by Jim Butcher
Mrs. Spunkelcrief was a fantastic landlady. She lived on the ground floor of the old house. She rarely left her home, was mostly deaf, and generally didn’t poke her nose into my business as long as my rent check came in—which it pretty much always did, these days, on time or a bit early.
A small army of crazy-strong zombies had assaulted my home without waking her up, probably because they’d had the grace to do it after her bedtime, which was just after sundown. But I guess the visit from the cops and the FBI had been even louder than that, because as Molly pulled the Blue Beetle into the little gravel parking lot, I saw her coming up the stairs from my apartment, one at a time, leaning heavily on her cane. She wore a soft blue nightgown and a shawl to ward against the October chill in the night, and her bright blue eyes flicked around alertly.
“There you are,” she said irritably. “I’ve been calling your house all evening, Harry.”
“Sorry, Mrs. S,” I said. “I’ve been out.”
I don’t think she could make out the words very well, but she wasn’t stupid. “Obviously you’ve been out,” she said. “What happened to your nice new door? It’s wide-open! If we get another one of those freak thunderstorms, the rain will pour right in and we’ll have mold climbing up the walls before you can say Jack Robinson.”
I spread my hands and talked as loudly as I could without actually shouting. “There was a mix-up with the police.”
“No,” she said, “the lease is quite clear. You are responsible for any damages inflicted on the apartment while you are a tenant.”
I sighed and nodded. “I’ll fix it tomorrow.”
“Oh, not so much sorrow as surprise, Harry. You’re a good boy, generally.” She peered from me to Molly, Susan, and Martin. “Most of the time. And you help out so when the weather is bad.”
I smiled at her in what I hoped was an apologetic fashion. “I’ll take care of the door, ma’am.”
“Good,” she said. “I thought you would. I’ll come check in a few days.” Mouse emerged from the darkness, not even breathing very hard from running to keep up with the Beetle. He immediately went over to Mrs. Spunkelcrief, sat, and offered her his right paw to shake. She was so tiny and the dog so large that she hardly had to bend down to grip his paw. She beamed broadly at Mouse, shook, and then patted his head fondly. “You can tell a lot about a man from how he treats his dog,” she said.
Mouse walked over to me, sat down panting happily, and leaned his shoulders against my hip affectionately, all but knocking me down.
Mrs. Spunkelcrief nodded, satisfied, and turned to walk away. Then she paused, muttered something to herself, and turned back around again. She dug into her robe’s pocket and produced a white envelope. “I almost forgot. This was lying on your stairs, boy.”
I took it from her with a polite nod. “Thank you, ma’am.”
“Welcome.” She shivered and wrapped her shawl a little more tightly around her. “What is the world coming to? People breaking down doors.”
I shot a glance at Molly, who nodded and immediately went to Mrs. Spunkelcrief’s side, offering an arm for support. My landlady beamed up at her, saying, “Bless you, child. My cane arm got tired on the way down.” Molly began helping her back up the little ramp to her apartment’s front door.
Mouse immediately went to the bottom of the stairs, his nose questing. Then he turned back to me, tail fanning the air gently. No surprises lurked in my apartment. I went on down into it, waving the candles and fireplace to life with a murmur and a gesture, tearing open the envelope as I went to the fireplace to open it.
Inside was a piece of folded paper and another, smaller envelope, upon which was written, in Luccio’s flowing writing, READ ME FIRST. I did:If you are receiving this letter, it is because someone has rendered me unable to contact you. You must presume that I have been taken out of play entirely.
The bearer of this note is the person I trust the most among every Warden stationed at Edinburgh. I cannot know the particulars of my neutralization, but you can trust his description implicitly, and I have found his judgment to be uncommonly sound in subjective matters.
Good luck, Harry.
-A-
I stared at the note for a moment. Then I unfolded the second piece of paper, very slowly. This one was written in blocky letters so precise that they almost resembled a printed font, rather than handwriting:Hullo, Dresden.
Luccio wanted me to bring this note to you in the event something happened to her. No idea what her note says, but I’m to give you whatever information I can.
I’m afraid it isn’t good news. The Council seems to have gone quite mad.
After your appearance at Cristos’s grandstand, a number of ugly things happened. Several young Wardens were caught debating amongst themselves about whether or not they should simply destroy the duchess in Edinburgh to ensure that the war continued—after all, they reasoned, the vampires wouldn’t be suing for peace if they could still fight. On Cristos’s orders, they were arrested and detained by older members of the Council, none of whom were Wardens, in order to Prevent Them from Destabilizing Diplomatic Deliberations.
Ramirez heard about what had happened and I suspect you can guess that his Spanish-by-way-of-America reaction was more passionate than rational. He and a few friends, only one of whom had any real intelligence, hammered their way into the wing where the Wardens were being detained—at which point every single one of them (except for the genius, naturally) was captured and similarly imprisoned.
It’s quiet desperation here. No one can seem to locate anyone on the Senior Council except Cristos, who is quite busily trying to Save Us from Ourselves by sucking up to Duchess Arianna. The Wardens’ chain of command is a smashing disaster at the moment. Captain Luccio went to Cristos to demand the release of her people and is, at this time, missing, as are perhaps forty percent of the seniormost Wardens.
She asked me to tell you, Dresden, that you should not return to Edinburgh under any circumstances until the Senior Council sorts this mess out. She isn’t sure what would happen to you.
She also wanted me to tell you that you were On Your Own.
I will send dispatches to you as events unfold—assuming I don’t Vanish, too.
“Steed”
PS—Why, yes, I can in fact capitalize any words I desire. The language is English. I am English. Therefore mine is the opinion which matters, colonial heathen.
I read over the letter again, more slowly. Then I sat down on the fireplace mantel and swallowed hard.
“Steed” was an appellation I’d stuck on Warden Chandler, who was a fixture of security in Edinburgh, one of the White Council’s home guards, and, once I had thought upon it, one of the guys who I’d always seen operating near Anastasia and in positions of trust: Standing as the sole sentinel at a post that normally required half a dozen. Brewing the Wardens and their captain their tea.
He and I had been the only ones present at the conversation where I’d tacked that nickname on him, thanks to the natty suit and bowler he’d been wearing, and the umbrella he’d accessorized—or maybe it was accessorised, in England—with, so the signature itself served as his bona fides. The flippant tone was very like Chandler, as well. I also knew Anastasia’s handwriting, and besides, the paper on which her letter was written was scented with one of the very gentle, very subtle perfumes she preferred.
The message was as legitimate as it was likely to get, under the circumstances.
Which meant we were in real trouble.
The White Council carried a fearsome reputation not simply because of its capability of engaging in direct action against an enemy, but because it wielded a great deal of economic power. I mean, it doesn’t take a genius to get rich after two hundred and fifty years of compounded interest and open trading. There was an entire brigade of economic warriors for the White Council who constantly sought ways to protect the Council’s investments against hostile economic interests sponsored by other long-lived beings, like vampires.
Money like that could buy a lot of influence. Not only that, but the Council could make the world a miserable place for someone who had earned their displeasure, in about a million ways, without ever throwing magic directly at someone. There were people in the Council who could play dirty with the most fiendish minds in history.
Taken as a whole, it seemed like a colossus, an institution as fixed and unmoving as a vast and ancient tree, filled with life, with strength, its roots sunk deep into the earth, a survivor of the worst storms the world had offered it.
But all of it, the power, the money, the influence, revolved around a critical core concept—every member of the White Council acted in concert. Or at least, that was the face that was supposed to be presented to the outside world. And it was mostly true. We might squabble and double-deal one another in peacetime, but when there was an enemy at hand we closed ranks. Hell, they’d even done that with me, and most of the Council thought that I was the next-best thing to Darth Vader. But at the end of the day, I think a lot of them secretly liked the idea of having Vader on the team when the monsters showed up. They didn’t love me, never would, and I didn’t need them to love me to fight beside them. When things got hairy, the Council moved together.
Except now we weren’t doing it.
I looked at the folded letter in my hands and had the sudden, instinctive impression that I was watching an enormous tree begin to fall. Slowly at first, made to seem so by its sheer size—but falling nonetheless, to the ruin of anything sheltered beneath its boughs.
I was pretty tired, which probably explained why I didn’t have any particular emotional reaction to that line of thought. It should have scared the hell out of me for a laundry list of reasons. But it didn’t.
Susan came over to stand near me. “Harry. What is it?”
I stared at the fire. “The White Council can’t help us find Maggie,” I said quietly. “There are things happening. They’ll be of no use to us.”
After all they had wrongly inflicted upon me, after all the times I had risked my neck for them, when I needed them, truly needed their help, they were not there.
I watched my hands crush the letters and envelopes without telling them to do it. I threw them into the fire and glowered as they burned. I didn’t notice that the fire in the fireplace had risen to triple its normal height until the blue-white brightness of the flames made me shade my eyes against them. Turning my face slightly away was like twisting the spigot of a gas heater—the fire immediately died back down to normal size.
Control, moron, I warned myself. Control. You’re a loaded gun.
No one spoke. Martin had settled down on one of the sofas and was cleaning his little pistol on the coffee table. Molly stood at the wood-burning stove, stirring a pot of something.
Susan sat down next to me, not quite touching, and folded her hands in her lap. “What do we have left?”
“Persons,” I said quietly.
“I don’t understand,” Susan said.
“As a whole, people suck,” I replied. “But a person can be extraordinary. I appealed to the Council. I told them what Arianna was doing. I went to that group of people looking for help. You saw what happened. So … next I talk to individuals.”
“Who?” she asked me quietly.
“Persons who can help.”
I felt her dark eyes on me, serious and deep. “Some of them aren’t very nice, I think.”
“Very few of them, in fact,” I said.
She swallowed. “I don’t want you to endanger yourself. This situation wasn’t of your making. If there’s a price to be paid, I should be the one to pay it.”
“Doesn’t work like that,” I said.
“He’s right,” Martin confirmed. “For example: You paid the price for his failure to sufficiently discourage you from investigating the Red Court.”
“I made my choice,” Susan said.
“But not an informed one,” I said quietly. “You made assumptions you shouldn’t have, because you didn’t have enough information. I could have given it to you, but I didn’t. And that situation wasn’t of your making.”
She shook her head, her expression resigned. “There’s no point in all of us fighting to hold the blame stick, I guess.”
Martin began to run a cleaning patch through his pistol’s barrel on a short ramrod and spoke in the tone of a man repeating a mantra. “Stay on mission.”
Susan nodded. “Stay on mission. Where do we start, Harry?”
“Not we,” I said, “me. I’m going down to the lab while you four stay up here and watch for trouble. Make sure you warn me when it shows up.”
“When it shows up?” Susan asked.
“Been that kind of day.”
Molly turned from the stove, her expression worried. “What are you going to do, boss?”
I felt as if my insides were all cloying black smoke, but I summoned up enough spirit to wink at Molly. “I gotta make a few long- distance calls.”
Chapter
Nineteen
I went to my lab and started cleaning off my summoning circle. I’d knocked a few things onto it in the course of sweeping up anything incriminating. The FBI or Rudolph had added a bit to the mess. I pushed everything away from the circle and then swept it thoroughly with a broom. When you use a circle as a part of ritual magic, its integrity is paramount. Any object that falls across it or breaks its plane would collapse the circle’s energy. Dust and other small particles wouldn’t collapse a circle, but they did degrade its efficiency.
After I was done sweeping, I got a new shop cloth and a bottle of cleaning alcohol and wiped it down as thoroughly as if I were planning to perform surgery upon it. It took me about twenty minutes.
Once that was done, I opened an old cigar box on one shelf that was full of river rocks. All but one of them were decoys, camouflage. I pawed through it until I found the smooth piece of fire-rounded obsidian, and took it out of the box.
I went to the circle and sat in it, folding my legs in front of me. I touched the circle with a mild effort of will, and it snapped to life in a sudden curtain of gossamer energy. The circle would help contain and shape the magic I was about to work.
I put the black stone down on the floor in front of me, took a deep breath, straightened my back, and then began to draw in my will. I remained like that, relaxed, breathing deeply and slowly as I formed the spell in my head. This one was a fairly delicate working, and probably would have been beyond my skill before I had begun teaching Molly how to control her own power. Now, though, it was merely annoyingly difficult.
Once the energy was formed in my mind, I took a deep breath and whispered, “Voce, voco, vocius.” I waited a few seconds and then repeated myself. “Voce, voco, vocius.”
That went on for a couple of minutes, while I sat there doing my impression of a Roman telephone. I was just starting to wonder whether or not the damned rock was going to work when the lab around me vanished, replaced by an inky darkness. The circle’s energy field became visible, a pale blue light in the shape of a cylinder, stretching from the floor up into the infinite overhead space. Its light did not make my surroundings visible, as if the glow from the circle simply had nothing to reflect from.
“Uh,” I said, and my voice echoed strangely. “Hello?”
“Hold on to your horses,” said a grumpy, distant voice. “I’m coming.”
A moment later, there was a flash of light and a cylinder like my own appeared, directly in front of me. Ebenezar sat in it, legs folded the same way mine were. A black stone that was a twin to my own sat in front of him. Ebenezar looked tired. His hair was mussed, his eyes sunken. He was wearing only a pair of pajama bottoms, and I was surprised at how much muscle tone he had kept, despite his age. Of course, he’d spent the last few centuries mostly working on his farm. That would put muscle on anyone.
“Hoss,” he said by way of greeting. “Where are you?”
“My place,” I said.
“Situation?”
“My wards are down. I’ve got backup but I don’t want to stay here for long. The police and FBI have gotten involved and the Reds have swung at me twice in the past two days. Where are you?”
Ebenezar grunted. “Best if I don’t say. The Merlin is preparing his counterstrike, and we’re trying to find out how much they already know about it.”
“When you say ‘we,’ I assume you mean the Grey Council.”
The Grey Council was the appellation that had stuck to our little rogue organization inside the White Council itself. It consisted of people who could see lightning, hear thunder, and admit to themselves that wizards everywhere were increasingly in danger of being exterminated or enslaved by other interests—such as the Vampire Courts or the Black Council.
The Black Council was mostly a hypothetical organization. It consisted of a lot of mysterious figures in black robes with delusions of Ringwraith-hood. They liked to call up the deadly dangerous demons from outside of reality, the Outsiders, and to infiltrate and corrupt every supernatural nation they could get to. Their motivations were mysterious, but they’d been causing trouble for the Council and everyone else for quite a while. I had encountered members of their team, but I had no hard proof of their existence, and neither did anyone else.
Cautionary rumors of their presence had been met with derision and accusations of paranoia by most of the White Council until last year, when a Black Council agent had killed more than sixty wizards and infiltrated the Edinburgh facility so thoroughly that more than 95 percent of the staff and security team had gotten their brains redecorated to one degree or another. Even the Senior Council members had been influenced.
The traitor had been stopped, if just barely, and at a heavy cost. And after that, the Council as a whole believed that there might be a faceless, nameless organization running amok in the world—and that any number of them could actually be members of the White Council itself, operating in disguise.
Paranoia and mistrust. They had been steadily growing within the White Council, whose leader, the Merlin, still refused to admit that the Black Council was real, for fear that our own people would start going over to the bad guys out of fear or ambition. His decision had actually had the opposite effect on the frightened, nervous wizards of the White Council. Instead of throwing the clear light of truth on the situation, the Merlin had made it that much more murky and shadowy, made it easier for fear to prey upon his fellow wizards’ thoughts.