by Butcher, Jim
My flesh passed through what should have been stone, and I emerged in a dark wood that lay covered in frost and a thin layer of snow. At least this time the ground in Chicago had been more or less level with the ground in the Nevernever. Last time, I’d had a three-inch drop I hadn’t expected, and I’d fallen on my ass into the snow. No harm done, I suppose, but this part of the Nevernever was just chock-full of things you did not want to think you were clumsy or vulnerable.
I took my bearings with a quick look around. The woods were the same, all three times I’d been through them. A hillside sank down ahead of me, and climbed steadily into the night behind me. At the top of the small mountain I stood upon, I was told, was a narrow and bitterly cold pass that led into the interior of the Unseelie Mountains, to Mab’s stronghold of Arctis Tor. Below me, the land sank into foothills and then into plains, where Mab’s authority ended and that of Titania the Summer Queen began.
I stood at a crossroads—which was only sensible, since I’d arrived from Chicago, one of the great crossroads of the world. One trail led upslope and down. The other crossed it at almost perfect right angles, and ran along the face of the hillside. I took a left, following the face of the hillside in a counterclockwise direction, also known as widdershins, in the parlance of the locals. The trail ran between frozen trees, their branches bowed beneath their burden of frost and snow.
I moved quickly, but not quickly enough to slip and blow out an ankle or brain myself on a low-hanging branch. The White Council had Mab’s permission to move through the woods, but they were by no means safe.
I found that out for myself about fifteen minutes into my walk, when snow suddenly fell softly from the trees all around, and silent black shapes descended to encircle me. It happened quickly, and in perfect silence—maybe a dozen spiders the size of ponies alit upon the frozen ground or clung to the trunks and branches of the surrounding trees. They were smooth-surfaced, sharp-edged creatures, like orbweavers, long-limbed and graceful and deadly-looking. They moved with an almost delicate precision, their bodies of a color of grey and blue and white that blended flawlessly with the snowy night.
The spider who had come down onto the trail directly in front of me raised its two forelegs in warning, and revealed fangs longer than my forearm, dripping with milky-white venom.
“Halt, man-thing,” said the creature.
That was actually scarier than the mere appearance of economy-sized arachnids. Between its fangs, I could see a mouth moving—a mouth that looked disturbingly human. Its multiple eyes gleamed like beads of obsidian. Its voice was a chirping, buzzing thing. “Halt, he whose blood will warm us. Halt, intruder upon the Wood of the Winter Queen.”
I stopped and looked around the circle of spiders. None of them seemed to be particularly larger or smaller than the others. If I had to fight my way clear, there wasn’t any obvious weak link to exploit. “Greetings,” I said, as I did. “I am no intruder, honored hunters. I am a Wizard of the White Council, and I and my folk have the Queen’s permission to tread these paths.”
The air around me shivered with chitters and hisses and clicks.
“Man-things speak often with false tongues,” said the lead spider, its forelimbs thrashing the air in agitation.
I held up my staff. “I guess they always have one of these, too, huh?”
The spider hissed, and venom bubbled from the tips of its fangs. “Many a man-thing bears such a long stick, mortal.”
“Careful, legs,” I said. “I’m on speaking terms with Queen Mab herself. I don’t think you want to play it like this.”
The spider’s legs shifted in an undulating motion, and the spider rippled two or three feet closer to me. The other spiders all shifted, too, moving a bit nearer. I didn’t like that, not even a little. If one of them jumped, they’d be all over me—and there were just too many of the damn big things to defend myself against them effectively.
The spider laughed, the sound hollow and mocking. “Mortals do not speak to the Queen and live to tell the tale.”
“It lies,” hissed the other spiders, the phrase a low buzzing around me. “And its blood is warm.”
I eyed all those enormous fangs and had an acutely uncomfortable flashback to Morgan driving his straw through the top of that damn juice box.
The spider in front of me flowed a little to the left and a little to the right, the graceful motion intended to distract me from the fact that it had gotten about a foot closer to me. “Man-thing, how are we to know what you truly are?”
In my professional opinion, you rarely get handed a straight line that good.
I thrust the tip of my staff forward, along with my gathered will, focusing it into an area the size of my own clenched fist as I shouted, “Forzare!”
Chapter Fourteen
The Hidden Halls of Edinburgh were the redoubt and fortress of the White Council of Wizardry from time immemorial. Well, actually, that last bit isn’t true. It’s been our headquarters for a little under five hundred years.
The White Council has existed since pre-Roman times, in one form or another, and its headquarters has shifted from time to time, and place to place. Alexandria, Carthage, Rome—we were in the Vatican in the early days of the Church, believe it or not—Constantinople and Madrid have all been home to the Council’s leadership at one time or another—but since the end of the Middle Ages, they’ve been located in the tunnels and catacombs hewn from the unyielding stone of Scotland.
Edinburgh’s tunnel network is even more extensive than those beneath the city of Chicago, and infinitely more stable and sturdy. The main headquarters of the complex is located deep beneath the Auld Rock itself—Castle Edinburgh, where kings and queens, lords and ladies, have defied, besieged, betrayed and slaughtered one another since pre-Christian times.
There’s a reason a fortress has been there for as long as mankind can remember—it is one of the world’s largest convergences of ley lines. Ley lines are the natural currents of magical energy running through the world. They are the most powerful means of employing magic known to man—and the lines that intersect in the earth deep below the Auld Rock represent a staggering amount of raw power waiting to be tapped by someone skilled or foolish enough.
I walked over a ley line about three steps after I entered the Hidden Halls, and I could feel its shuddering energy beneath my feet, rushing by like an enormous, silent subterranean river. I walked a bit faster for a few paces, irrationally nervous about being swept off of my feet by it, until I could only sense it as a dim and receding vibration in the ground.
I didn’t need to call up a light. Crystals set in the walls glowed in a rainbow of gentle colors, bathing the whole place in soft, ambient illumination. The tunnel was ancient, worn, chilly, and damp. Water always seemed ready to condense into a half-frozen dew the instant it was given the opportunity by an exhaled breath or a warm body.
The tunnel was about as wide as my spread arms, and maybe eight feet high. The walls were lined with bas-relief carvings in the stone. Some of them were renditions of scenes of what I’d been told were the historical high points of the White Council. Since I didn’t recognize anyone in the images, I didn’t have much context for them, so they mostly just looked like the crudely drawn cast of thousands you see on the Bayeux Tapestry. The rest of the carvings were wards—seriously world-class heavyweight wards. I didn’t know what they did, but I could sense the deadly power behind them, and I tread carefully as I passed deeper into the complex.
The entry tunnel from the Nevernever was more than a quarter of a mile long, sloping gently downward the whole way. There were metal gates every couple of hundred yards, each of them manned by a Warden backed up by a pair of Ancient Mai’s temple-dog statues.
The things were three feet high at the shoulder, and looked like escapees from a Godzilla movie. Carved from stone, the blocky figures sat inert and immobile—but I knew that they could come to dangerous life at an instant’s notice. I tried to think about what it might be
like to be facing a pair of aggressive temple-dog statues in the relatively narrow hallway. I decided that I’d rather wrestle an oncoming subway locomotive. At least then it would be over quickly.
I exchanged polite greetings with the Wardens on guard until I passed the last checkpoint and entered the headquarters proper. Then I took a folded map from my duster pocket, squinted at it, and got my bearings. The layout of the tunnels was complex, and it would be easy to get lost.
Where to begin?
If the Gatekeeper had been around, I would have sought him out first. Rashid had been my supporter and ally on more than one occasion, God knew why. I wasn’t on what anyone would call good terms with the Merlin. I barely knew Martha Liberty or Listens-to-Wind. I found Ancient Mai to be a very scary little person. That left Ebenezar.
I headed for the War Room.
It took me the better part of half an hour to get there. Like I said, the tunnel complex is enormous—and after the way the war had reduced the ranks of the Council, it seemed lonelier and emptier than ever. My footsteps echoed hollowly back from stone walls for minutes at a time, unaccompanied by any other sound.
I felt intensely uncomfortable as I paced the Hidden Halls. I think it was the smell that did it. When I’d been a young man, hauled before the Council to be tried as a violator of the First Law of Magic, they had brought me to Edinburgh. The musty, wet, mineral smell of the place had been almost all I knew while I had waited, hooded and bound, in a cell for a full day. I remember being horribly cold and tortured by the knots my muscles worked themselves into after so many hours tied hand and foot. I remember feeling more alone than ever in my life, while I awaited whatever was going to happen.
I had been scared. So scared. I was sixteen.
It was the same smell, and that scent had the power to animate the corpses of some of my darkest memories and bring them lurching back into the front of my thoughts. Psychological necromancy.
“Brains,” I moaned to myself, drawing the word out.
If you can’t stop the bad thoughts from coming to visit, at least you can make fun of them while they’re hanging around.
In a stroke of improbable logic, the War Room was located between the central chambers of the Senior Council and the barracks rooms of the Wardens, which included a small kitchen. The smell of baking bread cut through the musty dampness of the tunnel, and I felt my steps quickening.
I passed the barracks, which would doubtless be empty, for the most part. Most of the Wardens would be out hunting Morgan, as evidenced by the skeleton guard I’d seen at Chandler’s post. I took the next left, nodded to the very young Warden on guard, opened a door, and passed into the War Room of the White Council.
It was a spacious vault, about a hundred feet square, but the heavy arches and pillars that supported the ceiling took away a lot of that room. Illuminating crystals glowed more brightly here, to make reading easier. Bulletin boards on rolling frames took up spaces between pillars, and were covered by maps and pins and tiny notes. Most of them had one or more chalkboards next to them, which were covered in diagrams, cryptic, brief notation, and cruder maps. Completely ordinary office furniture occupied the back half of the vault, broken up into cubicles.
Typewriters clacked and dinged. Men and women of the administrative staff, wizards all, moved back and forth through the room, speaking quietly, writing, typing, and filing. A row of counters on the front wall of the room supported coffeepots warmed by propane flames, and several well-worn couches and chairs rested nearby.
Half a dozen veteran Wardens lay sprawled on couches napping, sat in chairs reading books, or played chess with an old set upon a coffee table. Their staves and cloaks were all at hand, ready to be taken up at an instant’s notice. They were dangerous, hard men and women, the Old Guard, survivors of the deadly days of the early Vampire War. I wouldn’t have wanted to cross any of them.
Sitting in a chair slightly apart from them, staring at the flames crackling in a rough stone fireplace, sat my old mentor, Ebenezar McCoy. He held a cup of coffee in his thick, work-scarred fingers. A lot of the more senior wizards in the Council had a sense of propriety they took way too seriously, always dressed to the nines, always immaculate and proper. Ebenezar wore an old pair of denim overalls with a flannel shirt and leather work boots that could have been thirty or forty years old. His silver hair, what he had left of it, was in disarray, as if he’d just woken from a restless sleep. He was aging, even by wizard standards, but his shoulders were still wide, and the muscles in his forearms were taut and visible beneath age-spotted skin. He stared at the fire through wire-rimmed spectacles, his dark eyes unfocused, one foot slowly tapping the floor.
I leaned my staff against a handy wall, got myself a cup of coffee, and settled down in the chair beside Ebenezar’s. I sipped coffee, let the warmth of the fire drive some of the wet chill out of my bones, and waited.
“They always have good coffee here,” Ebenezar said a few moments later.
“And they don’t call it funny names,” I said. “It’s just coffee. Not frappalattegrandechino.”
Ebenezar snorted and sipped from his cup. “Nice trip in?”
“Got tripped up by someone’s thugs on the Winter trail.”
He grimaced. “Aye. We’ve had our people harassed several times, the past few months. How are you, Hoss?”
“Uninformed, sir,” I said.
He eyed me obliquely. “Mmmm. I did as I thought best, boy. I won’t apologize for it.”
“Don’t expect you to,” I said.
He nodded. “What are you doing here?”
“What do you think?”
He shook his head. “I won’t take you on the strike team, Hoss.”
“You think I can’t pull my weight?”
He turned his eyes to me. “You have too much history with Morgan. This has got to be dispassionate, and you’re just about the least dispassionate person I know.”
I grunted. “You’re sure it was Morgan who did LaFortier?”
His eyes returned to the fire. “I would never have expected it. But too many things are in place.”
“No chance it’s a frame?”
Ebenezar blinked and shot me a look. “Why do you ask?”
“Because if the ass is finally getting his comeuppance, I want to make sure it’s on the level,” I said.
He nodded a couple of times. Then he said, “I don’t see how it could have been done. It looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, odds are it’s a damn duck. Occam’s razor, Hoss.”
“Someone could have gotten into his head,” I said.
“At his age?” Ebenezar asked. “Ain’t likely.”
I frowned. “What do you mean?”
“As a mind grows older, it gets established,” he said, “more set in its ways. Like a willow tree. Supple when it’s young, but gets more brittle as it ages. Once you’ve been around a century or so, it generally ain’t possible to bend a mind without breaking it.”
“Generally?”
“You can’t push it that far,” Ebenezar said. “Push a loyal man into betraying everything he believes in? You’d drive him insane before you forced him into that. Which means that Morgan made a choice.”
“If he did it.” I shook my head. “I just keep asking myself who profits most if we axe Morgan ourselves.”
Ebenezar grimaced. “It’s ugly all the way around,” he said, “but there it is. I reckon you ’gazed him, Hoss, but it ain’t a lie detector. You know that, too.”
I fell silent for a while and sipped coffee. Then I asked, “Just curious. Who holds the sword when you catch him? It’s usually Morgan who does the head chopping.”
“Captain Luccio, I reckon,” Ebenezar said. “Or someone she appoints. But she ain’t the kind to foist something like that off on a subordinate.”
I got treated to the mental image of Anastasia decapitating her old apprentice. Then of me, taking Molly’s head. I shuddered. “That sucks.”
Ebenez
ar kept staring at the fire, and his eyes seemed to sink into his head, as if he had aged twenty years right in front of me. “Aye.”
The door to the War Room opened and a slender, reedy little wizard in a tan tweed suit entered, lugging a large portfolio. His short white hair was curled tightly against his head and his fingers were stained with ink. There was a pencil tucked behind one ear, and a fountain pen behind the other. He stopped and peered around the room for a moment, spotted Ebenezar, and bustled right on over.
“Pardon, Wizard McCoy,” he said. “If you have a moment, I need you to sign off on a few papers.”
Ebenezar put his coffee on the floor and accepted a manila folder from the little guy, along with the fountain pen. “What this time, Peabody?”
“First, power of attorney for the office in Jakarta to purchase the building for the new safe house,” Wizard Peabody said, opening the folder and turning a page. Ebenezar scanned it, then signed it. Peabody turned more pages. “Very good. Then an approval on the revision of wages for Wardens—initial there, please, thank you. And the last one is approval for ensuring Wizard LaFortier’s holdings are transferred to his heirs.”
“Only three?” Ebenezar asked.
“The others are eyes-only, sir.”
Ebenezar sighed. “I’ll drop by my office when I’m free to sign them.”
“Sooner is better, sir,” Peabody said. He blinked and seemed to notice me for the first time. “Ah. Warden Dresden. What brings you here?”
“I thought I’d come see if someone wanted help taking Morgan down,” I drawled.
Peabody gulped. “I . . . see.”
“Has Injun Joe found anything?” Ebenezar asked.
Peabody’s voice became laced with diffident disapproval as he answered. “Wizard Listens-to-Wind is deep in preparations for investigative divination, sir.”
“So, no,” I said.
Peabody sniffed. “Not yet. Between him and the Merlin, I’m sure they’ll turn up precisely how Warden Morgan managed to bypass Senior Council security.” He glanced at me and said, in a perfectly polite tone, “They are both wizards of considerable experience and skill, after all.”