by Jim Butcher
I sipped at it, watching him. He didn’t make a production of it, but he checked the short-barreled shotgun he kept on a clip behind the bar, and put a pair of 1911s in unobtrusive spots behind the bar, so that no matter where he stood, one of the weapons would be within easy reach. He handled them like he knew exactly what he was doing.
I sipped at the ale and mused. I knew little of Mac’s background. He’d opened the tavern a few years before I’d moved to Chicago. No one I’d talked to knew where he’d been before that, or what he had done. I wasn’t surprised that he knew something about weapons. He’d always moved like someone who could handle himself. But since he wasn’t exactly a chatterbox, most of what I knew came from observation. I hadn’t the faintest idea of why or where he’d learned the business of violence.
I could respect that. I had run through a few bad patches that were just as well left behind and forgotten.
Mac looked up abruptly, and started polishing the bar near the shotgun’s clip. A second later the door opened, and a Warden of the White Council came in.
He was a tall man, six feet and then some, and built with the solidity of an aging soldier. His lank hair had more grey in it than I remembered, and was drawn back into a ponytail. His face was narrow, almost pinched, and in the absence of any other expression, he looked like he had just taken a big bite of alum-sprinkled lemon rind. The Warden wore the grey cloak of his office over black fatigues. He carried a carved staff in his right hand, and bore a long-bladed sword on his left hip.
That much I had expected.
What surprised me was how battered he looked.
The Warden’s cloak was ripped in several spots, and stained with what could have been mud, blood, and greenish motor oil. There were burn marks along the hem, and several raw, ragged holes in it that might have been the results of corrosive burns. His staff looked similarly nicked and stained—and the man himself looked like a boxer after a tough tenth round. He had bruises on one cheek. His nose had been broken sometime in the past several weeks. There was an ugly line of fresh, scarlet scar tissue running from his hairline to one eyebrow, and I could see white bandages through a hole in his jacket, over his left biceps.
For all of that, he came through the door like a man who knew he could clear out a bar full of marines if he needed to, and his eyes settled on me at once. His mouth twisted into an even more sour frown.
“Wizard Dresden,” he said quietly.
“Warden Morgan,” I responded. I figured Morgan would be along with any Wardens sent to Chicago. It was in his area of responsibility, and he didn’t like me. He’d spent a few years following me around, hoping to catch me performing black magic so that he could execute me. It hadn’t happened, and the Council had lifted my probation. I don’t think he had ever forgiven me for that. He blamed me for other things too, I think, but I had always figured they were just excuses. Some people don’t get along, ever. Morgan and I were two of them.
“McAnally,” Morgan said to the tavern keeper.
“Donald,” Mac replied.
Interesting. Hell, I’d been on the Council for years, and I hadn’t known Morgan’s first name.
“Dresden,” Morgan said. “Have you checked for veils?”
“If I told you I had, you’d check it yourself anyway, Morgan,” I said. “So I didn’t bother.”
“Of course you didn’t,” he said. I saw him frown a little in concentration, and then his eyes went a bit out of focus. He swept his gaze around the room, using his Sight, that odd, half-surreal sense that lets wizards observe the forces of magic moving around them. A wizard’s Sight cuts through all kinds of veils and spells meant to disguise and distract. It’s a potent ability, but it comes at a price. Anything you see through the Sight stays with you, never fading in your memory, always right there for recall, as if you’d just seen it. You can’t just forget something that you See. It’s there for life.
Morgan didn’t let his gaze linger too long near Mac or myself, and then he nodded to himself, and called out, “Clear.”
The door opened and Warden Luccio came in. She was a solid old matriarch of a woman, as tall as most men and built like someone who did plenty of physical labor. Her hair was a solid shade of iron grey, cropped into a neat, military cut. She too wore a Warden’s grey cloak, though she wore clothes suitable for hiking or camping beneath that: jeans, cotton, flannel, boots, all in muted tones of grey and brown. She too carried a staff and bore a sword at her side, though hers was a slender scimitar, light and elegant. Though not as worn as Morgan’s, her gear also showed evidence of recent action.
“Warden Luccio,” I said, and rose from the barstool to incline my head to her.
“Wizard,” she said quietly. I would have needed a high-speed camera to take in the details of her smile, but at least it was there. She nodded to me and then a little more deeply to Mac.
Behind her came three more Wardens. The first was a young man I vaguely recognized from a Council meeting a few years back. He had naturally tanned skin, dark hair, dark eyes, and sharp-edged, classically Spanish features. I remembered him in an apprentice’s brown robe back then, and covering his mouth with one hand to conceal a grin inspired by some of my dialogue with the Council’s bigwigs.
The brown robe was gone, and he looked like he had filled in a little since I’d first seen him, but good Lord, he was younger than Billy the werewolf. He wore a grey cloak that looked reasonably clean and not at all damaged, and black fatigues beneath that. A simple, straight sword hung from one hip, and was balanced on the other side by a holstered Glock and, I kid you not, three round fragmentation grenades. His staff was fairly new-looking, but there were enough dents and nicks in it to make me think he had kept things from hitting him with it, and he walked with a kind of arrogant confidence you see only in people who have not yet realized their own mortality.
“This is Warden Ramirez,” Luccio said. “Ramirez, Dresden.”
“How’s it going?” Ramirez said, flashing me a grin.
I shrugged. “You know. Pretty much the usual.”
Two more Wardens came in behind him, and they looked even younger and greener. Their cloaks and staves were immaculate, and they wore clothes and equipment so similar to Ramirez’s that they qualified as a uniform. Luccio introduced the blocky young man with distant, haunted eyes as Kowalski. The sweet-faced young Asian girl’s name was Yoshimo.
I limped over to Luccio and nodded at the tables Mac had set up. “I hope there’s room enough. When are the other Wardens arriving?”
Luccio fixed me with a quiet, weary gaze. Then she drew her hands from beneath her cloak and held out a folded bundle wrapped in brown paper, offering it to me. “Take it.”
I took the bundle and unwrapped it.
It was a folded grey cloak.
“Put it on,” said Luccio in her quiet, steady voice. “And then every available Warden will be here.”
Chapter
Thirty-one
I stared at Luccio for a second.
“That’s a joke,” I said. “Right?”
She gave me a brief, bitter smile. “Master McAnally,” she said to Mac. “I think we could use a round. Do you have anything decent to drink?”
Mac grunted and said, “Got a new dark.”
“Is it worth drinking?” Luccio asked. She sounded tired, but there was a teasing tone to her voice.
Mac glowered at her in answer, and she gave him a smile that was part challenge and part apology, and took a seat at one of the tables. She gestured at the table and said, “Wardens, please join me.”
Morgan took the seat to Luccio’s right, and the look he gave me could have burned holes in sheet metal. I did what I always did when Morgan did that: I eyed him right back, then dismissed him as if he weren’t even there. I pulled out the chair opposite Luccio and sat. The two youngest Wardens sat down, but Ramirez stayed standing until Mac had brought over bottles of his dark ale and left them on the table. He headed back over to the bar.
The young man drew a piece of chalk from his pocket, and quickly drew a heavy line on the floor all the way around the table. He finished the circle, then touched it lightly with the forefinger of his right hand and spoke a quiet word. I felt a flicker of his will as he released a tiny bit of power into the circle. The circle closed around us in a sudden, silent tension, raising a thin barrier around us that was almost entirely impregnable to magical forces. If anyone had been trying to spy on the meeting with magic, the circle would prevent it. If anyone had left some kind of listening device nearby, the magic-saturated air within the circle would be certain to fry it within a minute.
Ramirez nodded to himself and then reversed the last open chair at the table and straddled it, resting one arm on the back. Morgan slid him the last bottle of ale, and he took it in one hand.
“Absent friends,” Luccio murmured, holding up her bottle.
I could get behind that toast. The rest of us muttered, “Absent friends,” and we had a drink, and Luccio stared at her bottle for a moment.
I waited in the pregnant silence and then said, “So. Making me a Warden. That’s a joke, right?”
Luccio took a second, slower taste of the ale and then arched an eyebrow at the bottle.
Behind the bar again, Mac smiled.
“It’s no joke, Warden Dresden,” Luccio said.
“As much as we all would like it to be,” Morgan added.
Luccio gave him a look of very gentle reproof, and Morgan subsided into silence. “How much have you heard about recent events in the war?”
“Nothing in the past several days,” I said. “Not since my last check-in.”
She nodded. “I thought as much. The Red Court has begun a heavy offensive. This is the first time that they’ve concentrated their efforts on disrupting our communications. We suspect that a great many wizards never received word through our usual messengers.”
“Then they found weaknesses in the communications lines,” I said. “But they waited to exploit them until it would hurt us the most.”
Luccio nodded. “Precisely. The first attack came in Cairo, at our operations center there. Several Wardens were taken, including the senior commander of the region.”
“Alive?” I asked.
She nodded. “Yes. Which was an unacceptable threat.”
When vampires take you alive, it isn’t so that they can treat you to ice cream. That was one of the really nightmarish facets of the war with the Red Court. If the enemy got you, they could do worse than kill you.
They could make you one of their own.
If they managed to turn a Warden, especially one of the senior commanders, it would give them access to a treasury of knowledge and secrets—to say nothing of the fact that they would effectively gain, in many ways, a wizard of their own. Vampires didn’t use magic in the same way that mortal wizards did. They tapped into the same nauseating well of power that Kemmler and those like him used. But from what I understood of it, the skills carried over. A turned wizard would be a deadly threat to the Wardens, the Council, and mortals alike. We never talked about it, but there was a sort of silent understanding among wizards that we would never be taken alive. And an equally silent fear that we might be.
“You went after them,” I guessed.
Luccio nodded. “A major assault. Madrid, São Paolo, Acapulco, Athens. We struck at enemy strongholds there to acquire intelligence to the whereabouts of the prisoners. Our people were being held in Belize.” She waved a hand vaguely at Morgan.
“Our intelligence indicated the presence of the highest-ranking members of the Red Court, including the Red King himself. The Merlin and the rest of the Senior Council took the field with us,” Morgan said quietly.
That made me raise my brows. The Merlin, the leader of the Senior Council, was as defensive-minded as it was possible to be. He’d guided the White Council into the equivalent of a cold war with the Red Court, with everyone moving carefully and unwilling to commit, in the hopes that it would give the war time to settle away into negotiations and some kind of diplomatic resolution. An offensive action like a full assault from the Senior Council, the seven oldest and strongest wizards on the planet, had been long overdue.
“What changed the Merlin’s mind?” I asked quietly.
“Wizard McCoy,” Luccio said. “When our people were taken, he persuaded most of the Senior Council to take action, including Ancient Mai and the Gatekeeper.”
That made sense. My old mentor, Ebenezar McCoy, was a member of the Senior Council. He had a couple of longtime friends on the Council, but that didn’t give him a majority vote. If he wanted to get anything done, he had to talk someone from the Merlin’s bloc into casting their vote with him—either that, or convince the Gatekeeper, a wizard who habitually abstained from voting, to take a stand with him. If Ebenezar had convinced Ancient Mai and the Gatekeeper to vote with him in favor of action, the Merlin would have little choice but to move.
And just because the Merlin was a master of wards and defensive magic did not mean that he couldn’t kick some ass if he needed to. You don’t get to be the Merlin of the White Council by collecting bottle caps, and Arthur Langtry, the current Merlin, was generally considered to be the most powerful wizard on earth.
I had seen for myself what Ebenezar McCoy was capable of. A couple of years ago he had pulled an old Soviet satellite out of orbit and brought it down into the lap of Duke Ortega, the warlord of the Red Court. He’d killed a ton of vampires in doing it.
He’d also killed people. He’d taken the force of life and creation and used it to wipe out the lives of mortals—victims of the Red Court’s power. And it wasn’t the first time he’d done it. Ebenezar, I’d learned, held an office that did not officially exist—that of the White Council’s assassin. Known as the Blackstaff, he had a license to kill, as well as to break the other Laws of Magic when he deemed it necessary. When I learned that he was violating and undermining the same laws he’d taught me to obey, to believe in, it had wounded me so deeply that in some ways I was still bleeding.
Ebenezar had betrayed what I believed in. But that didn’t change the fact that the old man was the strongest wizard I’d ever seen in action. And he was the youngest and least powerful of the Senior Council.
“What happened?” I asked quietly.
“There was no evidence of the presence of the Red King or his entourage, but other than that the attack went as planned,” Morgan said. “We assaulted the vampires’ stronghold and took our people back with us.”
Luccio’s face twisted in sudden and bitter grief.
“It was a lure,” I said quietly. “Wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” she said quietly. “We moved out and took our wounded to the hospice in Sicily.”
“What happened?”
“We were betrayed,” she said, and her words carried more sharp edges than a sack of broken glass. “Someone within our ranks must have reported our position to the Red Court. They attacked us that night.”
“When was that?” I asked.
Luccio frowned, then glanced across the table at Ramirez.
“Three days ago, Zulu time,” Ramirez provided quietly.
“I’ve not slept,” Luccio said. “Between that and all the travel, I lose track.” She took another drink of ale and said, “The attack was vicious. They were coming for the Senior Council, and their sorcerers managed to cut us off from escaping into the Nevernever for nearly a day. We lost thirty-eight Wardens that day, in fighting all over Sicily.”
I sat there for a moment, stunned. Thirty-eight. Stars and stones, there were only about two hundred Wardens on the Council. Not every wizard had the kind of talent that made them dangerous in a face-to-face confrontation. Most of those who did were Wardens. In a single day, the Red Court had killed nearly 20 percent of our fighting force.
“They paid for it,” Morgan rumbled quietly. “But…they s
eemed almost mad to die in order to kill us. Driven. I saw four different death curses unleashed that day. I saw vampires climb over mounds of their own dead without so much as slowing down. We must have taken twenty of their warriors for every loss of our own.” He closed his eyes and his sour face was suddenly masked with very real and very human grief. “They kept coming.”
“We had many wounded,” Luccio said. “So many wounded. As soon as the Senior Council was able to open the ways into the Never-never, we retreated to the paths through Faerie. And we were pursued.”
I sat up straight. “What?”
Morgan nodded. “The Red Court followed us into the territory of the Sidhe,” he said.
“They had to know,” I said quietly. “They had to know that by pressing the attack in Faerie itself they would anger the Sidhe. They’ve just declared war on Summer and Winter alike.”
“Yes,” Morgan said in a flat voice. “But it didn’t stop them. They attacked us as we retreated. And…” He glanced at Luccio as if in appeal.
She gave him a firm look and said to me, “They had called demons to assist them.” She inhaled slowly. “Not simply beasts from the Nevernever. They had gone to the Netherworld. They had called Outsiders.”
I took a longer drink of Mac’s ale. Outsiders. Demons were bad enough, but they were at least something I was fairly familiar with. The reaches of the Nevernever, the world of spirit and magic that surrounds the mortal world, are filled with all kinds of beings. Most of them really don’t give a damn about mortal affairs, and we are nothing but a remote and unimportant curiosity to them. When beings of the spirit world are interested in mortal business, it’s for a good reason. The ones who like to eat us, hurt us, or generally terrify us are what wizards commonly refer to as demons, as a general term. They’re bad enough.
Outsiders, though, were so rarely spoken of that they were all but a rumor. I wasn’t really clear on all of the details, but the Outsiders had been the servants and foot soldiers of the Old Ones, an ancient race of demons or gods who had once ruled the mortal world, but who had apparently been cast out and locked away from our reality.