Peace Talks (The Dresden Files, #16)

by Jim Butcher

“The Knights of the Blackened Denarius each bear one of Judas’s silver coins with a fallen angel trapped inside,” I said. “You guys are their . . . their opposites. You each bear a sword worked with a nail from the Crucifixion . . .” I rolled one hand encouragingly. “With an angel inside,” breathed Butters. There was a stunned silence around the little circle.

But as I approached the front door, I was struck by two things: First, a modest, plain bronze plaque fixed to the wall that spelled out the words BETTER FUTURE SOCIETY in letters an inch high. Second, that my magical senses were all but assaulted by the humming power of the defensive enchantments that had apparently been built into each individual stone of the castle.

too. Just you remember what I taught you.” “Never start the fight. Always finish it.” “Not that.” “Make your bed and do your chores?” “Not that.” “Something, something, never let them see you sweat.” A grin flashed over the old man’s seamed face, there and gone. “Close enough.”

Our host had drawn up something of a seating arrangement. Or, perhaps . . . Battle lines.

“I am owed favors. You are obliged to repay them.” And, deep down inside of me, something twisted with acute discomfort, as if Lara’s words had just reached into my guts and started kicking them, then waterboarded my conscience for good measure. Welling up from the Winter mantle was the sure and certain knowledge that Lara was owed, and that it was an injustice too deep to tolerate that she should not be repaid. No matter how inconvenient or personally humiliating it might be. Wow. So that’s what it felt like from the faerie side of things. No wonder so many of them didn’t like me much.

A black banner with black gemstones draped down into a semi-alcove shape, surrounding a single enormous chair in shadow. A very tall, very large man, apparently in his fifties, sat lazily in the chair, silently regarding the gathering. He held a pipe negligently in one hand, apparently unlit, but smoke trailed sinuously down from his nostrils with each breath, and his eyes reflected the light of the room like a cat’s. Ferrovax, the dragon, disguised in human form.

went by a sky blue banner swirling with cloudy whites and flashing lines of gold, opposite Ferrovax’s cozy alcove, and exchanged a nod with Vadderung, CEO of Monoc Securities, seated in a comfortable stuffed chair that looked like it would be good for reading. Vadderung looked like a tall, muscular man in his early sixties who could probably bench-press a motorcycle. He wore a charcoal suit, his long wolf-grey hair and trimmed beard made rakish by a black eye patch on a leather thong. Like Ferrovax, he sat alone, without guards, with a rather large glass of wine in one hand and a smoldering pipe in the other.

“Called a council of my people. Told them to leave my son alone or I’d start breaking skulls. And then we decided to join the Accords.” I tilted my head. “After lying low for so long?” I asked. “Why?” River Shoulders glanced around the room, maybe a little nervously. “So I could get the chance to pay you back. What you did for me, for my family, was more than just work for hire. You cared.

“I heard you went up against one of the Forest People and beat him.” “Killed him,” I said. River Shoulders eyed me and repeated, “Beat him.” A little cold feeling went through me. “What?” He nodded. “Big part of why I’m here. Wanted to warn you.” “How?” I demanded. “There was nothing left but ketchup.” River Shoulders shrugged again. “I don’t know how. But I saw him not a moon ago. Blood on His Soul won’t forget. Keep your eyes open, huh?”

“My people follow three paths,” he said. He gestured at himself. “Sky path, like me. We learn. We remember. Watch the stars. Read. Talk to you people, mostly on the rez. Think about things.”

“Second path is the forest path. That’s most of us, maybe nine in ten. Forest path thinks that humans are good example of what not to do. That we should stay close to nature. Avoid contact. Fire. Tools. All that. Stay quiet and unseen mostly and live in harmony with the natural world.”

I tilted my head and made a guess. “The Genoskwa. He’s on the third path.” “War path,” River agreed. “He thinks our people are the first people. Thinks we should kill most of you. Make the rest into cattle and slaves.” He mused for a moment. “They’re assholes,” he said frankly.

“What happened?” “They picked a fight with the wrong humans,” River Shoulders said. “Vikings. Vikings had a champion. A teacher.” “Beowulf?” I asked. “Beowulf. Vadderung. He got a lot of names and faces.” River Shoulders nodded.

A good kid? “How old are you, exactly?” I asked. River Shoulders put on a serious expression, exaggerated his northern, Native American accent, and said, “Many moons.”

“Listens-to-Wind says you’re a good investment. Just got some rough edges and need to learn more. Especially with that thing Mab hung on your shoulders.” I frowned. “Listens-to-Wind made an offer like that, too.” “Sure,” River said. “But I taught him. And he’s just about gotten to the end of his path.” He looked uncomfortable. “Lot of the wizards who matter are near the end. Hanging on hard.” I tilted my head at him. “Why?” “Not the right person, time, or place to tell you, starborn.” I pursed my lips. “Six hundred and sixty-six years,” I said experimentally. River’s craggy brows rose, itself a feat of superhuman strength. “Huh,” he said. “You learned some things.” “I learned that,” I said. “We pretty close to that time,” he said. “Kinda promised not to tell you anything. Sucks. Necessary. But if I was you, I’d think hard about taking my offer.”

She shook her head several times. “No. No, Harry. I’m not changing how I live my life. This is my choice. And you’ve got no stones to throw when it comes to stupid plans. So either back me up or get out of the way.”

You can’t go around making people’s choices for them. Not if you love them.

I gotta know that you’re walking into this with your eyes open, Murph.” She looked down for a long moment. Then she looked back up at me and said, “I have to do this.”

“I love you,” I said. She opened her eyes and blinked a couple of times. Then she lifted one ear out of the water and said, “What did you say?” I smiled at her. Then I went back to running my hands gently down her arm, encouraging some of the dead stuff to come off. It would take a few days for her to get back to normal. “Oh,” she said, studying my face. Then she sat up in the water, twisted a little toward me, and slid both of her arms around my neck. She pulled my mouth down to hers with a strength that no longer surprised me. But the sudden, sweet, almost desperate softness of the kiss that followed nearly knocked me into the tub. And in the middle of it, she breathed, “I love you, too.”

Murphy gave me a somewhat desperate glance. Huh. I’d officially seen everything now. Murphy asking for a rescue. From monsters and madmen, she’d never cried uncle. It had taken a redhead.

He gave his head a little shake, as if dislodging an insect. “I heard about the vote in the Council, man. It’s bullshit. However inconvenient you might be for them, whether any of them like it or not, you’re a wizard, Harry.” “Yer a wizard, Harry,” I growled.

If any underworld boss in the world had a dental plan for his employees, it would be Marcone. Which reminded me, I should probably be looking into a checkup for Maggie before she went to her new school in the fall, and— No, wait. Focus, Dresden. Survive the evening now; plan Maggie’s dental appointments later.

The next turn let me see River Shoulders speaking earnestly—how else?—to Mab. Mab was listening to him with intense focus. How else? I saw her nod, speak a short phrase, and turn to continue toward her chair in her appointed camp.

Well. I hadn’t been thinking about having that aura of protection around me when Karrin and I got busy, but it was nice to have it. And it was nice to know it was real. Very nice. “Ouch,” Lara said, her tone annoyed. Then she glanced up at me and her expression became suddenly pleased. “Oh. You and the policewoman? Congratulations, wizard.”

Thanks, imagination. I didn’t have enough problems, so I really appreciate you making up another one just to keep me on my toes.

I pushed past the vampire and her victim and tried to figure out exactly when I’d started taking the field beside the things that go bump in the night instead of against them.

At the end of the hallway, I found a heavy trapdoor set in the floor. I froze. My heart started beating faster. The door didn’t match the castle’s décor. It wasn’t lined up exactly right with the stones. It was old and made of heavy wood. And there were scorch marks on it. Because it was my door. My door, mine, from my old apartment; the door to my subbasement lab. It still had the ring in it that I used to pull it up. And it had an additional bar on it that hadn’t been there before.

It wasn’t right. And no one was going to do anything about it. Unless it was me. Something went click somewhere inside. Ever since the Red Court had taken my daughter, I’d been reeling from one disaster to the next, surviving. This entire situation was just one more entropy barrage hitting my life, forcing me to scramble once again, maybe getting me killed. (Again. Technically.) Things were different now. I was a part of Maggie’s life. And she might need me to walk her down an aisle one day. Maybe it was time I started getting ahead of this stuff. Maybe it was time to get serious.

The external valets and staff stood around confused by this turn of events, except for one security guard who was fumbling for both his weapon and his radio, shouting into it in a high-pitched, terrified voice. He got a couple of words out before the doors to the truck rolled up and something that sounded like a broken piece of pneumatic machinery tore his torso to ribbons and sent a scarlet fan of blood onto the wall behind him. What hit the ground wasn’t a person for much longer. A dozen men in black tactical uniforms came pouring out of the back of the truck, holding suppressed semiautomatic carbines. They opened fire, the sound mostly a fuzzy cloud of clacks, hisses, and whumps. It was over in maybe three seconds. None of the valets or staff survived. The ones still moving after they fell got bullets to the head.

The guy wearing the robes was no looker, either. His face was too large and lumpy to be human. His mouth was so wide he could have eaten a banana sideways, and his lips were like rubbery, black, rotten fruits of the same variety. His skin was pocked and warty and a sickly blue-green where it wasn’t ghostly pale, and his eyes were huge, watery, protruding, and disturbing. He had hair like withered black seaweed, draping over his head and shoulders in uneven clumps. He moved with a kind of frantic, jerky energy, and my instincts sized him up as someone dangerous and not particularly sane. King Corb of the Fomor, I presumed.

Corb descended from the truck, spun on his heel, and, with a surprising amount of poise and grace, fell to one knee at the foot of the ramp, his head bowed. I felt my eyebrows go up.

Footsteps sounded on the ramp once more, heavier this time. A generally humanoid, generally feminine figure in a heavy, hooded cloak of some oddly metallic fabric descended the ramp a deliberate step at a time. Whoever she was, she was taller than Corb and had to unfold herself carefully from the truck. Her bare feet were visible, their proportions perfect, simply huge. They looked like she’d had them bronzed a long time ago, and the bronze had been covered with verdigris and then polished irregularly. It formed lumps and nodes over her skin like molten wax, but flexed and moved as if alive. Flickers of metallic and colored crystals were embedded in that bronze exoflesh. She reached out a hand to touch Corb on the shoulder as she glided past him, showing more of the same metallic flesh. She was graceful despite her stature, her strides long and purposeful. Corb fell in at her side, a pace behind her. Without looking at him, she extended a hand. Corb reached into his robes and withdrew a length of chain maybe ten feet long from them. One end was attached to a steel band around the base of his throat, mostly concealed by his robes. He handed the other end to the Titanic woman. She took it without breaking stride and strode into the castle, the soldiers falling in behind their leaders as they went in, weapons up.

Corb and his retinue seemed to enjoy giving everyone time to settle into an uncomfortable silence. Then he strode forward, his chain clanking, and pitched something into the air with a casual underhand toss. There was a heavy clump as the thing, about the size of my fist, bounced and then rolled. It came to a halt at the foot of the dais where the high seat stood. It was a very small severed head. It had been a while since the head had been taken, the skin shrunken tight, patches here and there beginning to fall to decay. I recognized the features. It was Gwynn ap Nudd, King of the Tylwyth Teg, one of the larger subnations of Faerie.

Mab rose slowly, and by the time she stood, her hair and eyes and raven-claw nails were all black as pitch, her skin whiter than Death’s horse. “You dare. YOU DARE! YOU ARE A GUEST IN THIS HOUSE!” “Read your own laws, woman,” Corb spat. “These hirelings were no members of a house, not vassals or lackeys. They’re chattel at best.”

“Old woman,” Corb taunted. “I remember you as a bawling brat. I remember your pimply face when you rode with the Conqueror. I remember how you wept when Merlin cast you out.” Mab’s face . . . . . . twisted into naked, ugly, absolute rage. Her body became so rigid, so immobile, that it could not possibly have belonged to a living thing. “Tell me,” Corb purred. “If he was yet among the living, do you think he would still love you? Would he be so proud of what you’ve become?” Mab did not descend from her high seat so much as reality itself seemed to take a polite step to one side. One moment she was there; the next there was a trail of falling snow and frost-blanketed floor in a laser-straight line, and Mab stood within arm’s length of Corb. “Your maggot lips aren’t worthy to speak his name,” she hissed.

“There you are,” Corb said, his tone approving. “I knew you had to be inside all of that ice somewhere. Gather all the power you wish, old woman. You know who you are, and so do I. You are no one.” Mab’s face twisted in very human-looking fury, and that scared me more than anything I’d seen in a good long while.

The cloaked figure moved every bit as quickly as Mab had. One moment she was ten feet behind Corb. The next, there was a sound like thunder. There was no way to track what happened clearly. I think the cloaked figure lashed out with a kick. I had the sense that there were defensive energies beyond anything I could have managed around Mab, and that the kick went through them as if they had not existed. The thunder was followed almost instantly by a second sound, a roar of shattering stone. I turned my head, feeling as if I had been encased in gelatin, and saw the pieces of the high seat flying out in a cloud. There was a ragged hole in the stone wall behind the seat about half the size of a coffin. And the Queen of Air and Darkness was nowhere to be seen. A stunned silence settled over the room.

The woman beneath the hood was made of bronze and crystal, and she was beautiful beyond mortal reckoning. Her hair, long and slick and close, as if she’d just emerged from water, looked like silk spun from silver. It was her eyes that bothered me. Or rather, her eye. One of her eyes was a crystalline emerald green. The other . . . On that perfect bronze face, the mutilation of her eye stood out like a gallows in a public park. The orbital ridges around the socket were covered in white, granite-like scars, as if the biggest, ugliest cat you’d ever seen had scratched it out. It wasn’t sunken, though the lid was closed. That mangled eye bulged ever so slightly, as if it had been meant for a being considerably larger than she was.

There was, around her, a humming throb of energy unlike anything I had ever sensed before, a power so ancient and terrible that the world had forgotten its like. That power demanded my respect, my obedience, my adoration, my abject terror, and suddenly I knew what was happening. I was standing in the presence of a goddess. I could barely breathe. I couldn’t have moved if I’d wanted to.

The goddess walked forward, staring down at Marcone. She circled him, shaking her head in judgment—and still no one moved. She pointed a finger at Ferrovax without looking at him and said, “Introduce me to this ephemeral.” For a few seconds there was silence. Then Ferrovax spoke in a ragged voice that sounded like it was being dragged out through his teeth. “This is Ethniu. Daughter of Balor. The Last Titan.” Ethniu lowered her pointing finger. Ferrovax gasped and staggered, putting a hand on the back of his chair to balance himself as he breathed heavily.

She looked around the room. “I offer it to all of the divine here. At the witching hour tonight, we who you thought fallen, defeated, banished, and humbled march upon the mortal world—starting with this fetid hive around us.” She smiled, very slowly. “Finally.”

She stared down at him for a moment with something almost like pity. “I remember that once you were great,” she said quietly. “For the sake of the being I remember, I offer you this one chance: Do not interfere. My quarrel is with the mortals. Stand aside and there need be no conflict.” She gestured at the hole in the wall behind the high seat. “That creature cannot protect you. Cannot enforce her justice. Each of the divine here must choose: abandon the mortal world—or burn with it.”

She leaned back her head, took a breath, and opened that eye, the Eye, screaming. The scream itself threatened to deafen me by sheer volume, but it was far, far more painful than that. I could feel it press against the vaults of my mind, emotion so violent and intense that it would tear my sanity to pieces if I let even a portion of it into my head. Light erupted from Ethniu, lashing out furiously at the ceiling. Where it touched the hanging swaths of fabric, they rotted and flaked away, scorching at the edges and bursting into flame. When it touched the ceiling, there was an enormous concussion, and the dark grey stone of the castle suddenly erupted with cold blue glowing light emanating from previously unseen runes and sigils written on every surface. I could feel a surge of pressure, which might have put out my ears had it been physical, as the castle’s magical defenses pitted themselves against the power of a goddess. They failed. Stone shattered to dust, and energy exploded upward through the ceiling, through the upper floor, and through the roof into the summer night. Pure magical energy surged out with it, through the room, into the night, in a wave of such breadth and power that five minutes before, I would have considered it impossible.

Looking back, that was the moment everything started to change. Magic ran rampant into the air. It howled through the streets and alleys of Chicago. It thundered through tunnels and roadways, a tsunami of raw power. And wherever it went, the mortal world fell into darkness. Power stations exploded. Electronic devices screamed and showered sparks. Screens played diabolical images and screeched in demonic voices before dying. Cars died; systems failed; trains went powerless and slowed. I heard later that there were nearly fifteen hundred automobile collisions in that single moment, resulting in scores of deaths. Chicago fell into total darkness.

More proof of these being journals.

“LaChaise,” Marcone said in a voice that very much was meant to carry to the rest of the room. The ghoul looked over his shoulder at Marcone. “Where are you going, sir?” Marcone asked. LaChaise pointed a finger at the hole in the rear wall. His voice was a low, rich Louisiana gumbo with some whiskey added in. “You heard that monster. You saw what she did.” “Yes,” Marcone said, his tone bored. “I also saw your signature at the bottom of the Unseelie Accords, I believe.”

LaChaise turned to leave, trailing half a dozen ghouls in the wake of his massive presence. “Are you a coward, sir?” Marcone asked, his voice deadly quiet.

“Baron Marcone is correct,” Etri said. “You are signatories of the Accords, as are we all. You are obligated to come to Mab’s defense. As are we all.” LaChaise’s jaw had extended slightly, and it made his voice a snarling, gobbling thing. “Your people are bleeding from a tussle with a mere White Court assassin,” the ghoul hissed. “Do you think you can challenge a Titan, Etri?” “Not alone,” Etri said calmly. He turned to Marcone and nodded firmly. “Svartalfheim does not make commitments lightly. We will stand in defense of this city.” Marcone returned the nod.

“Did you see what she was wearing?” “Titanic bronze,” Etri noted. “An alloy beyond the skill of even my people. Only the Hundred-Handed Ones knew its secret.” He looked at Marcone and clarified, “Mere physical force will never stop her. Only the most puissant of powers stands any chance of doing more than annoying her.”

“Idiot,” snapped Ferrovax, a plume of thick volcanic-smelling smoke rushing from his nostrils. “You know the mortals as well as I do. Once you awaken them, frighten them, you anger them. They will lash out at any supernatural threat they can find—and may I remind you, LaChaise, that you do not enjoy the safety of dwelling beneath an ocean they have barely explored.” “The wurm is right,” Vadderung said. He exchanged a nod with Ferrovax. “We must stop Ethniu here and now. If she is allowed to sack a mortal city of this size, there will be no way to contain their rage. Blind and foolish as they are, they are many, and full of the courage of ignorance. None of us will be able to carry on business in the face of that—and Corb and Ethniu will simply sit in their palace under the sea and laugh while the rest of us try to survive.”

“Courage, sir,” the robber baron of Chicago said. “Skill. And will.” He turned to Vadderung and said, “I wish to hire the entirety of the available Einherjaren for a night.” “I can have five hundred here in the next few hours,” Vadderung said.