by Butcher, Jim
“There are others yet who will pay for what they have done,” Mab snarled in her own voice. It sounded hideous—not unmelodious, because it was as rich and full and musical as it ever had been. But it was filled with such rage, such fury, such pain and such hate that every vowel clawed at my skin, and every consonant felt like someone taking a staple gun to my ears.
“I am Sidhe,” she hissed. “I am the Queen of Air and Darkness. I am Mab.” Her chin lifted, her eyes wide and white around the rippling colors of her irises—utterly insane. “And I repay my debts, mortal. All of them.”
There was an enormous crack, a sound like thick ice shattering on the surface of a lake, and Mab and her translator were gone.
I knelt there, shaking in the wake of hearing her voice. I realized a minute later that I had a nosebleed. A minute after that, I realized that there was a trickle of blood coming out of my ears, too. My eyes ached with strain, as if I’d been outdoors in bright sunlight for too many hours.
It took me still another minute to get my legs to start moving again. After that I staggered to the nearest bathroom and cleaned up. I spent a little while poking at my memory and trying to see if there were any holes in it that hadn’t been there before. Then I spent a while more wondering if I’d be able to tell if she had taken something else.
“Jesus Christ,” I breathed, shivering.
Because though I hadn’t been in on the original attack on Mab’s tower, and when I did attack it I had been unwittingly serving Mab’s interests, the fact remained that I had indeed offered her the same insult as Thorned Namshiel. The lacerating fury that turned her voice into razor blades could very well be directed at me in the near future.
I hurried out of the chapel and went down to the cafeteria.
Being bullied into eating dinner sounded a lot more pleasant than it had a few minutes ago.
The doctor came into the waiting room at ten seventeen that night.
Charity came to her feet. She’d spent much of the day with her head bowed, praying quietly. She was beyond tears, at least for the moment, and she put a sheltering arm around her daughter, pulling Molly in close to her side.
“He’s in recovery,” the doctor said. “The procedures went…” The doctor sighed. He looked at least as tired as either of the Carpenter women. “As well as could be expected. Better, really. I hesitate to make any claims at this point, but he seems to be stable, and assuming there are no complications in the next hour or two, I think he’ll pull through.”
Charity bit her lip hard. Molly threw her arms around her mother.
“Thank you, Doctor,” Charity whispered.
The doctor smiled wearily. “You should realize that…the injuries were quite extensive. It’s unlikely that he’ll be able to fully recover from them. Brain damage is a possibility—we won’t know until he wakes up. Even if that isn’t an issue, the other trauma was severe. He may need assistance, possibly for the rest of his life.”
Charity nodded calmly. “He’ll have it.”
“That’s right,” Molly said.
“When can I see him?” Charity asked.
“We’ll bring him up in an hour or two,” the doctor said.
I cleared my throat. “Excuse me, Doc. Is he going to be on a respirator?”
“For the time being,” the doctor said. “Yes.”
I nodded. “Thank you.”
The doctor nodded to us, and Charity thanked him again. He left.
“Okay, grasshopper,” I said. “Time for us to clear out.”
“But they’re going to bring hi— Oh,” Molly said, crestfallen. “The respirator.”
“Better not to take any chances, huh?” I asked her.
“It’s all right, baby,” Charity said quietly. “I’ll call home as soon as he wakes up.”
They hugged tightly. Molly and I started walking out.
“Oh,” Molly said, her voice very tired. “I did that homework.”
I felt pretty tired, too. “Yeah?”
She nodded and smiled wearily up at me. “Charlemagne.”
I called Thomas, and he gave me and Molly a ride to Murphy’s place.
The night was clear. The cloud cover had blown off, and the moon and the stars got together with the snow to turn Chicago into a winter wonderland months ahead of schedule. The snow had stopped falling, though. I suppose that meant Mab had turned her attention elsewhere. Thomas dropped me off a short distance away, and then left to drive the grasshopper back to her home. I covered the last hundred yards or so on foot.
Murphy lives in a teeny little house that belonged to her grandmother. It was just a single story, with two bedrooms, a living room, and a little kitchen. It was meant for one person to live in, or possibly a couple with a single child. It was certainly overloaded by the mob of Wardens who had descended on the place. Luccio’s reinforcements had arrived.
There were four Wardens in the little living room, all of them grizzled veterans, two young members in the kitchen, and I was sure that there were at least two more outside, standing watch behind veils. I was challenged for a password in an amused tone by one of the young Wardens when I came in the kitchen door. I told him to do something impolite, please, and asked him where Luccio might be.
“That’s anatomically unlikely,” the young man replied in a British accent. He poured a second cup of steaming tea and said, “Drink up. I’ll let her know you’re here.”
“Thanks.”
I was sipping tea and sitting at Murphy’s table when Luccio came in a few minutes later. “Give us the room, please, Chandler, Kostikos.”
The younger men cleared out to the living room—a polite illusion, really. The house was too small to provide much in the way of privacy.
Luccio poured herself a cup of tea and sat down across from me.
I felt my shoulders tense up a little. I forced myself to remain quiet, and sipped more tea.
“I’m concerned,” Luccio said quietly, “about the Archive.”
“Her name is Ivy,” I said.
She frowned. “That’s…part of my concern, Harry. Your personal closeness with her. It’s dangerous.”
I lifted my eyebrows. “Dangerous? I’m in danger because I’m treating her like a real person?”
Luccio grimaced as if tasting something bitter. “Frankly? Yes.”
I thought about being diplomatic and polite. Honest, I really did. But while I was thinking about it, I accidentally bumped the button that puts my mouth on autopilot, because it said, “That’s a load of crap, Captain, and you know it.”
Her expression went still as the whole of her attention focused on me. “Is it?”
“Yes. She’s a kid. She’s alone. She’s not some computer database, and it’s inhuman to treat her like one.”
“Yes,” Luccio said bluntly. “It is. And it’s also the safest way to deal with her.”
“Safest for who?” I demanded.
Luccio took a sip of tea. “For everyone.”
I frowned down at my cup. “Tell me.”
She nodded. “The Archive…has been around for a long time. Always passed down in a family line, mother to daughter. Usually the Archive is inherited by a woman when she’s in her early to mid-thirties, when her mother dies, and after she’s given birth to her own daughter. Accidents are rare. Part of the Archive’s nature is a drive to protect itself, a need to avoid exposing the person hosting it to risk. And given the extensive knowledge available to it, the Archive is very good at avoiding risky situations in the first place. And, should they arise, the power available to the Archive generally ensures its survival. It is extremely rare for the host of an Archive to die young.”
I grunted. “Go on.”
“When the Archive is passed…Harry, try to imagine living your life, with all of its triumphs and tragedies—and suddenly you find yourself with a second set of memories, every bit as real to you as your own. A second set of heartaches, loves, triumphs, losses. All of them just as real—and then a third. An
d a fourth. And a fifth. And more and more and more. The perfect memory, the absolute recall of every Archive that came before you. Five thousand years of them.”
I blinked at that. “Hell’s bells. That would…”
“Drive one insane,” Luccio said. “Yes. And it generally does. There is a reason that the historical record for many soothsayers and oracles presents them as being madwomen. The Pythia, and many, many others, were simply the Archive, using her vast knowledge of the past to build models to predict the most probable future. She was a madwoman—but she was also the Archive.
“As a defense, the Archives began to distance themselves from other human beings, emotionally. They reasoned that if they could stop adding the weight of continuing lifetimes of experience and grief to the already immense burden of carrying so much knowledge, it might better enable them to function. And it did. The Archive keeps its host emotionally remote for a reason—because otherwise the passions and prejudices and hatreds and jealousies of thousands of lifetimes have the potential to distill themselves into a single being.
“Normally, an Archive would have her own lifetime of experience to insulate her against all these other emotions and memories, a baseline to contrast against them.”
I suddenly got it. “But Ivy doesn’t.”
“Ivy doesn’t,” Luccio agreed. “Her grandmother was killed in a freak accident, an automobile crash, I believe. Her mother was a seventeen-year-old girl who was in love, and pregnant. She hated her mother for dying and cursing her to carry the Archive when she wanted to have her own life—and she hated the child for having a lifetime of freedom ahead of her. Ivy’s mother killed herself rather than carry the Archive.”
I started feeling a little sick. “And Ivy knows it.”
“She does. Knows it, feels it. She was born knowing exactly what her mother thought and felt about her.”
“How could you know this about her…” I frowned, thinking. Then said, “Kincaid. The girl was in love with Kincaid.”
“No,” Luccio said. “But Kincaid was working for Ivy’s grandmother at the time, and the girl confided in him.”
“Man, that’s screwed up,” I said.
“Ivy has remained distant her whole life,” Luccio said. “If she begins to involve her own emotions in her duties as the Archive, or in her life generally, she runs the serious risk of being overwhelmed with emotions and passions which she simply is not—and cannot be—psychologically equipped to handle.”
“You’re afraid that she could go out of control.”
“The Archive was created to be a neutral force. A repository of knowledge. But what if Ivy’s unique circumstance allowed her to ignore those limitations? Imagine the results of the anger and bitterness and desire for revenge of all those lifetimes, combined with the power of the Archive and the restraint of a twelve-year-old child.”
“I’d rather not,” I said quietly.
“Nor would I,” Luccio said. “That could be a true nightmare. All that knowledge, without conscience to direct it. The necromancer Kemmler had such a spirit in his service, a sort of miniature version of the Archive. Nowhere near as powerful, but it had been studying and learning beside wizards for generations, and the things it was capable of were appalling.” She shook her head.
I took a sip of tea, because otherwise the gulp would have been suspicious. She was talking about Bob. And she was right about what Bob was capable of doing. When I’d unlocked the personality he’d taken on under some of his former owners, he’d nearly killed me.
“The Wardens destroyed it, of course,” she said.
No, they hadn’t. Justin DuMorne, former Warden, hadn’t destroyed the skull. He’d smuggled it from Kemmler’s lab and kept it in his own—until I’d burned him to death, and taken it from him in turn.
“It was just too much power under too little restraint. And it’s entirely possible that the Archive could become a similar threat on a far larger scale. I know you care about the child, Harry. But you had to be warned. You might not be doing her any favors by acting like her friend.”
“Who’s acting?” I said. “Where is she?”
“We’ve been keeping her asleep,” Luccio said, “until you or Kincaid got here.”
“I get it,” I said. “You don’t think I should get close to her. Unless you’re worried about what’s going to happen when you wake her up and she’s really scared and confused.”
Luccio’s cheeks flushed and she looked away. “I don’t have all the answers, Dresden. I just have concerns.”
I sighed.
“Whatever,” I said. “Let me see her.”
Luccio led me into Murph’s guest bedroom. Ivy looked very tiny in the double bed. I sat down beside her, and Luccio leaned over to gently rest her hand on Ivy’s head. She murmured something and drew her hand away.
Ivy let out a small whimper and then blinked her eyes open, suddenly hyperventilating. She looked around wildly, her eyes wide, and let out a small cry.
“Easy, easy,” I said gently. “Ivy, it’s all right. You’re safe.”
She sobbed and flung herself tight against me.
I hugged her. I just rocked her gently and hugged her while she cried and cried.
Luccio watched me, her eyes compassionate and sad.
After a long while Ivy whispered, “I got your letter. Thank you.”
I squeezed a little.
“They did things to me,” she said.
“I know,” I said quietly. “Been there. But I was all right after a while. You’re going to be all right. It’s over.”
She hugged me some more, and cried herself back to sleep.
I looked up at Luccio and said, “You still want me to push her away? You want her baseline to be what she shared with those animals?”
Luccio frowned. “The Senior Council—”
“Couldn’t find its heart if it had a copy of Grey’s Anatomy, X-ray vision, and a stethoscope,” I said. “No. They can lay down the law about magic. But they aren’t telling me who I’m allowed to befriend.”
She looked at me for a long moment, and then a slow smile curled up one side of her mouth. “Morgan told them you’d say that. So did McCoy and Listens-to-Wind. The Merlin wouldn’t hear it.”
“The Merlin doesn’t like to hear anything that doesn’t fit into his view of the world,” I said. “Japanese.”
“Excuse me?”
“Japanese. There’s a Japanese steakhouse I go to sometimes to celebrate. Surviving this mess qualifies. Come with me, dinner tomorrow. The teriyaki is to die for.”
She smiled more broadly and inclined her head once.
The door opened, and Murphy and Kincaid arrived. Kincaid was moving under his own power, though very gingerly, and with the aid of a walking stick. I got out of the way, and he came over to settle down next to Ivy. She woke up enough to murmur something about cookies and a Happy Meal. He settled down on the bed beside her, and she pressed up against his arm before settling down to rest again. Kincaid, evidently exhausted himself, drew a gun, took the safety off, placed it on his chest, and went to sleep too.
“It’s cute,” I whispered to Murphy. “He has a teddy Glock.”
She was looking at Kincaid and Ivy with a decidedly odd expression. She shook her head a little, blinked up at me, and said, “Hmm. Oh, hah, very funny. I had your car dug out of the snow, by the way.”
I blinked at her. “Thank you.”
“Got your keys?”
“Yeah.”
“Give you a ride to it,” she said.
“Groovy.”
We took off.
Once we were in the car and moving, Murphy said, “I like Luccio.”
“Yeah?”
“But she’s all wrong for you.”
“Uh-huh,” I said.
“You come from different worlds. And she’s your boss. There are secrets you have to keep from her. That’s going to make things difficult. And there are other issues that could come up.”
�
�Wait,” I said. I mimed cleaning out my ears. “Okay, go ahead. Because for a second there, it sounded like you were giving me relationship advice.”
Murphy gave me a narrow, oblique look. “No offense, Dresden. But if you want to compare total hours of good relationships and bad, I leave you in the dust in both categories.”
“Touché,” I said. Sourly. “Kincaid was looking awfully paternal in there, wasn’t he?”
“Oh, bite me,” Murphy said, scowling. “How’s Michael?”
“Gonna make it,” I said. “Hurt bad, though. Don’t know how mobile he’s going to be after this.”
Murphy fretted her lower lip. “What happens if he can’t…keep on with the Knight business?”
I shook my head. “I have no idea.”
“I just…I didn’t think that taking up one of the swords was the sort of job offer you could turn down.”
I blinked at Murphy. “No, Murph. There’s no mandatory martyrdom involved. You’ve got a choice. You’ve always got a choice. That’s…sort of the whole point of faith, the way I understand it.”
She digested that in silence for a time. Then she said, “It isn’t because I don’t believe.”
“I know that,” I said.
She nodded. “It isn’t for me, though, Harry. I’ve already chosen my ground. I’ve taken an oath. It meant more to me than accepting a job.”
“I know,” I said. “If you weren’t the way you are, Murph, the Sword of Faith wouldn’t have reacted to you as strongly as it did. If someone as thick as me understands it, I figure the Almighty probably gets it too.”
She snorted and gave me a faint smile, and drove the rest of the way to my car in silence.
When we got there she parked next to the Blue Beetle. “Harry,” she said, “do you ever feel like we’re going to wind up old and alone? That we’re…I don’t know…doomed never to have anyone? Anything that lasts?”
I flexed the fingers of my still-scarred left hand and my mildly tingling right hand. “I’m more worried about all the things I’ll never be rid of.” I eyed her. “What brings on this cheerful topic?”