Jim Butcher - Ghost Story

The Corpsetaker stood in the air above the pit, hissing words into Morty’s ear. Mort’s head was moving back and forth in a feeble negative. He was weeping, his body twitching and jerking in obvious agony. His lips were puffy and swollen, probably the result of getting hit in the mouth repeatedly. I don’t think he could focus his eyes—but he kept doggedly shaking his head.

Again, the hooded lemurs were gathered around, but instead of playing cards, this time they all stood in an outward-facing circle around the pit, as if guarding against an attack.

Pity for them that the back door from the Nevernever was inside the circle. When the spook squad and I came through, they all had their backs to us.

Now, I’m not arrogant enough to think that I was the first guy to lead a company of ghosts into an assault. Granted, I don’t think it happens every day or anything, but it’s a big world and it’s been spinning for a long time. I’m sure someone did it long before I was born, maybe pitting the ancestral spirits of one tribe against those of another.

I’m not the first person to assault an enemy fortress from the Nevernever side, either. It happened several times to either side in the war with the Red Court. It’s a fairly standard tactical maneuver. It requires a certain amount of intestinal fortitude to pull off, as Evil Bob had demonstrated with his Normandy defenses.

But I am dead certain— ba-dump-bump-ching —that I’m the first guy to lead an army of spirits in an assault from the spirit-world side . . . and had them start off by screaming, “BOO!”

The spooks all stood in the same space I did, which felt weird as hell—but I hadn’t wanted to take a chance with the rickety Way collapsing and leaving some of the squad behind. When I shouted, they all did, too—and I got a whole hell of a lot more than I bargained for.

The sound that came out of all those spirit throats, including mine, seemed to feed upon itself, wavelengths building and building like seas before a rising storm. Our voices weren’t additive, bunched so closely like that, but multiplicative. When we shouted, the sound went out in a wave that was almost tangible. It hit the backs of the gathered lemurs and bumped them forward half a step. It slammed into the walls of the underground chamber and brought dust and mold cascading down.

And Mort’s eyes snapped open in sudden, startled shock.

“Get ’em!” I howled.

The dead protectors of Chicago’s resident ectomancer let out a bloodcurdling chorus of battle cries and blurred toward the foe.

You hear a lot of stories of honor and chivalry from soldiers. Most people assume that such tales apply primarily to men who lived centuries ago. But let me tell you something: People are people, no matter which century they live in. Soldiers tend to be very practical and they don’t want to die. I think you’d find military men in any century you cared to name who would be perfectly okay with the notion of shooting the enemy in the back if it meant they were more likely to go home in one piece. Sir Stuart’s guardians were, for the most part, soldiers.

Spectral guns blazed. Immaterial knives, hatchets, and arrows flew. Ectoplasm splashed in buckets.

Half the lemurs got torn to shreds of flickering newsreel imagery before I was finished shouting the command to attack, much less before they could recover from the stunning force of our combined voices.

The Corpsetaker shrieked something in a voice that scraped across my head like the tines of a rusty rake, and I twisted aside on instinct. One of the Lecters took the hit, and a gaping hole the size of a bowling ball appeared in the center of his chest.

“With me!” I shouted. I vanished and reappeared at the bottom of the staircase that led down to the chamber. A streamer of urine yellow lightning erupted from the Corpsetaker’s outstretched hand, but I’d had my shield bracelet at the ready, and I deflected the strike into a small knot of stunned enemy lemurs. When it hit them, there was a hideous, explosive cascade of fire and havoc, and they were torn to shreds as if they’d been made of cheesecloth.

Holy crap.

Either one of those spells would have done the same to me if I’d been a quarter second slower. Dead or alive, Kemmler’s disciples did not play for funsies.

The Lecter Specters appeared in a cloud around me, even as I sent a slug of pure force out of the end of my staff, forcing the Corpsetaker to employ her own magical counter, her wrists crossed in front of her body. The energy of my strike splashed off an unseen surface a few inches in front of her hands, and gobbets of pale green light splattered out from the impact.

“Dresden!” screamed Mort. He stared at me—or, more accurately, at the Lecters all around me—with an expression of something very like terror. “What have you done? What have you done ?”

“Come on!” I shouted, and vanished from the bottom of the stairs to the top, just as the Corpsetaker appeared halfway up the stairway and sent another torrent of ruinous energy down toward the position the Lecters and I had just vacated.

At the top of the stairs, the tunnel was like I remembered it—decorated in miniature shrines with very real sigils of power concealed within splatters of gibberish. Candles glowed at each position—ward flames that accompanied the activation of the mystic defenses.

“The shrines!” I shouted to the Lecters. “Manifest and destroy them!”

I brought my shield up again, an instant before Corpsetaker sent a slew of dark, gelatinous energy up the stairs. I caught the spell in time, but it instantly began wrenching at my shield as if it had been some kind of living being, chewing away at it, devouring the energy I was using to hold the shield firm.

Crap. I was not going to fare well in a magical duel with someone who had clearly been doing this kind of thing for a long, long time—not when I had the Lecters to protect. The Corpsetaker would tear them apart if she could to stop us from bringing the wards down. She—I always thought of her as a she, for some reason, even though she could grab any kind of body she wanted, male, female, or otherwise—was far more experienced than I was, with what was probably a much broader range of nasty memories upon which to draw.

On top of that, I was already winded, so to speak. The fight with Evil Bob had been a job of work. If I stood there trading punches, she had an excellent chance of wearing me down enough to kill me. If all I did was keep shielding the Lecters, she’d be free to throw her hardest punches, and I felt certain that anyone from Kemmler’s crew could hit like a truck.

Time to get creative.

I dropped the shield and simultaneously thrust my staff at the black jelly stuff, snarling, “Forzare!” Pure force tore the dark energy to shreds and continued on down the stairs to strike the Corpsetaker. My aim was bad. The strike only spun her in place and sent her sprawling back into open air.

I took a quick look back at the Lecters and immediately wished I hadn’t. The flames of the candles in the hall had burned down to pinpoints of cold blue light. Once again, the ghosts had assumed forms from nightmares—and they were going totally ballistic on the Big Hoods’ hideout. Something that looked like a blending of a gorilla and a Venus flytrap smashed apart a wooden crate supporting one shrine. A giant caterpillar, its segmented body made of severed human heads, their faces screaming, their tongues functioning as legs, rippled up a wall and began tearing out chunks of concrete where a ledge had been worn, destroying another shrine.

Right. It was working. I just had to keep the Corpsetaker busy until the wild rumpus got finished tearing apart the defenses.