The Ultimate Dresden Omnibus, 0-15

by Butcher, Jim

  “Hell’s bells,” I breathed.

  Thomas watched the tigers pace. “She was lovely. Sixteen or so? I don’t know, exactly. I didn’t ask for her name.” He spread his hands. “It was a fatal feeding, of course. I don’t think I’ve ever really explained to you exactly what that is like.”

  “What is it like?” I asked in a quiet rasp.

  “Like becoming light,” he said, his eyes drifting closed. “Like sinking into the warmth of a campfire when you’ve been shivering for hours. Like a hot steak after a day of swimming in cold water. It transforms you, Harry. Makes you feel . . .” His eyes became haunted, hollow. “Whole.”

  I shook my head. “Thomas. Jesus.”

  “Once she was gone and my body was restored, the skinwalker tortured me again, until I was in the same desperate condition. Then he fed me another doe.” He shrugged. “Rinse and repeat. Perhaps half a dozen times. He gave me young women and then put me in agony again. I was all but chewing out my own innards when he took me to the island. To tell you the truth, I barely remember it.” He smiled. “I remember seeing Molly. But you’ve taught her enough to protect herself, it seems.”

  “Thomas,” I said gently.

  He smirked. “If you ever get tired of her, I hope you’ll let me know.”

  I stared at him, sickened. “Thomas.”

  Author’s Note

  When I was seven years old, I got a bad case of strep throat and was out of school for a whole week. During that time, my sisters bought me my first fantasy and sci-fi novels: the boxed set of Lord of the Rings and the boxed set of Han Solo adventure novels by Brian Daley. I devoured them all during that week.

  From that point on, I was pretty much doomed to join SF&F fandom. From there, it was only one more step to decide I wanted to be a writer of my favorite fiction material, and here we are.

  I blame my sisters.

  My first love as a fan is swords-and-horses fantasy. After Tolkien I went after C. S. Lewis. After Lewis, it was Lloyd Alexander. After them came Fritz Leiber, Roger Zelazny, Robert Howard, John Norman, Poul Anderson, David Eddings, Weis and Hickman, Terry Brooks, Elizabeth Moon, Glen Cook, and before I knew it, I was a dual citizen of the United States and Lankhmar, Narnia, Gor, Cimmeria, Krynn, Amber—you get the picture.

  When I set out to become a writer, I spent years writing swords-and-horses fantasy novels—and seemed to have little innate talent for it. But I worked at my writing, branching out into other areas as experiments, including SF, mystery, and contemporary fantasy. That’s how the Dresden Files initially came about—as a happy accident while trying to accomplish something else. Sort of like penicillin.

  But I never forgot my first love, and to my immense delight and excitement, one day I got a call from my agent and found out that I was going to get to share my newest swords-and-horses fantasy novel with other fans.

  The Codex Alera is a fantasy series set within the savage world of Carna, where spirits of the elements, known as furies, lurk in ever facet of life, and where many intelligent races vie for security and survival. The realm of Alera is the monolithic civilization of humanity, and its unique ability to harness and command the furies is all that enables its survival in the face of the enormous sometimes hostile elemental powers of Carna, and against savage creatures who would lay Alera in waste and ruin.

  Yet even a realm as powerful as Alera is not immune to destruction from within, and the death of the heir apparent to the Crown has triggered a frenzy of ambitious political maneuvering and infighting amongst the High Lords, those who wield the most powerful furies known to man. Plots are afoot, traitors and spies abound, and a civil war seems inevitable—all while the enemies of the realm watch, ready to strike at the first sign of weakness.

  Tavi is a young man living on the frontier of Aleran civilization—because let’s face it, swords-and-horses fantasies start there. Born a freak, unable to utilize any powers of furycrafting whatsoever, Tavi has grown up relying up on his own wits, speed, and courage to survive. When an ambitious plot to discredit the Crown lays Tavi’s home, the Calderon Valley, naked and defenseless before a horde of the barbarian Marat, the boy and his family find themselves directly in harm’s way.

  There are no titanic High Lords to protect them, no Legions, no Knights with their mighty furies to take the field. Tavi and the free frontiersmen of the Calderon Valley must find some way to uncover the plot and to defend their homes against merciless horde of the Marat and their beasts.

  It is a desperate hour, when the fate of all Alera hangs in the balance, when a handful of ordinary steadholders must find the courage and strength to defy an overwhelming foe, and when the courage and intelligence of one young man will save the Realm—or destroy it.

  Thank you, readers and fellow fans, for all of your support and kindness. I hope that you enjoy reading the books of the Codex Alera as much as I enjoyed creating them for you.

  —Jim

  Furies of Calderon, Academ’s Fury, Cursor’s Fury,

  Captain’s Fury, and Princeps’ Fury are available

  from Ace Books.

  ALSO BY JIM BUTCHER

  BIGFOOT ON CAMPUS

  by JIM BUTCHER

  The campus police officer folded his hands and stared at me from across the table. “Coffee?”

  “What flavor is it?” I asked.

  He was in his forties, a big, solid man with bags under his calm, wary eyes, and his name tag read DEAN. “It’s coffee-flavored coffee.”

  “No mocha?”

  “Fuck mocha.”

  “Thank God,” I said. “Black.”

  Officer Dean gave me hot black coffee in a paper cup, and I sipped at it gratefully. I was almost done shivering. It just came in intermittent bursts now. The old wool blanket Dean had given me was more gesture than cure.

  “Am I under arrest?” I asked him.

  Officer Dean moved his shoulders in what could have been a shrug. “That’s what we’re going to talk about.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  “Maybe,” he said in a slow, rural drawl, “you could explain to me why I found you in the middle of an orgy.”

  “Well,” I said, “if you’re going to be in an orgy, the middle is the best spot, isn’t it.”

  He made a thoughtful sound. “Maybe you could explain why there was a car on the fourth floor of the dorm.”

  “Classic college prank,” I said.

  He grunted. “Usually when that happens, it hasn’t made big holes in the exterior wall.”

  “Someone was avoiding the cliché?” I asked.

  He looked at me for a moment, and said, “What about all the blood?”

  “There were no injuries, were there?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Then who cares? Some film student probably watched Carrie too many times.”

  Officer Dean tapped his pencil’s eraser on the tabletop. It was the most agitated thing I’d seen him do. “Six separate calls in the past three hours with a Bigfoot sighting on campus. Bigfoot. What do you know about that?”

  “Well, kids these days, with their Internets and their video games and their iPods. Who knows what they thought they saw.”

  Officer Dean put down his pencil. He looked at me, and said, calmly, “My job is to protect a bunch of kids with access to every means of self-destruction known to man from not only the criminal element but themselves. I got chemistry students who can make their own meth, Ecstasy, and LSD. I got ROTC kids with access to automatic weapons and explosives. I got enough alcohol going through here on a weekly basis to float a battleship. I got a thriving trade in recreational drugs. I got lives to protect.”

  “Sounds tiring.”

  “About to get tired of you,” he said. “Start giving it to me straight.”

  “Or you’ll arrest me?” I asked.

  “No,” Dean said. “I bounce your face off my knuckles for a while. Then I ask again.”

  “Isn’t that unprofessional conduct?”

  �
��Fuck conduct,” Dean said. “I got kids to look after.”

  I sipped the coffee some more. Now that the shivers had begun to subside, I finally felt the knotted muscles in my belly begin to relax. I slowly settled back into my chair. Dean hadn’t blustered or tried to intimidate me in any way. He wasn’t trying to scare me into talking. He was just telling me how it was going to be. And he drank his coffee old-school.

  I kinda liked the guy.

  “You aren’t going to believe me,” I said.

  “I don’t much,” he said. “Try me.”

  “Okay,” I said. “My name is Harry Dresden. I’m a professional wizard.”

  Officer Dean pursed his lips. Then he leaned forward slightly and listened.

  * * *

  The client wanted me to meet him at a site in the Ouachita Mountains in eastern Oklahoma. Looking at them, you might not realize they were mountains, they’re so old. They’ve had millions of years of wear and tear on them, and they’ve been ground down to nubs. The site used to be on an Indian reservation, but they don’t call them reservations anymore. They’re Tribal Statistical Areas now.

  I showed my letter and my ID to a guy in a pickup, who just happened to pull up next to me for a friendly chat at a lonely stop sign on a winding back road. I don’t know what the tribe called his office, but I recognized a guardian when I saw one. He read the letter and waved me through in an even friendlier manner than he had used when he approached me. It’s nice to be welcomed somewhere, once in a while.

  I parked at the spot indicated on the map and hiked a good mile and a half into the hills, taking a heavy backpack with me. I found a pleasant spot to set up camp. The mid-October weather was crisp, but I had a good sleeping bag and would be comfortable as long as it didn’t start raining. I dug a fire pit and ringed it in stones, built a modest fire out of fallen limbs, and laid out my sleeping bag on a foam camp pad. By the time it got dark, I was well into preparing the dinner I’d brought with me. The scent of foil-wrapped potatoes baking in coals blended with that of the steaks I had spitted and roasting over the fire.

  Can I cook a camp meal or what?

  Bigfoot showed up half an hour after sunset.

  One minute, I was alone. The next, he simply stepped out into view. He was huge. Not huge like a big person, but huge like a horse, with that same sense of raw animal power and mass. He was nine feet tall at least and probably tipped the scales at well over six hundred pounds. His powerful, wide-shouldered body was covered in long, dark brown hair. Even though he stood in plain sight in my firelight, I could barely see the buckskin bag he had slung over one shoulder and across his chest, the hair was so long.

  “Strength of a River in His Shoulders,” I said. “You’re welcome at my fire.”

  “Wizard Dresden,” River Shoulders rumbled. “It is good to see you.” He took a couple of long steps and hunkered down opposite the fire from me. “Man. That smells good.”

  “Darn right it does,” I said. I proceeded with the preparations in companionable silence while River Shoulders stared thoughtfully at the fire. I’d set up my camp this way for a reason—it made me the host and River Shoulders my guest. It meant I was obliged to provide food and drink, and he was obliged to behave with decorum. Guest-and-host relationships are damned near laws of physics in the supernatural world: They almost never get violated, and when they do, it’s a big deal. Both of us felt a lot more comfortable around one another this way.

  Okay. Maybe it did a wee bit more to make me feel comfortable than it did River Shoulders, but he was a repeat customer, I liked him, and I figured he probably didn’t get treated to a decent steak all that often.

  We ate the meal in an almost ritualistic silence, too, other than River making some appreciative noises as he chewed. I popped open a couple of bottles of McAnnally’s Pale, my favorite brew by a veritable genius of hops, back in Chicago. River liked it so much that he gave me an inquisitive glance when his bottle was empty. So I emptied mine and produced two more.

  After that, I filled a pipe with expensive tobacco, lit it, took a few puffs, and passed it to him. He nodded and took it. We smoked and finished our beers. By then, the fire had died down to glowing embers.

  “Thank you for coming,” River Shoulders rumbled. “Again, I come to seek your help on behalf of my son.”

  “Third time you’ve come to me,” I said.

  “Yes.” He rummaged in his pouch and produced a small, heavy object. He flicked it to me. I caught it and squinted at it in the dim light. It was a gold nugget about as big as a Ping-Pong ball. I nodded and tossed it back to him. River Shoulders’s brows lowered into a frown.

  You have to understand. A frown on a mug like his looked indistinguishable from scowling fury. It turned his eyes into shadowed caves with nothing but a faint gleam showing from far back in them. It made his jaw muscles bunch and swell into knots the size of tennis balls on the sides of his face.

  “You will not help him,” the Bigfoot said.

  I snorted. “You’re the one who isn’t helping him, big guy.”

  “I am,” he said. “I am hiring you.”

  “You’re his father,” I said quietly. “And he doesn’t even know your name. He’s a good kid. He deserves more than that. He deserves the truth.”

  He shook his head slowly. “Look at me. Would he even accept my help?”

  “You aren’t going to know unless you try it,” I said. “And I never said I wouldn’t help him.”

  At that, River Shoulders frowned a little more.

  I curbed an instinct to edge away from him.

  “Then what do you want in exchange for your services?” he asked.

  “I help the kid,” I said. “You meet the kid. That’s the payment. That’s the deal.”

  “You do not know what you are asking,” he said.

  “With respect, River Shoulders, this is not a negotiation. If you want my help, I just told you how to get it.”

  He became very still at that. I got the impression that maybe people didn’t often use tactics like that when they dealt with him.

  When he spoke, his voice was a quiet, distant rumble. “You have no right to ask this.”

  “Yeah, um. I’m a wizard. I meddle. It’s what we do.”

  “Manifestly true.” He turned his head slightly away. “You do not know how much you ask.”

  “I know that kid deserves more than you’ve given him.”

  “I have seen to his protection. To his education. That is what fathers do.”

  “Sure,” I said. “But you weren’t ever there. And that matters.”

  Absolute silence fell for a couple of minutes.

  “Look,” I said gently. “Take it from a guy who knows. Growing up without a dad is terrifying. You’re the only father he’s ever going to have. You can go hire Superman to look out for Irwin if you want to, and he’d still be the wrong guy—because he isn’t you.”

  River toyed with the empty bottle, rolling it across his enormous fingers like a regular guy might have done with a pencil.

  “Do you want me on this?” I asked him. “No hard feelings if you don’t.”

  River looked up at me again and nodded slowly. “I know that if you agree to help him, you will do so. I will pay your price.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Tell me about Irwin’s problem.”

  * * *

  “What’d he say?” Officer Dean asked.

  “He said the kid was at the University of Oklahoma for school,” I said. “River’d had a bad dream and knew that the kid’s life was in danger.”

  The cop grunted. “So … Bigfoot is a psychic?”

  “Think about it. No one ever gets a good picture of one, much less a clean shot,” I said. “Despite all the expeditions and TV shows and whatnot. River’s people have got more going for them than being huge and strong. My guess is that they’re smarter than humans. Maybe a lot smarter. My guess is they know magic of some kind, too.”

  “Jesus,” Officer Dean said. “
You really believe all this, don’t you.”

  “I want to believe,” I said. “And I told you that you wouldn’t.”

  Dean grunted. Then he said, “Usually they’re too drunk to make sense when I get a story like this. Keep going.”

  * * *

  I got to Norman, Oklahoma, a bit before noon the next morning. It was a Wednesday, which was a blessing. In the Midwest, if you show up to a college town on a weekend, you risk running into a football game. In my experience, that resulted in universal problems with traffic, available hotel rooms, and drunken football hooligans.

  Or wait: Soccer is the one with hooligans. Drunken American football fans are just … drunks, I guess.

  River had provided me with a small dossier he’d had prepared, which included a copy of his kid’s class schedule. I parked my car in an open spot on the street not too far from campus and ambled on over. I got some looks: I sort of stand out in a crowd. I’m a lot closer to seven feet tall than six, which might be one reason why River Shoulders liked to hire me—I look a lot less tiny than other humans, to him. Add in the big black leather duster and the scar on my face, and I looked like the kind of guy you’d want to avoid in dark alleys.

  The university campus was as confusing as all of them are, with buildings that had constantly evolved into and out of multiple roles over the years. They were all named after people I doubt any of the students had ever heard of, or cared about, and there seemed to be no organizational logic at all at work there. It was a pretty enough campus, I supposed. Lots of redbrick and brownstone buildings. Lots of architectural doohickeys on many of the buildings, in a kind of quasi-classical Greek style. The ivy that was growing up many of the walls seemed a little too cultivated and obvious for my taste. Then again, I had exactly the same amount of regard for the Ivy League as I did for the Big 12. The grass was an odd color, like maybe someone had sprayed it with a blue-green dye or something, though I had no idea what kind of delusional creep would do something so pointless.

  And, of course, there were students—a whole lot of kids, all of them with things to do and places to be. I could have wandered around all day, but I thought I’d save myself the headache of attempting to apply logic to a university campus and stopped a few times to ask for directions. Irwin Pounder, River Shoulders’s son, had a physics course at noon, so I picked up a notebook and a couple of pens at the university bookstore and ambled on into the large classroom. It was a perfect disguise. The notebook was college-ruled.