or at least, most committed to his version of the story.”
Susan’s eyes widened as she understood. “If we won’t fight for our side of the story, he decides against us and for the Eebs.”
I nodded. “At which point he can declare that we have abused his hospitality,” I said. “And he will be free to kill us, probably without repercussion.”
“But you just said—”
“M—The Winter Queen doesn’t feel a thing for me,” I said. “She might be annoyed. But this time next week, she’ll barely remember me.”
“But the Council—”
“I said they would feel strongly about it,” I said. “I never said they’d be upset.”
Susan’s eyes got a little wider.
“A trial of skill, then,” the Erlking said. “A match. The Knight and the lady huntress versus two of your own, Red hunters. Choose which will stand for your side of the issue.” He clapped his hands once, a sound like a small cannon going off. “Prepare the hall.”
Goblins leapt to obey, and cleared the long trestle tables outward with great energy and efficiency. Others began to rip at the stone with their bare, black-nailed hands. They tore it like wet earth, swiftly gouging out a great ring in the floor, a trench six inches wide, almost that deep, and thirty or forty yards across.
“We’re hardly armed properly for such a trial, mine host,” I said. “Whilst the Red hunters are fully equipped for battle as they are.”
The Erlking spread his hands again. “Ah, but they are armed with what they deemed necessary to them for the hunt. And a true hunter never leaves himself unprepared for what the world may bring to face him. Do you say, perhaps, that you are no hunter after all?”
“No,” Susan said at once. “Of course not.”
The Erlking looked at her and gave her a nod of approval. “I am glad you find yourselves appropriately armed.” He glanced over at the Eebs, who were discussing matters in furious whispers, probably employing a nonstandard use of pronouns. “Sooth, boy, you were quick enough at wordplay that I would fain feed thee and send thee on thy way, had you come here unpursued. But I will not rouse the wrath of the Lords of Outer Night lightly. A war with them would be a waste of dozens of excellent hunting moons.” He shrugged. “So. Prove yourselves worthy, and you may be on your way.”
I cleared my throat. “And our . . . fellow visitors?”
The Erlking didn’t smile or otherwise change his expression, but I suddenly got creeped out enough to have to fight to keep from stepping away from him. “My hall is fully furnished to receive all manner of outsiders. There are rooms in these caves filled with clever devices meant for the amusement of my kin, and lacking only the appropriate . . . participants.”
“What happens if we lose?” Susan asked.
“If fortune is kind, you will have clean deaths in the trial. If not . . .” He shrugged. “Certain of my kin—Rafforut, for example—are most eager to give purpose to all the rooms of my hall. You would amuse them for as long as you could respond. Which might be a very, very long time.”
Susan eyed the Erlking. Then she said, “Let’s do it, then. I, too, have promises to keep.”
He inclined his head to her. “As you wish, lady huntress. Sir Knight, lady, please enter the circle.”
I started toward it and Susan walked beside me.
“How should we do it?” she asked.
“Fast and hard.”
Her voice turned wry. “How did I know you’d want it like that?”
I let out a short bark of genuine laughter. “I thought I was supposed to be the one with one thing on his mind.”
“Oh, when we were younger, certainly,” she replied. “Now, though, our roles have reversed.”
“Meaning you want it fast and hard, too?”
She gave me a sly and very heated look with her dark eyes from beneath her dark lashes. “Let’s just say that there’s something to be said for that, once in a while.” She spun the table leg in a few circles. I watched. She stopped and glanced at me, arching an eyebrow inquisitively.
My godmother might have tipped me off to a cure, a way to free Susan of the creature that had devoured half of her being and thirsted for me, something the Fellowship of St. Giles had been trying—and failing—to do for hundreds of years. It was possible that, with a bit more work, I could make it happen for her, give her back control of her life.
But even if I did, we couldn’t be together. Not now.
Mab was bad enough . . . and Hell’s bells, I hadn’t even thought about it, I’d been so busy, but Mab’s understudy, Maeve, the Winter Lady, was arguably more psychotic than Mab herself. And she was unarguably pet-tier, more vicious, and more likely to want to play games with anyone close to me.
I wondered how long it would take me to lose myself. Weeks? Months? Neither Mab nor Maeve would want me to remain my own man. I wondered if, when I was what
they wanted me to be, it would bother me to remember what I had been. What others had meant to me.
All I said was, “I miss you.”
She looked down and away, blinking. Then she gave me a rather hesitant smile as a tear fell—as if it were something she hadn’t done in a while, and was still remembering how to accomplish it. “I miss joking with you.”
“How could you do it?” I asked quietly. “How could you not tell me about her?”
“By tearing out a piece of myself,” she said quietly. “I know it was wrong. I knew it was wrong when I did it, and that . . . that I was going to regret it someday. But I had to keep her safe. I’m not asking you to forgive. Just . . . just understand.”
I thought about that moment of stillness and choice at the Stone Table.
“Yeah,” I said. I lifted a hand and touched her face with my fingertips. Then I leaned over to kiss her forehead. “I do understand.”
She stepped closer and we hugged. She felt surprisingly slender and fragile in my arms. We stayed that way for a little while, both of us feeling the fear of what was coming. We tried to ignore the hundreds of red eyes watching us. We more or less succeeded.
Another cannon clap of sound echoed around the vast hall, and the Erlking said, “Red hunters. Let your chosen champions enter the circle or else forfeit the trial.”
“Okay,” I said. “The Eebs will be tough but they’re doable. They rely on stealth tactics, and this is going to be as straight up as you can get. I’m going to hit them with something that should give you enough time to close. Take whichever one is on the left. Move too far to the right and you’ll be in my line of fire, so don’t. You smash one, I burn the other, and we go get some custom coffee mugs to memorialize the occasion later.”
Susan said, “I stopped drinking coffee. You know, the caffeine.”
I looked at her with mock disgust. “You heathen.”
“Fine!” Esmerelda said from the far side of the circle. She pointed a finger at one of the vampires trapped beneath the goblins’ nets. “You. You do it.” Impatiently, the tiny woman went to the trapped vampire, hideous and inhuman in its true form, and sliced through the odd material of the net with her nails, freeing the captive. Without ceremony, she pitched the vampire into the circle.
One of her foot soldiers? Okay. This might be easier than I’d thought.
Esteban appeared then, walking calmly forward.
The slowly accelerating lub-dub sound of the Devourer’s unsettling heartbeat came with him. The Devourer loomed over Esteban, horrible and hungry-looking, and at a command from the vampire, it shambled forward into the circle, its all- black eyes staring at us with unnerving intensity. I might have been projecting or something, but it seemed to me that the Ick was spoiling for some payback.
“Oh, crap,” Susan said in a very small voice.
“When the circle is closed,” said the Erlking’s deep baritone, “the trial begins. It will conclude when one party has been neutralized. Do the champions of the Red hunters stand ready?”
All of the vampires let out wailing shrieks, and even the Ick emitted a hissing burble, like an overfull teakettle.
“What are we going to do?” Susan whispered frantically.
I had no idea. “You take the scrub,” my mouth said. “I’ll handle the Devourer.”
“Right,” she said, her eyes wide. “Right.”
The Erlking appeared, halfway between the two parties, standing outside the circle. “Sir Knight! Do you and the lady huntress stand ready?”
We both nodded sharply, though our eyes were fixed upon our opponents, not the Erlking. I began drawing in my will, and power seethed in my belly and chest and became an odd pressure behind my eyes.
The Erlking drew his sword and held it high, and every goblin in the place began roaring. Fire licked up the blade of the sword, wreathing it in green flame, and then he dropped the sword, thrusting its tip into the trough in the stone the goblins had dug.
Green goblin fire flared up with a howl and clouds of foul smoke. It raced around the exterior of the circle in both directions, until the two tongues of flame met at the point opposite where they had begun.
Susan screamed. I screamed. The vampire screamed. The Ick . . . did that teakettle thing.
And then we all started trying to kill one another.
Chapter Thirty-seven
Vampires and Icks are fast, but I’d dueled their like before. Like the apocryphal Loki, my previous opponents had learned that no matter how quick you are on your feet, you aren’t faster than thought.
The spell I’d been holding ready lashed out before either of our opponents had moved more than a couple of feet, naked force howling out from my outstretched hand to seize not the Ick, but, in a sudden flash of inspiration, I directed it at the vampire beginning to bound along beside and a little behind it. Clearly, maybe even wisely, the vamp was hoping to stand in the Devourer’s shadow when the hurt started flying.
I cried out, “Forzare!” and my raw will hammered the vampire down and at an oblique angle—directly in front of and beneath the feet of the Ick.
If you have no weapons with which to fight the enemy, find a way to make your enemy be your weapon. If you can pull it off, it makes you look amazing.
The vampire went under the Ick’s feet with a wailing squeal and a crunchy-sounding splatter of vile fluids. The collision tripped up the massive hunting creature as its legs tangled with the vampire’s rubbery, sinuous limbs, and the Ick came crashing to the ground, its unnatural drumbeat heart thudding loud and furious, swiping and smashing in fury at the entanglement without ever bothering to consider what it might be destroying.
Susan adjusted almost instantly to what had happened, and closed on the sprawling Ick with incredible speed. Her arm blurred as the Ick began recovering its balance, smashing her club straight down onto its skull and driving its head down to rebound from the floor.
The Ick took the hit like it was a love tap, slashing at Susan with its claws—but she had already bounded into the air, jerking her knees up to avoid the grabbing claws and flying clear over the Devourer to a roar of approval from the watching goblins. She landed in a baseball player’s slide and shot forward over the gore-smeared stone, snapping one hand back to grab the throat of the downed vampire as she did.
The battered body came free of the Ick’s limbs, minus a limb or two of its own, and thrashed weakly, slowing Susan’s slide and stopping her forward motion a bare inch before her feet would have slid into the green flame surrounding the fighting ring.
The Ick whirled around as it staggered to its feet again, preparing to pursue her, when I lifted my blasting rod, snarled, “Fuego,” and hammered it with all the power I could shove through the magical focus. Blue-white fire, blindingly bright against the rather dim green flames of the Erlking’s will, drew a group scream of surprise and discomfort from the gathered goblins. The fire struck the Ick and gouged a chunk of black, rubbery flesh the size of a watermelon out of the massive muscles of its back. Its head whipped back so sharply that the top of its head practically touched its own spine, and it lost its balance for another second or two, slipping on the gore the first vampire had provided as it turned toward me.
I dimly took note of Susan as this happened. The half-crushed, half-dismembered vampire flailed wildly with its remaining claws and fangs, putting up an insanely desperate, vicious fight in an attempt to hang on to its life.
Susan took a hard blow to the side of the head, and when she turned back, her lip was bloodied, her teeth bared in a snarl, and the dark swirls and points of her tattoos began to spread over her face like black ink dripped upon water. She dropped the improvised club, got both hands on the vampire’s throat, and, with calm, precise strength, thrust its head into the green fire.
There was a bloody explosion as that fire devoured the vampire, and though its heat had seemed no greater than any campfire’s, the temperature within that fire had to be something as hot as the sun. As the vamp
ire’s skull entered it, it simply disintegrated with a howl of vaporized liquids, spattering tiny bits of bone like shrapnel and covering Susan and the dying vampire both in an enormous, dark, foul-smelling cloud.
“Susan!” I shouted, and darted over to one side so that I wouldn’t be loosing blasts of fire blindly into that cloud if I missed. I hit the Devourer, gouging out a small trough in one of its arms, missed with the third blast, and scored with a fourth, burning a scorch mark as wide as my thigh across its hip. The drumbeat of its heart was a huge, pounding rhythm by now, like the double bass drums of a speed-metal band. The hits seemed only to make it more furious, and it shifted into a controlled forward rush meant to crowd me into the outer ring of fire or else leave me unable to escape its grasping claws.
But either the blow on the noggin or one of the blasts I’d unleashed had slowed the Ick down. I sprinted for the angle on its approach, for the path that would let me evade the Devourer and its outstretched claws, and got clear of its attack, beating the monster out on footwork and keeping from being trapped against the circle’s perimeter as it came at me.
I found a fierce smile spreading over my lips as I moved. I kept hurling blasts at its legs as I ran, attempting to slow it even more. I didn’t hit with more than a quarter of them, I think, but the missed bolts of fire splashed against the Erlking’s green fire in sizzling bursts of light. The adrenaline made my senses crystalline, bringing me every sight and sound with a cold purity, and I suddenly saw where the Devourer was weakest.
Though it was hard to tell with its alien movement, I realized that it was favoring one side ever so slightly. I darted in for a better look, nearly got my head ripped off by a flailing fist, and saw that the Ick’s leg was wounded, low on the back of its thigh, where the black flesh was twisted and mangled. Had it been mortal skin and tissue, I would have thought it the result of a severe burn—as long as whatever had done the burning had been molten- metal hot and shaped like Mouse’s teeth. The Foo dog had gotten to the Ick during its encounter with Thomas, with a wound that had threatened to cripple it. That was why it had been forced to withdraw. If it stayed and Mouse had managed another such strike, it would have been entirely immobilized.
