by Butcher, Jim
I love being a wizard. Every day is like Disneyland.
I ripped off my ridiculous stole, robe, and cloak as I turned toward the doorway. The frantic motions of panic made the two or three light sources that had not been instantly snuffed into independent stroboscopes. Running toward the room’s exit was a surreal experience, but I was certain that Peabody had planned his steps before he’d begun to move, and he’d had plenty of time to sprint across the room in the darkness and leave the auditorium.
I tried to think like a wizard who had just been outed as Black Council and marked for capture, interrogation, and probable death. Given that I had been fairly sure it was going to happen to me over the past few days, I’d already given consideration to how to get out of Council HQ, and I figured Peabody had taken more time to plan than I had.
If I was him, I’d rip open a Way into the Nevernever and close it behind me. I’d find a good spot to get out, and then I’d make sure it was prepared to be as lethally hostile to pursuers as I could make it. The centuries upon centuries of wards placed upon the Edinburgh tunnels by generations of wizards, though, prevented any opening to the Nevernever from inside the security checkpoints, so Peabody would have to get through at least one Warden-manned security gate before he enacted his plan.
I had to stop him before he got that far.
I plunged through the doorway and noted that both Wardens on guard outside were of the younger generation who had risen to the ranks since the disastrous battle with the Red Court in Sicily. Both young men were standing blankly at attention, showing no reaction whatsoever to the furor in the Speaking Room.
A corner of a black formal robe snapped as its wearer rounded a corner in the hallway to my right, and I was off and running. I felt like hell, but for a refreshing change of pace, I had an advantage over an older, more experienced wizard—I was younger and in better shape.
Wizards might stay alive and vigorous for centuries, but their bodies still tend to lose physical ability if they do not take great pains to stay in training. Even then, they still don’t have the raw capabilities of a young person—and running at a dead sprint is as raw as physical activity gets.
I rounded the corner and caught a glimpse of Peabody, running up ahead of me. He turned another corner, and by the time I rounded that one, I had gained several steps on him. We blew through Administration and passed the Warden barracks, where three Wardens who were still freaking teenagers, the dangerous babies we’d hurried through military training for the war, emerged from the doors twenty feet ahead of Peabody.
“The end is nigh!” he snarled.
All three of them froze in their tracks, their expressions going blank, and Peabody went through the group, puffing, and knocked one of them down. I pushed harder, and he started glancing over his shoulder, his eyes wide.
He ducked around the next corner, and my instincts twigged to what he was about to try. I came around the corner and flung myself into a diving roll, and a spray of conjured liquid hissed as it went by overhead. It smacked against the wall behind me with a frantic chewing noise, like a thousand bottles of carbonated soda all shaken and simultaneously opened.
I hadn’t had time to recharge my energy rings, and they were still on my dresser back home, but I didn’t want Peabody to get comfortable taking shots at me over his shoulder. I lifted my right hand, snarled, “Fuego!” and sent a basketball-sized comet of fire flying down the hallway at him.
He spat out a few words and made a one-handed defensive gesture that reminded me of Doctor Strange, and my attacking spell splashed against something invisible a good three feet short of him. Even so, some of it wound up setting the hem of his formal robes on fire, and he frantically shucked out of it as he continued to flee.
I made up even more distance on him, and as he turned into one of the broad main hallways of the complex, I wasn’t twenty feet away, and the first security checkpoint was right in front of us. Four Wardens, all of them young, manned the gate—which was to say that, since all the grown-ups, grandpas, and fussbudgets who might object were at the trial, they were sitting on the floor playing cards.
“Stop that man!” I shouted.
Peabody shrieked, obviously terrified, “Dresden’s gone warlock! He’s trying to kill me!”
The young Wardens bounced to their feet with the reaction speed of youth. One of them reached for his staff, and another drew his gun. A third turned and made sure the gate was locked—and the fourth acted on pure instinct, whipping her hand around her head in a tight circle and making a throwing gesture as she shouted.
I brought up my shield in time to intercept an invisible bowling ball, but the impact hit the shield with enough force to stop me cold. My legs weren’t ready for that, and I staggered, bouncing a shoulder off of one wall.
Peabody’s eyes gleamed with triumph as I fell, and he snapped, “The end is nigh!” freezing the young Wardens in place, as he’d done before. He ripped the key on its leather thong from around the neck of one of the Wardens, opened the gate, then turned with a dagger in his hand and sliced it along the thigh of the young woman who had clobbered me. She cried out and her leg began spurting blood in rhythm with her heart, a telltale sign of a severed artery.
I got back to my feet and hurled a club of raw force at Peabody, but he defeated it as he had the fireball, leapt through the gate, and ripped at the air, peeling open a passage between this world and the next.
He plunged through it.
“Son of a bitch,” I snarled. None of the young Wardens were moving, not even the wounded girl. If she didn’t get help, she would bleed to death in minutes. “Dammit!” I swore. “Dammit, dammit, dammit!” I threw myself onto the girl, ripping the belt off of my jeans and praying that the wound was far enough down her leg for a tourniquet to do any good.
Footsteps hammered the floor, and Anastasia Luccio appeared, gun in her good hand, her face white with pain. She slid to a halt next to me, breathing hard, set the weapon on the floor, and said, “I’ve got her. Go!”
On the other side of the security gate, the Way was beginning to close.
I rose and rushed it, diving forward. There was a flash of light, and the stone tunnel around me abruptly became a forest of dead trees that smelled strongly of mildew and stagnant water. Peabody was standing right in front of the Way as he tried to close it, and I hit him in a flying tackle before he could finish the job. He went over backward and we hit the ground hard.
For a stunned half second, neither of us moved, and then Peabody shifted his weight, and I caught the gleam of the bloodied dagger at the edge of my vision.
He thrust the point at my throat, but I got an arm in the way. He opened a vein. I grabbed at his wrist with my other hand, and he rolled, gaining the upper position and gripping the dagger with both hands, leaning against my one arm with all of his weight. Drops of my own blood fell onto my face as he forced the point slowly toward my eye.
I struggled to throw him off me, but he was stronger than he looked, and it was clear that he had more experience in close-quarters fighting than I did. I clubbed at him with my wounded arm, but he shrugged it off.
I felt my triceps giving way and watched the tip of the knife come closer. The breaking point was at hand and he knew it. He threw more effort into his attack, and the dagger’s tip suddenly stung hot against my lower eyelid.
Then there was a huge noise, and Peabody went away. I remained still for a stunned moment, and then looked up.
Morgan lay on the ground just inside the still-open Way, Luccio’s gun smoking in his hand, his wounded leg a mass of wet scarlet.
How he’d managed to run after us given his injury, I had no idea. Even with painkillers, it must have hurt like hell. He stared at Peabody’s body with hard eyes. Then his hand started to shake, and he dropped the gun to the ground.
He followed it down with a groan.
I went to him, breathing hard. “Morgan.” I turned him over and looked at his wound. It was soaked in blood, but
it wasn’t bleeding much anymore. His face was white. His lips looked grey.
He opened his eyes calmly. “Got him.”
“Yeah,” I said. “You got him.”
He smiled a little. “That’s twice I pulled your ass out of the fire.”
I choked out a little laugh. “I know.”
“They’ll blame me,” he said quietly. “There’s no confession from Peabody, and I’m a better candidate politically. Let them pin it on me. Don’t fight it. I want it.”
I stared down at him. “Why?”
He shook his head, smiling wearily.
I stared down at him for long seconds, and then I got it. Morgan had been lying to me from the very start. “Because you already knew who killed LaFortier. She was there when you woke up in his chambers. You saw who did it. And you wanted to protect her.”
“Anastasia didn’t do it,” Morgan said, his voice intense and low. “She was a pawn. Asleep on her feet. She never even knew she was being used.” He shuddered. “Should have thought of that. She got put in that younger body, made her mind vulnerable to influence again.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“Woke up, LaFortier was dead, and she had the knife. Took it from her, veiled her, and pushed her out the door,” Morgan said. “Didn’t have time to get both of us out.”
“So you took the blame thinking you’d sort things out in the aftermath. But you realized that the frame was too good for anyone to believe you when you tried to tell them what was up.” I shook my head. Morgan hadn’t given a damn about his own life. He’d escaped when he realized that Anastasia had still been in danger, that he wouldn’t be able to expose the real traitor alone.
“Dresden,” he said quietly.
“Yeah?”
“I didn’t tell anyone about Molly. What she tried to do to Ana. I . . . I didn’t tell.”
I stared at him, unable to speak.
His eyes became cloudy. “Do you know why I didn’t? Why I came to you?”
I shook my head.
“Because I knew,” he whispered. He lifted his right hand, and I gripped it hard. “I knew that you knew how it felt to be an innocent man hounded by the Wardens.”
It was the closest he’d ever come to saying that he’d been wrong about me.
He died less than a minute later.
Chapter Forty-nine
Thorsen kept me from bleeding to death from the cut Peabody had given me. The Swede and his backup squad had been faced with a long run to catch up, a lot of locked gates, and the confusion we’d left in our wake. They reached me about three minutes after Morgan died. They did their best to revive Morgan, but his body had taken enough torment and lost too much blood. They didn’t even bother with Peabody. Morgan had double-tapped the traitor’s head with Luccio’s pistol.
They bundled me off to the infirmary, where Injun Joe and a crew of healers—some of whom had gone to medical school when the efficacy of leeches was still being debated—were caring for those wounded in the attack.
After that, things fell into place without requiring my participation.
The Senior Council managed to contain and banish the mordite-infused mistfiend, a rare and dangerous gaseous being from the far reaches of the Nevernever, before it had killed more than forty or fifty wizards. All things considered, it could have been a lot worse, but the fact that it had been the gathering of LaFortier’s former political allies who had been subject to the attack occasioned an enormous outcry of suspicion, with the offended parties claiming that the Merlin had disregarded their safety, been negligent in his security precautions, etc., etc. The fact that the attack had occurred while unmasking LaFortier’s true killer was brushed aside. There was political capital to be had.
Basically the entire supernatural world had heard about LaFortier’s death, the ensuing manhunt for Morgan, and the dustup during his trial, though most of the details were kept quiet. Though there was never any sort of official statement made, word got out that Morgan had been conspiring with Peabody, and that both of them had been killed during their escape attempt.
It was a brutal and callous way for the Council to save face. The Merlin decided that it was ultimately less dangerous for the wizards of the world if everyone knew that the Council responded to LaFortier’s murder with a statement of deadly strength and power—i.e., the immediate capture and execution of those responsible.
But I knew that whoever Peabody had been in bed with, the people who had really been responsible knew that the Council had killed an innocent man, and one of their largest military assets, at that, to get the job done.
Maybe the Merlin was right. Maybe it’s better to look stupid but strong than it is to look smart but weak. I don’t know. I’m not sure I want to believe that the world stage bears that strong a resemblance to high school.
The Council’s investigators worked more slowly than Lara’s had, but they got to the same information by following the money, eventually. The Council confronted the White Court with the information.
Lara sent them the heads of the persons responsible. Literally. Leave it to Lara to find a way to get one last bit of mileage out of Madeline and the business manager’s corpses. She told the Council to keep the money, too, by way of apology. The next best thing to six million in cash buys a lot of oil to pour on troubled waters.
He might have wound up with his brains splattered all over a desolate little hellhole in the Nevernever, but Peabody had inflicted one hell of a lot of damage before he was through. A new age of White Council paranoia had begun.
The Merlin, the Gatekeeper, and Injun Joe investigated the extent of Peabody’s psychic infiltration. In some ways, the worst of what he’d done was the easiest to handle. Damn near every Warden under the age of fifty had been programmed with that go-to-sleep trance command, and it had been done so smoothly and subtly that it was difficult to detect even when the master wizards were looking and knew where to find it.
Ebenezar told me later that some of the young Wardens had been loaded up with a lot more in the way of hostile psychic software, though it was impossible for one wizard to know exactly what another had done. Several of them, apparently, had been intended to become the supernatural equivalent of suicide bombers—the way Luccio had been. Repairing that kind of damage was difficult, unpredictable, and often painful to the victim. It was a long summer and autumn for a lot of the Wardens, and a mandatory psychic self-defense regimen was instituted within weeks.
It was tougher for the members of the Senior Council, in my opinion, all of whom had almost certainly been influenced in subtle ways. They had to go back over their decisions for the past several years, and wonder if they had been pushed into making a choice, if it had been their own action, or if the ambiguity of any given decision had been natural to the environment. The touch had been so light that it hadn’t left any lasting tracks. For anyone with half a conscience, it would be a living nightmare, especially given the fact that they had been leading the Council in time of war.
I tried to imagine second-guessing myself on everything I’d done for the past eight years.
I wouldn’t be one of those guys for the world.
I was in the infirmary for a week. I got visits from McCoy, Ramirez, and Molly. Mouse stayed at my bedside, and no one tried to move him. Listens-to-Wind was a regular presence, since he was pretty much my doctor. Several of the young Wardens I had helped train stopped by to have a word, though all of them were looking nervous.
Anastasia never visited, though Listens-to-Wind said she had come by and asked after me when I was asleep.
The Gatekeeper came to see me in the middle of the night. When I woke up, he had already created a kind of sonic shield around us that made sure we were speaking in privacy. It made our voices sound like our heads were covered with large tin pails.
“How are you feeling?” he asked quietly.
I gestured at my face, which was no longer bandaged. As Listens-to-Wind had promised, my eye was fine. I had two
beautiful scars, though, one running down through my right eyebrow, skipping my eye, and continuing for an inch or so on my cheekbone, and another one that went squarely through the middle of my lower lip and on a slight angle down over my chin. “Like Herr Harrison von Ford,” I said. “Dueling scars and beauty marks. The girls will be lining up now.”
The quip didn’t make him smile. He looked down at his hands, his expression serious. “I’ve been working with the Wardens and administrative staff whose minds Peabody invaded.”
“I heard.”
“It appears,” he said, choosing his words carefully, “that the psychic disruption to Anastasia Luccio was particularly severe. I was wondering if you might have any theories that might explain it.”
I stared across the darkened room quietly for a moment, then asked, “Did the Merlin send you?”
“I am the only one who knows,” he said seriously. “Or who will know.”
I thought about it for a moment before I said, “Would my theory make any difference in how she gets treated?”
“Potentially. If it seems sound, it might give me the insight I need to heal her more quickly and safely.”
“Give me your word,” I said. I wasn’t asking.
“You have it.”
“Before he died,” I said, “Morgan told me that when he woke up in LaFortier’s room, Luccio was holding the murder weapon.” I described the rest of what Morgan had told me of that night.
The Gatekeeper stared across the bed at the far wall, his face impassive. “He was trying to protect her.”
“I guess he figured the Council might do some wacky thing like sentencing an innocent person to death.”
He closed his eyes for a moment, and then touched the fingertips of his right hand to his heart, his mouth, and his forehead. “It explains some things.”
“Like what?”
He held up his hand. “In a moment. I told you that the damage to Anastasia was quite extensive. Not because she had been persuaded to do violence—that much came easily to her. I believe her emotional attitudes had been forcibly altered.”