Changes

Chapter 45

Both of us had been gathering up our wills during the snark-off, and the first instant of the duel nearly killed us both.

I called forth force and fire, both laced with the soulfire that would help reinforce its reality, making the attack more difficult to negate or withstand. It took the shape of a sphere of blue-white fire the size of an inflatable exercise ball.

Meanwhile, Arianna fluttered her hands in an odd, twisting gesture and a geyser of water erupted from the soil with bone-crushing force.

The two attacks met halfway between us, with results neither of us could prevent. Fire and water turned to scalding-hot steam in a detonation that instantly washed back over us both. My shield bracelet was ready to go, and a situation something like this one that had rendered my left hand into a horror prop had inspired me to be sure I could protect myself from this kind of heat in the future.

I leapt back and landed in a crouch, raising the shield into a complete dome around me as the cloud of steam swept down, its heat boiling the grass as it came. It stayed there for several seconds before beginning to disperse, and when it finally did, I couldn’t see Arianna anywhere on the field.

I kept the all-around shield in place for a moment, and rapidly focused upon a point a little bit above and midway between my eyebrows. I called up my Sight and swept my gaze around the stadium, to see Arianna, forty yards away and running to put herself in position to shoot me in the back. A layer of greasy black magic seemed to infest the air around her—the veil that my physical eyes hadn’t been able to see. To my Sight, she was a Red Court vampire in its true form, only even more flabby and greasy than the normal vamp, a creature ancient in power and darkness.

I tried not to see anything else, but there was only so much I could do. I could see the deaths that had been heaped upon this field over centuries, lingering in a layer of translucent bones that covered the ground to a depth of three or four feet. In the edges of my vision, I could see the grotesqueries that were the true appearance of the Red Court, every one of them a unique and hideous monster, according to his particular madness. I didn’t dare look directly up at the spectators, and especially not those gathered on the second floor of the little temple at the end of the stadium. I didn’t want to look at the Red King and his Lords unveiled.

I kept my gaze moving, as if I hadn’t spotted Arianna on the prowl, and kept turning in a circle, timing when my back was going to be exposed to her before I dropped the shield and rose, panting, as if I couldn’t have held it any longer than that. I kept on turning, and an instant before she would have released her spell, I whirled on her, pointed a finger, and snarled, “Forzare!”

Raw will lashed out and exploded against her chest just before the flickers of electricity she’d gathered could congeal into a real stroke of lightning. It threw her twenty feet back and slammed her against the ancient rock wall along the side of the ball court.

Before she could fall, I looked up at the top of the wall, seized a section of large stones in fingers of unseen will, and raked them out of their resting places, so that they plunged thirty feet down toward Arianna.

She was superhumanly quick, of course. Anyone mortal would have been crushed. She got away with only a glancing blow from one of the smaller stones and darted to the side, rolling a sphere of lurid red light into a ball between her hands as she went.

I didn’t want to be on the receiving end of that, whatever it was. So I kept raking at the wall, over and over again, bringing down dozens of the stones and forcing her to keep moving, while I ran parallel to her and kept our spacing static.

We were both slinging magic on the run, but she had more one-on-one experience than me. Like a veteran gunslinger in the Old West, she took her time lining up her shot while I flailed away at her with rushed actions that had little chance to succeed. All told, I must have dropped several dozen tons of rock down onto her as we ran, inflicting nothing worse than a few abrasions and heavy bruises.

She threw lightning at me once.

The world flashed red-white and something hard hit me in the back. My legs went wobbly and I sat there for a subjective hour, stunned, and realized that whatever she had packed her lightning bolt with, it had been sufficient to throw me twice as far as my heavy punch had thrown her. I’d bounced off the opposite wall. I looked down at myself, expecting to see a huge hole with burned edges—and instead found a black smudge on my overdone breastplate, and a couple of flaws in the gold filigree where the metal had partially melted.

I was alive.

My head came back together in a sudden rush, and I knew what was coming. I flung up my shield, shaping it not into a portion of a sphere, as I usually did, but into a lengthy triangle in the shape of a pup tent. I crouched beneath it and no sooner had I done so than stones from the wall above me, torn free by Arianna’s will, began to slam into the shield. I crouched there, rapidly being buried in grey stone, and tried desperately to get my impact-dizzied brain to think of a plan.

The best I came up with under the circumstances was this: What would Yoda do?

There was a tiny moment between one rock falling and the next and I dropped the shield. As the next rock began to fall, I stretched out my hand and my will, catching it before gravity could give it much velocity. Again I screamed, “Forzare!” and with an enormous effort of will I altered the course of the stone’s fall, flinging it as hard as I could at Arianna, abetted by gravity and the remnants of her own magic.

She saw it coming, but not until it was too late. She lifted her hands, her fingers making warding gestures as she brought her own defensive magic to bear. The stone smashed through it in a flash of reddish light, and then struck her in the hip, spinning her about wildly and sending her to the ground.

“Harry Dresden, human catapult!” I screamed drunkenly.

Arianna was back on her feet again in an instant: Her shield had bled enough of the energy from the stone to prevent it from smashing into her with lethal force, but it had bought me enough time to get out of the pile of rocks around me and away from the stadium wall. I smashed at her with more fire, and she parried each shaft deftly, congealing water out of the air into wobbling spheres that intercepted the bolts of flame and exploded into concealing steam. By the fifth or sixth bolt, I couldn’t see her with my physical eyes, but I did see energies in motion behind the steam as she pulled another dark sheath of veiling energy around her, and I saw her take off into an animal-swift sprint, again circling me to attack me from behind.

No. She couldn’t be trying the same thing twice.

Duels between wizards are about more than swatting each other with various forms of energy, just as boxing is about more than throwing hard punches. There is an art to it, a science to it, in which one attempts to predict the other’s attack and counter it effectively. You have to imagine a counter to what the opponent might do, and have it ready to fly at an instant’s notice. Similarly, you have to imagine your way around the strength of his defenses. A duel of magic is determined almost purely by the imaginations and raw power of those involved.

Arianna had obviously prepared against my favorite weapon—fire—which was only intelligent. But she had tried this backstabbing ploy on me once before, and nearly got burned doing it. A wizard of any experience would tell you that she would never have tried that one again, for fear that the enemy would exploit it even further.

Arianna was an experienced killer, but she hadn’t done a lot of dueling with nothing to rely on except her magic. She’d always had the cushion of her extraordinary strength and speed to fall back upon. Hell, it would have been the smart way to kill me—come straight in, shedding attacks and maybe taking some hits to get close enough to end it decisively.

Except here, she couldn’t. And she wasn’t adjusting well to the handicap. Flexibility of thought is almost never a strength of the truly ancient monsters of the world.

Instead of obliging her by standing in place, as I had last time she’d tried to give me the runaround, I darted forward, into the edges of the concealing steam. I got burned, and accepted it as the price of doing business. I clenched my teeth, focusing past my pain, and tracked Arianna’s energy with my Sight, waiting for my shot and hoping that she didn’t have the Sight as well.

Apparently she didn’t, or wasn’t bothering to use it, relying upon her superior senses instead. She got into position and seemed to realize that I’d gone into the steam. She began to advance cautiously, gathering more lightning to her cupped hands. I saw the instant in which she began to spot my outline, the way she drew a breath to speak the word to unleash the lightning upon me.

“Infriga,” I hissed, and threw both hands forward. “Infriga forzare!”

And the entire cloud bank of steam in the air around me congealed into needle-pointed spears of ice that flew at her as if fired from a gun.

They struck her just as she unleashed her lightning bolt, which shattered one of the spears and tore a two-foot furrow in the dirt some twenty feet to my side.

Arianna stood still for a moment, her black eyes wide with disbelief, staring down at the spears and shards of ice that had slammed deep into her flesh. She looked up at me for a second and opened her mouth.

A blob of black blood burst out and spilled down over her chin. Then she shuddered and fell, simply limp, to the ground.

From the far end of the ball court, I heard my godmother throw back her head and let out an eerie howl of excitement and triumph, bubbling with laughter and scorn.

I watched Arianna twisting upon the spears of ice. She’d been pierced in dozens of places. The worst hit came from an icicle as thick as my forearm, which had impaled her through the belly and come out the back, bursting the blood reservoir of the creature beneath Arianna’s flesh mask. The pure, crystalline-clear ice showed a glimpse of her insides, as if seen through a prism.

She gasped a word I didn’t recognize, again and again. I didn’t know what language it was, but I knew what it meant: No, no, no, no.

I stood over her for a moment. She struggled to bring some other form of magic to bear against me, but the cruel torment of those frozen spears was a pain she had never experienced and did not know how to fight. I stared down at the creature that had taken my daughter and felt . . .

I felt only a cold, calm satisfaction, whirling like a blizzard of snow and sleet in the storm of my wrath.

She stared up at me with uncomprehending eyes, black blood staining her mouth. “Cattle. You are c-cattle.”

“Moo,” I said. And I lifted my right hand.

Her eyes widened further. She gasped a word I didn’t know.

From the corner of my eye, I saw the Red King rise from his distant throne.

I poured all that was left of my fury into my hand and snarled, “No one touches my little girl.”

The explosion of force and fire tore a crater in the ground seven feet across and half as deep.

Arianna’s broken, headless corpse lay sprawled within it.

Silence fell over the ruined city.

I turned toward the Red King and started walking that way. I stopped on what would have been the ten-yard line in a football stadium and faced him. “Now give me my daughter,” I said.

He stared at me, bleak and remote as a far mountain. And then he smiled and said, in perfect English, “I think not.”

I clenched my teeth. “We had a deal.”

He looked at me with uncaring eyes and said, “I never spoke a word to you. A god does not converse or bargain with cattle. He uses and dispenses with them as he sees fit. You have served your purpose, and I have no further use for you—or the mewling child.”

I snarled. “You promised that she would not be harmed.”

“Until after the duel,” he said, and sycophantic chuckles ran through the vampires all around me. “It is after the duel.” He turned his head to one side and said to one of the jaguar warrior vampires in his retinue, “Go. Kill the child.”

I almost got the Red King while his head was turned, but some instinct seemed to warn him at the last instant, and he ducked. The bolt of flame I’d hurled at him blew the jaguar warrior vamp’s jaw off of his head and set him on fire. He fell back, stumbling and screaming, his monstrous form tearing free of his mask of flesh.

The Red King whirled toward me in a fury, and those black eyes pressed down upon me with all the crushing weight of the ages. I was driven to my knees by a blanket of pure will—and not just will, but horrible pain, pain that originated not in my body but in the nerves themselves—pain I was helpless to resist.

I heard someone shout, “Harry!” and saw the masked figures upon the temple with the Red King step forward. A gun went off, and then someone screamed. I heard a bellow, and looked up to see my friends and my godmother facing the masked Lords of Outer Night. Sanya was on his feet but motionless, grimly clutching Esperacchius in both hands. Murphy was on one knee and had dropped her P-90. One hand was moving slowly, determinedly toward the sword on her back. Martin was on the ground.

I couldn’t see any of the others. I couldn’t turn my head far enough. But nobody was up to fighting. None of us could move beneath the horrible pressure of will of the Red King and the Lords of Outer Night.

“Insolent beast,” snarled the Red King. “Die in agony.” He seized another guard by his jaguar skin and jerked him close, as if the brawny vampire had been a child. “Need I repeat myself?” he seethed, and shoved his bloodstained ritual knife into the warrior’s hands. “Place that child upon the altar and kill her.”