by Jim Butcher
There was a specific Law of Magic against contacting them—Thou Shalt Not Open the Outer Gates. No one wanted to be the one suddenly suspected of opening ways for the Outsiders to enter the mortal world. The Wardens absolutely did not play around with violations of the Laws of Magic. Their entire purpose in life was to protect the Council—first from violators of the seven Laws, and then from everyone else.
I eyed the folded grey cloak on the table in front of me.
“I thought only mortal magic could call up Outsiders,” I said quietly.
Luccio said quietly, “You are correct.”
My stomach lurched a little. Someone had told the Red Court where to find the Council. Someone had blocked off their escape route to the Nevernever so strongly that the most powerful wizards on the planet had required a full day to open them again. And someone had begun calling up Outsiders in numbers, sending them to attack the White Council.
The Council is not what it was, Cowl had said. It has rotted from the inside. It will fall. Soon.
“The Wardens fell back to fight a holding action against the Red Court so that our wounded could escape to safety,” Luccio reported, her crisp voice at odds with her weary eyes. “That was when they loosed the Outsiders upon us. We lost another twenty-three Wardens in the first moments of combat, and many more were wounded.” There was silence while she took a long pull from her bottle, emptying it, then setting it down sharply on the table, anger flickering in her eyes. “If Senior Council members McCoy and Liberty had not come to our aid, we might have all died there. Even with them, we managed to hold them only long enough for the Gatekeeper and the Merlin to raise a ward behind us, to give us time to escape.”
“A ward?” I blurted. “Are you telling me that they stonewalled an entire army of vampires and demons? With one ward?”
“You don’t get to be Merlin of the White Council by collecting bottle caps,” Ramirez said, his voice dry.
I glanced aside at Ramirez. He grinned at me and swigged beer.
“McCoy was injured,” Luccio continued.
Ramirez snorted. “Who wasn’t?”
Luccio snapped, “Carlos.”
He lifted a hand in surrender and settled back onto his chair again, but his grin never faded.
“There were many injuries,” Luccio continued. “But as the hospice in Sicily had been taken, we diverted the worst cases to a hospital we control in the Congo.” She stared at her bottle for a moment. Her mouth opened, and then she closed it again. She closed her eyes.
Morgan frowned at her. Then he put a hand on Luccio’s shoulder, looked at me, and said, “The vampires knew.”
I got a sick, twisting feeling in my stomach. “Oh, God.”
“It was daylight there,” Morgan said. “And the place was a fortress of the Merlin’s wards. There was no way for the vampires to breach it from the Nevernever, and nothing short of a demon lord could have broken through them.” His mouth twisted, and his eyes glittered with rage and hate. “They sent mortals against us. Against men and women lying injured, unconscious, helpless in their beds.” The anger in his voice seemed to strangle him for a moment.
“But…” I said. “Look, I know what it’s like going up against mortals you don’t want to kill. It’s difficult, but they can be stopped. Fought. Bullets and explosives can be defended against.”
“Which is why they used gas,” Ramirez said quietly, stepping in where Morgan’s and Luccio’s voices had failed. His own tone was serious. His grin had vanished. “A nerve agent, probably sarin. They deployed it against the entire hospital, the people we had protecting it, and six square blocks of city around it.” He put his own bottle down and said, “No one survived.”
“My God…” I whispered.
There was dead silence.
“Ebenezar?” I asked in a whisper. “You said he was wounded. Was he…”
Ramirez shook his head. “Stubborn old bastard wouldn’t go to the hospital,” the young Warden said. “He went with one of the teams staging a counteroffensive with the Fellowship of Saint Giles.”
“Thousands of innocent mortals died,” Luccio said, and there was a slow, low snarl in her voice. She kept it tightly leashed and under control, but I heard it. I recognized it, and I knew what it was like to feel it permeating my words. “Women. Children. Thousands. And today I buried one hundred and forty-three Wardens.”
I sat there, stunned.
In a single, vicious stroke, the Red Court had very nearly destroyed the White Council.
“They have crossed every line,” Luccio said, her voice quiet and precise. “Violated every principle of war of our world and the mortal world alike. Madness. They have gone mad.”
“They’ve committed suicide,” I said quietly. “They don’t have a prayer against the Council and the Faerie Courts alike.”
“The Sidhe were taken by surprise,” Morgan rumbled. “They aren’t prepared for a fight. And we’re holding on by our fingernails. We’ve got less than fifty Wardens capable of combat. Without our communications network in order, members of the Council have been attacked individually and by surprise. We don’t know how many more wizards have died.”
“And it gets even better,” Ramirez said. “Agents of the Red Court are haunting the ways through Faerie. We were attacked on the way here, twice.”
“Our priority,” Luccio said, voice crisp, “is to consolidate our forces and to draw upon every available resource to restore the Wardens as a fighting force. We must draw the members of the Council together and make sure that they are protected. We’re reorganizing our security.” She shook her head. “And frankly, we must protect the lives of the Senior Council. So long as they are concealed from the enemy and still able to take action, they are a dangerous force. Together they wield more power than any hundred members of the Council, and it can be concentrated with deadly effect, as the Merlin showed in the Nevernever. So long as they stand ready to strike, the enemy cannot openly unveil his full strength.”
“More important,” Morgan growled, “the mortal wizards who betrayed us, whoever they are, fear the Senior Council. That is why their first move was an attempt to destroy them.”
Luccio nodded. “If we can hold on until the Faerie Courts mobilize for action, we can recover from this attack. Which brings us to today,” Luccio said, and studied me, tired and frank. “Every other Warden able to fight is currently either engaged against the enemy or safeguarding the Senior Council. Our lines of support and communication are tenuous.” She gestured at those seated at the table. “This is every resource the White Council has to spare.”
I looked at the weary captain of the Wardens. At the battered Morgan. At Ramirez, who had reclaimed his cocky smile, and at Yoshimo and Kowalski, untried, quiet, and frightened.
“Warden Luccio,” I said. “May I speak to you privately?”
Morgan scowled and said in a hot voice, “Anything you have to say to her you can say to all—”
Luccio put her hand on Morgan’s arm, a gentle gesture, but it cut him off. “Morgan. Perhaps you would be so kind as to get me another bottle. And I’m sure McAnally would be willing to provide us all with some dinner.”
Morgan stared at her for a second, then at me. Then he rose, smudged the chalk circle with a boot, and broke the circle around the table, releasing the buzzing tension from the air.
“Come on, kids,” Ramirez told the other two younger wardens, rising. “We have to go sit with Uncle Morgan while the other adults have a serious talk.” He put a hand on my shoulder on the way past and squeezed. “Hey, bartender! Are those onion rings I smell?”
I waited until they had all settled down at the far end of the bar and Mac began to bring them some food. Then I turned to Luccio and said, “I can’t be a Warden.”
She studied me for a second and then asked, in a very precise, very polite voice, “And why not?”
“Because you people have been threatening to kill me for doing something I didn’t do since I was sixteen years
old,” I said. “You’re all convinced I’m some sort of hideous threat, and every time you get the chance you try to make my life miserable.”
Luccio listened attentively and then said, “Yes. And?”
“And?” I said. “I’ve spent my entire adult life with the Wardens looking over my shoulder waiting for a chance to accuse me of things I didn’t do, and trying to set me up and entrap me when you never found me doing anything.”
Luccio’s eyebrows shot up. “What?”
“Don’t give me that,” I said. “You know damned well that Morgan tried to provoke me into attacking him just before we got the treaty with Winter, so he and the Merlin would have an excuse to throw me to the vampires.”
Luccio’s eyes widened, and her voice came out harder. “What?” She shot a look at Morgan, and then back at me. “Are you telling me the truth?”
There was some kind of cadence to the question that her words didn’t usually have, and on pure instinct I reached out with my senses. I could feel a light tension in the air, humming like the space between the tines of a tuning fork.
“Yes,” I told her. The humming chime continued unabated. “I’m telling you the truth.”
She stared at me for a long second and then settled back onto her chair. The humming tension faded. She folded her hands on the table, frowning down at them. “Then…There were rumors. Of how Morgan behaved around you. But I thought that they were only that.”
“They weren’t,” I said. “Morgan has threatened and persecuted me every time he got the chance.” I clenched my right hand into a fist. “And I have done nothing. I won’t become a part of that, Warden Luccio. So keep the cape. I wouldn’t polish my car with it.”
She regarded her folded hands, eyes narrow. “Dresden,” she said quietly. “The White Council is at war. Would you simply abandon your own people to the mercies of the Red Court? Would you stand aside and let Kemmler’s disciples have their way?”
“Of course not,” I said. “And I never said I wouldn’t fight. But I won’t be wearing this.” I shoved the cloak across the table. “Keep it.”
She shoved it back to the table before me. “Put it on.”
“Thank you, no.”
“Dresden,” Luccio said, and her voice was calm and agate-hard. “It is not a request.”
“I don’t respond well to threats,” I said.
“Then respond to reality,” she snapped. “Dresden, the Wardens are all but shattered. We need every battle-capable wizard we can recruit, train, or conscript.”
“A lot of wizards can fight,” I growled.
“And they aren’t Harry Dresden,” she said. “You idiot. Don’t you know what I am offering you?”
“Yeah. The chance to hunt down teenage kids who were never told the Laws of Magic and execute them for breaking them. The chance to badger and intimidate and interrogate anyone who doesn’t suit me. Neither of which I want anything to do with.”
“Ebenezar said you were stubborn, but not that you were a fool. The Council has been betrayed, Dresden. And you are the most infamous wizard in it. There are many who have spoken out against you. Many who say that you began the war with the Red Court intentionally so that you could create an opportunity to bring about the fall of the Council.”
I burst out in bitter laughter. “Me? That’s insane. For crying out loud, I can’t even balance my stupid checkbook!”
Luccio’s eyes softened a little, and she sighed. “I believe you.” She shook her head. “But you have a reputation, and the members of the Council will be badly unsettled by this loss. Their fear could easily turn upon you. That is why you are going to join the Wardens.”
I scowled. “I don’t get it.”
“It is time to set our past differences aside. If you wear the cloak of a Warden and step in to fight when the Council is in its hour of need, it will make our people look at you differently.”
I took a deep breath. “Oh. Vader syndrome.”
“Excuse me?”
“Vader syndrome,” I said. “There’s no ally so impressive, encouraging, and well loved as an ally who was an enemy that made you shake in your boots a couple of minutes ago.”
“There’s more to it than that,” Luccio said. “I think that you do not realize your own reputation. You have overcome more enemies and battled more evils than most wizards a century your senior. And times are changing. There are more young wizards attaining membership to the Council than ever before—like Ramirez and his companions, there. To them, you are a symbol of defiance to the conservative elements of the Council, and a hero who will risk his life when his principles demand it.”
“I am?”
“You are,” Luccio said. “I can’t say that I approve of it. But right now the Council will need every scrap of courage and faith we can muster. Your presence and support in the face of a greater danger will appease your detractors, and the presence of a wizard who has experience in battle will encourage the younger members of the Council.” She grimaced. “Put simply, Dresden, we need you. And you need us.”
I rubbed at my eyes for a moment. Then I said, “Let’s say I do sign on. I’m willing to wear the cloak. I’m willing to fight for as long as the war is on. But I won’t move away from Chicago. There are people here who depend on me.” I glowered. “And I won’t bow my head to Morgan. I don’t want him within a hundred miles of my town.”
Luccio rubbed at her jaw, and then nodded slowly, her eyes thoughtful. “I have to reassign Morgan in any case.” She nodded again, more sharply. “Then I’m conscripting you into the Wardens as a regional commander.”
I blinked.
“You’ll be in charge of security and operations in this region, and coordinate with the other three American regional commanders.”
“Uh,” I said. “What does that mean?”
“That it will be your job to protect mortals in this area. To be vigilant against supernatural threats in your region, and represent the Council in matters of diplomacy. To aid and assist other wizards who come to you for aid and protection, and, when required, to strike out at the enemies of the Council, such as the Red Court and their allies.”
I frowned. “Uh, I pretty much do that anyway.”
Luccio’s face broke into the first genuinely warm smile I’d ever seen on her, the care lines vanishing, replaced with crow’s-feet at the corners of her eyes. “So now you’ll do it in a grey cloak.” Her expression sobered. “You’re a fighter, Dresden. If the White Council is to survive, we need more like you.”
She pushed away from the table and walked over to the bar, carrying our empty bottles with her.
When she came back, I had just finished getting the cloak pin settled and draping the heavy, soft grey fabric around my shoulders. She stopped in front of me and looked me up and down for a moment. Ramirez glanced at me, and his grin widened. Morgan looked, and from his expression you would think someone had just shoved a knife into his testicles. Mac’s brow furrowed, and he studied me in the cloak, his lips quietly pursed.
“Thank you,” Luccio said quietly, and offered me an ale.
I accepted it with a nod. We touched bottles and took a drink.
“Very well then, Commander,” Luccio said, her tone turning brisk and businesslike. “This is your territory, and you have the most recent intelligence on Kemmler’s disciples. What is our next step?”
I shoved my hair back from my eyes and said, “Okay, Warden Lucc—uh, Captain Luccio. Let’s sit down and get to work. It’s getting dark, and we don’t have much time.”
Chapter
Thirty-two
When I walked through the door of Murphy’s house, it was raining and I was still wearing the grey cloak. I limped into the kitchen, where Thomas and Butters and Bob were sitting at a table with a bunch of candles, paper, pencils, and empty cans of Coors.
Thomas’s jaw dropped open. “Holy crap,” he said.
Butters blinked at Thomas and then at me. “Uh. What?”
“Harry!” B
ob said, orange eye lights glowing brightly. “You stole a Warden’s cloak?”
I scowled at them and took the cloak off. It dripped all over the kitchen floor. “I didn’t steal it.” Mouse came padding into the room, tail wagging, and I rubbed briefly at his ears.
“Oh,” Bob said. “So you took it off a body?”
“No,” I said, annoyed, and settled onto a chair at the table. “I got drafted.”
“Holy crap,” Thomas said again.
“I don’t get it,” Butters said.
“Harry’s joined the wizard secret police!” Bob burbled. “He gets to convict on suspicion and take justice into his own hands! How cool is that!”
Thomas looked at me steadily and then at the door behind me. Then back to me.
“I’m alone,” I said quietly. “Relax.”
He nodded. “What happened?”
“A lot,” I said. “There isn’t time to cover it all now. But the Wardens are in town, and I’m not so worried about them crawling all over and finding out everyone’s secrets.”
“Why not?” Thomas asked.
“Because at the moment all five of them are at a hotel downtown, getting showers and changing bandages while I try to come up with more information about the heirs of Kemmler.”
Thomas blinked slowly. “All five…and they have wounded?”
I nodded, my lips pressed hard together.
“Wow,” Thomas said quietly. “How bad is it?”
“They drafted me,” I said.
“That’s bad, all right,” Bob said cheerfully.
I looked at the scattered papers and books on the table. “Tell me you guys came up with something.”
Butters blinked a few times and then started fumbling at the papers on the table, peering at them in the candlelight. “Uh, well, there’s good news and bad news.”
“Bad first,” I said. “I’m going to need the pick-me-up afterward.”
“We’ve got nothing on those numbers,” Butters said. “I mean, they aren’t a code. They’re too short. They could be an address or an account number, but none of the banks we could get on the phone use that number of digits.” He coughed apologetically. “If I could have gotten on the Net I could have gotten you a lot more, but…” He gestured uselessly around the room. “We couldn’t get one call in fifty to go through, and at most of the places we called, no one answered. And in the past hour the phones have gone out altogether.”