by Jim Butcher
For the record, it's also how all the best liars do business-by making their imagined version of things so coherent that they almost believe it themselves.
I'm not a terribly good liar, but I knew the basics of how to make an illusion work, and I had two secret weapons. The first was the tuft of hair from an actual malk, which I could use to aid in the accuracy of my illusion. The second was a buddy of mine, a big grey tomcat named Mister who deigned to share his apartment with Mouse and me. Mister didn't come with me on cases, being above such trivial matters, but he found me pleasant company when I was at home and not moving around too much, except when he didn't, in which case he went rambling.
I closed my eyes once I'd drawn my chalk circle, gripped the malk hair in my hand, and started my image on a model of Mister. I'd seen malks a couple of times, and most of them bore the same kinds of battle scars Mister proudly wore. They didn't look exactly like cats, though. Their heads were shaped differently, and their fur was rougher, stiffer. The paws had one too many digits on them, too, and were wider than a cat's-but the motion as they moved was precisely the same.
"Noctus ex illuminus," I murmured once the image was firmly fixed in my thoughts, that of three ugly, lean, battle-marked malks walking through on their own calm business. I sent out the energy that would power the glamour and broke the circle with a slow, careful motion.
"Is it working?" Gard asked quietly.
"Yeah," I said, focused on the illusion, my eyes still closed. I fumbled about until I found Mouse's broad back, then rested one hand on his fur. "Stop distracting me. Walk."
"Very well." She drew in a short breath, said something, and then there was a snapping sound and a flash of light. "The rune is active," she said. She put her hand on my shoulder. The malks weren't using any light sources, and if a group of apparent malks tried to walk through with one, it would kind of spoil the effect we were trying to achieve. So we'd have to make the walk in the dark. "We have perhaps five minutes."
I grunted, touched my dog, and we all started walking, trusting Mouse to guide our steps. Even though it was dark, I didn't dare open my eyes. Any distraction from the image in my head would cause it to disintegrate like toilet paper in a hurricane. So I walked, concentrating, and hoped like hell it worked.
I couldn't spare any brain-time for counting, but we walked for what felt like half an hour, and I was getting set to ask Gard if we were through yet, when an inhuman voice not a foot from my left ear said in plain English, "More of these new claws arrive every day. We are hungry. We should shred the ape and have done."
I nearly fell on my ass, it startled me so much, but I held on to the image in my head. I'd heard malks speak before, with their odd inflections and unsettling intonations, and the sound only reinforced the image in my head.
A round of both supporting and disparaging comments rose from all around me, all in lazy, malk-inflected English. There were more than twenty of them. There was a small horde.
"Patience," said another malk. The tone of voice somehow suggested this was a conversation that had repeated itself a million times. "Let the ape think it has cowed us into acting as its door wardens. It hunts in the wizard's territory. The wizard will come to face it. The Erlking will give us great favor when we bring the wizard's head."
Gosh. I felt famous.
"I'm weary of waiting," said another malk. "Let us kill the ape and its prey and then hunt the wizard down."
"Patience, hunters. The wizard will come to us," the first one said. "The ape's turn will come, after we have brought down the wizard." There was an unmistakable note of pleasure in its voice. "And his little dog, too."
Mouse made another subvocal rumble in his chest. I could, just barely, feel it in his back. He kept walking, though, and we passed through the stretch of tunnel occupied by the malks. It was another endless stretch of minutes and several turns before Gard let out her breath between her teeth and said, "There were more than twenty."
"Yeah, I kind of noticed that."
"I think we are past them."
I sighed and released the image I'd been holding in my head, calling forth dim light from my amulet. Or tried to release the image, at any rate. I opened my eyes and blinked several times, but my head was like one of those TVs at the department store, when one image has been burned into it for too long. I looked at Mouse and Gard, and had trouble shaking the picture of the savage, squash-headed malks I'd been imagining around them with such intensity.
"Do you have another of those rune things?" I asked her.
"No," Gard said.
"We'll have to get creative on the way out," I said.
"There's no need to worry about that yet," she said, and started walking forward again.
"Sure there is. Once we get the girl, we have to get back with her. Christ, haven't you read any Joseph Campbell at all?"
She shrugged one shoulder. "Grendelkin are difficult opponents. Either we'll die, or it will. So there's only a fifty-fifty chance that we'll need to worry about the malks on the way out. Why waste the effort until we know if it will be necessary?"
"Call me crazy, but I find that if I plan for the big things, like how to get back to the surface, it makes it a little simpler to manage the little things. Like how to keep on breathing."
She held up a hand and said, "Wait."
I stopped in my tracks, listening. Mouse came to a halt, snuffling at the air, his ears twitching around like little radar dishes, but he gave no sign that he'd detected lurking danger.
"We're close to its lair," she murmured.
I arched an eyebrow. The tunnel looked exactly the same as it had for several moments now. "How do you know?"
"I can feel it," she said.
"You can do that?"
She started forward. "Yes. It's how I knew it was moving in the city to begin with."
I ground my teeth. "It might be nice if you considered sharing that kind of information."
"It isn't far," she said. "We might be in time. Come on."
I felt my eyebrows go up. Mouse had us both beat when it came to purely physical sensory input, and he'd given no indication of a hostile presence ahead. My own senses were attuned to all kinds of supernatural energies, and I'd kept them focused ever since we'd entered Undertown. I hadn't sensed any stirring of any kind that would indicate some kind of malevolent presence.
If knowledge is power, then it follows that ignorance is weakness. In my line of work, ignorance can get you killed. Gard hadn't said anything about any kind of mystic connection between herself and this beastie, but it was the most likely explanation for how she could sense its presence when I couldn't.
The problem with that was that those kinds of connections generally didn't flow one-way. If she could sense the grendelkin, odds were the grendelkin could sense her right back.
"Whoa, wait," I said. "If this thing might know we're coming, we don't want to go rushing in blind."
"There's no time. It's almost ready to breed." There was a hint of a snarl in her words as the ax came down off her shoulder. Gard pulled what looked like a road flare out of her duffel bag and tossed the bag aside.
Then she threw back her head and let out a scream of pure, unholy defiance. The sound was so loud, so raw, so primal, it hardly seemed human. It wasn't a word, but that didn't stop her howl from eloquently declaring Gard's rage, her utter contempt for danger, for life-and for death. That battle cry scared the living snot out of me, and it wasn't even aimed in my direction.
Gard struck the flare to life with a flick of a wrist and shot me a glance over her shoulder. Eerie green light played up over her face, casting bizarre shadows, and her icy eyes were very wide and white-rimmed above a smile stretched so tightly that the blood had drained from her lips. Her voice quavered disconcertingly. "Enough talk."
Holy Schwarzenegger.
Gard had lost it.
This wasn't the reaction of the cool, reasoning professional I'd seen working for Marcone. I'd never actually seen any
one go truly, old-school berserkergang, but that scream… It was like hearing an echo rolling down through the centuries from an ancient world, a more savage world, now lost to the mists of time.
And suddenly I had no trouble at all believing her age.
She charged forward, whipping her ax lightly around with her right hand, holding the blazing star of the flare in her left. Gard let out another banshee shriek as she went, a wordless cry of challenge to the grendelkin that declared her intent as clearly as any horde of phonemes: I am coming to kill you.
And ahead of us in the tunnels, something much, much bigger than Gard answered her, a deep-chested, basso bellow that shook the walls of the tunnel in answer: Bring it on.
My knees turned shaky. Hell, even Mouse stood with his ears pressed against his skull, tail held low, body set in a slight crouch. I doubt I looked any more courageous than he did, but I kicked my brain into gear, spat out a nervous curse, and hurried after her.
Charging in headlong might be a really stupid idea, but it would be an even worse idea to stand around doing nothing, throwing away the only help I was likely to get. Besides, for better or worse, I'd agreed to work with Gard, and I wasn't going to let her go in without covering her back.
So I charged headlong down the tunnel toward the source of the terrifying bellow. Mouse, perhaps wiser than I, hesitated a few seconds longer, then made up for it on the way down the tunnel, until he was running a pace in front of me, matching my stride. We'd gone maybe twenty yards before his breath began to rumble out in a growl of pure hostility, and he let out his own roar of challenge.
Hey, when in Cimmeria, do as the Cimmerians do. I screamed, too. It got lost in all the echoes bouncing around the tunnels.
Gard, running hard ten paces ahead of me, burst into a chamber. She gathered herself in a sudden leap, flipping neatly in the air, and plummeted from sight. The falling green light of the flare showed me that the tunnel opened into the top of a chamber the size of a small hotel atrium, and if Mouse hadn't stopped first and leaned back against me, I might have slid over the edge before I could stop. As it was, I got a really good look at a drop of at least thirty feet to a wet stone floor.
Gard landed on her feet, turned the momentum into a forward roll, and a shaggy blur the size of an industrial freezer whipped past her, slamming into the wall with a coughing roar and a shudder of impact.
The blond woman bounced up, kicked off a stone wall, flipped over again, and came down on her feet, ax held high. She'd discarded the flare, leaving it in the center of the floor, and I got my first good look at the place, and at the things in it.
First of all, the chamber, cavern, whatever it was, was huge. Thirty feet from ceiling to floor, at least thirty feet wide, and it stretched out into the darkness beyond the sharp light cast by the flare. Most of it was natural stone. Some of the surfaces showed signs of being crudely cut with hand-wielded tools. A ledge about two feet wide ran along the edge of the chamber in a C-shape, up near the top. I'd nearly tumbled off the ledge into the cavern. There were stairs cut into the wall below me-if you could call the twelve-inch projections crudely hacked out of the stone every couple of feet a stairway.
My glance swept over the cavern below. A huge pile of newspapers, old blankets, bloodstained clothes, and unidentifiable bits of fabric must have served as a nest or bed for the creature. It was three feet high in the middle, and a good ten or twelve feet across. A mound of bones, nearby, was very nearly as large. The old ivory gleamed in the eerie light of the flare, cleared entirely of meat, though the mound was infested with rats and vermin, all tiny moving forms and glittering red eyes.
A huge stone had been placed in the center of the floor. A metal beer keg sat on top of it, between the tied-down, spread-eagled legs of a rather attractive and very naked young woman. She'd been tied down with rough ropes, directly over a thick layer of old bloodstains congealed into an almost-rubbery coating on the rock. Her eyes were wide, her face flushed with tears, and she was screaming.
Gard whipped her ax through a series of scything arcs in front of her, driving them at the big furry blur. I had no idea how she was covering the ground fast enough to keep up with the thing. They were both moving at Kung Fu Theater speed. One of Gard's swipes must have tagged it, because there was a sudden bellow of rage and it bounded into the shadows outside the light of the flare.
She let out a howl of frustration. The head of her ax was smeared with black fluid, and as it ran across the steel, flickers of silver fire appeared in the shape of more strange runes. "Wizard!" she bellowed. "Give me light!"
I was already on it, holding my amulet high and behind my head, ramming more will through the device. The dim wizard light flared into incandescence, throwing strong light at least a hundred feet down the long gallery-and drawing a shriek of pain and surprise from the grendelkin.
I saw it for maybe two seconds, while it crouched with one arm thrown up to shield its eyes. The grendelkin was flabby over a quarter ton of muscle, and the nails on its fingers and toes were black, long, and dangerous-looking. It was big, nine or ten feet, and covered in hair. It wasn't fur, like a bear or a dog, but hair, human hair, with pale skin easily seen beneath, so that the impression it gave was one of an exceptionally hirsute man, rather than that of a beast.
And the beast was definitely male; terrifyingly so-I'd seen smaller fire extinguishers. And from the looks of things, Gard and I must have interrupted him in the middle of foreplay.
No wonder he was pissed.
Gard saw the grendelkin and charged forward. I saw my chance to pitch in. I lifted my staff and pointed it at the creature, gathered another surge of will, and snarled, "Fuego!"
My staff was an important tool, allowing me to focus and direct energy much more precisely and with more concentration than I could manage without it. It didn't work as well as my more specialized blasting rod for directing fire, but for this purpose it would do just fine. A column of golden flame as wide as a whiskey barrel leapt across the cavern to the grendelkin, smashing into his head and upper body. It was too dispersed to kill the grendelkin outright, but hopefully it would blind and distract the beast enough to let Gard get in the killing blow.
The grendelkin lowered his arm, and I saw a quick flash of yellow eyes, a hideous face, and a mouthful of fangs. Those teeth spread into a smile, and I realized I might as well have hit him with the stream of water from a garden hose, for all the effect the fire had on him. He moved, an abrupt whipping of his massive shoulders, and flung a stone at me.
Take it from me, the grendelkin's talents were wasted on the abduct-rape-devour industry.
He should have been playing professional ball.
By the time I realized the rock was on the way, it had already hit me. There was a popping sound from my left shoulder, and a wave of agony. Something flung me to the ground, driving the breath out of my lungs. My amulet fell from my suddenly unresponsive fingers, and the brilliant light died at once.
Dammit, I had assumed big and hostile meant dumb, and the grendelkin wasn't. The beast had deliberately waited for Gard to charge forward out of the light of the dropped flare before he threw.
"Wizard!" Gard bellowed.
I couldn't see anything. The brief moment of brilliant illumination had blinded my eyes to the dimmer light of the flare, and Gard couldn't be in much better shape. I got to my feet, trying not to scream at the pain in my shoulder, and staggered back to look down at the room.
The grendelkin bellowed again, and Gard screamed-this time in pain. There was the sound of a heavy blow, and Gard, her hands empty, flew across the circle of green flare-light, a dim shadow. She struck the wall beneath me with an ugly, heavy sound.
It was all happening so fast. Hell's bells, but I was playing out of my league, here.
I turned to Mouse and snarled an instruction. My dog stared at me for a second, ears flattened to his skull, and didn't move.
"Go!" I screamed at him. "Go, go, go!"
Mouse spun an
d shot off back down the way we'd come.
Gard groaned on the floor beneath me, stirring weakly at the edge of the dim circle of light cast by the flare. I couldn't tell how badly she was hurt-but I knew that if I didn't move before the grendelkin finished her, she wasn't going to get any better. I could hear Elizabeth sobbing in despair.
"Get up, Harry," I growled at myself. "Get a move on."
I could barely move my left arm, so I gripped my staff in my right and began negotiating the precarious stone stairway.
A voice laughed out in the darkness. It was a deep voice, masculine, mellow, and smooth. When it spoke, it did so with precise, cultured pronunciation. "Geat bitch," the grendelkin murmured. "That's the most fun I've had in a century. Surt, but I wish there were a few more Choosers running about the world. You're a dying breed."
I could barely see the damned stairs in the flare's light. My foot slipped, and I nearly fell.
"Who's the seidrmadr?" the grendelkin asked.
"Gesundheit," I said.
The beast appeared at the far side of the circle of light, and I stopped in my tracks. The grendelkin's yellow eyes gleamed with malice and hunger. He flexed his claw-tipped hands very slowly, baring his teeth in another smile. My mouth felt utterly dry and my legs were shaking. I'd seen him move. If he rushed me, things could get ugly.
Strike that. When he rushed me, things were going to get ugly.
"Is that a fire extinguisher in your pocket?" I asked, studying the grendelkin intently. "Or are you just happy to see me?"
The grendelkin's smile spread wider. "Most definitely the latter. I'm going to have two mouths to feed, shortly. What did she promise you to fool you into coming with her?"
"You got it backward. I permitted her to tag along with me," I said.
