by Jim Butcher
“S-so,” Carol said, “what are you doing, exactly?”
“I’m going to take their smoke screen away.” I held the sprinkler head in my right hand and closed my eyes, focusing on it, on its texture, its shape, its composition. I began pouring energy into the object, imagining it as a glowing aura of blue-white light with dozens of little tendrils sprouting from it. Once the energy was firmly wrapped around the sprinkler, I transferred it to my left hand and extended my right again.
“B-but we don’t have any lights.”
“Oh, we have lights,” I said. I held out my right hand and called forth my little ball of sunshine. In the myrk-free interior of the circle, it was as white-hot and as bright as usual, but I could see that outside of the circle it didn’t spread more than five or six feet through the myrk out there.
“Oh, my God,” Carol said.
“Actually, all the regular lights are on too-they’re just being blocked. The myrk isn’t shutting down the electricity. These computers are all on, for example-but the myrk is keeping you from seeing any of the indicator lights.”
“Harry!” Michael called.
“You rush a miracle worker, you get lousy miracles!” I called back in an annoyed tone. The rest of the spell was going to be a little tricky.
“H-how are you doing that?” Carol breathed.
“Magic,” I growled. “Hush.” I wore a leather glove over my left hand, as usual, which should offer my scarred skin a little protection. All the same, this wouldn’t be much fun. I murmured, “Ignus, infusiarus,” and thrust the end of the sprinkler into the flame floating over my right hand.
“How does this help us?” Carol demanded, her voice shaking and frightened.
“This place still has electricity,” I said. Maybe I was imagining the smell of burned leather as the heat from the flame poured into the metal sprinkler. “It still has computers. It still has phones.”
“Harry!” Michael said, swinging his head left and right, staring up at the ceiling. “They’re climbing. They’re going to come through the roof.”
I began to feel the heat, even in the nerve-damaged fingers of my left hand. It was going to have to be hot enough. I drew up more of my will, lifted the sprinkler and the flame, and visualized what I wanted, the tendrils of energy around it zipping out to every other sprinkler head in the whole building. “And it still has its sprinklers.”
I broke the circle with my foot, and energy lashed out from the sprinkler to every other object shaped like it in the surrounding area. Heat washed out of me in a wave, headed in dozens of different directions, and I poured all the energy I could into the little ball of sunshine, which suddenly had several dozen sprinkler heads to absorb its energy instead of only one.
It took maybe ten seconds before the fire detector let out a howl and the sprinkler system chattered to life. People let out surprised little shrieks, and a steady emergency klaxon wound to life somewhere out in the station. Sparks flew up from several phones, monitors, and computers.
“Okay,” I said. “So the office doesn’t have computers. But the rest still applies.”
Michael looked up at me and showed me his teeth in a ferocious grin. “When?”
I watched my little ball of sunshine intensely as the water came down. For maybe half a minute nothing happened, except that we got drenched. It was actually kind of surprising how much water was coming down-surprising in a good way, I mean. I wanted lots of water.
Somewhere around the sixty-second mark I felt my spell begin to flicker, its power eroded away by the constant downpour.
“Wait for it,” I said. “Ready…”
At two minutes my spell buckled, the connection to the other sprinklers snapping, the fire in my hand snuffing out. “Michael!” I shouted. “Now!”
Michael grunted and flung open the door. Before he’d stepped through it there was a sudden flutter of faltering power in the air, and the holy blade blazed with light brighter than the heart of the sun itself.
He plunged through the door, and as the burning light of Amoracchius emerged into the station at large, dozens or hundreds of hob throats erupted into tortured cries. The sound of the wicked faeries’ screams was so loud that I actually felt the pressure it put on my ears, the way you can at a really loud concert.
But louder still was the voice of Michael Carpenter, Knight of the Cross, avenging angel incarnate, bearer of the blade that had once belonged to a squire called Wart. “Lava quod est sordium!” Michael bellowed, his voice stentorian, too enormous to come from a human throat. “In nomine Dei, sana quod est saucium!”
After the Sword had left the room, I could see that all the office lights had come back, as well as those outside. “Mouse!” I screamed. “Stay! Guard the wounded!” I hurried after Michael and glanced back behind me. Mouse trotted forward and planted himself in the doorway between the hobs and the people in the office, head high, legs braced wide to fill the space.
Outside the sprinklers were doing a credible impersonation of a really stinky monsoon. I slipped in a puddle of water and burning hob blood a few feet outside the door. The light from the Sword was so bright, so purely, even painfully white that I had to shield my eyes with one arm. I couldn’t look directly at Michael, or even anywhere near him, so I followed him by the pieces of hob he left in his wake.
Several wicked faeries had been struck down by Michael’s sword.
They were the lucky ones.
Many more-dozens that I could see-had fallen too far away for Michael to have reached them with the blade. Those were simply lumps of smoldering charcoal spewing columns of greasy smoke, their meat flash-cooked away from bone. Some of the soon-to-be-former hobs were still thrashing as they burned.
Hell’s bells.
I don’t call him the Fist of God as a pet name, folks.
I followed Michael, alert for any dimming of the Sword’s light. If any of the sprinklers in the building were a different model from the one I’d used to focus my spell, it wouldn’t have been able to heat them and trigger them. If Michael wound up plunging back into the myrk, then the hobs, afforded a measure of protection from the light, would gang up on him-and fast.
But as luck (or maybe fate, or maybe God, but probably a cheap city contractor) would have it, it looked like they’d all been the same. Water came down everywhere, washing away the myrk as if it had been a layer of mud, replacing it with thousands upon thousands of fractured rainbows as the pure illumination of Amoracchius shone through the artificial downpour.
For the hobs, there was nowhere to hide.
I followed the trail of smitten fiends. Smiten fiends? Smited fiends? Smoted fiends? Don’t look at me. I never finished high school. Maybe learning the various conjugations of to smite had been in senior-year English. It sure as hell hadn’t been on my GED test.
I stopped and peered around as best I could through the blinding light and steady fall of water from the sprinklers, trying to get an idea of where Michael was headed.
I felt a sudden, swift vibration that rose through the soles of my shoes, and then a heavy thud accompanying a second such tremor. I whirled to face the front of the building as glass and brick and stone exploded from the entry door. Behind it was a vague flicker of haze in the air, but as whatever was behind the veil entered the glare of Amoracchius and my impromptu thundershower, the spell faltered and vanished.
Twenty feet and four or five tons of Big Brother Gruff erupted from the veil.
He wore armor made of some kind of translucent crystal, and the sword in his hand was longer than my freaking car. His mouth opened, and I felt his battle roar rather than hearing it over the cacophony of combat, a sound so deep and loud that it should have been made by a freaking whale.
“Oh, yeah,” I muttered. “Today just keeps getting better and better.”
Chapter Twenty-five
A nybody with an ounce of sense knows that fighting someone with a significant advantage in size, weight, and reach is difficult. If your oppon
ent has you by fifty pounds, winning a fight against him is a dubious proposition, at best.
If your opponent has you by eight thousand and fifty pounds, you’ve left the realm of combat and enrolled yourself in Road-kill 101. Or possibly in a Tom and Jerry cartoon.
My body was already in motion, apparently having decided that waiting on my brain to work things through was counterproductive to survival. It was thinking that the cat-and-mouse analogy was a pretty good one. While I was nimbler and could accelerate more swiftly than the huge gruff, he could build up more speed on a straightaway. Physically speaking, I had almost no chance of seriously harming him, while even a love tap from him would probably collapse my rib cage-another similarity.
Jerry wins on television, but in real life Tom would rarely end up with the short end of the stick. I don’t remember Mister ever coming home nursing mouse-inflicted wounds. For that matter, he hardly ever came home from one of his rambles hungry. Playing cat and mouse is generally only fun for the cat.
My body, meanwhile, had flung itself to one side, forcing Tiny to turn as he pursued me, limiting his speed and buying me a precious second or three-time enough for me to sprint toward a section of floor marked off by a pair of yellow caution signs, where Joe the janitor had been waxing the floor. I crossed the wet, slick floor at a sprint and prayed that I wouldn’t trip. If I went down it would take only one stomp of one of those enormous hooves to slice me in half.
Footgear like that isn’t so hot for slippery terrain, though. As soon as I crossed to the other side of the waxed floor I juked left as sharply as I could, changing direction. Tiny tried to compensate and his legs went out from under him.
That isn’t a big deal, by itself. Sometimes when you run something happens and you trip and you fall down. You get a skinned knee or two, maybe scuff up your hands, and very rarely you’ll do something worse, like sprain an ankle.
But that’s at human mass. Increase the mass to Tiny’s size, and a fall becomes another animal entirely, especially if there’s a lot of velocity involved. That’s one reason why elephants don’t ever actually run-they aren’t capable of it, of lifting their weight from the ground in a full running stride. If they fell at their size, the damage could be extreme, and evidently nature had selected out all those elephant wind sprinters. That much weight moving at that much speed carries a tremendous amount of energy-enough to easily snap bones, to drive objects deep into flesh, to scrape the ground hard enough to strip a body to the bone.
Tiny must have weighed twice what an elephant does. Five tons of flesh and bone came down all along one side of his body and landed hard-then slid, carrying so much momentum that Tiny more resembled a freight train than any kind of living being. He slid across the floor and slammed into the wall of a rental car kiosk, shattering it to splinters-and went right on through it, hardly even slowing down.
Tiny dug at the floor with the yellow nails of one huge hand, but they didn’t do anything but peel up curls of wax as he went sliding past me.
I slammed on the brakes and tried to judge where Tiny looked like he’d coast to a halt. Then I drew in my will.
It was difficult as hell in the falling water, but I didn’t need a lot of it. When it comes to intentionally screwing up technology, I’ve always had a gift.
I focused on the lights above the entire section of the station Tiny slid into, lifted my right hand, and snarled, “Hexus!” Some of them actually exploded in showers of golden sparks. Some of them let out little puffs of smoke-but every single one of them went out.
Michael had advanced down the concourse far behind me, and the light of Amoracchius was now shielded by the station’s interior walls. When I took out the electric lights, it created a genuine swath of heavy shadows.
The sudden island of darkness drew hobs like corpses draw flies: burned, terrified, furious hobs whose tidbit-filled night on the town had suddenly turned into a nightmare. They didn’t have eyes, but they found their way to the dark easily enough, and I saw more than a dozen rush in, one of them passing within a couple of feet of me without ever slowing down or taking note of my presence.
Tiny started bellowing a second later, his huge voice blending with the vengeful howls of angry hobs.
“Ain’t so big now,” I panted, “are you?”
But as it turned out, Tiny was just as big.
A crushed hob flew out of the shadows and splattered the floor maybe twenty feet away. I don’t mean that he was just rag-doll limp. He was crushed, crushed like a beer can, where Tiny’s huge fist had simply seized the hob, squeezed it hard enough to empty it of various internal liquids, and then thrown it away.
Light flashed in the shadows, a long streak of sparks, like flint drawn along a long, long strip of steel, and suddenly low blue flames surrounded the blade of Tiny’s sword. They were guttering, barely able to stay alight beneath the falling water, but they cast enough light to let me see what was happening.
The hobs had gone mad with hate.
It had been inevitable, I suppose. The minions of Winter and those of Summer do not play well with one another, and the denizens of Faerie do not behave like human beings. Their natures are far more primal, more immutable. They are what they are. Predators are swift to attack prey that has fallen and is vulnerable. Winter fae hate the champions of Summer. The hobs were both.
Several of them threw themselves at Tiny’s head, while the others just started hacking with their crude weapons or biting with their sharklike teeth. Tiny’s armor served him well in that mess, defending the most critical areas, and as hobs went for his throat the gruff started throwing his head back and forth. I thought it was panic for a second, until he slammed one of his horns into a hob with such power that it broke the wicked faerie’s skull. His sword slewed back and forth in two quick, precise motions, and half a dozen hobs fell, dead and burning.
The others let out shrieks of terror and bounded away, their hatred insufficient to the task of withstanding the fallen gruff. Tiny rolled to his knees and began to push himself up, and though his expression was contorted with pain his inhuman eyes swept around until they spotted me.
Oh, crap.
I didn’t wait for him to get up and kill me. I ran.
Of all the times to do without my jacket and staff. For crying out loud, what had I been thinking? That I had Summer so thoroughly outwitted that I wouldn’t need them? That life just hadn’t been challenging enough until now? Stupid, Harry. Stupid, stupid. I swore that if I lived through this, I’d make up dummy copies of my gear for when I needed Thomas to play stalking horse.
The ground started shaking as Tiny took up the chase behind me.
My options were limited. To my right was the exterior wall of the building, and I couldn’t go outside into the deepening snow. My imagination treated me to a dandy image of me floundering in hip-deep snow while Tiny, with his far greater height and mass, cruised effortlessly up behind me and beer-canned me. Ahead of me was an empty hallway leading to another wall, and on my left were nothing but rows and rows of…storage lockers.
I fumbled in my pocket again as I ran through the water sheeting the floor, and started trying to get a look at the numbers on the lockers. I spotted the one corresponding to Gard’s key, and I skidded to a halt on the watery floor. I jammed the key in the lock frantically as Tiny, running with a limp but still running, closed the last dozen yards between us.
I had to time it perfectly. I raised my right hand, aimed at the hoof on his wounded leg, and waited for all of his weight to come forward onto it before triggering every energy ring on my right hand, unleashing a rushing column of force that hit him with the power of a speeding car.
The gruff ’s hoof went out from under him again on the wet floor, and he pitched forward with a roar of frustration. He dropped his blade and reached for me with both hands as he fell.
I waited until the last second to jump back, ripping open the door to Gard’s locker as I went.
I could only describe what happened
next as a bolt of lightning. It wasn’t lightning-not really. Real lightning did not have the raw, savage intensity of this…thing, and I realized with a startled flash of insight that this energy, whatever it was, was alive. White-hot power tinged with flashes of scarlet streaked out of the locker like a hundred hyperkinetic serpents, zigzagging with impossible speed. That living lightning ripped into Tiny, cutting through his crystalline armor as if it had been made of soft wax. It burned and slashed and pounded the flesh beneath in a long line from Tiny’s shoulder to his lower leg, letting out a screaming buzz of sound unlike anything I had ever heard before.
In the last fraction of a second before it vanished, the energy snapped back and forth like the tip of a whip, and Tiny’s left leg came off at the knee.
The gruff screamed. Whatever that thing had been, it had taken the fight out of Tiny.
Hell’s bells.
I stared at the maimed Summer champion and then at the open, innocent-looking locker. Then I walked slowly forward.
Tiny had only one eye open, and it didn’t look like it would focus on anything. His breathing was rough, quick, and ragged, which translated into a seething, oat-scented breeze anywhere within ten or fifteen feet of his head.
Tiny blinked his other eye open, and though they still wouldn’t focus he let out a weak-sounding grunt. “Mortal,” he rasped, “I am bested.” One of his ears flicked once and he exhaled in a sigh. “Finish it.”
I walked past the fallen gruff without stopping, noting as I did that the stroke of energy that had severed his leg had cauterized it shut, too. He wasn’t going to bleed to death.
I peered cautiously into the locker.
It was empty except for a single, flat wooden box about the size of a big backgammon kit. The back wall of the locker sported something else-the blackened outline of some sort of rune. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen Gard employing some kind of rune-based magic, but I’d be damned if I knew how it was done. I reached out with my wizard’s senses cautiously, but felt nothing. Whatever energy had been stored there was gone now.
