Jim Butcher - Ghost Story

A line of tracer fire went streaking right through me, having no more effect than a stiff breeze. I breathed a faint sigh of relief. I was inside Molly’s mindscape, but her conflict was not with me , and neither was the Corpsetaker’s. I was just as much a ghost here at the moment as I had been back in the real world.

The city around me, I saw, was a vast grid of fortified buildings, and I realized that the kid had changed her usual tactics. She wasn’t trying to obscure the location of her mental fortress with the usual tricks of darkness and fog. She had instead chosen a different method of obfuscation, building a sprawl of decoys, hiding the true core of her mind somewhere among them.

Corpsetaker had countered her, it would seem, by the simple if difficult expedient of deciding to crush them all , even if it had to be done one at a time. That vast beast construct had been something more massive than I had ever attempted in my own imagination, though Molly had tossed some of those at me once or twice. It wasn’t simply a matter of thinking big—there was an energy investment in creating something with that kind of mental mass, and Molly generally felt such huge, unsubtle thrusts weren’t worth the effort they took—especially since someone with the right attitude and imagination would take them down with only moderately more difficulty than small constructs.

Corpsetaker, though, evidently didn’t agree. She was a lot older than Molly or me, and she would have deeper reserves of strength to call upon, greater discipline, and the confidence of long experience. The kid had managed to take on the Corpsetaker on Molly’s most familiar ground, and to play her hand in her strongest suit—but my apprentice’s strength didn’t look like it was holding up well against the necromancer’s experience and expertise.

I stopped paying attention to everything happening—all the artillery strikes and cavalry charges and shambling hordes of zombies and storms of knives that just came whirling out of the sky. The form of any given construct wasn’t as important as the fact of its existence. A flying arrow that could pierce the heart, for example, was potentially just as dangerous as an animate shadow reaching out with smothering black talons. As long as one could imagine an appropriate construct to counter the threat, and do so in time to stop it, any construct could be defeated. It was a simple thing at its most basic level, and it sounded easy. But once you’re throwing out dozens or hundreds—or thousands—of offensive and defensive constructs at a time . . . Believe me—it takes your full attention.

It’s also all you can do to deal with one opponent, which explained why I hadn’t been assaulted by the Corpsetaker instantly, if she had even taken note of my presence at all. She and Molly were locked together tight. The soulgaze had probably played a part in that. Neither was letting go until her opponent was dead.

Both combatants were throwing enormous amounts of offensive constructs at each other, even though Molly was demolishing her own defenses almost as rapidly as the Corpsetaker was. As tactics go, that one had two edges. Molly was hurting herself, but by doing so, she was preventing the Corpsetaker from pressing too closely, lest she be caught up in the vast bursts of destruction being exchanged. A mistake could easily destroy anyone’s mind in that vista of havoc, centuries-old necromancer or not. On the other hand, if she spotted where Molly was fighting from, it looked like she’d have the power to drive in and crush my apprentice. But if she closed in on the wrong target, she’d leave herself wide-open to a surprise attack from the real Molly. Corpsetaker had to know that, just as she had to know that if she simply kept on the pressure, the whole place would eventually be ground down and Molly would be destroyed anyway.

My apprentice had come with a good plan, but she had miscalculated. The Corpsetaker was a hell of a lot stronger than she had expected. Molly was playing the most aggressive defensive plan I’d ever seen, and hoping that she could pressure the Corpsetaker into making a mistake. It wasn’t a good plan, but it was all she had.

One way or another, it wasn’t going to be a long fight. Best if I got moving.

Molly was here somewhere in the sprawl of fake strongholds, and she would be just as hidden from me as from the Corpsetaker. But I had an advantage that the necromancer didn’t: I knew my apprentice.

This wasn’t the Nevernever. We were in Molly’s head, inside a world of thought and imagination. There was no magic involved—not now that we were here anyway. I might be a slender wisp of a ghost, but I still had my brain, and that gave me certain liberties here.

I went over to the ruined building, where the monster thing was groaning through its death. I heaved aside a piece of rubble and pulled a pale blue bathroom rug, stained with dust and weird purple blood, out of the wreckage. It was a tiny piece of an environmental construct, but even so, it was a serious effort to appropriate it as my own. My arms shook with weakness as I lifted the carpet and snapped it once. Blood and dust flew from it as if it had never existed, and then I settled it calmly on flat ground, sat on it, and folded my legs and my arms in front of me.

“Up, Simba,” I said in my best attempt to imitate Yul Brynner, and the carpet quivered and then rose off the ground, staying as rigid and almost as comfortable as a sheet of heavy plywood. It rose straight in the air, and as it did, I gripped the edges surreptitiously. It wouldn’t do to have either my enemy or my apprentice get a glimpse of me flailing wildly for my balance as the carpet moved. But on the other hand, I didn’t want to just fall off, either. I could probably come up with something to keep me from getting hurt when I hit the ground, but it would look awfully bad, and I don’t care how close to dead he might be; a wizard has his pride.

Granted, the imagination was the only place where I was going to get one of these darned things to work. I’d tried the flying-carpet thing before, when I was about twenty. It had been a fairly horrible experiment that had dropped me into a not-yet-closed landfill during a thunderstorm. And then there was the famous flying-broomstick incident of Wacker Drive, which wound up on the Internet as a UFO sighting. After that, I had wisely determined that flying was mostly just a great way to get killed and settled for driving my old car around instead.

But hey. In my imagination, that carpet had worked great—and that was how it went as a guest in Molly’s imagination, too.

I went up high enough to get a good view—and was impressed with the kid. The city of fortresses stretched for miles. There were hundreds of them, and fighting raged all the way through. It was the opposite of what the kid usually did in a mental battle—an inverse Mongol horde, with endless defenders pouring out like angry bees to defend the hive. Corpsetaker, unfortunately, was playing mama bear to Molly’s queen bee. She’d get hurt coming in, but as long as she wasn’t stupid, not very badly. She could crush all the defenders eventually—and then rip the hive to shreds.

I leaned forward a little and the carpet began to gather speed, moving ahead. Shifts of my weight to the left or right let me bank, and it wasn’t long before I was cruising through the rain as fast as I could and still keeping my eyes clear. I flew a spiral pattern, scanning the city beneath me. The battle kept going in the skies, too—mostly flying demon things and lightning bolts that kept smashing them out of the air. It got boring to watch after the first dozen spectacular lightning strikes or so, and I tuned that conflict out, too, as I kept searching.

Finally, I spotted what I was looking for: a ruined building that had been reduced to a crater by an artillery shell or some other explosion. It was impossible to tell what it had been from what was left, and burned rubble covered the area around it, coating a thick-bodied old oak tree and the tree house on its lower branches in dust, dirt, and debris.