Cold Days

Chapter Forty-three

Suddenly, I wasn’t on the bitch seat of Karrin’s Harley. I was hanging suspended in midair, and I was in agony.

I opened my eyes and looked wildly around me. Barren, icy earth. Cold grey sky. My arms and legs were stretched out into an X shape, and ice the color of a deep blue sky encased them, holding them stretched out against what felt like an old, knotted tree. Muscles and ligaments from my everywhere were at the trembling breaking point. My own heartbeat was torment. My face burned, exposed to cold so severe that it hurt even me.

I tried to scream, but couldn’t. A slow, gargling moan came out instead, and I coughed blood into the freezing air.

“You knew this was coming,” said a voice, a voice that still made my entire body thrum in response, something simple and elemental that did not care how long she had held me in torment. “You knew this day would come. I am what I am. As are you.”

Mab walked into my vision from the left. I barely had enough strength to keep my eyes focused on her.

“You saw what happened to my last Knight,” she said, and began to take slow steps closer to me. I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction, but I couldn’t help it—I heard myself make a soft noise, felt myself make a feeble effort to move or escape. It made her wide eyes glint for an instant. “I gave you power for a purpose, and that purpose is complete.” She turned her hand over slowly, and showed me something she held in it—a small metal spike, too large to be a needle, too small to be a nail. She walked closer to me, rolling the fine-pointed etcher between two fingers, and smiled.

Her fingertips traced over my chest and ribs, and I shuddered. She’d carved the word weak upon my body in dozens of alphabets and hundreds of languages, etching it into my flesh, the palms of my hands, the soles of my feet, with miles upon miles of scars.

I wanted it to be over. I wanted her to kill me.

She leaned close to my face. “Today,” she breathed, “we start carving your teeth.”

Cold enveloped me, and water slithered into my mouth though I tried to keep it out. Some seeped through my cracked lips. More went up my nostrils and took the long way around—and then it froze into ice, slowly forcing my jaws apart. Mab leaned in close to me, lifting the etcher, and I caught the faint scent of oxidation as the instrument began scratching at my incisors. . . .

Oxidation. The smell of rust.

Rust meant steel—something no Faerie I’d ever seen, apart from Mother Winter, could touch.

This wasn’t actually happening to me. It wasn’t real. The pain wasn’t real. The tree wasn’t real. The ice wasn’t real.

But . . . I still felt them. I could feel something behind them, a will that was not my own, forcing the idea of pain upon me, the image of helplessness, the leaden fear, the bitter vitriol of despair. This was a psychic assault like nothing I’d ever seen before. The ones I’d felt before this one were feeble shadows by comparison.

No, I thought.

“Nnngh,” I moaned.

And I then I drew a deep breath. This was not how my life would end. This was not reality. I was Harry Dresden, Wizard of the White Council, Knight of Winter. I had faced demons and monsters, fought off fallen angels and werewolves, slugged it out with sorcerers and cults and freakish things that had no names. I had fought upon land and sea, in the skies above my city, in ancient ruins and in realms of the spirit most of humanity did not know existed. I bore scars that I’d earned in dozens of battles, made enemies out of nightmares, and laid low a dark empire for the sake of one little girl.

And I would be damned if I was going to roll over for some punk Outsider and his psychic haymaker.

The words first. Damned near everything begins with words.

“I am,” I breathed, and suddenly the ice was clear of my mouth.

“I am Harry . . .” I panted, and the pain redoubled.

And I laughed. As if some freak who had never loved enough to know loss could tell me about pain.

“I AM HARRY BLACKSTONE COPPERFIELD DRESDEN!” I roared.

Ice and wood shattered. Frozen stone cracked with a sound like a cannon’s blast, a spiderweb of tiny crevices spreading out from me. The image of Mab flew away from me and blew into thousands of crystalline shards, like a shattering stained-glass window. The cold and the pain and the terror reeled away from me, like some vast and hungry beast suddenly struck on the nose.

The Outsiders loved their psychic assaults, and given that this one happened about two seconds after Sharkface came up out of the water, it was pretty clear who was behind it. But that was fine. Sharkface had chosen a battle of the mind. So be it. My head, my rules.

I lifted my right arm to the frozen sky and shouted, wordless and furious, and a bolt of scarlet lightning flashed from the seething skies. It smashed into my hand and then down into the earth. Frozen dirt sprayed everywhere, and when it had cleared, I stood holding an oaken quarterstaff carved with runes and sigils, as tall as my temple and as big around as my joined thumb and forefinger.

Then I stretched my left arm down to the earth and cried out again, sweeping it up in a single, beckoning gesture. I tore metals from the ground beneath me, and they swirled like mist up around my body, forming into a suit of armor covered in spikes and protruding blades.

“Okay, big guy,” I snarled out at the dark will that even now gathered itself to attack again. “Now we know who I am. Let’s see who you are.” I took the staff and smote its end down on the ground. “Who are you!” I demanded. “You play in my head, you play by my rules! Identify yourself!”

In answer, there was only a vast roaring sound, like an angry arctic wind gathering into a gale.

“Oh, no, you don’t,” I muttered. “You started this, creep! You want to get up close and personal, let’s play! Who are you?”

A vast sound, like something you’d hear in the deep ocean, moaned through the sky.

“Thrice I command thee!” I shouted, focusing my will, sending it coursing into my voice, which boomed out over the landscape. “Thrice I bid thee! By my name I command thee: Tell me who you are!”

And then an enormous swirling form emerged from the clouds overhead—a face, but only in the broadest, roughest terms, like something a child would make from clay. Lightning burned far back in its eyes, and it spoke in the voice of gale winds.

I AM GATEBREAKER, HARBINGER!

I AM FEARGIVER, HOPESLAYER!

I AM HE-WHO-WALKS-BEFORE!

For a second, I just stood there, staring up at the sky, shocked.

Hell’s bells.

It worked.

The thing spoke, and as it did, I knew, I knew what it was, as if I’d been given a snapshot of its core identity, its quintessential self.

For one second, no more than that, I understood it, what it was doing, what it wanted, what it planned and . . .

And then that moment was past, the knowledge vanished the way it had come—except for one thing. Somehow, I’d held on to a few crumbling fragments of insight.

I knew the thing trying to tear my head apart was a Walker. I didn’t know much about them except that nobody else knew much about them either, and that they were extremely bad news.

And one of them had tried to kill me when I was sixteen years old. He-Who-Walks-Behind had nearly done it. Except . . . from where I stood now, I wasn’t sure he’d really been trying to kill me. He’d been shaping me. I don’t know for what, but he’d been trying to provoke me.

And this thing in my head, the thing I’d named Sharkface, was like him, a Walker, a peer. It was huge, powerful, and in a way utterly different from the kinds of power I had seen before. This thing wasn’t bigger than Mab. But it was horribly, unbearably deeper than her, like a photograph of a sculpture compared to the sculpture itself. It had power at its command that was beyond anything I had seen, beyond measure, beyond comprehension—just plain beyond.

This thing was power from the Outside, and I was a grain of sand to its oncoming tide.

But you know what?

That grain of sand might be the last remnant of what had once been a mountain, but that which it is, it is. The tide comes and the tide goes. Let it hammer the grain of sand as it may. Let lofty mountains fear the slow, constant assault of the waters. Let the valleys shudder at the pitiless advance of ice. Let continents drown beneath the dark and rising tide.

But that grain of sand?

It isn’t impressed.

Let the tide roll in. The sand will still be there after it rolls out again.

So I looked up at that face and I laughed. I laughed scorn and defiance at that vast, swirling power, and it didn’t just feel good. It felt right.

“Go ahead!” I shouted. “Go ahead and eat me! And then we’ll see if you’ve got the stomach to keep me down!” I lifted my staff and golden white fire began to pour from the carved runes as I gathered power into it. The air grew chill with Winter, and frost formed on the razor-edged blades in my armor. I ground my feet into place, setting them firmly, and the glow of soulfire began to emanate from the cracks in the earth around me. I bared my teeth at the hungry sky, flew the bird at it with my free hand, and screamed, “Bring it on!”

A furious voice filled the air, a sound that shook the earth and sky alike, that made the ground buckle and the swirling clouds recoil.

And then I was back on the Harley, clutching Karrin’s waist in one hand and clinging to the Winchester with the other. The motorcycle was still in motion, but it wasn’t accelerating. It felt like we were coasting.

Karrin let out a low, gurgling cry, and suddenly sagged forward, panting. I pulled her back against me, helping her to sit up, and after a few seconds she gave her head a few quick shakes and snarled, “I hate getting into a Vulcan mind meld.”

“It hit you, too?” I asked.

“It . . .” She cast a look over her shoulder, up at me, and shuddered. “Yeah.”

“You okay now?”

“I’m starting to get angry,” she said.

A hideously mirthful sound spread over the air—the sound of the Erlking’s laughter. His great steed swerved in close to the motorcycle, and he lifted his sword in a gesture of fierce defiance. Then his burning eyes turned to me and he spoke in a voice that was murderously merry. “Well-done, starborn!”

“Uh,” I said. “Thank you?”

The lord of the goblins laughed again. It was the kind of sound that would stick with you—and wake you up in the middle of the night, wondering whether perhaps poisonous snakes had surrounded your bed and were about to start slithering in.

I looked back. The Hunt had spread out into a ragged semblance of its former cohesion, but even as I watched, the riders and hounds poured on extra effort to gather together again. I looked around but saw no sign of Sharkface.

I did see something else—V-shaped ripples coming toward us through the water. A whole lot of them.

“Here they come!” I shouted to the Erlking. “Good hunting!”

“That much seems certain,” he called in that same cheerfully vicious voice, and wheeled his horse to the right. Half of the riders and hounds split off with him, while the other half continued streaming after me.

I pointed at our target as the Erlking headed toward his. “There!” I called. “Let’s do it!”

The Harleytiger let out another snarling roar, and Karrin raced toward the second barge. Hellish shrieks went up from both groups of the Hunt—and the oncoming things in the water smoothly split into two elements as they came forward. We raced the enemy toward the barges.

This time we didn’t have surprise on our side. It couldn’t have been more than a minute or two since the Hunt had announced its arrival, but I saw figures stirring on the deck of the barge ahead of us.

“Gun!” shouted Karrin. “Incoming!”

Crap.

Out over the water like this, I didn’t have access to anywhere near enough magic to provide a continuous shield—and I couldn’t try to slap down individual bullets, either. By the time I saw the gunfire, the round would already be going through us. Which meant that this was going to happen the vanilla way, the way soldiers worldwide have done it for a few centuries now. Advance, advance, advance, and hope that you didn’t get shot.

Then Karrin snatched the rifle out of my hand and screamed, “Take the bike!”

I fumbled for a moment, but found the handlebars, reaching around her to make it happen. I gunned the throttle as Karrin raised the Winchester to her shoulder, half rose, and squinted through the buckhorn sights.

Flashes came from the boat, and something that sounded like an angry hornet flicked past my ear. I saw bits of spray coming up from the water ahead of us as the shooters misjudged their range, and I kept on racing straight ahead.

When we got to within a hundred yards, Karrin started shooting.

The old rifle boomed, and sparks flew up from the barge’s hull. She worked the lever action without lowering it from her shoulder and fired again. One of the dark shapes on the deck vanished, and two more flinched away. More gunfire came from the boat—panic fire, splashing wildly everywhere and mostly nowhere close to us. Whoever was over there, they didn’t like getting shot at any more than I did.

As we closed the last yards, Karrin fired three more times in a rapid, assured pace. I couldn’t see whether she hit anyone else until we went roaring past the barge, no more than ten feet away, when a man holding the distinctive shape of a shotgun rose into sight. Karrin was covering the barge’s stern with the Winchester when he popped up. The old gun roared again, and the gunman fell away and out of sight.

We raced by unharmed, but the enemy gunfire had done its work. The riders and hounds of the Hunt had been distracted by the flying bullets, and they didn’t do nearly as much damage to the barge as in the initial attack. Even as I watched, more and more figures with guns appeared on the barge and started shooting.

I checked the oncoming rush of Outsiders.

We weren’t going to sink the barge before they got here.

“—to sink it!” Karrin was shouting.

“What?”

“We don’t have to sink the barge!” she shouted. “It can’t move on its own! We just have to kill the boat that’s pulling it!”

“Right!” I said, and leaned the Harley into a turn that would take us arching back toward the barge—this time at its front, or prow, or bow or something, where a rig containing a tugboat a bit bigger than the Water Beetle had been built on.

It also brought us closer to the oncoming Outsiders, and I couldn’t tell which of us would get there first. As I sped up, Karrin dug into the compartments on the Harley, reaching around me, then said, “Hold it steady!”

Then she stood up, and I couldn’t see a damned thing—but I did see the way she pulled the pin out of a freaking hand grenade, and let the spoon spin off into the night. The Harley buzzed past the tugboat’s rig maybe ten feet ahead of the Outsiders, and Karrin gave the grenade a rather feeble little flick as we went by. I heard it smash into glass, like a stone thrown against a window, and then we were past the barge, and a huge sound thudded through the air, like an entire library of books all dropped flat at the same instant, and an incandescent white light flared from the tug.

I looked back over my shoulder and saw that the tugboat was on fire, pouring out thick black smoke and leaning sharply to one side. Murphy saw it, too, and let out an ululating war cry before she sat back down and pushed my hands off the handlebars, reassuming control of the Harley. “Two down!” she said. “One to go!”

I looked back behind me. The Outsiders had begun swarming at the barge, and one of them actually came out of the water at one of the rearmost riders of the Hunt—this horrible thing that was all pustules and multiple limbs with too many joints. As it leapt, the rider raised a shadowy bow and loosed a darkling arrow. It struck the Outsider and burst into red-amber flame the same color as the burning eyes of the Hunt. The Outsider let out an unearthly wail and plunged back beneath the surface.

“Come on,” I said to Karrin. “Head for the other boat.”

“Should we?” she asked. “That Erlking guy seems a little . . . do-it-yourselfy.”

She was right about that. Like any of the other seriously powerful beings of Faerie, the Erlking had a strong sense of pride—and you crossed that pride at your own risk. If I showed up and the Erlking thought I was making the statement that I judged him unfit to finish the task, it could come back to haunt me. On the other hand, I’d already insulted him once and there was a lot on the line. “If he didn’t want me making calls like this, he shouldn’t have let me shoot him and take over his Hunt,” I said. I turned to beckon the riders and hounds behind me and shouted, “Come on!” My voice came out as both my own and in the howling screech of the Hunt, the two interwoven, and the rest of my group joined in the shriek and formed up around the Harley as it raced across the water, toward the third barge.

Where the fight wasn’t going well.

There were several long, straight streaks of molten steel where the Erlking and his riders had struck the barge’s hull, the edges marked with flickering tongues of eerie green fire, but they had not torn a hole in it like we had the first barge, either, and the Outsiders had gotten to this barge faster than they had to mine. Even as we approached, I saw a racing hound of the Hunt vanish in a spray of water as things, plural, too twisted and too confusing to count, surged up from below and began to drag the hound down.

A shriek loud enough to cause spray to rise from the water shook the air, and the Erlking himself plunged down from overhead, leading a trio of hunters behind him. Blades and arrows struck at the Outsiders in plumes of ember fire. The Erlking seized the hound by the scruff of its neck and dragged it up out of the grasp of the creatures beneath the surface.

The Erlking and his riders had fallen into a formation, a great, tilted wheel. At the far end, the riders were maybe fifty feet above the waves, circling in the air to then charge down at the surface of the water where it met the hull of the barge. The Outsiders would throw themselves up out of the waves, meeting each individual rider. Hounds would, in turn, try to throw themselves on the Outsiders, smothering their defense so that the rider could strike the barge.

Meanwhile, figures aboard the barge fired rifles wildly into the night, though the deck of the thing was actually bobbing with the thrashing of the Outsiders in the water around it. Whoever they were, they struck me as amateurish—though maybe it was only because I’d been exposed to real soldiers before, who were a deadly threat even on the scale of supernatural conflict. These guys weren’t the Einherjaren—but at the end of the day, they still had deadly weapons, and more than one rider and hound had been struck by rounds and bled molten light from their shadow-masked bodies. The piercing screech of the Hunt met with the howls of Outsiders and the crack of rifle fire, and bit by bit, the barge’s hull bled red-hot steel.

But it wasn’t happening fast enough.

With a groan, the barge’s tugboat, this one mounted behind it, began shoving the thing forward through the water and toward the shore of Demonreach.

“I shouldn’t have split us up,” I said. “We didn’t cover twice as many targets. We just got twice as half-assed.”

Karrin made a sputtering sound, then said, “You and math are not friends. Regret later. Lead now.”

“Right,” I said. The barge wasn’t exactly leaping into motion—but it wouldn’t stop on a dime once it got moving, either. “Do you have any more grenades?” I asked Karrin.

“I used them a couple of weeks ago,” she said.

“With Kincaid?” I asked. There was an edge to it. She and the assassin were kind of an item, the last time I looked.

“Harry,” she said, “focus.”

Hell’s bells, she was right. I didn’t need the Winter mantle turning me into a territorial alpha dick right now. I stared at the barge for a long second, pushing that instinct away, and then said to the Hunt, “Join the Erlking! Attack the barge!”

Hounds and riders streamed past us, joining the madman’s wheel of death in the sky, and I lowered my voice, speaking only to Karrin as I reloaded the Winchester. “Get me to the tugboat.”

She gave me a quick, wide-eyed glance, and then seemed to get it. She gunned the motor, sending the Harley shooting past the Erlking’s very large, very threatening, and very distracting formation, as we raced alone toward the chugging tugboat.

She brought us right alongside it, and once again I leapt from the back of the Harley. I hit the side of the tug pretty hard, but was able to get the fingers of my left hand around the top of the rail, and with a few kicks managed to swing myself up onto the deck. I landed in a crouch, clutching the rifle, got my bearings, and headed toward a stairwell that would lead me to the boat’s bridge.

I went up it as quietly as I could, which is pretty damned quiet for a guy my size, Winchester at the ready. The bridge of the tug was big enough to merit its own enclosed space, and I slipped up to the door, took a breath, then ripped it open, lifting the Winchester as I did.

The bridge was empty, the wheel secured with a pair of large plastic ties. There was a piece of paper taped to the wheel, and on it was written in large black marker, LOOK BEHIND YOU.

I started to turn, but a cannonball hit me between the shoulder blades. I flew forward onto the bridge and slammed my head against the Plexiglas forward windows. I fell back from that, stunned, and a heavy weight hit me from the side, slamming me into a bulkhead, which felt almost exactly like being slammed into a steel wall.

I wound up prone, my face to the deck, and once more the heavy weight slammed into me, landing on my back.

And Cat Sith, who had told me not to turn my back on anyone, purred, “Wizard, Knight, fool. Too ignorant even to know how to die properly.” His skin-crawling voice came out in a throaty buzz next to my ear. “Allow me to educate you.”