by Jim Butcher
The Gatekeeper turned his head toward me and became still for a moment. Then he reached his other gloved hand into his hood. He made a strangled, muffled sound.
“Hi,” I said. King of wit, that’s me.
The Gatekeeper sounded as though he had to swallow half a gallon of laughter as he responded, “Greetings, Wizard Dresden. Am I interrupting anything?”
My other boot fell off and plopped to the ground. I regarded my dangling, muddy sock-feet with pursed lips. “Nothing all that important.”
“That is good,” he said. He paced around a bit, peering up at me, and then said, “There’s a broken branch through your belt. Get your right foot on the branch below you, your left hand on the one above you, and loosen your belt. You should be able to climb down.”
I did as he said and got my muddy self down from the tree and to earth. “Thank you,” I said. I privately thought to myself that I’d have been a hell of a lot more grateful about five minutes earlier. “What are you doing here?”
“Looking for you,” he said.
“You’ve been watching?”
He shook his head. “Call it listening. But I have had glimpses of you. And matters are worsening in Chicago.”
“Stars and stones,” I muttered and picked up my boots. “I don’t have time to chat.”
The Gatekeeper put a gloved hand on my arm. “But you do,” he said. “My vision is limited, but I know that you have accomplished your mission for the Winter Queen. She will keep her end of the bargain, grant us safe passage through her realm. So far as the Council is concerned, that will be enough. You would be safe.”
I hesitated.
“Wizard Dresden, you could end your involvement in the matter. You could choose to step clear of it, right now. It would end the trial.”
My aching, weary, half-smothered, and dirty self liked that idea. End it. Go home. Get a hot shower. A bunch of hot food. Sleep.
It was impossible, anyway. I was only one tired, beat-up, strung-out guy, wizard or not. The faeries had way too many powers and tricks to deal with on a good day, let alone on this one. I knew what Aurora was up to now, but, hell, she was getting set to charge into the middle of a battlefield. A battlefield, furthermore, that I had no idea how to evenfind , much less survive. The Stone Table had been in some weird pocket of the Nevernever like nothing I’d ever felt before. I had no idea how to reach it.
Impossible. Painful. Way too dangerous. I could call it a day, get some sleep, and hope I did better the next time I came up to the plate.
Meryl’s face came to mind, ugly and tired and resolute. I also saw the statue of Lily. And Elaine, trapped by her situation but fighting things in her own way despite the odds against her. I thought of taking the Unraveling from Mother Winter, able to think of nothing but using it for my own goals, for helping Susan. Now it would be used for something else entirely, and as much as I wanted to forget about it and go home, I would bear a measure of the responsibility for the consequences of its use if I did.
I shook my head and looked around until I spotted my bag, jewelry, staff, and rod on the ground several yards away from the muddy bog Aurora had created. I recovered all of them. “No,” I said. “It isn’t over.”
“No?” the Gatekeeper said, surprise in the tone. “Why not?”
“Because I’m an idiot.” I sighed. “And there are people in trouble.”
“Wizard, no one expects you to stop a war between the Sidhe Courts. The Council would assign no such responsibility to any one person.”
“To hell with the Sidhe Courts,” I said. “And to hell with the Council too. There are people I know in trouble. And I’m the one who turned some of this loose. I’ll clean it up.”
“You’re sure?” the Gatekeeper said. “You won’t step out of the Trial now?”
My mud-crusted fingers fumbled with the clasp of my bracelet. “I won’t.”
The Gatekeeper regarded me in silence for a moment and said, “Then I will not vote against you.”
A little chill went through me. “Oh. You would have?”
“Had you walked away, I would kill you myself.”
I stared at him for a second and then asked, “Why?”
His voice came out soft and resolute, but not unkind. “Because voting against you would have been the same thing in any case. It seems meet to me that I should take full responsibility for that choice rather than hiding behind Council protocol.”
I got the bracelet on, then shoved my feet back into my boots. “Well, thanks for not killing me, then. If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got somewhere to be.”
“Yes,” the Gatekeeper said. He held out his hand, a small velvet bag in it. “Take these. You may find a use for them.”
I frowned at him and took the bag. Inside, I found a little glass jar of some kind of brownish gel and a chip of greyish stone on a piece of fine, silvery thread. “What’s this?”
“An ointment for the eyes,” he said. His tone became somewhat dry. “Easier on the nerves than using the Sight to see through the veils and glamours of the Sidhe.”
I lifted my eyebrows. Bits of drying mud fell into my eyes and made me blink. “Okay. And this rock?”
“A piece from the Stone Table,” he said. “It will show you the way to get there.”
I blinked some more, this time in surprise. “You’re helping me?”
“That would constitute interfering in the Trial,” he corrected me. “So far as anyone else is concerned, I am merely seeing to it that the Trial can reach its full conclusion.”
I frowned at him. “If you’d just given me the rock, maybe,” I said. “The ointment is something else. You’re interfering. The Council would have a fit.”
The Gatekeeper sighed. “Wizard Dresden, this is something I have never said before and do not anticipate saying again.” He leaned closer to me, and I could see the shadows of his features, gaunt and vague, inside his hood. One dark eye sparkled with something like humor as he offered his hand and whispered, “Sometimes what the Council does not know does not hurt it.”
I found myself grinning. I shook his hand.
He nodded. “Hurry. The Council dare not interfere with internal affairs of the Sidhe, but we will do what we can.” He stretched out his staff and drew it in a circle in the air. With barely a whisper of disturbance, he opened the fabric between the Nevernever and the mortal world, as though his staff had simply drawn a circle of Chicago to step into—the street outside my basement apartment, specifically. “Allah and good fortune go with you.”
I nodded to him, encouraged. Then I turned to the portal and stepped through it, from that dark moor in Faerie to my usual parking space at home. Hot summer air hit my face, steamy and crackling with tension. Rain sleeted down, and thunder shook the ground. The light was already fading and dark was coming on.
I ignored them all and headed for my apartment. The mud, substance of the Nevernever, melted into a viscous goo that began evaporating at once, assisted by the driving, cleansing rain.
I had calls to make, and I wanted to change into non-slimy clothes. My fashion sense is somewhat stunted, but I still had to wonder.
What do you wear to a war?
Chapter
Twenty-nine
I went with basic black.
I made my calls, set an old doctor’s valise outside the front door, got a quick shower, and dressed in black. A pair of old black military-style boots, black jeans (mostly clean), a black tee, black ball cap with a scarlet Coca-Cola emblem on it, and on top of everything my leather duster. Susan had given me the coat a while back, complete with a mantle that falls to my elbows and an extra large portion of billow. The weather was stormy enough, both figuratively and literally, to make me want the reassurance of the heavy coat.
I loaded up on the gear, too—everything I’d brought with me that morning plus the Gatekeeper’s gifts and my home-defense cannon, a heavy-caliber, long-barreled, Dirty Harry Magnum. I debated carrying the gun on me and decided against it.
I’d have to go through Chicago to get to whatever point would lead me to the Stone Table, and I didn’t need to get arrested for a concealed carry. I popped the gun, case and all, into my bag, and hoped I wouldn’t have to get to it in a hurry.
Billy and the werewolves arrived maybe ten minutes later, the minivan pulling up outside and beeping the horn. I checked the doctor bag, closed it, and went out to the van, my gym bag bumping against my side. The side door rolled open, and I stepped up to toss my gear in.
I hesitated upon seeing the van, packed shoulder to shoulder with young people. There were ten or eleven of them in there.
Billy leaned over from the driver’s seat and asked, “Problem?”
“I said only volunteers,” I said. “I don’t know how much trouble we’re going into.”
“Right,” Billy said. “I told them that.”
The kids in the van murmured their agreement.
I blew out my breath. “Okay, people. Same rules as last time. I’m calling the shots, and if I give you an order, you take it, no arguments. Deal?”
There was a round of solemn nods. I nodded in reply and peered to the back of the dim van, at a head of dull green hair. “Meryl? Is that you?”
The changeling girl gave me a solemn nod. “I want to help. So does Fix.”
I caught a flash of white hair and dark, nervous eyes from beside Meryl. The little man lifted a hand and gave me a twitching wave.
“If you go along,” I said, “same rules as everyone else. Otherwise you stay here.”
“All right,” Meryl said with a laconic nod.
“Yeah,” Fix said. “Okay.”
I looked around at all of them and grimaced. They looked so damnedyoung . Or maybe it was just me feeling old. I reminded myself that Billy and the Alphas had already had their baptism by fire, and they’d had almost two years to hone their skills against some of the low-intensity riffraff of the Chicago underground scene. But I knew that they were getting in way over their heads on this one.
I needed them, and they’d volunteered. The trick was to make sure that I didn’t lead them to a horrible death.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go.”
Billy pushed open the passenger door, and Georgia moved back to the crowded rear seats. I got in beside Billy and asked, “Did you get them?”
Billy passed me a plastic bag from Wal-Mart. “Yeah, that’s why it took so long to get here. There was police tape all over and cops standing around.”
“Thanks,” I said. I tore open a package of orange plastic box knives and put them into the doctor’s valise, then snapped it closed again. Then I took the grey stone from my pocket, wrapped the thread it hung by around my hand, and held my hand out in front of me, palm down and level with my eyes. “Let’s go.”
“Okay,” Billy said, giving me a skeptical look. “Go where?”
The grey stone quivered and twitched. Then it swung very definitely to the east, drawing the string with it, so that it hung at a slight angle rather than straight down.
I pointed the way the stone leaned and said, “Thata-way. Toward the lake.”
“Got it,” Billy said. He pulled the van onto the street. “So where are we heading?”
I grunted and stuck an index finger up.
“Up,” Billy said, his voice skeptical. “We’re going up.”
I watched the stone. It wobbled, and I focused on it as I might on my own amulet. It stabilized and leaned toward the lake without wavering or swaying on its string. “Up there,” I clarified.
“Where up there?”
Lightning flashed and I pointed toward it. “There up there.”
Billy glanced at someone in the back and pursed his lips thoughtfully. “I hope you know a couple of streets I don’t, then.” He drove for a while more, with me telling him to bear right or left. At a stoplight, the rain still pounding on the windshield, wipers flicking steadily, he asked, “So what’s the score?”
“Well-Intentioned But Dangerously Insane Bad Guys are ahead coming down the stretch,” I said. “The Faerie Courts are duking it out up there, and it’s probably going to be very hairy. The Summer Lady is our baddie, and the Winter Knight is her bitch. She has a magic hankie. She’s going to use it to change a statue into a girl and kill her on a big Flintstones table at midnight.”
There were a couple of grunts as Meryl pushed her way toward the front of the van. “A girl? Lily?”
I glanced from the stone back to her and nodded. “We have to find Aurora and stop her. Save the girl.”
“Or what happens?” Billy asked.
“Badness.”
“Kaboom badness?”
I shook my head. “Mostly longer term than that.”
“Like what?”
“How do you feel about ice ages?”
Billy whistled. “Uh. Do you mind if I ask a few questions?”
I kept my eyes on the chip of stone. “Go ahead.”
“Right,” Billy said. “As I understand it, Aurora is trying to tear apartboth of the Faerie Courts, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Why? I mean, why not shoot for just Winter so her side wins?”
“Because she can’t,” I said. “She’s limited in her power. She knows she doesn’t have the strength it would take to force things on her own. The Queens and the Mothers could stop her easily. So she’s using the only method she has open to her.”
“Screwing up the balance of power,” Billy said. “But she’s doing it by giving a bunch of mojo to Winter?”
“Limits,” I said. “She can’t move Winter’s power around at all, the way she can Summer’s. That’s why she had to kill her own Knight. She knew she could pour his power out into a vessel of her choosing.”
“Lily,” growled Meryl.
I glanced over my shoulder at her and nodded. “Someone who would trust her. Who wouldn’t be able to protect herself against Aurora’s enchantment.”
“So why’d she turn the girl to stone?” Billy asked.
“It was her cover,” I said. “The Queens could have found an active Knight. But once Lily was turned to stone, the Knight’s mantle was stuck in limbo. Aurora knew that everyone would suspect Mab of doing something clever and that Titania would be forced to prepare to fight. Mab would have to move in response, and the pair of them would create the battleground around the Stone Table.”
“What’s the Table for?”
“Pouring power into one of the Courts,” I said. “It belongs to Summer until midnight tonight. After that, any power that gets poured in goes to Winter.”
“Which is where we’re going now,” Billy said.
“Uh-huh,” I said. “Turn left at that light.”
Billy nodded. “So Aurora steals the power and hides it, which forces the Queens to bring out the battleground with the big table.”
“Right. Now Aurora plans to take Lily there and use the Unraveling to free her of the stone curse she’s under. Then she kills her and touches off Faerie-geddon. She’s got to get to the table after midnight, but before Mab’s forces actually take the ground around it. That means she’s only got a small window of opportunity, and we need to stop her from using it.”
“I still don’t get it,” Billy said. “What the hell is she hoping to accomplish?”
“Probably she thinks she can ride out the big war. Then she’ll put it all together again from the ashes just the way she wants it.”
“Thank God she’s not too arrogant or anything,” Billy muttered. “It seems to me that Mab is going to be handed a huge advantage in this. Why didn’t Aurora just work together with Mab?”
“It probably never occurred to her to try it that way. She’s Summer. Mab is Winter. The two don’t work together.”
“Small favors,” Billy said. “So what do we do to help?”
“I’m going to have to move around through a battleground. I need muscle to do it. I don’t want to stop to fight. We just keep moving until I can get to the Stone Table and stop Aurora. And
I want all of you changed before we go up there. Faeries are vindictive as hell and you’re going to piss some of them off. Better if they never get to see your faces.”
“Right,” Billy said. “How many faeries are we talking about?”
I squinted up at a particularly violent burst of lightning. “All of them.”
The stone the Gatekeeper had given me led us to the waterfront along Burnham Harbor. Billy parked the van on the street outside the wharves that had once been the lifeblood of the city and that still received an enormous amount of shipping every year. Halogen floodlights every couple of hundred feet made the docks into a silent still life behind a grid of chain-link fence.
I turned to the Alphas and said, “All right, folks. Before we go up, I’ve got to put some ointment on your eyes. It stinks, but it will keep you from being taken in by most faerie glamours.”
“Me first,” Billy said at once. I opened the little jar and smeared the dark ointment on under his eyes, little half-moons of dark, greasy brown. He checked his eyes in the mirror and said, “And I used to sneer at the football team.”
“Get your game face on,” I said. Billy slipped out of the car and pitched his sweats and T-shirt back in. I got out of the van and opened the side door. Billy, in his wolf-shape, came trotting around the side of the van and sat nearby as I smeared the greasy ointment on the eyes of all the Alphas.
It was a little unnerving, to me anyway. They were all naked as I did it, shimmering into wolf-form as soon as I had finished, and joining Billy outside. One of the girls, a redhead who had been daintily plump, now looked like something from a men’s magazine. She gave me a somewhat satisfied smile as I noticed, and the next, a petite girl with mousy brown hair and a long scar on her shoulder, held her dress against her front and confided, “She’s been impossible this year,” as I smeared ointment on her.
Half a dozen young men and another half a dozen young women, all told, made for a lot of wolf. They waited patiently as I slapped the ointment on Fix, then Meryl, and finally myself. I used the very last of it, and blew out a deep breath. I put on my gun, on a hip rig instead of a shoulder holster, and hoped that the rain and my duster would conceal it from any passing observation. Then I drew my pentacle out to lie on my shirt, gathered up my staff and rod, slipping the latter through the straps on the doctor’s bag, and picked it up. I juggled things around for a moment, until I could get the grey stone on its thread out and into my hand, and thought that maybe Elaine had the right idea when it came to going with smaller magical foci.