by Jim Butcher
I opened the door onto a quiet buzz of activity. In times of supernatural crisis, McAnally's became a sort of functional headquarters for gossip and congregation. I understood why. The tavern was old, lit by a dozen candles and kerosene lamps, and smelled of wood smoke and the steaks Mac cooked for his heavenly steak sandwiches. There was a sense of security and permanence to the place. Thirteen wooden pillars, each one hand-carved with all manner of supernatural scenes and creatures, held up the low ceiling. Ceiling fans that normally turned in lazy circles were not moving now, thanks to the power outage, but the actual temperature of the bar was unchanged. There were thirteen tables scattered out irregularly around the room, and thirteen stools at the long bar.
The whole layout of the place was meant to disperse and divert dangerous or destructive energies that might accompany any grouchy wizard types into the tavern-nothing major. It was just a kind of well-planned feng shui that cut down on the number of accidents bad-tempered practitioners of the arts might inadvertently inspire. But that dispersal of energies did a little something to ward off larger magical forces as well. It wasn't going to protect the place from a concentrated magical attack: McAnally's wasn't a bomb shelter. It was more like a big beach umbrella, and when I came through the door I felt a sudden relief of pressure I hadn't realized had built up. The minute I shut the door behind me, some of the fear and tension faded, the dark energies Cowl had stirred up sliding around the tavern like a stream pouring around a small, heavy stone.
A sign on the wall just inside the door proclaimed, ACCORDED NEUTRAL TERRITORY. That meant that the signatories of the Unseelie Accords, including the White Council and the Red Court, had agreed that this place would be treated with respect. No one was supposed to start any kind of conflict inside the tavern, and would be bound by honor to take outside any fight that did come up, as rapidly as possible. That kind of agreement was only as good as the honor of anyone involved, but if I broke the Accords in the building, the White Council would hang me out to dry. From past experience, I assumed that the Red Court would come down on any of their folk who violated the tavern's neutrality in the same way.
The tavern was crowded with members of the supernatural community of Chicago. They weren't wizards. Most of them had only a pocketful of ability. One dark-bearded man had enough skill at kinetomancy to alter the spin on any dice he happened to throw. An elderly woman at another table had an unusually strong rapport with animals, and was active in municipal animal shelter charities. A pair of dark-haired sisters who shared an uncanny mental bond played chess at one of the tables, which seemed kind of masturbatory, somehow. In one of the corners, five or six wizened old practitioners-not strong enough to have joined the Council, but competent enough in their own right-huddled together over mugs of ale, speaking in low tones.
Mac himself glanced over his shoulder. He was a tall, spare man in a spotless white shirt and apron. Bald and good at it, Mac could have been any age between thirty-five and fifty. He pursed his lips upon seeing me, turned back to his wood-burning stove, and quickly finished up a pair of steaks he'd been cooking.
I started limping over to the bar, and as I went the room grew quiet. By the time I was there, the uneven thump of my staff on the floor and the sizzling of the steaks were the only sounds.
"Mac," I said. Someone vacated a stool, and I nodded my thanks and sat down with a wince.
"Harry," Mac drawled. He slipped his frying pan off the stove, slapped both steaks onto plates, and with a couple of gestures and brief movements made fried potatoes and fresh vegetables appear on the plates, too. It wasn't magic. Mac was just a damned good cook.
I glanced around the room and spoke in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear. "I need some space, Mac. Some people are meeting me here shortly. I'll need several tables."
A round of nervous whispers and quiet comments went through the crowd. The old practitioners in the corner rose from their table without further ado. Several of them nodded at me, and one grizzled old man growled, "Good luck."
The less experienced members of the supernatural crowd looked from me back to the departing seniors, uncertainty on every face.
"Folks," I said, in general. "I can't tell you what to do. But I would like to request that you all think about getting home before dark. Come nightfall, you want to be behind a threshold."
"What's happening?" blurted one of the youngest men in the room. He still had pimples.
Mac eyed him and snorted.
"Come on. I'm a wizard. We have union rules against telling anybody anything," I said. There was a round of muted chuckles. "Seriously. I can't say any more for now," I said. And I couldn't. Odds were better than good that one or more spies lurked among the patrons of the tavern, and the less information they had about White Council plans and activities, the better. "Take this seriously, guys. You don't want to be outside come nightfall."
Mac turned around to the bar and swept his eyes over it, his expression polite and pointed. He grunted and flicked his chin at the door, and the noise from the room rose again as people began speaking quietly to one another, getting up, and leaving money on the tables as they left.
Two minutes later, Mac and I were the only people left in the tavern. Mac walked around the edge of the bar and sat down next to me. He put one steak-laden dinner plate on the bar in front of me, kept the other for himself, and added a couple of bottles of his home-brewed dark ale. Mac flipped the tops off with a thumbnail.
"Bless your soul, Mac," I said, and picked up one bottle. I held it up. Mac clinked his bottle of ale against mine, and then we both took a long drink and fell to on the steaks.
We ate in silence. After a while, Mac asked, "Bad?"
"Pretty bad," I said. I debated how much I could tell him. Mac was a good guy and a long-term acquaintance and friend, but he wasn't Council. Screw it. The man gave me steak and a beer. He deserved to know something more than that there was a threat he probably couldn't do anything about. "Necromancers."
Mac's fork froze on the way to his mouth. He shook his head, put his last bite of steak into his mouth, and chewed slowly. Mac never used a sentence when one word would do. "Wardens?"
"Yeah. A lot of them."
He pursed his lips with a frown. "Kemmler," he said.
I arched an eyebrow, but I wasn't really surprised that he knew the infamous necromancer's name. Mac always seemed to have a pretty darned good idea about what was going on. "Not Kemmler. His leftovers. But that's bad enough."
"Ungh." Mac finished up his plate in rapid order, then rose and started collecting money and clearing the tables in the corner farthest from the door. At some point he collected my barren plate and empty bottle and put a fresh ale down in front of me.
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 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 othe
r 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 bar stool 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.
Ramirez glanced at Luccio, and she nodded. "Close the circle, please, Warden."
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, Sao 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.