Proven Guilty df-8

by Jim Butcher

“I can’t tell how old they are,” I said. “My gut says not very, but I can’t be sure.”

  “It must have been weeks,” Thomas said. “It takes that long for bones to get this clean.”

  “It’s all relative,” I said. “Time can pass at different rates in Faerie. These bones could have fallen a thousand years ago, by the local clock. Or twenty minutes ago.”

  Thomas muttered something under his breath and shook his head.

  “What killed them, Harry?” Murphy asked.

  “Fire. They were burned to death,” I said quietly. “Down to the bone.”

  “Could you do that?” Thomas asked.

  I shook my head. “I couldn’t make it that hot. Not at the heart of Winter.” Not even with Hellfire. The remains of perhaps a thousand creatures lay scattered about. I’d cut loose once in the past and roasted a bunch of vampires-and maybe some of their victims with them-but even that inferno hadn’t been big enough to catch more than a tithe of the fallen defenders of Arctis Tor.

  “Then who did it?” Charity asked quietly.

  I didn’t have an answer for her. I rose and nudged a smaller skull with my staff. “The littler ones were goblins,” I said. “Foot soldiers.” I rolled a troll-sized thighbone aside with my staff. An enormous sword, also of that same black ice, lay shattered beneath it. “These trolls were her personal guard.” I gestured back at the gate. “Covering her retreat to the tower, maybe. Some of them got taken down along the way. The others made a stand at the tower’s base. Died there.”

  I paced around, checking what the tracking spell had to say, and triangulated again. “Molly’s in the tower,” I murmured.

  “How do we get in?” Murphy asked.

  I stared at the blank wall of the spire. “Um,” I said.

  Charity glanced over my shoulder and nodded at the spire. “Look behind those trolls. If they were covering a retreat, they should be near the entrance to the tower.”

  “Maybe,” I said. I walked over to the tower and frowned at the black ice. I ran my right hand over its surface, feeling for cracks or evidence of a hidden doorway, my senses tuned to discover any magic that might hide a door. I had the sudden impression that the black ice and the slowly pulsing colors inside were somehow alive, aware of me. And they did not like me at all. I got a sense of alien hatred, cold and patient. Otherwise, I got nothing for my trouble but half-frozen fingers.

  “Nothing here,” I said, and rapped my knuckles on the side of the tower, eliciting the dull thump of a very solid object. “Maybe the trolls just wanted to fight with their backs to something solid. I might have to go all the way around checking for-”

  Without any warning at all the ice of the tower parted. An archway appeared, the ice that had hidden it flowing seamlessly into the rest of the tower. The interior of the tower was all shadows and slowly shifting lights that did little to provide any illumination. Inside was nothing but a spiral staircase, winding counterclockwise up through the spire.

  I glanced from the archway to my chilled fingers and back. “Next time, I guess I’ll just knock.”

  “Come on,” Charity said. She shifted her grip on the war hammer, holding it at something like high port arms, handle parallel to her spine, heavy head ready to descend. “We have to hurry.”

  Thomas and Murphy turned to join us at the door.

  An idle, puzzled sense of familiarity gave way to my instincts’ furious warning. Fetches were the masters of the sucker punch. Like the Bucky-fetch who had jumped us just as we opened the doors to the theater, they knew how to position themselves to attack just as their enemies focused their attention on some kind of distraction.

  The suddenly opened doorway was it.

  Mounds of bones around the courtyard exploded into motion. Fetches hurtled at us over the ground. There weren’t three of them, either-there were dozens.

  The fetches, here in Faerie, did not look like movie monsters. Their true forms were only vaguely humanoid, wavering uncertainly, as black as midnight shadows but for ghostly white eyes. I could see other shapes around them, translucent and faint. Here, another one of those alien monster things. There some kind of wolflike biped. There an enormous man with the head of a warthog. But the salve I had spread over my eyes revealed those illusions for what they really were, and showed me the thing beneath the mask.

  My magic had a risky batting average against these creatures, but there were things I could do besides hosing energy directly at the enemy. Hell-fire came to my call, and my staff’s runes exploded into light as brilliant as a magnesium flare. Their flame lit the benighted courtyard while somehow not damaging my clothing or flesh. My will and the Hellfire roared through me in a torrent as I whirled the staff in a circle over my head and screamed, “Veritas cyclis!”

  The howling winds thundered down into the silent courtyard as if I had torn off an unseen roof. They gathered along my spinning staff, fluttering with lightning the same color as the blazing runes on the staff. I cried out and hurled the winds, not at the oncoming fetches, but at the thousands of bones lying between them and me.

  The wind picked them up with a wailing shriek; a sudden cyclone of broken bones and shattered armor, spinning them into a whirling curtain. The lead fetches were too late to avoid plunging into the cloud, and the ossified tornado began to rip them apart, battering to pulp whatever was not sheared away by the edges and points of bone and broken shards of ice. Fetches following in their wake skidded to a halt, letting out a startlingly loud chorus of hisses, the sounds filled with rage.

  Thomas cried out and I heard heavy footsteps. Another fetch, this one much larger, came around the curve of the spire’s wall. The ghost image of the Reaper was all around him. A beat later, another charged us from the other direction, just as large, this one with the faint image of Hammer-hand, an almost obscenely muscled figure in black, heavy mallets emerging from the ends of his sleeves.

  “Into the tower!” I bellowed.

  The Reaper reached Thomas, and its arm rose up, tipped with gleaming black talons in its true form, the illusion superimposing the image of the Reaper’s trademark scythe over them. Thomas caught the Reaper’s sweeping claws on his saber, but instead of the ringing of steel on steel, there was a flash of green-white light and the Reaper-fetch howled in agony as the steel of the blade struck its claws cleanly from its appendage.

  Thomas crouched, hips and shoulders twisting in a sharp, one-two movement. The saber’s blade cut and burned a flattened X shape into the fetch’s abdomen. The fetch roared in agony, and liquid green-white fire burst from the wound. The creature swung its other arm, its speed taking even Thomas by surprise. He avoided most of the power of the blow, but what was left slammed him into the side of the tower.

  I heard a gunshot behind me, then another, and then Murphy snarled, “Damn it!” I turned in time to see her bob to one side and then to the other as Hammerhand swung a mallet limb down at her. The blow crashed into the courtyard with a cracking impact as loud as a rifle shot. Murphy danced in closer to the fetch, inside the awkward reach of its club-hands. It thrust one down at her. At first I thought she was slapping it aside, but then she grabbed onto the fetch and continued the motion, adding her own weight and strength to the fetch’s and redirecting the force of the blow so that the fetch’s weapon-hand crushed its own foot. The fetch bellowed in pain and lost its balance. Murphy shoved in the same direction and the fetch fell. She leapt away from it, for the tower door, while I grabbed Thomas and hauled him inside.

  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 shoulde
rs 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.

  Charily 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 work 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. Sh
e 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 die 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?”