Battle Ground (The Dresden Files #17) - Jim Butcher Page 0,27
sharpened slightly. “Or you.”
I glowered at him.
“Just making it clear where we stand,” he said, in the most annoying way possible. “Honestly, I have no feelings for you personally either way. Excuse me.”
And he lifted his gun and sent a bullet about six inches past my left ear.
By the time I flinched, there was a splattering sound and one of the squid things flopped and contorted on the floor, coming to a halt and dying a leaking, broken little monstrosity, ichor making the stones of the castle spark and sizzle.
I rubbed furiously at my ear, which itched tremendously for no good reason at all, and scowled at the Redcap.
He lifted his pistol, smiled, and said, “As my lady commands. Proceed, wizard.”
I grimaced at him. Then I trudged over to the battlements where the pizza had been set up and crouched down in the corner, where I’d have cover from assassin squid from a couple of directions at least. The Redcap followed, coming to a halt about ten feet away from me and simply standing there, gun in hand, waiting.
I got down to business. A stick of chalk from my pocket and the pizza were all I really needed. Summonings were pretty straightforward affairs, magically speaking. It was the consequences of summonings that got complicated.
For example, I was about to attempt a summoning using a being’s true name, right here in front of half of the world. Dammit. I’d have to go nonverbal on this one. It was a low-powered-enough spell that, with any luck, wouldn’t hurt too much to perform silently.
Words and magic go hand in hand. Hell, half the words to describe magic practitioners go back to root sources that basically mean speaker. There’s a reason for that. Magic happens mainly in your head, fueled by emotion and shaped by concentration, reason, and raw will. There’s an awful lot of juice going through your brain at any given moment while performing real magic, enough to actually do damage to it.
Part of what keeps your brain insulated from damage is “wrapping” the concept of a given spell up in verbalized phonemes—and it’s got to be done in a language that you’re not really familiar with, if it’s going to do you any good. It provides a kind of insulation for your mind and thoughts. You can do magic without using words all you like—but it has consequences that begin with twitches and disorientation and eventually result in violent seizures and death. No wizard with an ounce of sense makes a practice of doing his magic silently.
But that doesn’t mean we can’t cheat now and then.
* * *
* * *
The circle trap with the pizza bait was purely pro forma at this point. I’d been working with this particular being too long and too closely to really require it. So, once things were set up, I settled down on my knees, closed my eyes, and created a mental image of myself in my head, positioned just as I was in life and softly chanting a Name. I poured a whisper of energy into it and held the image, silently kneeling and waiting.
It took less than a long moment. There was a burring sound in the air, and I saw the Redcap tense and raise his gun. I held up my palm toward him sharply and gave my head a single firm shake. He stared hard at me for a second before lowering the gun, and then my only actual vassal arrived.
Major General Toot-Toot Minimus resembled a glowing violet comet more than anything else as he approached in a low-pitched buzz of dragonfly wings. It wasn’t until he got closer that the nimbus around him resolved into the shape of an athletic young man crowned with a shock of dandelion-silk hair in shades of lavender and violet. He might have cut a very impressive figure if he’d been more than about thirty inches tall.
Toot . . . was not dressed properly. I’d grown used to his little outfits made of castoff doll clothing and repurposed human refuse, which had served him well for weapons and armor over the years. But now Toot-Toot had been upgraded.
He wore a full suit of gothic plate armor, made of some weird-looking alloy colored a deep, almost black shade of purple. It came complete with a small black cape emblazoned with the corporate logo of Pizza ’Spress, a local delivery chain, in gold embroidery, surrounded by letters in the logo, FOR THE ZA LORD.