I watched for another ten minutes, until I was pretty sure I had it, and could see the patterns aligning to give me my string of openings.
“Harry?” Michael asked, finally.
I held up my hand to silence him, bouncing my hand slightly to help me keep track, following the pattern. The way through was going to open about . . . now.
I leapt down to the ground and started running.
I was five strides onto the ice, and through the opening in the first row of grinders, before I realized that I may have miscounted, and that if I had, I would have no opening through the next-to-last row.
There was no help for it. The opening behind me was already gone. I’d just have to adjust on the fly.
I kept moving forward, dashing ahead through a pair of house-sized grinders before they could crash together with me in the middle. I whipped to the diagonal for a couple of rows, and the air got colder and colder as I went ahead. I could stand at the heart of a cavern of ice deep within a glacier, naked and wet from the shower and not shiver, but this cold was beginning to get to me. My breath became a large plume, visible in the air, and the floating chips of ice gathered on my eyelashes, making me fear that if I blinked, they might freeze together.
On I went, going over a single smaller block like a hurdler, and the cold got deeper and deeper, and while the Winter Knight had nothing to fear from slipping on simple ice, the fine, powdery sleet coating the cavern floor from all the grinding impacts did not make things easy, even for me.
One hundred and eighty yards or so, and things went relatively well. Then I found out that I had, indeed, miscounted.
I ran for the place where the opening in the row of spinning, randomly slamming grinders should have been, and realized about a step before I got there that it wasn’t coming.
So I pointed my staff at the more battered-looking of the blocks in front of me, focused my will and shouted, “Forzare!”
Unseen force smashed into the block, sending it spinning wildly away from me. The block into which it had been about to smash went spinning after it, as if the two were attracted by mutual gravity. I followed in their wake, as they smashed into a couple of blocks in the next row, and ice shattered into a cloud of mist and flying chips. Something hit my stomach and something else hit my hand. A section of block came tumbling wildly toward me, and I bounded up into a rolling dive that took me a good six feet off the cavern floor, shouting, “Parkour!”
Then I was through the grinders and into the shelter of the archway.
The cold there was a living thing, something that abruptly doubled me over, my body beginning to shudder and tingle. It took everything I had to lift an arm, secure a hold on the lever with my bare fingers, and haul it steadily down.
There was a loud grinding sound, like ancient, ice-encrusted gears beginning to whir together, and an enormous thumping sound that reminded me of explosives going off at a safe distance. The horrible cold faded almost immediately to something merely Antarctic, and I sank to one knee and peered back the way I had come.
The blocks had ceased their motion, simply dropping to the ground wherever they were moving or spinning or crashing.
I was through.
I stood up and waved my still-lit staff left and right in a broad motion. Then I paused to take stock of myself.
My shirt was bloody and so was my right hand. I lifted my shirt to examine my abdomen and found a small wound there. It took me a minute, but I was able to get my fingers around the end of a splinter of ice approximately the size and shape of a small nail, and I withdrew it in a little squirt of steaming red blood. Ugly, but it hadn’t gone all the way through the muscle and it couldn’t have pierced my abdominal wall. Not dangerous. I checked my right hand. A similar shard of ice had pierced me, but it was smaller and the heat of my blood had evidently melted it away. It wasn’t bad. I’d lost a couple of layers of skin to the frozen metal of the gate’s deactivation lever. That was it.
But, man, I was glad I didn’t have a mirror to look in right about now.
By the time the rest of the crew reached me, the air was merely wintry, and I was on my feet again, and I’d used a small fire spell to sear away the blood that was on the little shard of ice, along with the shard itself.
Michael approached me with his eyes wide and said, “Dear God in Heaven, Harry. That was amazing. I’ve never seen you move so quickly.”
“Yeah,” I said. “There aren’t many perks to being the Winter Knight, but that’s one of them.”
“Did you shout ‘Parkour’?” Michael asked.
“Well, sure,” I said. “That was kinda Parkour-like.”
Michael fought to keep a smile off his face. “Harry,” he said, “I’m almost certain one doesn’t shout ‘Parkour.’ I believe one is supposed to simply do Parkour.”
“Do I criticize your Latin battle cries? No, never once.”
“That is true,” Michael said soberly. He nodded toward my belly. “Are you all right?”
“Flesh wound,” I said. “I’ll get some Bactine on it when we get back. Or let Charity drag out her bottle of iodine.”
“She’d like that,” Michael said, nodding.
“Ugh,” Ascher said, stepping beneath the arch, her arms folded against her stomach. “I hate the cold.”
“Wear looser clothes,” Valmont suggested in a voice so dry that it defied anyone listening to find any snark in it. “Nice moves, Dresden.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I’m auditioning for the sequel to Frogger in a week.”
Nicodemus, Grey, the Genoskwa, and Deirdre entered the archway together a moment later. Which was not even a little suspicious.
Michael turned to me with a quizzical expression on his face, and had begun to form a question when the Genoskwa lunged, powering toward me with ferocious speed, and simply seized me by the upper body, his thumbs pressing against my chest, his hands wrapping around my arms and pinning them at my side.
Michael swore and went for his sword, but Grey suddenly had Valmont by the hair, her head tilted back. Fingers that ended in an eagle’s talons pierced her throat delicately, drawing beads of blood, and he said, “Easy there, sir Knight. We don’t want any needless bloodshed.”
The Genoskwa leaned down to glower at me and rumbled, “Please. Struggle. I would love some needless bloodshed.”
“Nicodemus,” Ascher said, her voice sharp. “What is the meaning of this?”
Nicodemus walked up to the arch arm in arm with Deirdre. “Because we have come to the Gate of Blood, children,” he said. He drew the Bedouin dagger from his belt and its damascene blade glittered in the light of my staff and amulet. “The time has come for one of you to die.”
Thirty-nine
Michael’s sword swept out of its sheath, and the silver-white fire of Amoracchius filled the archway. He said nothing. He didn’t need to. He took the Sword in a two-handed grip and settled into a relaxed ready position.
Deirdre and Nicodemus immediately split apart, so that they forced Michael to divide his attention between them. She dropped into a fighting crouch, while Nicodemus narrowed his eyes and became very still. Grey regarded Michael impassively, while in his grasp, Anna Valmont turned completely pale and held very still. I felt the Genoskwa’s summer-sausage fingers tighten painfully.
“Now, now, sir Knight,” Nicodemus said, his voice almost a growl. “There’s no need for this to devolve into general mayhem, is there?”
“I will not allow you to harm them,” Michael said.
“Lower the Sword,” Nicodemus said. “Or I will order Grey to kill Valmont.”
“If you do that,” Michael said calmly, “Dresden and I will fight to the death.”
I felt my eyes get a little bit wider, and my voice might not have been as deep and steady as it usually was, but I managed to say, “Right. We’ll fight you. Not each other. In c
ase that wasn’t clear.”
“How assured is your victory?” Michael asked Nicodemus. “How many times has Amoracchius foiled your plans over the centuries?”
“You’ve never beaten me, Knight,” Nicodemus said.
“Almighty God as my witness, and as He gives me grace,” Michael said, “if you harm that woman, I will strike you down.”
“Right,” I said. “Me too.”
Nicodemus gave me an impatient glance and turned his attention back to Michael. “You should have stayed in your little house, quietly retired,” he said. “You didn’t matter there. I didn’t care about you any longer. If you begin a fight here, you will never see your family again.”
Michael smiled faintly. “That is where you are wrong. With God’s blessing, it will take a good many years. But I will see them again.”