Changes df-12

by Jim Butcher

  Sure. Maybe it hadn’t.

  “Hello?” I said to the darkness. “Is anyone there?”

  There wasn’t.

  Die alone.

  “Stop that,” I snapped out loud. “Control yourself, Dresden.”

  That sounded like good advice. So I started taking deep, steady, controlled breaths and tried to focus my thoughts. Focus. Forethought. Reason. Sound judgment. That was what was going to get me through this.

  Fact one: My daughter was still in danger.

  Fact two: I was hurt. Maybe badly. Maybe forever. Even the efficient resilience of a wizard’s body had its limits, and a broken spine was quite likely beyond them.

  Fact three: Susan and Martin could not get the girl out on their own.

  Fact four: There wasn’t a lot of help forthcoming. Maybe, with Sanya along, the suicidal mission could be considered only mostly suicidal. After all, the Knights of the Cross were a big deal. Three of them were, apparently, enough Knights to protect the whole world. For the past few years, the dark-skinned Russian had been covering all three positions, and apparently doing it well. Which made a vague amount of sense, I suppose—Sanya was the wielder of Esperacchius, the Sword of Hope. We needed hope right now. At least, I did.

  Fact five: I had missed the rendezvous with Ebenezar many hours ago. I’d never intended to go, and there was nothing I could do about the fact that he was going to be upset—but my absence had probably cost me the support of the Grey Council, such as it was.

  Fact six: Sanya, Susan, Martin, and whatever other scanty help I could drum up couldn’t get to Chichén Itzá without me—and I sure as hell couldn’t get there in the shape I was in. According to the stored memories in my mother’s jewel, the Way required a swim.

  Fact seven: I was going to Show Up for my daughter, and to hell with what it would cost.

  And there were only so many options open to me.

  I took the least terrifying one. I closed my eyes, steadied my breathing, and began to picture a room in my mind. My now-ruined improved summoning circle was in the floor. Candles were lit at five equidistant points around it. The air smelled of sandalwood incense and burned wax. It took a few minutes to picture it all, in perfect detail, and to hold it in my mind, as rock solid to my imagination as the actual room the construct was replacing.

  That took considerable energy and discipline.

  Magic doesn’t require props to function. That’s a conceit that has been widely propitiated by the wizarding community over the centuries. It helped prove to frightened villagers, inquisitions, and whoever else might be worried that a person was clearly not a wizard. Otherwise he’d have all kinds of wizardly implements necessary to his craft.

  Magic doesn’t require the props, but magic is wrought by people, and people need them. Each prop has a symbolic as well as a practical reason for being a part of any spell. Simple stuff, lighting candles and the like, could be accomplished neatly in the mind, eventually becoming a task as easy and thoughtless as tying one’s shoe.

  Once you got into the complicated stuff, though, you had an enormous number of things to keep track of in your mind, envisioning flows of energy, their manipulation, and so on. If you have the real props, they serve as a sort of mnemonic device: You attach a certain image to the prop, in your head, and every time you see or touch that prop, the image is packaged along with it. Simple.

  Except that I didn’t have any props.

  I was winging the whole thing. Pure imagination. Pure concentration.

  Pure arrogance, really. But I was at a lower rock bottom than normal.

  In my thoughts I lit the candles, walking slowly around the circle in a clockwise fashion—or deosil, as the fairy tales, Celtic songs, and certain strains of Wicca refer to it—gradually powering up the energy it required to operate. I realized that I had forgotten to make the floor out of anything specific, in my head, and the notional floor space, from horizon to horizon, suddenly became the linoleum from my first ratty Chicago apartment. Hideous stuff, green lines on a grey background, but simple to envision.

  I imagined performing the spell without ever moving my body, envisioned every last detail, everything from the way the floor dug unpleasantly into my knees as I began to the slight clumsiness in the fingers of my left hand, which always seemed to be a little twitchy whenever I got nervous.

  I closed the circle. I gathered the power. And then, when all was prepared, when I held absolutely everything in my imagination so vividly that it seemed more real than the room around me, I slid Power into my voice and called quietly, “Uriel, come forth.”

  For a second, I couldn’t tell whether the soft white light had appeared only in my head or if it was actually in the room. Then I realized that it stabbed at my eyes painfully. It was real.

  I kept the spell going in my head, easier now that it was a tableau. I just had to keep my concentration focused.

  I squinted into the light and saw a tall young man there. He wore jeans and a T-shirt and a farmer’s duck coat. His blond hair fell over his eyes, but they were blue and bright and guileless as he looked around the room. He stuck his hands into his coat pockets and nodded slowly. “I was wondering when I’d get this call.”

  “You know what’s happening, then?” I asked.

  “Yes, yes,” he answered, with perhaps the slightest bit of impatience in his tone. He turned his gaze to me and frowned abruptly. He leaned forward slightly, peering at me.

  I carefully fortified and maintained the image of the restraining magical circle in my imagination. When an entity was called forth, the circle was the only thing protecting the caller from its wrath.

  “Please, Dresden,” the archangel Uriel said. “It’s a very nice circle, but you can’t honestly think that it’s any kind of obstacle to me.”

  “I like to play it safe,” I said.

  Uriel let out a most unangelic snort. Then he nodded his head and said, “Ah, I see.”

  “See what?”

  He paused and said, “Why you called me, of course. Your back.”

  I grunted. It was more effort than usual. “How bad is it?”

  “Broken,” he said. “It’s possible that, as a wizard, your body might be able to knit the ends back together over forty or fifty years. But there’s no way to be sure.”

  “I need it to be better,” I said. “Now.”

  “Then perhaps you shouldn’t have climbed that ladder in your condition.”

  I let out a snarl and tried to turn toward him. I just sort of flopped a little. My body never left the surface of the backboard.

  “Don’t,” Uriel said calmly. “It isn’t worth getting upset over.”

  “Not upset?!” I demanded. “My little girl is going to die!”

  “You made your choices,” Uriel told me. “One of them led you here.” He spread his hands. “That’s a fair ball, son. Nothing to do now but play it out.”

  “But you could fix me if you wanted to.”

  “My wishes have nothing to do with it,” he said calmly. “I could heal you if I were meant to do so. Free will must take precedence if it is to have meaning.”

  “You’re talking philosophy,” I said. “I’m telling you that a child is going to die.”

  Uriel’s expression darkened for a moment. “And I am telling you that I am very limited in terms of what I can do to help you,” he said. “Limited, in fact, to what I have already done.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Soulfire. Just about killed myself with that one. Thanks.”

  “No one is making you use it, Dresden. It’s your choice.”

  “I played ball with you when you needed help,” I said. “And this is how you repay me?”

  Uriel rolled his eyes. “You tried to send me a bill.”

  “You want to set a price, feel free,” I said. “I’ll pay it. Whatever it takes.”

  The archangel watched me, his eyes calm and knowing and sad. “I know you will,” he said quietly.

  “Dammit,” I said, my voi
ce breaking. Tears started from my eyes. The colors and lines in my imagination began to blur. “Please.”

  Uriel seemed to shiver at the sound of the word. He turned his face from me, clearly uncomfortable. He was silent.

  “Please,” I said again. “You know who I am. You know I’d rather have my nails torn out than beg. And I am begging you. I am not strong enough to do this on my own.”

  Uriel listened, never quite looking at me, and then shook his head slowly. “I have already done what I can.”

  “But you’ve done nothing,” I said.

  “From your point of view, I suppose that’s true.” He stroked his chin with a thumb, frowning in thought. “Though . . . I suppose it isn’t too much of an imbalance for you to know . . .”

  My eyes were starting to cramp from looking to one side so fiercely without being able to move my head. I bit my lip and waited.

  Uriel took a deep breath and looked as if he were considering his words with care. “Your daughter, Maggie, is alive and well. For now.”

  My heart skipped a beat.

  My daughter.

  He’d called her my daughter.

  “I know you wanted Susan to be the woman you loved and remembered. Wanted to be able to trust her. But even if you weren’t admitting it to yourself, you had to wonder, on some level. I don’t blame you for it,” he said. “Especially after those tracking spells failed. It’s natural. But yes.” He met my eyes. “Flesh of your flesh and bone of your bone. Your daughter.”

  “Why tell me that?” I asked him.

  “Because I have done all that I can,” he said. “From here, it is up to you. You are Maggie’s only hope.” He started to turn away, then paused and said, “Consider Vadderung’s words carefully.”

  I blinked. “You know Od . . . Vadderung?”

  “Of course. We’re in similar fields of work, after all.”

  I exhaled wearily, and stopped even trying to hold the spell. “I don’t understand.”

  Uriel nodded. “That’s the difficult part of being mortal. Of having choice. Much is hidden from you.” He sighed. “Love your child, Dresden. Everything else flows from there. A wise man said that,” Uriel said. “Whatever you do, do it for love. If you keep to that, your path will never wander so far from the light that you can never return.”

  And as quickly as that, he was gone.

  I lay in the darkness, shivering with weariness and the effort of the magic. I pictured Maggie in my head, in her little-girl dress with ribbons in her hair, like the picture.

  “For you, little girl. Dad’s coming.”

  It took me less than half a minute to restore the spell, and not much longer than that to build up the next wave of energy I would need. Until the last second, I wondered if I could actually go through with it. Then I saw a horrible image of Maggie in her dress being snatched up by a Red Court vampire, and my whole outraged being seemed to fuse into a singularity, a single white-hot pinpoint of raw, unshakable will.

  “Mab!” I called, my voice steady. “Mab, Queen of Air and Darkness, Queen of the Winter Court! Mab, I bid you come forth!”

  Chapter 30

  The third repetition of her name hung ringing in the air, and deafening silence came after as I awaited the response.

  When you trap something dangerous, there are certain fundamental precautions necessary to success. You’ve got to have good bait, something to draw your target in. You’ve got to have a good trap, something that works and works fast. And, once the target is in the trap, you’ve got to have a net or a cage strong enough to hold it.

  Get any of those three elements wrong, and you probably won’t succeed. Get two of them wrong, and you might be looking at a result far more disastrous than mere failure.

  I went into this one knowing damned well that all I had was bait. Mab, for her own reasons, had wanted to suborn me into her service for years. I knew that calling her by her name and title would be enough to attract her interest. Though the mechanism of my improved summoning circle would have been a fine trap—if it still existed, I mean—the cage of my will had always been the weakest point in any such endeavor.

  Bottom line, I could get the tiger to show up. Once it was there, all I had was a really good chalk drawing of a pit on the sidewalk and “Nice kitty.”

  I wasn’t going into it blind and ignorant, though. I was desperate, but not stupid. I figured I had the advantage of position. Mab couldn’t kill a mortal. She could only make him desperately wish he was dead, instead of enduring her attentions. I didn’t have a lot to lose. She couldn’t make me any more useless to my daughter than I was already.

  I waited, in perfect darkness, for the mistress of every wicked fairy in every dark tale humanity had ever whispered in the night to put in an appearance.

  Mab didn’t disappoint me.

  Surprise me, yes. But she didn’t disappoint.

  Stars began to appear in front of my eyes.

  I figured that was probably a really bad thing, for a moment. But they didn’t spin around in lazy, dizzy motion like the kind of stars that mean your brain is smothering. They instead burned steady and cold and pure above me, five stars like jewels on the throat of Lady Night.

  Seconds later, a cold wind touched my face, and I became conscious of a hard smoothness beneath me. I laid my hands carefully flat, but I didn’t feel the cot and the backboard under me. Instead, my fingers touched only cold, even stone, a planar surface that seemed level beneath my entire body. I wriggled my foot and confirmed that there was stone beneath it there, too.

  I stopped and realized that I could feel my foot. I could move it.

  My whole body was there. And it was naked. I wavered between yelping at the cold suddenly being visited upon my ass, and yelling in joy that I could feel it at all. I saw land to one side and scrambled to get off the cold slab beneath me, crouching down and hanging on to the edge of the slab for balance.

  This wasn’t reality, then. This was a dream, or a vision, or something that was otherwise in between the mortal world and the spiritual realm. That made sense. My physical body was still back in St. Mary’s, lying still and breathing deeply, but my mind and my spirit were here.

  Wherever “here” was.

  My eyes adjusted to the darkness and I saw gentle mist and fog hanging in the air. Boiling clouds let a flash of moonlight in, and it played like a spotlight over the hilltop around me, and upon the ancient table of stone beside me. The moon’s touch made deeply carved runes all around the table’s edge dance with flickers of illumination, writing done in some language I did not know.

  Then I understood. Mab had created this place for our meeting. It was known as the Valley of the Stone Table. It was a broad, bowl-shaped valley, I knew, though the mist hid most of it from me. In its exact center stood a mound maybe fifty feet across and twelve feet high at its center. Atop the mound stood the massive slab of stone, held up on four stumpy pillars. Other stones stood in a circle around it, some tumbled down, some broken, only one remaining in Stonehenge-like lintel. The stones all shed faint illumination in shades of blue and purple and deep, deep green. Cold colors.

  Winter colors.

  Yeah. It was after the equinox. So that tracked. The Table was in Winter’s domain. It was an ancient conduit of power, transferred in the most primitive, atavistic fashion of all—in hot blood. There were grooves and whorls in the table’s surface, coated with ancient stains, and it squatted on the hill, patient and hungry and immovable, like a snapping turtle waiting for warm, vital creatures to wander too close.

  The blood spilled upon this table would carry the power of its life with it, and would flow into the well of power in the control of the Winter Queen.

  A movement across the table from me drew my eye. A shadow seemed to simply congeal from the mist, forming itself into a slender, feminine shape draped in a cloak and cowl. Glittering green candle flames flickered in what looked like two eyes within the cowl’s hood.

  My throat went dry. It took me tw
o tries to rasp, “Queen Mab?”

  The form vanished. A low, feminine laugh drifted through the mist to my right. I turned to face it.

  A furious cat squall erupted from the air six inches behind me and I nearly jumped out of my skin. I spun to find nothing there, and the woman’s laugh echoed around the top of the misty mound, this time more amused.

  “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you,” I said, my heart pounding in my throat. “You told me so, didn’t you?”

  Whispering voices hissed among the stones around me, none of them intelligible. I saw another flicker of mocking green eyes.

  “Th-this is a limited-time offer,” I said, trying to make my voice sound steady. “It’s been forced by circumstance. If you don’t get off your royal ass and jump on it, I’m walking.”

  “I warned you,” said a calm voice behind me. “Never let her bring you here, my godchild.”

  I carefully kept myself from letting out a shriek. It would have been unwizardly. Instead, I took a deep breath and turned to find the Leanansidhe standing a few feet away, covered in a cloak the color of the last seconds of twilight, the deep blue-purple fabric hiding her completely except for her pale face inside the hood. Her green cat eyes were wide and steady, her expression solemn.

  “But I’m here,” I said quietly.

  She nodded.

  Another shadow appeared beside her, green eyes burning. Queen Mab, I presumed, and noted that she was actually a couple of inches shorter than my godmother. Of course, especially in a place like this, Mab could be as gargantuan or Lilliputian as she chose.

  Probably-Mab stepped closer, still covered in shadows despite the fact that she was nearer to me than my godmother was. Her eyes grew brighter.

  “So many scars,” said my godmother, and her voice had changed subtly, growing cold and precise. “Your scars are beautiful things. Within and without.” The shadowed figure stepped behind one of the fallen stones and emerged from behind another on the opposite side of the circle. “Yes,” said the cold voice coming from the Leanansidhe’s lips. “I can work with this.”