by Jim Butcher
I had been scared. So scared. I was sixteen.
It was the same smell, and that scent had the power to animate the corpses of some of my darkest memories and bring them lurching back into the front of my thoughts. Psychological necromancy.
“Brains,” I moaned to myself, drawing the word out.
If you can’t stop the bad thoughts from coming to visit, at least you can make fun of them while they’re hanging around.
In a stroke of improbable logic, the War Room was located between the central chambers of the Senior Council and the barracks rooms of the Wardens, which included a small kitchen. The smell of baking bread cut through the musty dampness of the tunnel, and I felt my steps quickening.
I passed the barracks, which would doubtless be empty, for the most part. Most of the Wardens would be out hunting Morgan, as evidenced by the skeleton guard I’d seen at Chandler’s post. I took the next left, nodded to the very young Warden on guard, opened a door, and passed into the War Room of the White Council.
It was a spacious vault, about a hundred feet square, but the heavy arches and pillars that supported the ceiling took away a lot of that room. Illuminating crystals glowed more brightly here, to make reading easier. Bulletin boards on rolling frames took up spaces between pillars, and were covered by maps and pins and tiny notes. Most of them had one or more chalkboards next to them, which were covered in diagrams, cryptic, brief notation, and cruder maps. Completely ordinary office furniture occupied the back half of the vault, broken up into cubicles.
Typewriters clacked and dinged. Men and women of the administrative staff, wizards all, moved back and forth through the room, speaking quietly, writing, typing, and filing. A row of counters on the front wall of the room supported coffeepots warmed by propane flames, and several well-worn couches and chairs rested nearby.
Half a dozen veteran Wardens lay sprawled on couches napping, sat in chairs reading books, or played chess with an old set upon a coffee table. Their staves and cloaks were all at hand, ready to be taken up at an instant’s notice. They were dangerous, hard men and women, the Old Guard, survivors of the deadly days of the early Vampire War. I wouldn’t have wanted to cross any of them.
Sitting in a chair slightly apart from them, staring at the flames crackling in a rough stone fireplace, sat my old mentor, Ebenezar McCoy. He held a cup of coffee in his thick, work-scarred fingers. A lot of the more senior wizards in the Council had a sense of propriety they took way too seriously, always dressed to the nines, always immaculate and proper. Ebenezar wore an old pair of denim overalls with a flannel shirt and leather work boots that could have been thirty or forty years old. His silver hair, what he had left of it, was in disarray, as if he’d just woken from a restless sleep. He was aging, even by wizard standards, but his shoulders were still wide, and the muscles in his forearms were taut and visible beneath age-spotted skin. He stared at the fire through wire-rimmed spectacles, his dark eyes unfocused, one foot slowly tapping the floor.
I leaned my staff against a handy wall, got myself a cup of coffee, and settled down in the chair beside Ebenezar’s. I sipped coffee, let the warmth of the fire drive some of the wet chill out of my bones, and waited.
“They always have good coffee here,” Ebenezar said a few moments later.
“And they don’t call it funny names,” I said. “It’s just coffee. Not frappalattegrandechino.”
Ebenezar snorted and sipped from his cup. “Nice trip in?”
“Got tripped up by someone’s thugs on the Winter trail.”
He grimaced. “Aye. We’ve had our people harassed several times, the past few months. How are you, Hoss?”
“Uninformed, sir,” I said.
He eyed me obliquely. “Mmmm. I did as I thought best, boy. I won’t apologize for it.”
“Don’t expect you to,” I said.
He nodded. “What are you doing here?”
“What do you think?”
He shook his head. “I won’t take you on the strike team, Hoss.”
“You think I can’t pull my weight?”
He turned his eyes to me. “You have too much history with Morgan. This has got to be dispassionate, and you’re just about the least dispassionate person I know.”
I grunted. “You’re sure it was Morgan who did LaFortier?”
His eyes returned to the fire. “I would never have expected it. But too many things are in place.”
“No chance it’s a frame?”
Ebenezar blinked and shot me a look. “Why do you ask?”
“Because if the ass is finally getting his comeuppance, I want to make sure it’s on the level,” I said.
He nodded a couple of times. Then he said, “I don’t see how it could have been done. It looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, odds are it’s a damn duck. Occam’s razor, Hoss.”
“Someone could have gotten into his head,” I said.
“At his age?” Ebenezar asked. “Ain’t likely.”
I frowned. “What do you mean?”
“As a mind grows older, it gets established,” he said, “more set in its ways. Like a willow tree. Supple when it’s young, but gets more brittle as it ages. Once you’ve been around a century or so, it generally ain’t possible to bend a mind without breaking it.”
“Generally?”
“You can’t push it that far,” Ebenezar said. “Push a loyal man into betraying everything he believes in? You’d drive him insane before you forced him into that. Which means that Morgan made a choice.”
“If he did it.” I shook my head. “I just keep asking myself who profits most if we axe Morgan ourselves.”
Ebenezar grimaced. “It’s ugly all the way around,” he said, “but there it is. I reckon you ’gazed him, Hoss, but it ain’t a lie detector. You know that, too.”
I fell silent for a while and sipped coffee. Then I asked, “Just curious. Who holds the sword when you catch him? It’s usually Morgan who does the head chopping.”
“Captain Luccio, I reckon,” Ebenezar said. “Or someone she appoints. But she ain’t the kind to foist something like that off on a subordinate.”
I got treated to the mental image of Anastasia decapitating her old apprentice. Then of me, taking Molly’s head. I shuddered. “That sucks.”
Ebenezar kept staring at the fire, and his eyes seemed to sink into his head, as if he had aged twenty years right in front of me. “Aye.”
The door to the War Room opened and a slender, reedy little wizard in a tan tweed suit entered, lugging a large portfolio. His short white hair was curled tightly against his head and his fingers were stained with ink. There was a pencil tucked behind one ear, and a fountain pen behind the other. He stopped and peered around the room for a moment, spotted Ebenezar, and bustled right on over.
“Pardon, Wizard McCoy,” he said. “If you have a moment, I need you to sign off on a few papers.”
Ebenezar put his coffee on the floor and accepted a manila folder from the little guy, along with the fountain pen. “What this time, Peabody?”
“First, power of attorney for the office in Jakarta to purchase the building for the new safe house,” Wizard Peabody said, opening the folder and turning a page. Ebenezar scanned it, then signed it. Peabody turned more pages. “Very good. Then an approval on the revision of wages for Wardens—initial there, please, thank you. And the last one is approval for ensuring Wizard LaFortier’s holdings are transferred to his heirs.”
“Only three?” Ebenezar asked.
“The others are eyes-only, sir.”
Ebenezar sighed. “I’ll drop by my office when I’m free to sign them.”
“Sooner is better, sir,” Peabody said. He blinked and seemed to notice me for the first time. “Ah. Warden Dresden. What brings you here?”
“I thought I’d come see if someone wanted help taking Morgan down,” I drawled.
Peabody gulped. “I . . . see.”
“Has Injun Joe found anything?” Ebenezar asked.<
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Peabody’s voice became laced with diffident disapproval as he answered. “Wizard Listens-to-Wind is deep in preparations for investigative divination, sir.”
“So, no,” I said.
Peabody sniffed. “Not yet. Between him and the Merlin, I’m sure they’ll turn up precisely how Warden Morgan managed to bypass Senior Council security.” He glanced at me and said, in a perfectly polite tone, “They are both wizards of considerable experience and skill, after all.”
I glowered at Peabody, but I couldn’t think of a good dig before he had accepted the papers and pen back from Ebenezar. Peabody nodded to him and said, “Thank you, sir.”
Ebenezar nodded absently as he picked up his coffee cup, and Peabody bustled out again.
“Paper-pushing twit,” I muttered under my breath.
“Invaluable paper-pushing twit,” Ebenezar corrected me. “What he does isn’t dramatic, but his organizational skills have been a critical asset since the outbreak of the war.”
I snorted. “Bureaucromancer.”
Ebenezar smiled faintly as he finished his cup, the first couple of fingertips of his right hand stained with blue ink. Then he rose and stretched, drawing several faint popping sounds from his joints. “Can’t fight a war without clerks, Hoss.”
I stared down at my half cup of coffee. “Sir,” I said quietly. “Speaking hypothetically. What if Morgan is innocent?”
He frowned down at me for a long moment. “I thought you wanted a piece of him.”
“I’ve got this weird tic where I don’t want to watch wrongly accused men beheaded.”
“Well, naturally you do. But, Hoss, you’ve got to underst—” Ebenezar froze abruptly and his eyes widened. They went distant with thought for a moment, and I could all but hear gears turning in his head.
His eyes snapped back to mine and he drew in a slow breath, speaking in a murmur. “So that’s it. You’re sure?”
I nodded my head once.
“Hell’s bells,” the old man sighed. “You’d best start asking your questions a lot more careful than that, Hoss.” He lowered his chin and looked at me over the rims of his spectacles. “Two heads fall as fast as one. You understand?”
I nodded slowly. “Yeah.”
“Don’t know what I can do for you,” he said. “I’ve got my foot nailed to the floor here until Morgan’s located.”
“Assuming it’s not a duck,” I said, “where do I start looking?”
He pursed his lips for a moment. Then he nodded slowly and said, “Injun Joe.”
Chapter Fifteen
The Senior Council members, as it turned out, do not live like paupers.
After I passed through still more security checkpoints, the stone hallway yielded to a hall the size of a ballroom that looked like something out of Versailles. A white marble floor with swirls of gold in it was matched in color to elegant white marble columns. A waterfall fell from the far wall, into a pool around which grew a plethora of plants, from grass to roses to small trees, forming a surprisingly complex little garden. The faint sound of wind chimes drifted through the air, and the golden light that poured down from crystals in the ceiling was indistinguishable from sunlight. Birds sang in the garden, and I saw the quick, darting black shape of a nightingale slalom between the pillars and settle in one of the trees.
A number of expensive, comfortable-looking sets of furniture were spaced in and near the garden, like the sets you sometimes see at the pricier hotels. A small table against one wall was covered with an eclectic buffet of foods, everything from cold cuts to what looked like the sautéed tentacles of an octopus, and a wet bar stood next to it, ready to protect the Senior Council members from the looming threat of dehydration.
A balcony ran around the entire chamber, ten feet up, and doors opened onto the Senior Council members’ private chambers. I paced through the enormous, grandiose space of the Ostentatiatory to a set of stairs that swept grandly up one wall. I looked around until I spotted which door had a pair of temple-dog statues standing guard along with a sleepy-looking young man in a Warden’s cape and a walking cast. I walked around the balcony and waved a hand at him.
I was just about to speak when both temple-dog constructs abruptly moved, turning their heads toward me with a grating sound of stone sliding against stone.
I stopped in my tracks, and held my hands up a little. “Nice doggy.”
The young Warden peered at me and said something in a language I didn’t recognize. He looked like someone from eastern Asia, though I couldn’t have guessed at his nation of origin. He stared at me for a second, and I recognized him abruptly as one of the young men on Ancient Mai’s personal staff. The last time I’d seen him, he’d been frozen half to death, trying to bear a message to Queen Mab. Now a broken ankle had presumably kept him from joining the search for Morgan.
Some people are just born lucky, I guess.
“Good evening,” I said to him, in Latin, the official tongue of the White Council. “How are you?”
Lucky stared at me for another moment before he said, “We are in Scotland. It is morning, sir.”
Right. My half hour walk had taken me six time zones ahead. “I need to speak with Wizard Listens-to-Wind.”
“He is occupied,” Lucky told me. “He is not to be disturbed.”
“Wizard McCoy sent me to speak to him,” I countered. “He felt it was important.”
Lucky narrowed his eyes until they were almost closed. Then he said, “Wait here, please. Do not move.”
The temple dogs continued staring at me. Okay, I knew they weren’t really staring. They were just rock. But for essentially mindless constructs, they had an intense gaze.
“That will not be a problem,” I told him.
He nodded and vanished through the door. I waited for ten uncomfortable minutes before he returned, touched each dog lightly on the head, and nodded to me. “Go in.”
I took a wary step, watching the constructs, but they didn’t react. I nodded and went on by them, trying not to look like a nervous cat as I passed from the Ostentatiatory into LaFortier’s chambers.
The first room I came to was a study, or an office, or possibly a curio shop. There was a massive desk carved out of some kind of unstained wood, though use and age had darkened the front edge, the handles of the drawers, and the area immediately in front of the modern office chair. A blotter lay precisely centered on the desk, with a set of four matching pens laid in a neat row. Shelves groaned with books, drums, masks, pelts, old weaponry, and dozens of other tokens that looked as though they came from exotic lands. The wall spaces between the shelves were occupied by shields fronted with two crossed weapons—a Norman kite shield with crossed broadswords, a Zulu buffalo-hide shield with crossed assegais, a Persian round shield with a long spike in its center with crossed scimitars, and many others. I knew museums that would declare Mardi Gras in the galleries if they could get their hands on a collection half that rich and varied.
A door at the far end of the study led into what was evidently a bedroom. I could see a dresser and the foot of a covered bed approximately the size of a railroad car.
I could also see red-black droplets of blood on the walls.
“Come on, Harry Dresden,” called a quiet, weathered voice from the bedroom. “We’re at a stopping point and waiting on you.”
I walked into the bedroom and found myself standing in a crime scene.
The stench hit me first. LaFortier had been dead for days, and the second I crossed the threshold into the room, the odor of decay and death flooded my nose and mouth. He lay on the floor near the bed. Blood was sprinkled everywhere. His throat gaped wide-open, and he was covered in a black-brown crust of dried blood. There were defensive wounds on his hands, miniature versions of the slash on his throat. There might have been stab wounds on his torso, under the mess, but I couldn’t be sure.
I closed my eyes for a second, swallowed down my urge to throw up, and looked around the rest of the room.
&
nbsp; A perfect circle of gold paint had been inscribed on the floor around the body, with white candles burning at five equidistant points. Incense burned at five more points halfway between the candles, and take it from me—the scent of sandalwood doesn’t complement that of a rotting corpse. It just makes it more unpleasant.
I stood staring down at LaFortier. He had been a bald man, a little over average height, and cadaverously skinny. He didn’t look skinny now. The corpse had begun to bloat. The front of his shirt was stretched tight against its buttons. His back was arched and his hands had locked into claws. His teeth were bared in a grimace.
“He died hard,” said the weathered voice, and “Injun Joe” Listens-to-Wind stepped out of a doorway that led to a bathroom, drying his hands on a towel. His long hair was grey-white, with a few threads of black in it. His leathery skin was the ruddy bronze of a Native American complexion exposed to plenty of sunshine, and his eyes were dark and glittering beneath white brows. He wore faded blue jeans, moccasin boots, and an old Aerosmith T-shirt. A fringed leather bag hung from a belt that ran slantwise across his body, and a smaller, similar bag hung from a thong around his neck. “Hello, Harry Dresden.”
I bowed my head to him respectfully. Injun Joe was generally regarded as the most skilled healer on the White Council, and maybe in the world. He had earned doctoral degrees in medicine from twenty universities over the years, and he went back to school every decade or two to help him stay current with modern practice. “Went down fighting,” I agreed, nodding to LaFortier.
Injun Joe studied the body for a moment, his eyes sad. Then he said, “I’d rather go in my sleep, I think.” He glanced back at me. “What about you?”
“I want to be stepped on by an elephant while having sex with identical triplet cheerleaders,” I said.
He gave me a grin that briefly stripped a century or two of care and worry from his face. “I’ve known a lot of kids who wanted to live forever.” The smile faded as he looked back to the dead man. “Maybe someday that will happen. But maybe not. Dying is part of being alive.”