Jim Butcher - Dresden Files Omnibus

by Jim Butcher

  But that was insane. Setting out to conquer death? People died. That was a fact of life.

  But what if they didn’t have to?

  What if my mother hadn’t died? Or my father? How different would my life be today?

  Impossible. You couldn’t just drive death away.

  Could you?

  Maybe that wasn’t the point. Maybe this was one of those things in which the effort meant more than the outcome. I mean, if there was a chance, even a tiny, teeny chance that Kumori was right, and that the world could be so radically changed, wouldn’t I be obliged to try? Even if I never reached the goal, never finished the quest, wouldn’t the attempt to vanquish death itself be a worthy pursuit?

  Wow.

  This question was a big one. Way bigger than me.

  I shook my head and told Kumori, “I don’t know about that. What I know is that I’ve seen the fruits of that kind of path. I saw Cowl try to murder me when I got in his way. I’ve seen what Grevane and the Corpsetaker have done. I’ve heard about the suffering and misery Kemmler caused—and is still causing today, thanks to his stupid book.

  “I don’t know about something as big as trying to murder death. But I know that you can tell a tree from what kind of fruit falls off it. And the necromancy tree doesn’t drop anything that isn’t rotten.”

  “Ours is a calling,” Kumori said, her voice flat. “A noble road.”

  “I might be willing to believe you if so much of that road wasn’t paved in the corpses of innocents.”

  I saw her head shake slowly beneath the hood. “You sound like them. The Council. You do not understand.”

  “Or maybe I’m just not quite arrogant enough to start rearranging the universe on the assumption that I know better than God how long life should last. And there’s a downside to what you’re saying, too. How about trying to topple the regime of an immortal Napoleon, or Attila, or Chairman Mao? You could as easily preserve the monsters as the intellectual all-stars. It can be horribly abused, and that makes it dangerous.”

  I faced her down for a long and silent second. Then she let out a sigh and said, “I think we have exhausted the possibilities of this conversation.”

  “You sure?” I asked her. “The offer is still open. If you want to get out, I’ll get the Council to protect you.”

  “Our offer is open as well. Stand aside, and no rancor will follow you.”

  “I can’t,” I said.

  “Nor can I,” she said. “Understand that I do not wish you any particular harm. But I will not hesitate to strike you down should you place yourself in our path.”

  I stared at her for a second. Then I said, “I’m going to stop you. I’m going to stop you and Cowl and Grevane and Corpsetaker, and your little drummers too. None of you are going to promote yourself to godhood. No one is.”

  “I think you will die,” she said, her tone even, without inflection.

  “Maybe,” I said. “But I’m going to stop you all before I go. Tell Cowl to get out of the way now, and I won’t hunt him down after all of this is over. He can walk. You too.”

  She shook her head again and said, “I’m sorry we could not work something out.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  She hesitated. Then she asked me, her voice soft and genuinely curious, “Why?”

  “Because this is what I have to do,” I said. “I’m sorry you aren’t going to let me help you.”

  “We all act as we think we must,” she said. “I will see you by and by, Dresden.”

  “Count on it,” I said.

  Kumori left without another word, gliding silently down the stairs and out of sight.

  I sat there for a moment, aching and tired and more scared than I had sounded a minute before.

  Then I got up, shoved my pain and my fear aside, and hobbled out to the Blue Beetle.

  I had work to do.

  Chapter

  Thirty

  I went back to my car, got in, and headed out to find a few things I would need to make the summoning of the Erlking marginally less suicidal. Serious summoning spells have to be personalized both to the entity to be summoned and to the summoner, and it took me a little while to find enough open businesses to get it all. Traffic on the streets grew steadily worse as the afternoon wore on, slowing me down even further.

  More ominous than that, the tenor of the city had begun to slowly, steadily change. What had been an atmosphere of bemused enjoyment of an unanticipated holiday from the daily grind had turned into annoyance. As the sun tracked across the sky and the power still hadn’t come back on, annoyance started turning into anger. By high noon, there were police visible on every street in cars, on motorcycles, on bicycles, and on foot.

  “That all for ya?” asked an enterprising vendor. He was a potbellied, balding gardener selling fresh fruit and vegetables from the back of a pickup on a corner, and he was the only one I’d seen who wasn’t trying to gouge Chicagoans in their moment of trial. He put the pumpkin I’d chosen in a thin plastic bag as he did, and took the money I offered him.

  “That’s everything,” I said. “Thanks.”

  Shouting broke out somewhere nearby, and I looked up to see a whip-thin young man sprinting down the sidewalk across the street. A pair of cops chased him, one of them shouting at his uselessly squealing radio.

  “Christ, look at that,” the vendor said. “Cops everywhere. Why do they need the cops everywhere if this is just a power outage?”

  “They’re probably just worried about someone starting a riot,” I said.

  “Maybe,” the vendor said. “But I hear some crazy things.”

  “Like what?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “That terrorists blew up the power plant. Or maybe set off some kind of nuke. They can disrupt electronics and stuff, you know.”

  “I think someone might have noticed a nuclear explosion,” I said.

  “Oh, sure,” he said. “But hell, maybe somebody did. Practically no phones, radio is damned near useless. How would we know?”

  “I dunno. The big boom? The vaporized city?”

  The vendor snorted. “True, true. But something happened.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Something happened.”

  “And the whole damned city is getting scared.” The vendor shook his head as more shouting broke out farther down the block. A police car, lights and sirens wailing, tried to bull through the traffic to move toward the disturbance, without much success.

  “Getting worse,” the vendor observed. “This morning it was all smiles. But people are getting afraid.”

  “Halloween,” I said.

  The vendor glanced at me and shivered. “Maybe that’s part of it. Maybe just because it’s getting darker. Clouding over. People get spooked sometimes. Just like cattle. If they don’t get the lights on, tonight might be bad here.”

  “Maybe,” I said. I juggled the bag with my staff, trying to work out how to carry them both back down the street to the Beetle.

  “Here,” said the vendor. “I’ll help you, son.”

  “Thank you,” I told him, though to be honest I felt embarrassed that I actually wanted his help, much less needed it. “That old Bug there.”

  He walked the fifty feet down the sidewalk with me. He dropped off the sack in the front-end trunk of the VW, nodded at me, and said, “About time I got my old self out of here anyway, I think. Getting tense around here. Thunderstorm’s coming in.”

  “Newspaper weatherman said it was supposed to be clear,” I said.

  The vendor snorted and tapped his nose. “I lived around this old lake all my life. There’s a storm coming.”

  Boy was there. In spades.

  He nodded to me. “You should get home. Good night to stay in and read a book.”

  “That sounds nice,” I agreed. “Thanks again.”

  I nudged the Beetle out into traffic by virtue of being more willing to accept a fender-bender than anyone else on the road. I had everything I needed to try to whistle up
the Erlking, but it had eaten up a lot of my day. I’d tried to call Murphy’s place every time I’d stopped the car, but I never got a line through to Thomas and Butters, and now, with the afternoon sun burning its way down toward the horizon, I had run out of daylight.

  It was time to rendezvous with the Wardens, so I headed for McAnally’s.

  Mac’s tavern was tucked in neatly beneath one tall building and surrounded by others. You had to go down an alley to get to the tavern, but at least it had its own dinky parking lot. I managed to find a spot in the lot and then limped down the alley to the tavern, taking the short flight of steps down to the heavy wooden door.

  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 a 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 other 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.