by Jim Butcher
He nodded, as if he’d expected the answer.
“Plus there’s one more reason not to call in the Council,” I said.
“Why?”
“Right now, Cowl, Grevane, and Corpsetaker aren’t working together. If I call in the Council it gives them a common enemy and a reason to cooperate.”
“They have a common enemy,” he pointed out. “You.”
I laughed, and it came out a little bitter. “They aren’t worried about me. Hell, I can’t even figure out what’s going on.” I rubbed at my eyes. “You said there were two things I need to know. What’s the second thing?”
“Your car.”
“Oh, I got it back,” I said. “It’s out front.”
“No, dummy,” Thomas said. “Whoever trashed your car did it deliberately. They were trying to tell you something.”
“It might not even be related to this situation,” I said.
He snorted. “Yeah. It just happened now, out of all the times it could have happened.”
“Whoever was sending the message, it’s a little obscure. You think it’s one of the Kemmler crowd?”
“Why not?” he said.
I thought about it for a minute. “It doesn’t seem like something Grevane would do. I bet he’s more like the kind to send undead minions to deliver his messages. Corpsetaker would send a nightmare or a forced hallucination or something. She’s big on the mind magic. Ghouls don’t really send messages. They just eat you.”
“That leaves Cowl, his buddy, and Grevane’s buddy with the liver spots.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I almost feel like there was something familiar about Liver Spots,” I said. “I’m not sure what. I might be grasping at straws.”
“What about Cowl and Kumori?”
“I don’t know, man,” I said. “They were just a couple of people in cloaks. I never saw their faces. If I had to guess from the way they talked, I’d bet that they were Council.”
“That would be a very good reason to cover their faces,” Thomas agreed.
“There’s no point in chewing this over and over,” I said. I rubbed at my eyes. “Bony Tony’s numbers mean something. They’ll lead to the book, somehow. I’m sure of it.”
“Maybe a locker number?” Thomas asked.
“Too many digits,” I said.
“Maybe it’s some kind of cipher. Substituting letters for numbers.”
I raised my eyebrows. “That’s a thought.” I dug the folded piece of paper out of my pocket and passed it over to him. “Stay here and work on it. See if you can make any sense out of it.”
He accepted the paper. “Now I feel like James Bond. Suave and intelligent, breaking all the codes while looking fabulous. What are you going to do?”
“I think the Erlking is the key to this,” I said. “And the Erlking is a faerie.”
He lifted his eyebrows. “Meaning?”
“When you want to know about faeries,” I said, “it’s best to ask a faerie. I’m going to call up my godmother and see if she knows anything.”
“From what you’ve told me, isn’t that kind of dangerous?”
“Very,” I said.
“You’re hurt. You should have some backup.”
I nodded. “Watch the fort,” I said. “Mouse.”
The big dog lifted his shaggy head from the floor, ears perked forward, serious eyes on me.
“Come on,” I told him. “We’re going for a ride.”
“Oh, Harry,” Thomas said.
“Yeah?”
“Before you go…would you mind if I, uh, helped Butters out by getting his polka contraption loaded up into your trunk?”
“What. You don’t like polka?”
Thomas’s expression looked strained. “Please, Harry. I like the little guy, but come on.”
I rubbed at my mouth with one hand to cover up the smile. “Sure. Probably safest for everyone that way.”
“Thank you,” he said, and collected the polka suit and brought it up the stairs behind me as I prepared to take a chance on a conversation with one of the more dangerous beings I knew.
Chapter
Twenty-one
Mouse and I took the Beetle out of Chicago proper, following the lake north out of town. For once I wished I had an automatic transmission. Driving stick with only one good hand and one good leg is not fun. In fact, it’s the next best thing to impossible, at least for me. I wound up using my wounded leg more than I should have, and the discomfort intensified. I thought about the painkillers in my pocket, and then blew them off. I needed to be sharp. When all of this was over, there would be time to muddle my head with codeine. So I drove, and swore under my breath at anything that made me change gears, while Mouse rode along in the passenger seat with his head usually sticking out the window.
By the time I was far enough from town to start calling out to my godmother, the sun had set, though the cloud-veiled western sky still glowed the color of campfire embers. I pulled off onto a side road that was made of old gravel and stubborn weeds that kept trying to grow up in the road’s smooth center. It led down to a little dead end where some kind of construction project never went through. It was a popular spot for local kids to hang out and imbibe illegal substances of one intensity or another, and there were empty beer cans and bottles scattered around in abundance.
Mouse and I left the car up on the road, and walked maybe fifty yards down through trees and heavy undergrowth to the shore of the lake. At one point on the shore, a little spit of land formed a promontory only ten or twelve inches higher than the surface of the water.
“Wait here,” I told Mouse, and the dog sat down at the end of the spit of land, watching me with alert eyes, his ears flicking around at all the little sounds. Then I walked out onto the spit to its end, and a cold wind off the lake swept around me, blowing my coat and threatening my balance. I grimaced and leaned on my staff, out at that point of land where earth and water and sky met one another, and focused my thoughts, blocking out the pain of my leg, my fears, my questions. I gathered together my will, then lifted my face to the wind and called out, quietly, “Leanansidhe. An it please thee, come hither and hold discourse with me.”
I sent my will, my magic coursing into the words, and they reverberated with power, echoing from the surface of the lake, repeating themselves in whispers in the swirling wind, vibrating the ground upon which I stood.
Then I waited. I could have repeated myself, but my godmother had certainly heard me. If she was going to come, she would. If she wasn’t, no amount of repetition was likely to change her mind. The wind blew colder and stronger, throwing cold droplets up from the lake and into my face. One gust of wind brought me the sound of an airliner overhead, and another the lonely whistle of a freight train. Distantly, somewhere on the lake, a bell rang out several times, a solemn sound that made me think of a funeral dirge. Beyond that, nothing stirred.
I waited. In time, the fire faded from the overcast sky, and only the darkest tones of purple were left on the western horizon behind me. Dammit. She wasn’t coming.
After I thought that but before I could actually turn around, there was a swirling in the waters near my feet, and a slow spiral of water spray spun up from the surface of the lake, a bizarre sight. The spray rolled up and away from a female form, beginning at the feet, bare and pale, and rolling up over a medieval-style gown of emerald green. The gown was belted with a woven silver rope, and a slightly curved, single-edged knife of some dark, glassy material hung at an angle through it.
When the spray rolled up over the woman’s face, I expected my godmother’s blazing wealth of copper and scarlet curls, her wide feline eyes of amber, her features that always made her seem smug and somewhat pleased with herself, in absence of the animation of any other emotion.
Instead I saw a long, pale throat, features of heart-stopping, cold beauty, canted eyes greener than any color to be found in the natural world, and long, silken hair of purest white, bound within a circlet of what looked lik
e rose vines surrounded in gleaming ice, beautiful and brittle and cruel.
Behind me, a deep-throated snarl burst forth from Mouse, back on the shore.
“Greetings, mortal,” said the faerie woman. Her voice shook water and earth and sky with subtle power. I felt it resonating through the elements around me as much as heard it.
My mouth went dry and my throat got tight. I leaned on my staff to help me balance as I cast a courtly bow in her direction. “Greetings, Queen Mab. I do beg your pardon. It was not my intention to disturb thee.”
My head shifted into panicked, quick thought. Queen Mab had come to me, and that absolutely could not be good. Mab, monarch of the Winter Court of the Sidhe, the Queen of Air and Darkness, was not a very nice person. In fact, she was one of the most feared beings of power you’d find short of archangels and ancient gods. I’d once used my wizard’s Sight to look upon Mab as she unveiled her true self in a working of power, and it had come perilously close to driving me insane.
Mab was not some paltry mortal being like Grevane or Cowl or the Corpsetaker. She was far older, far crueler, far more deadly than they could ever be.
And I owed her a favor. Two, to be exact.
She stared at me for a long and silent moment, and I didn’t look at her face. Then she let out a quiet laugh and said, “Disturb me? Hardly. I am here only to fulfill the duties I have been obliged to take upon myself. It is no fault of thine that this summons reached mine ears.”
I straightened up slowly and avoided her eyes. “I had expected my godmother to come.”
Mab smiled. Her teeth were small and white and perfect, her canines delicately sharp. “Alas. The Leanansidhe is tied up at the moment.”
I drew in a breath. My godmother was a powerful member of the Winter Court, but she couldn’t hold a candle to Mab. If Mab wanted to take Lea down, she certainly could do it—and for some reason the thought spurred on a protective instinct, something that made me irrationally angry. Yes, Lea was hardly a benevolent being in her own right. Yes, she’d tried to enslave me several times in the past several years. But for all of that, she was still my godmother, and the thought of something happening to her angered me. “For what reason have you detained her?”
“Because I do not tolerate challenges to my authority,” she said. One pale hand drifted to the hilt of the knife at her belt. “Certain events had convinced your godmother that she was no longer bound by my word and will. She is now learning otherwise.”
“What have you done to her?” I asked. Well. It didn’t sound like a question so much as a demand.
Mab laughed, and the sound of it came out silvery and smoother than honey. The laugh bounded around the waves and the earth and the winds, clashing against itself in a manner that made the hairs on my neck stand up and my heart race with a sudden apprehension as I felt an odd kind of pressure settle over me, as if I were closed into a small room. I gritted my teeth and waited the laugh out, trying not to show how harshly it had affected me. “She is bound,” Mab said. “She is in some discomfort. But she is in no danger from my hand. Once she acknowledges who rules Winter, she will be restored to her station. I can ill afford the loss of so potent a vassal.”
“I need to speak to her now,” I said.
“Of course,” Mab said. “Yet she languishes in the process of enlightenment. Thus am I here to fulfill her obligation to teach and guide you.”
I frowned. “You locked her away somewhere, but you’re keeping her promises?”
Something cold and haughty flickered through Mab’s eyes. “Promises must be kept,” she murmured, and the words made wave, wind, and stone tremble. “My vassal’s oaths and bargains are binding upon me, so long as I restrain her from fulfilling them.”
“Does that mean that you will help me?” I asked.
“It means that I will give you what she might give you,” Mab said, “and speak what knowledge she might have spoken to you were she here in flesh, rather than in proxy.” She tilted her head slowly to one side. “You know, wizard, that I may speak no word that is untrue. Thus is my word given to you.”
I eyed her warily. It was true that the high Sidhe could not speak words that were untrue—but that wasn’t the same thing as telling the truth. Most of the Sidhe I had met were past masters of the art of deception, speaking in allusions and riddles and inferences that would undermine the necessary honesty of their words so thoroughly that they might be much stronger lies than if they had simply spoken a direct falsehood. Trusting the word of one of the Sidhe was an enterprise best undertaken with extraordinary caution and exacting care. If I had any choice in the matter, I would avoid it.
But there was nothing I could do but forge ahead. I still had to find out more about what Sergeant Kemmler’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was doing in Chicago, and that meant taking the risk of speaking with my godmother. Mab was simply more of the same risk.
A lot more of it.
“I seek knowledge,” I said, “about the one known as the Erlking.”
Mab arched an eyebrow. “Him,” she said. “Yes. Your godmother knows some little of him. What would you know of him?”
“I want to know why all of Kemmler’s disciples are grabbing up all the copies of the White Council’s book about him.”
Nothing that I could imagine would truly rattle Mab’s composure, but that sentence apparently came close. Her expression froze, and with it the wind came to a sudden, dead halt. The waves of the shore abruptly stilled to a sheet of glass beneath her feet, dimly reflecting the glow of the city skyline in the distance and the last shreds of purple light in the leaden sky.
“Kemmler’s disciples,” she said. Her eyes were deeper than the lake she stood upon. “Could it be?”
“Could what be?” I asked.
“The Word,” she said. “The Word of Kemmler. Has it been found?”
“Um,” I said. “Sort of.”
Her delicate white brows rose. “Meaning what, pray tell?”
“Meaning that the book was found,” I said. “By a local thief. He tried to sell it to a man named Grevane.”
“Kemmler’s first student,” Mab said. “Did he acquire the book?”
“No,” I said. “The thief used mortal technology to conceal the book, in order to prevent Grevane from taking it from him without paying.”
“Grevane killed him,” Mab guessed.
“And how.”
“This mortal ferromancy—technology, you called it. Does it yet conceal the book?”
“Yeah.”
“Grevane yet seeks it?”
“Yeah. Him and at least two more. Cowl and the Corpsetaker.”
Mab lifted a pale hand and tapped a finger to rich, lovely lips the color of frozen mulberries. Her nails were colored with shining opalescence gorgeous to the eye and distracting as hell. I felt a little dizzy until I forced myself not to look at them. “Dangerous,” she mused. “You have fallen among deadly company, mortal. Even the Council fears them.”
“You don’t say.”
Mab narrowed her eyes, and a little smile graced her lips. “Impudent,” she said. “It’s sweet on you.”
“Gosh, that’s flattering,” I said. “But you haven’t told me a thing about why they might be interested in the Erlking.”
Mab pursed her lips. “The being you ask me about is to goblins as I am to the Sidhe. A ruler. A master of their kind. Devious, cunning, strong, and swift. He wields dominion over the spirits of fallen hunters.”
I frowned. “What kind of spirits?”
“The spirits of those who hunt,” Mab said. “The energy of the hunt. Of excitement, hunger, bloodlust. Betimes, the Erlking will call those spirits into the form of the great black hounds, and ride the winds and forests as the Wild Hunt. He carries great power with him as he does. Power that calls to the remnants of hunters now passed on from mortal life.”
“You’re talking about ghosts,” I said. “The spirit of hunters.”
“Indeed,” Mab said. “Shades that
lay in quiet rest, beyond the beck of the mortal pale, will rise up to the night and the stars at the sound of his horn, and join the Hunt.”
“Powerful shades,” I said quietly.
“Specters most potent,” Mab said, nodding, her eyes bright and almost merry as they watched me.
I leaned on my staff, trying to get as much weight as I could off of my injured leg, so that it would stop pounding enough to make me think. “So a gaggle of wizards whose stock in trade is enslaving the dead to their will is interested in a being whose presence calls up powerful spirits they couldn’t otherwise reach.” I followed the chain of logic from there. “There’s something in the book that tells them how to get his attention.”
“Darling child,” Mab said. “So clever for one so young.”
“So what is it?” I asked. “Which part of the book?”
“Your godmother,” she said, her smile growing wider, “has no idea.”
I ground my teeth together. “But you do?”
“I am the Queen of Air and Darkness, wizard. There is little I do not.”
“Will you tell me?”
She touched the tip of her tongue to her lips, as if savoring the taste of the words. “You should know us better than that by now, wizard. Nothing given by one of the Sidhe comes without a price.”
My foot hurt. I had to hop a little bit on my good leg when my balance wavered. “Great,” I muttered. “What is it you want?”
“You,” Mab said, folding her hands primly in front of her. “My offer of Knighthood yet stands open to you.”
“What’s wrong with the new guy?” I asked, “that you’d dump him for me?”
Mab showed me her teeth again. “I have not yet replaced my current Knight, treacherous though he is,” she purred.
“He’s still alive?” I asked.
“I suppose,” Mab said. “Though he very much wishes that he were not. I have taken the time to explain to him at length the error of his ways.”
Torture. She’d been torturing him in vengeance for his treachery for more than three years.