Changes

Chapter 47

“Godmother!” I shouted, turning toward the pyramid.

Lea appeared at my side, her hands now filled with emerald and amethyst light—her own deadly sorcery. “Shall we pursue the quest now?”

“Yeah. Stay close. We’ll round up the team and move.”

Molly was nearest. I went to my apprentice and shouted in her ear, “Come on! Let the birdmen take it from here! We’ve got to move.”

Molly gave me a vague nod, and finally lowered the little wands as the kenku’s charge drove into the Red Court and took the pressure from our flanks. The tips of her wands, both of them made of ivory, were cracked and chipped. Her arms hung limply and swung at her sides, and she looked even paler now than she had going in. She turned to me, gave me a quivering smile, and then suddenly sank to the ground, her eyes rolling back in her head.

I stared at her in shock for a second, and then I was on my knees next to her, my amulet glowing as I used its light to check her for injuries. In the chaos, I hadn’t seen that one of her legs, at midthigh, was a mass of blood. One of the wild shots from the security goons had hit her beneath the armored vest. She was bleeding out. She was dying.

Thomas crashed to the ground next to me. He ripped off his belt and whipped it around her leg as a tourniquet. “I’ve got this!” he said, looking up at me, his expression remote, calm. “Go, go!”

I stared at him for a second, uncertain. Molly was my apprentice, my responsibility.

He regarded me and his calm mask cracked for a second, showing me his tension, the fear he was holding in check at the scale of the conflict around us. “Harry,” he said. “I’ll guard her with my life. I swear it.”

I nodded, and then clenched a fist, looking around. That much spilled blood would start drawing vampires to the wounded girl like bees to flowers. Thomas couldn’t care for her and fight. “Mouse,” I called, “stay with them!”

The dog rushed over to Molly and literally stood over her head, his eyes and ears everywhere, a guardian determined not to fail.

Then I ran to Murphy and Sanya, who both bore small cuts and abrasions, and who looked like they were about to charge into the nearest portion of the fray. Martin tagged along with me, apparently calm, and by all appearances unaware that he was in the middle of a battle. Say what I would about Martin, his blandness, his boring demeanor, and his noncombative body language were very real armor in this situation. He simply didn’t look like an important or threatening target, and he was untouched.

I looked around them and picked up a sword that had been dropped by one of the warriors they had killed, a simple Chinese straight sword known as a jian. It was light, razor-sharp on both edges, and suited me just fine.

“We’re going to the pyramid,” I called to Murphy and Sanya. A group of thirty or forty kenku went over us, witch shadows against the rising moon, and entered the fray against the jaguar warriors who still stood between us and an exit from the ball court. “There!” I said. “Go, go, go!”

I suited action to my words and plunged toward the opening Ebenezar’s allies were cutting for us. There was a surge of magic and a flash of motion ahead of us, as another vampire noble tossed another flare of power at me. I caught a small stroke of lightning on my mentor’s staff—it was shorter, thicker, and heavier than mine—conducting the attack down my arm, across my shoulder, and out the tip of my newly acquired sword. The lightning bolt chewed a hole in the belly of the Red Court noble. He staggered as I closed on him. I spun the staff to the horizontal, and checked him in the nose as I went by, dropping him to the ground.

We went past the remains of the temple and out into the open space between the buildings. It was chaos out there. Jaguar warriors and priest types were everywhere, and most of them were armed. Mortal security folks were forming into teams and racing toward the ball court to reinforce the Red Court. I realized that at some point Murphy, her clothing shining with white light, her halo a blaze of molten gold, had begun racing along on my right side, with Sanya on my left. The brilliant light of the two Swords was a terror to the vampires and half-breeds alike, and they recoiled from that aura of power and fear—but that wasn’t the same thing as retreating. They simply fell back, while other creatures closed a large circle about us, drawing it slowly tighter as we moved toward the pyramid.

“We aren’t going to make it,” Murphy said. “They’re getting ready to rush us from all sides.”

“Always they are doing that,” Sanya said, panting, his cheerful voice going slightly annoyed. “Never is it anything new.”

They were right. I could sense the change in motion of the villains around us, how they were retreating more slowly before us, pressing in more closely behind us.

I felt my eyes drawn up to the pyramid ahead—and there, standing on the fifth level of the pyramid, looking down, was a figure in a golden mask. Evidently, one of the Lords of Outer Night had been knocked all the way over to the pyramid by Ebenezar’s entrance. And I could feel his will at work in the foes around us—not used to overcome an enemy with immobility now, but to infuse his troops with confidence and aggression.

“That guy,” I said, nodding at him. “Gold mask. We take him down and we’re through.”

Murphy scanned the pyramid until she spotted him. Then her eyes tracked down to the base of the stairs and she nodded shortly. “Right,” she said.

And she raised Fidelacchius, let out a scream that had startled a great many large men working out at her dojo, and plunged into the warriors of the Red Court like a swimmer breasting a wave.

Sanya blinked.

Holy crap, I hadn’t meant she should do that.

“Tiny,” Sanya said, letting out a belly laugh as he began to move. “But fierce!”

“You’re all insane!” I screamed, and plunged forward with them, while Martin backpedaled and tried to keep up with us while simultaneously warding off the vampires closing in from behind.

Murphy did what no mortal should have been able to do—she cut a path through a mob of warrior vampires. She went through them as if they’d been no more than a cloud of smoke. Fidelacchius blazed, and no weapon raised against the Sword of Faith, neither modern steel nor living relic, could withstand its edge.

Murphy hardly seemed to actually attack anyone. She simply moved forward, and when attacks came at her, bad things happened to whoever had attempted to strike her. Sword thrusts were slid gently aside while she continued onward, her own blade seeming to naturally, independently pass through an S-shaped slash upon the opponent’s body on the way through, wreaking terrible damage with delicate speed. Warriors who flung themselves upon her found their hands grabbing nothing, their bodies being sent tumbling through the air—and that horrible Sword of light left wounds in each and every opponent, their edges black and sizzling.

They’d come at her in twos, and once, three of the jaguar warriors managed to coordinate an attack. It didn’t do them any good. Murphy had been handling opponents who were bigger and stronger and faster than her, in situations of real danger, since she was a rookie cop. The vampires and half-breeds, swift and strong as they were, seemed no more able to beat her down than had all of those thugs and criminals. Stronger though her enemies were, the blazing light of the Sword seemed to slow them, to undermine their strength—not much, but enough to make the difference. Murphy dodged and feinted and tossed warriors into one another, using their own strength against them. The three-on-one she faced almost seemed unfair. One of the jaguar warriors, armed with an enormous club, wound up smashing his two compatriots, courtesy of the intern Knight, only to find his club sliced into three pieces that wound up on the ground next to his own severed leg.

Karrin Murphy led the charge, and Sanya and I tried to keep up. She went through that sea of foes like a little speedboat, her enemies spun and tossed and turned and disoriented in her wake. Sanya and I hacked our way through stunned foes, pushing and chopping with unsophisticated brutality—and that big Russian lunatic just kept laughing the whole time.

We hit the stairs, and resistance thinned sharply. Murphy surged ahead, and the Lord of Outer Night raised a bejeweled hand against her, his sheer will causing the air to ripple and thicken. Sanya and I hit it like a brick wall and staggered to a halt, but it seemed to slide off of Murphy, as had every other attack to come at her, her halo burning still brighter. Panicked, the enemy raised a hand and sent three shafts of sorcerous power howling at her, one right after another. Murphy’s feet, sure and swift on the stairs, carried her into a version of a boxer’s bobbing dance, and each shaft went blazing uselessly past her.

Sanya yelped and dropped, dodging the bolt that nearly clobbered him. I blocked one on my shield and took the other in the shin. My godmother’s armor protected my flesh, but I hit the stone stairs of the pyramid pretty hard.

I jerked my eyes up in time to see Murphy rush the Lord of Outer Night and speed straight past him, her sword sweeping up in a single, upward, vertical slash.

The gold mask fell from the vampire’s head—along with the front half of its skull. Silver fire burned at the revealed, twisted, lumpy lobes of the vampire’s brain, and as its blood flowed out and touched that fire, it went up in a sudden pyre of silver-white flame. The Lord of Outer Night somehow managed to scream as fire consumed it, and flung more bursts of magic blindly and in all directions for several more seconds, until it finally fell into blackened ash and ugly smears on the stone.

Only then did the barrier of its will vanish, and Sanya, Martin, and I hustled up the stairs toward the temple.

Still, the enemy pursued us—there were so damned many of them— and as I gained more height I was able to look back and see that the Red Court had begun to contain the kenku incursion. The battle was still furiously under way within the ball court, and though the feathered warriors were the match of any two or three vampires or half-breeds, the enemy had numbers to spare. I could only be grateful that so many of their spell-slingers were duking it out with the Grey Council instead of getting in our way.

“Dammit,” I said, looking up the steps toward the temple at their summit. Shadows moved inside. “Dammit!” I looked around me wildly and suddenly felt a hand grasp mine, where I clutched my staff.

Murphy shook my hand until I looked at her. “Sanya and I will stay here,” she said, panting. “We’ll hold them until you get Maggie.”

I looked down the slope of the pyramid. Hundreds of the Red Court were coming up, and they were tearing free of their flesh masks now, revealing the monsters beneath. Hold them? It would be suicide. The Swords gave their wielders immense power against things out of nightmares, but it didn’t make them superhuman. Murphy and Sanya had both been fighting for twenty minutes—and there is no aerobic exercise that compares with the physical demands of combat. Both of them were breathing hard, growing tired.

Suicide.

But I needed to get up there.

“Dresden,” Martin called. “Come on!”

I hadn’t even realized he was shaking me, trying to get me up the stairs.

I guess I was getting pretty tired, too.

I narrowed my focus to Martin, to the stairs up, and tried to ignore the burning in my arms, my legs, my chest. I drew in a sharp breath, and it was like inhaling sudden cool, clean wind. I thought I heard someone whispering to me, something in a tongue I didn’t understand—but I knew my queen’s voice. I became aware that a cloud of white mist and vapor was gathering around me as I continued, a little faster, the humid air of the Yucatán boiling around the frost that had formed on my armor.

Then the cold washed away the hot fatigue, and I felt the ice flowing into me, implacable, merciless, relentless. My legs began to churn like the pistons of an engine. Suddenly one step per stride simply wasn’t enough, and I started flying up them two at a time, rapidly leaving Martin behind.

I reached the top and a half-breed jaguar warrior flung himself toward me. I snarled, batted his sword aside with mine, and lashed out with one foot, landing a stomping kick in the center of his chest.

His sternum cracked audibly, and he flew backward as if rammed by a truck. He hit the stone wall behind him hard enough to shake dust from the roof overhead, and crumpled like a broken toy. Which was exactly the kind of power the Winter Knight was supposed to have, and as I watched the poor idiot drop, I felt nothing but satisfaction.

The square temple had four doorways, one on each side, and in the one to my immediate right a vampire torn free of its flesh mask appeared, a jaguar skin still draped over its shoulders. It clutched an obsidian knife in its hand—the Red King’s dagger. It was the vamp he’d dispatched to kill Maggie.

“Fog of war, huh?” I asked him, and felt myself smiling. “Buddy, did you ever walk through the wrong door at the wrong time.”

Its eyes flicked to the floor to my left for an instant, and I looked, too. Maggie crouched there, directly between the altar and the door on my left, chained and shivering, huddling low to the ground as if hoping to be overlooked.

“Go on,” I said, looking back at the vampire. I bounced the sword in my hand lightly. White mist poured off the blade. So did a few snow-flakes. “Go for it, tough guy. Take one step toward that girl and see what happens.”

The door opposite me suddenly darkened.

The Red King and no fewer than four of his Lords stood there, gold masks shining, throwing back weird reflections from the dazzling array of flickering lights and fires in the darkness outside.

His face twisted with rage, and his will and the wills of the Lords behind him fell upon me like blows from individual sledgehammers. I staggered, planted my mentor’s staff firmly on the stone floor, and barely kept myself from being driven to the ground.

“Now,” the Red King said, his voice strangled with fury. “Put that little bitch on the altar.”

One of the Lords stepped forward and bent down to seize the child by her hair. Maggie screamed.

“No!” I shouted.

The Red King went to the altar and kicked the corpse of the dead woman from it. “Mortal,” he spat. “Still so certain that his will matters. But you are nothing. A wisp. A shadow. Here and then gone. Forgotten. It is fated. It is the way of the universe.” He jerked the ritual knife from the hands of the warrior and glared at me, his true nature writhing and twisting beneath his skin. The Lord dragged the shackled, screaming child to the altar, and the Red King’s black eyes gleamed.

“This is your only role, mortal,” he said, “your only grace, the only thing you are truly meant to do.” He stared at Maggie and bared his teeth, all long fangs, slaver running out of his mouth and down over his chin. “Die.”