binds outsiders

I covered the rest of the ground toward the uphill end of Ebenezar’s circle. I couldn’t have dropped the gas into the circle at its lower end. Gravity wouldn’t have been our friend. But I got to the uphill side of the circle and poured out the gasoline as quickly as I could without sloshing it out of the little trench in the concrete.
One of the cornerhounds let out an ululating cry, the sound distressed, and half the creatures atop Ebenezar peeled off him and flung themselves at me.
The cornerhounds probably should have thought their way through taking pressure off a man of my grandfather’s skills. A shouted word sent a burst of flame roaring out from the surface of his body in an expanding Ebenezar-shaped wave of blue-white fire, and the cornerhounds around him recoiled. The old man slammed his right palm on the earth, growling a low phrase, and gravity suddenly increased around the hounds coming toward me, dragging them to earth as they fought in vain against the weight of their own bodies.
The hounds on Ebenezar recovered from the blast of flame and threw themselves onto him again. Now he couldn’t fight back—not and hold the hounds coming toward me, anyway.
The Outsiders went at him, and there was another light show as the old man’s personal defenses resisted and spat sparks of defiance back at them. In that moment, only the power of my grandfather’s mind and will stood between him and death.
Meanwhile, the four who’d originally been on me came darting spastically back into the fray, circling out around the field of increased gravity that held their companions.
I looked up to see cornerhounds blurring toward my face, which was exactly where I did not want them—but I flung my face into the circle, because that was where I absolutely did want them, spinning as I went so that I could look back and see the cornerhounds leaping toward me in a group so tight that each of the four hounds was touching the others, talons and tentacles outstretched, in one of those moments that, at the time, seemed to last forever.
And as I went, as their tails cleared the line of the circle, I focused my will on the trough in the floor, snapped my fingers, and shouted, “Flickum bicus!”
My will carried fire to the gasoline in the circle, a single small static spark of eye-searing brightness, and flame leapt up with a low sound like something huge taking a deep breath, the fire racing swiftly around the circle’s exterior and burning with a clear, cold blue light.
Working magic inside of circles is intense. Doing it in a ring of fire, where the flames close the circle is … like being inside a room where the walls and floors and ceilings are all sheets of mirror, with infinities of reflection spinning in every direction. Anything you do with magic inside a ring of fire has a tendency to build power very, very rapidly, and to send fragments of energy rebounding around inside of it, recombining in potent and unpredictable ways—so potent and unpredictable, in fact, that while the technique was not black magic per se, it was nonetheless on the list of prescribed spells and actions that the Wardens used to assess the warlock potential of any given wizard. It was that dangerous.
Think of a ring of fire as, oh, an experimental fusion reactor. One way or another, something big is going to happen. If this banishing got out of hand, something closely resembling a small nuke could go off in the middle of the Gold Coast.
The good news was that this was the kind of magic I was good at—moving massive amounts of energy in a straight line. Even better, the fact that the Outsiders were in the circle with me meant that I didn’t need any of their bits to create a channel for the spell.
Of course, it also meant they could rip my face off while I tried.
God, I love working under pressure.
I hit the ground and slid a ways as the first of the hounds closed on me. I kicked its squishy nest of tentacles as hard as I could with one booted heel along the way. That pushed me back a bit from the thing and seemed to disorient it long enough for me to shout, “Hounds of the corners, I banish thee!”
I infused my voice with my will, and the normally invisible screen of the circle suddenly came to green-gold life, myriad ribbons of tiny flame stretching up to the ceiling of the garage, but rather than remain a steady column, the ring of fire pulsed and swelled and subsided again. Flickers and sparks began to spit from the stone where Ebenezar’s will held gravity against four of the hounds. More sparks began whirling off his defensive spells, larger and brighter, moving more like fireflies, with an eerie emulation of biological purpose.
When I added my voice to that, the flames brightened to an almost unbearable intensity—and a basso wail went up from thirteen throats at once, and every single hound turned to fling itself at me.
Once the old man was loose of them, he promptly raised his left hand and smacked his palm down on the concrete, and concrete groaned as gravity increased again, dragging at the hounds, who despite their resistance were crushed inexorably to the floor.
And the old man’s face had gone purple with the effort of the spell, his expression twisted into an agonized rictus.
My God, he could be killing himself right in front of my eyes.
He couldn’t keep up an effort like this for long.
“Cornerhounds, servants of the Outer Night, this world is not meant for you!” I shouted at them. “I banish thee!”
Again came a chorus of basso moans, but the helpless hounds couldn’t break the grasp of Ebenezar McCoy’s will.
Except for one—the one who happened to be nearest me.
The old man, while holding his defenses and an earth magic working that would take me at least a minute to even assemble, had done a second earth spell with such precision that he had excluded me from the excessive gravity while catching all the cornerhounds in his mind’s net.
Well. Twelve out of thirteen. The last one began to drag itself out of the gravity well and toward me, pushing itself upright the moment its front talons cleared the increased gravity, its legs bunching for a leap that would end at my throat. It got clear and leapt.
The ring of fire began to make a howling sound, the light flickering and strobing through several spectrums of color that fire had no business emitting. The energy in the air became so thick that it made my eyes itch, and I hadn’t even added my own gathered will to it yet. If I defended myself from the hound, abandoned the banishing, there would be no way to predict what would happen with all this gathered energy.
So I stood my ground as the hound tore free of the heavy gravity, and shouted, “Hounds of Tindalos, return to the Void that awaits thee! I banish thee!” I raised my staff in both hands and began to release my will.
And I felt them.
Inside my head.
Felt the Outside.
I’m not going to try to explain to you what it was like to experience that. If it hasn’t happened to you, there’s no common point of reference.
It hurt. That much I can tell you. The Winter mantle didn’t do a damned thing against that kind of pain. Pain is as good a way to think of it as any. Touching their thoughts to yours is like licking frozen iron and giving yourself an ice-cream headache from it at the same time.
Their thoughts, or whatever madness it was that passed for them, began to devour mine. I felt like my mind was being chewed apart by a swarm of ants. And then for just an instant, the alien thought patterns made sense, and I saw an image from their point of view—a being made of coherent light, a column of glowing energy centers, and pure dread, standing like an obelisk before the cornerhounds, a bolt of terrible lightning gathered around its upraised fists, head, and shoulders, like a miniature storm front.
I saw what they saw when they looked at me.
And I felt their fear.
The Winter mantle howled with sudden hunger, Winter’s power flooded into me, and frost gathered on every surface in the parking garage with a crackling like a swimming pool full of Pop Rocks. Certainty flooded over me, the sense of the fusion of purpose, will, desire, and belief—certainty that moments like this were precisely why I existed in the first place.
“BEGONE!” I roared, and slammed my staff down, unleashing my will as I did.
And within the ring of fire, reality became a storm of ghostly energy, of random light and sound, of darting bolts of light and color. I felt the cornerhounds raise their will against mine—and theirs crumbled like day-old corn bread. I tore them from their ectoplasmic bodies and sent their unseen, immaterial asses screaming back to the Void outside of all Creation.
The thirteenth hound’s talons were maybe eight inches from the tip of my nose when energy howled and swirled in the circle as the banishing spell caught up the cornerhounds. There was a sudden indrawn-breath sound that moaned through the night all around us, a great shuddering in the air—and then they simply vanished.
So instead of being dismembered by a thousand-pound monster, a thousand pounds of gross, slimy ectoplasm smashed into my chest, promptly knocking me on my ass and sending me sliding fifteen feet across the floor.
Twelve more cornerhounds’ worth of ectoplasm washed out over the now-extinguished ring of fire and began to ooze over the entire parking garage.


Peace Talks Chapter 12, Page 106-110