Jim Butcher - Cold Days

The echoes of my summoning bounced around the graveyard over my head a few times and then . . .

And then . . .

And then nothing.

I sat there for a moment, waiting, while the burning oil hissed and sputtered on the ice. A running tendril of oil ran out to my blood and hair, and a tongue of flame followed a moment later. That part was fine by me. It wasn’t like I wanted to leave a target that juicy lying around for someone to steal, anyway.

I waited until the fire burned out entirely, and quiet settled over my grave again, but nothing happened. Dammit. I wasn’t going to figure out what was really going on tonight by carefully sifting all the facts and analyzing how they all fit together. Not in the time I had left. My only real chance was to get to someone who knew and get them to talk. Granted, going to talk to Mother Winter was about half an inch shy of trying to call up Lucifer, or maybe Death itself (if there was such a being—no one was really sure), but when you need information from witnesses and experts, the only way to get it is to talk to them.

Maybe my summons hadn’t been deathy enough, but I hadn’t wanted to kill some poor animal just to get the old girl’s attention. I might have to, though. There was just too much at stake to get squeamish.

I shook my head, put my tools away, and then the ice just beneath my toes shattered and a long, bony arm, covered in wrinkles and warts and spots, and belonging to a body that would have been at least twenty feet tall, shot up and seized my head. Not my face. My entire head, like a softball. Or maybe an apple. Stained black claws on the ends of the knobby fingers dug into me, piercing my skin, and I was abruptly jerked down into the freaking ice with so much power that for a second I was terrified my neck had snapped.

I thought I would be broken for certain when I hit the ice, but instead I was drawn through it and down into the mud, and through that, and then I was falling, screaming in sudden, instinctive, blind terror. Then I hit something hard and it hurt , even through the power of the mantle, and I let out a brief, croaking exhalation. I dangled there, stunned for a moment, with those cold, cruel pointed claws digging into my flesh. Distantly I could hear a slow, limping step, and feel my feet dragging across a surface.

Then I was flung and spun twice on the horizontal, and I crashed into a wall. I bounced off it and landed on what felt like a dirt floor. I lay there, not able to inhale, barely able to move, and either I’d gone blind or I was in complete blackness. The nice part about having your bells rung like that is that mind-numbing horror sort of gets put onto a side burner for a bit. That was pretty much the only nice thing about it. When I finally managed to gasp in a little air, I used it to make a whimpering sound of pure pain.

A voice came out of the darkness, a sound that was dusty and raspy and covered in spiders. “Me,” it said, drawing the word out. “You attempt to summon. Me.”

“You have my sincerest apologies for the necessity,” I said, or tried to say to Mother Winter. I think it just came out, “Ow.”

“You think I am a servant to be whistled for?” continued the voice. Hate and weariness and dark amusement were all mummified together in it. “You think I am some petty spirit you can command.”

“N-n-nngh, ow.” I gasped.

“You dare to presume? You dare to speak such names to draw my attention?” the voice said. “I have a stew to make, and I will fill it with your arrogant mortal meat.”

There was a sound in the pitch-darkness. Steel being drawn across stone. A few sparks went up, blinding in the darkness. They burned into my retinas the outline of a massive, hunched form grasping a cleaver.

Sparks danced every few seconds as Mother Winter slowly sharpened her implement. I was able to get my breathing under control and to fight past the pain. “Mmm . . .” I said. “M-Mother Winter. Such a pleasure to meet with you again.”

The next burst of sparks gleamed off of an iron surface—teeth.

“I n-need to speak to you.”

“Speak, then, manling,” said Mother Winter. “You have a little time left.”

The cleaver rasped across the sharpening stone again.

“Mab has ordered me to kill Maeve,” I said.

“She is always doing foolish things,” said Mother Winter.

“Maeve says that Mab’s gone insane,” I said. “Lily concurs.”

There was a wheezing sound that might have been a cackle. “Such a loving daughter.”

I had to believe that I was going to get out of this somehow. So I pressed her. “I need to know which of them is right,” I said. “I need to know who I should turn my hand against to prevent a great tragedy.”

“Tragedy,” said Mother Winter in a purr that made me think of rasping scorpions. “Pain? Terror? Sorrow? Why should I wish to prevent such a thing? It is sweeter than an infant’s marrow.”

It is a good thing I am a fearless and intrepid wizardly type, or that last bit of sentence would have set my flesh to crawling hard enough to carry me across the dirt floor.

I was kind of hosed anyway, so I took a chance. I crossed my fingers in the dark and said, “Because Nemesis is behind it.”

The cleaver’s rasp abruptly stopped.

The darkness and silence were, for a moment, absolute.

My imagination treated me to an image of Mother Winter creeping silently toward me in the blackness, cleaver lifted, and I stifled an urge to burst into panicked screams.

“So,” she whispered a moment later. “You have finally come to see what has been before you all this time.”

“Uh, yeah. I guess. I know there’s something there now, at least.”

“So very mortal of you. Learning only when it is too late.”

Rasp. Sparks.

“You aren’t going to kill me,” I said. “I’m as much your Knight as Mab’s.”

There was a low, quiet snort. “You are no true Knight of Winter, manling. Once I have devoured your flesh, and your mantle with it, I will bestow it upon someone worthier of the name. I should never have given it to Mab.”

Uh, wow. I hadn’t thought of that kind of motivation. My guts got really watery. I tried to move my limbs and found them numbed and only partially functional. I started trying to get them to flip me over so that I could get my feet under me. “Uh, no?” I heard myself ask in a panicked, cracking voice. “And why is that, exactly?”

“Mab,” said Mother Winter in a tone of pure disgust, “is too much the romantic.”

Which pretty much tells you everything you need to know about Mother Winter, right there.

“She has spent too much time with mortals,” Mother Winter continued, withered lips peeled back from iron teeth as the sparks from her cleaver’s edge leapt higher. “Mortals in their soft, controlled world. Mortals with nothing to do but fight one another, who have forgotten why they should fear the fangs and the claws, the cold and the dark.”

“And . . . that’s bad?”

“What value has life when it is so easily kept ?” Mother Winter spat the last word. “Mab’s weakness is evident. Look at her Knight.”

Her Knight was currently trying to sit up, but his wrists and ankles were fastened to the floor by something cold, hard, and unseen. I tested them, but couldn’t feel any edges. The bonds couldn’t have been metal. And they weren’t ice. I didn’t know how I knew that, but I was completely certain. Ice would have been no obstacle. But there was something familiar about it, something I had felt before . . . in Chichén Itzá.

Will.

Mother Winter was holding me down by pure, stark will. The leaders of the Red Court had been ancient creatures with a similar power, but that had been a vague, smothering blanket that had made it impossible to move or act, a purely mental effort.