And I suddenly knew how the late Summer Lady, Aurora, had felt at the end.
“Get up, Harry,” I panted, fighting through the disorientation, the polar shifts in pain. “Get up before they nail you.”
Nail you. Get it?
But I always joke when I’m afraid, and I was terrified. Whatever these things were, if they got more than one of those nails into me, I doubted I would be able to hold my thoughts together long enough to get them out again. I had a gruesome vision of myself stretched in lifeless, agonized rigor on the sidewalk, nails sticking out of every square inch of my skin.
I tried to scramble, to evade, but compared to the darting motes of light, I was moving in slow-motion replay. Half a dozen more of the glimmering things came arrowing toward me out of the night, zooming at me in a flying V formation, and I knew things were about to get really bad.
Then someone blew on a coach’s whistle, a sound I heard even through my stunned ears, and a tiny, distant voice piped, “To the Za Lord!”
Half a dozen little cool blue spheres of light flashed toward my attackers, intercepting them only a couple of feet from my body. Six explosions of sparks and glowing motes lit the night, various colors swirling and spinning, as the tiny soldiers of the Za Lord’s Guard closed to battle with my attackers.
Toot soared in from directly overhead, his heels landing hard on my stomach. For somebody the size of a chicken, he was strong, and my breath huffed out as I was knocked back to the ground. He planted his feet wide, a snarl on his tiny face, his shield hefted up to a defensive position, his table-knife sword in hand. “Stay down, my lord! Wait until we clear a path for escape!”
A path? I took a second to look around. I saw one of Toot’s “kernels” go by, flying sideways, wielding a spear made of a straight pin and a pencil against another of the Little Folk, a humanish figure dressed in what looked like actual black armor made of some kind of shaped plastic or maybe carapace, and carrying another of the too-familiar nails. The enemy faerie was wounded, and glowing motes of scarlet and sullen orange light dribbled from a straight pin–inflicted wound on his tiny leg.
Sullen and chill spheres of light darted everywhere, dozens of them, all spinning and diving and looping at once. There was no way to track all of that motion. Even if I’d been completely clearheaded, I would have done well to follow a tenth of it.
Five or six more enemy fae, larger and brighter than the others, dived down at me bearing a nail sword in each hand. They let out shrill, eerie little cries as they came at me—and at Toot-toot.
Okay, I’ve thought a lot of things about Toot-toot over the years. I’ve compared him to a lot of really humorous stuff, and occasionally to people I didn’t admire too much. I’ve made jokes at his expense, though never when I thought it would hurt him. But if you’d asked me for a perfect parallel for the little guy a year ago, I would never, ever, ever have said, “King Leonidas.”
Toot let out a high-pitched roar and leapt into the air. He smashed his shield into the black-armored fae in the center of the enemy formation, spinning as he did, to send the luckless faerie careening into the companion on his left. Toot’s sword lashed out, and a single dragonfly wing went fluttering free of the body it had been attached to. The little fae went spinning out of the air to crash into a pile of fallen bricks and rubble.
Two got through.
Agony.
The next thing I knew, Toot was pulling a nail from the muscle over my abdomen, and fresh hits there and in my left pectoral muscle had added their toll of pain to my evening. Toot, gripping the nail carefully by its duct-tape handle, turned and flung it at a pair of dueling fae, striking the orange-lit enemy with the broad side of the steel nail. There was a flash of white light, and the hit fae let out a shriek that started at the edge of human hearing and went up into dog frequencies, and darted away, the guard in hot pursuit.
“They’re breaking!” Toot bellowed. Well. As much as someone who can fit in a bread box can bellow. “After them, kernels!”
Sullen lights slithered away in panic, while bright balls of blue buzzed after them.
“Permission to pursue those jerks, my lord?” Toot shouted.
I finally had a couple of seconds to get my head together. I shook it violently. It didn’t help, but the simple act of putting together recognition of a problem, consideration of a solution, and taking action to fix it had gotten my mental house in some kind of order.
“It’s a feint,” I said, looking around. “They’re luring the guard away.”
There. High up. Way the hell high up, maybe twenty stories. A blob of ember-colored light suddenly plunged off of a balcony and began to fall toward us. As it came closer, the blob broke apart into dozens of angry little spheres. They began to bob and interweave, picking up more and more speed, the patterns dizzying, confusing. Streaking lights peeled off from the main cloud in every direction.
Toot, once more perched on my stomach, stared up at them, his mouth open. His left arm sagged, his shield dropping down to his side. “Uh-oh.” He gulped. “Um. I’m not sure I can get them all, my lord.”
I sat up, forcing him off my stomach, and gained my feet. “You did good, Toot,” I growled. “Okay, small fry. Wizard time.”
A couple of years back, me and my apprentice, Molly, had been studying air magic as part of her basic grounding in the elemental forces. She hadn’t ever picked up the knack for using blasts of wind as weapons, but she had managed to develop a spell that did a passable imitation of a blow-dryer.
I lifted my right hand, summoned my will, and readied the blow-dryer spell.
Only I turned it to eleven.
“Ventas reductas!” I thundered, unleashing my will, and an arctic gale came howling and shrieking from my outstretched hand. It condensed the damp October air into mist, too, bellowing out from my hand in a cone the size of an apartment building. Frost formed on every surface in the immediate area. It struck the cloud of diving Little Folk and sent them tumbling in every direction. Little orange lights went spinning and wobbling, their complex formation shattered.
I saw them begin to gather to one side, trying to re-form, but I poured on the wind and altered the direction of the blast, scattering them again. Molly’s spell was more efficient than anything I’d come up with when I had her level of experience, but there’s no free lunch. That much wind takes a lot of energy to whip up, and I wasn’t going to be able to hold it forever.
Abruptly, Toot flashed away from me, diving through the air, his wings a blur. He vanished behind the nose of a parked car on the other side of the street, brandishing his sword.
A brawl spilled out from the tail end of the car an instant later. One of the enemy Little Folk went tumbling in a windmill of arms and legs and fetched up against the corpse of the traffic signal. Two went darting away in obvious panic, their flight erratic and swift, dropping their nail swords as they fled.
And then there was a flash of sparks as steel struck steel, and Toot came out from behind the truck, frantically defending himself from another of the Little Folk almost as tall as he was. The foe was dressed in black armor covered in spikes made from the tips of freaking fishhooks, even the helmet, and he fought with what seemed to be an actual sword designed to size, a wavy-bladed thing that I think was called a flamberge.
As I watched, the enemy champion’s blade sheared half an inch of aluminum from the top of Toot’s shield, and he followed up with a series of heavy two-handed blows meant to divide Toot in half.
Toot bobbed and weaved like a reed, but the assault was ferocious, the foe as fast as he was. He got the flat of the shield in front of another blow, stopping it, but on the next strike the flamberge’s wavy blade caught on the edge of the shield and sliced through it again, leaving it little more than a rectangle of aluminum strapped to Toot’s arm. Toot took to the air, but his opponent matched him, and they darted and spun around a light pole, the enemy’s sword meeting Toot’s improvised blade in flashes of silver sparks.