understood. There are Outsiders who want to eat your face off, and then there are the rest of them, who don’t go in for that kind of namby-pamby cuddly stuff.
Demons they might be. But demons summoned by mortals, the only way for them to get into our reality. They always have a mortal purpose, if not always a rational one.
“Trying to interfere with it in some way,” I suggested. “If a senior member of the Council was torn apart by monsters, it would tend to tilt blame toward the Fomor.”
“Definitely a poor way to begin negotiations,” Ebenezar agreed. “And I don’t think that we—”
He suddenly froze and stared.
I followed his gaze.
In a corner of the alley, where one of the building’s cornices formed a shadowy alcove, blue lines of light had appeared at the intersection of the ground and the two walls.
“Oh, Hell’s bells,” I breathed. “Is that what I think it is?”
“Belike,” growled the old man, his eyes shifting around. “How well do you know this block?”
“It’s Chicago,” I said.
“Good. We need a place without people or much that can catch fire.”
I eyed him and said, “It’s Chicago.”
The light in the corner shifted weirdly, warped, spun into curlicues and spirals that should have existed only in Escher drawings. The stone of the building twisted and stretched, and then rock rippled and bubbled like pancake batter, and something started hauling itself out of the surface of the stone at the intersection of the three lines of light. My chest suddenly vibrated as if I’d been standing in a pool in front of an outflow pipe, and a surge of nausea nearly knocked me down.
The thing that slithered into our world was the size of a horse, but lower, longer, and leaner. It was canine in shape, generally—a quadruped, the legs more or less right, and everything else subtly wrong. A row of short, powerful-looking tentacles ran along its flanks. A longer, thicker tentacle lashed like a whip where its tail should have been. The feet were spread out, wide, for grasping, kind of like an eagle’s talons, and where its head should have been was nothing but a thick nest of more of the tendrils. It had something like scales made of mucus, rather than fur, and flesh squelched on flesh.
“Cornerhound,” Ebenezar said, his voice purely disgusted. “Damned things.”
The old man looked weary and obdurate, like a stone that had been resisting the sea since the last ice age. His expression was annoyed.
But then I noticed one of the more terrifying sights I’d seen in my life.
Ebenezar McCoy’s hands were unsteady.
The end of his staff quivered as they trembled.
My mentor, my teacher, the most feared wizard on the planet, was frightened.
He stepped between the hound and me and lifted his left hand as the thing stood there for a second, dripping slime onto the ground beneath it and seething. Dozens of little mouths lined with serrated teeth opened along its flanks, gasping at the thick summer air as though it was something that the creature found only partially breathable.
Then the cornerhound crouched, its body turning toward us with serpentine fluidity. The cluster of tentacles around its head began to quiver and undulate in weird unison, the motion becoming more and more energetic, and a weird moaning sound erupted from the creature, descending swiftly down the scale of audible sound until the tentacles all undulated together in a single quivering movement, and suddenly flew forward at the same instant, with a sound so deep I could feel it more than hear it.
The old man lifted his hand with a single sharp word, and a wall of pure arcane power blazed into light between us, its surface covered in sigils and formulae and runes I had never seen before, a wall of such density and complexity that it made me feel young and clumsy for the first time in years.
Something hit the wall with a visible impact, sending out ripples of energetic transfer through its surface, making it suddenly opaque with spreading concentric circles of light, and the ground quivered so sharply that it buzzed and tickled at the soles of my feet clear through my shoes.
Ebenezar shouted, “Concentrated fire works best!”
And then there was a flash of light and a huge sound and an invisible tsunami grabbed me and threw me off my feet.
As I went down, I saw the old man’s shield wall shatter, as a thousand pounds of Outsider came crashing through it. Broken shards of light streaked in