by Jim Butcher
“It sort of did,” I said.
“My brother the… geosexual?”
I snorted. “Look, think of it as a business partner. And be glad it’s on our side.”
“It isn’t on our side,” Molly said quietly. “But… I think it might be on yours.”
“Same thing,” I said warningly, out at the island in general. “You hear that? They’re my guests. Be nice.”
The thrumming tension in the island didn’t change. Not in the least. It went on with a kind of glacial inevitability that didn’t give two shakes for the desires of one ephemeral little mortal, wizard or not. I got the feeling that nice simply wasn’t in Demonreach’s vocabulary. I’d probably have to be satisfied with it refraining from violence.
“We’ll talk,” I said to the island, trying to make it a threat.
Demonreach didn’t care.
I muttered under my breath, bounced the Winchester on my shoulder, and started walking.
Walking on the island is an odd experience. I’d say it’s like walking through your house in the dark, except I’ve never known a house as well as I knew that island. I knew where every stone lay, where every branch stuck out in my path, knew it without being warned by any senses at all. Walking in the dark was as easy as doing it in broad daylight—easier, even. I’d have had to pay at least a little attention to use my eyes. But here, every step was solid, and every motion I made was minimal, efficient, and necessary.
I made my way through unbroken brush in the dark, hardly making a sound, never tripping once. As I did I noted that Molly had been right about another thing: The clash of energies in the air had created enough dissonance to drive away most of the animals, the ones that had the capacity to readily escape. The deer were gone. Birds and raccoons were gone, and so were the skunks—though that would be one hell of a long swim to the nearest stretch of lakeshore, animals had been known to swim farther. Smaller mammals, mice and squirrels and so on, remained, though they had crowded into the ten yards or so nearest the shoreline all around the island. The snakes were having a field day with that, and evidently weren’t bright enough to know that there was a bigger problem brewing.
I found the trail to the top of the hill, the high point on the island, and started up it. There were irregular steps cut into the hillside to make the ascent easier. They were treacherous if you didn’t walk carefully, or if you didn’t have near-omniscience about the place.
At the top of the hill is a ruined lighthouse made of stone. It’s basically just a chewed-up silo shape now, having collapsed long ago. Next to the ruined tower, someone cobbled together a small cottage out of fallen stones. When I first saw it, it had been a square, squat little building with no roof. Thomas and I had been planning on putting the roof back on, so that I could overnight on the island someplace where I could build a fire and stay warm, but we hadn’t gotten that far yet when everything had gone sideways. The cottage just sat, empty and forlorn—but a soft golden glow bathed the interior wall I could see from my position. There was the scent of wood smoke on the air.
Someone had built me a fire.
I made my way forward cautiously, looking around with both my awareness and my eyes, just in case my omniscience was in actuality nigh-omniscience, but I couldn’t sense any threat. So I went into the cabin and looked around.
There was a fire in the fireplace and a folding table stacked with thick plastic boxes containing jars of food that would stay good for months at a time. The boxes would resist the tampering of critters. There were some camp implements stored in another box, and I took the time to break out a metal coffeepot, went out to the little old iron pump just outside the front door, and filled it. I tossed in a couple of handfuls of coffee grounds, hung it on the swivel arm by the fireplace, and nudged it over the fire.
Then I broke out the skull and set him down on the table. “Okay, Bob,” I said. “We have work to do. You been listening?”
“Yeah, yeah,” Bob said, his eyelights flickering to life. “Island go boom or something.”
“We’re on a mission to find out what it’s going to do, and why, and how we can stop it.”
“Gosh, I’d never have thought of that myself, Harry.”
“This is top secret stuff,” I said. “Anything you learn here is for me and you only. You go to someone else, I want this whole evening locked away someplace nice and tight. And don’t go splitting off another personality on me, like you did with Evil Bob.”
“Entirely confidential, check,” Bob said. “And it would take a lot more than one night working with you to build up enough momentum to spin off a whole new me. I have to actually learn things to make that happen.”
“Less insult, more analysis,” I said.
The beams from the skull’s eye sockets grew brighter. They swept left and right, up and down, panning around like prison searchlights. Bob made thoughtful noises.
I tended the coffeepot. After it had been boiling for a few minutes, I took it off the fire, added a splash of cold water from the pump to settle the grounds, and poured myself a cup. I added a little powdered creamer and a bunch of sugar.
“Might as well drink syrup,” Bob muttered.
“Says the guy with no taste buds,” I said. I sipped. “Been meaning to have you out here to take a look at the place anyway.”
“Uh-huh,” Bob said absently.
“So?” I asked.
“Um,” Bob said. “I’m still working on the surface layer of spells on the stones of this cottage, Harry.”
I frowned. “Uh. What?”
“You know there’re symbols there, right?”
I sipped coffee. “Sure,” I said. “They kinda lit up when—”
Nauseating, mind-numbing horror and pain flashed over my thoughts for a couple of seconds. I’d used my wizard’s Sight to look at the wrong being a couple of years ago, and that isn’t the kind of mistake you ever live down. Now the memory of seeing that thing’s true being was locked into my noggin, and it wouldn’t go away or fade into the past—not ever.
That’s bad. But the really bad part is that I’ve gotten used to it. It just caused a stutter step in my speech.
“—the naagloshii tried to get inside. It didn’t seem to like them much.”
“I should fucking think not,” Bob said, his voice nervous. “Um, Harry… I don’t know what these are.”
I frowned at him. “Uh. What?”
“I don’t know,” he repeated. He sounded genuinely surprised. “I don’t know what they are, Harry.”
Magic is like a lot of other disciplines that people have recently begun developing, in historic terms. Working with magic is a way of understanding the universe and how it functions. You can approach it from a lot of different angles, applying a lot of different theories and mental models to it. You can get to the same place through a lot of different lines of theory and reasoning, kind of like really advanced mathematics. There’s no truly right or wrong way to get there, either—there are just different ways, some more or less useful than others for a given application. And new vistas of thought, theory, and application open up on a pretty regular basis, as the Art develops and expands through the participation of multiple brilliant minds.
But that said, once you have a good grounding in it, you get a pretty solid idea of what’s possible and what isn’t. No matter how much circumlocution you do with your formulae, two plus two doesn’t equal five. (Except maybe very, very rarely, sometimes, in extremely specific and highly unlikely circumstances.) Magic isn’t something that just makes things happen, poof. There are laws to how it behaves, structure, limits—and the whole reason Bob was created was so that those limits could be explored, tested, and charted.
I could count on the fingers of no hands how many times Bob had come up completely dry. He always knew something. The skull had been working with wizards for centuries. He’d run into damned near everything.
“Uh, what?” I said. “Seriously? Nothing?”
“They’re
powerful,” he said. “I can tell you that much. But they’re also complex. I mean, like, Molly on her best day could not come close to weaving together something this crazy. You on your best day could not sling around enough power to juice up one of the smallest stones. And that’s just the first layer. I think there are more. Maybe a lot more. Uh, like hundreds.”
“On each stone?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s… It isn’t… You can’t put that much magic into that little space,” I protested.
“No, no, I can’t,” Bob said. “And, no, you can’t. Because it’s impossible. But, um. Someone doesn’t care.”
“How did they do it?”
“If I knew that, it wouldn’t be impossible,” Bob said, an edge to his voice. “But I can tell you this much: It predates wizardry as we know it.”
I would have said, What? but I felt like I’d been saying that a lot already. So I sipped coffee and scowled interrogatively instead.
“This work, the actual spells on the stone, comes from before even the predecessors to the White Council. I’m conversant in the course and application of the Art since the golden age of Greece. This stuff, whatever it is? It’s older.”
“You can’t lay out spells that last that long,” I mumbled. “It isn’t possible.”
“Lot of that going around,” Bob said. “Harry… you’re… we’re talking about a whole different level, here. One that I didn’t even know existed. Uh. Do you get what that means? In round terms, at least?”
I shook my head slowly.
“Well, at least you’re smart enough to know that,” Bob said. “Um, okay. You know the old chestnut about how sufficiently advanced science could be described only as magic?”
“Right,” I said.
“Well, I’m going to use the same model right now: As a wizard, you’re pretty good at making wooden axles and stone wheels. These spells? They’re an internal combustion engine. You do the math from there. On your metaphorical abacus, I guess.”
I blew out a very long, very slow breath.
Hell’s bells.
I suddenly felt very young and very arrogant, and not terribly bright. I mean, I’d known I was going to be out of my depth when I first hooked up with the island, but I thought I’d at least be in the same freaking ocean. Instead, I was…
I was in uncharted space, wasn’t I?
And the best part of this whole conversation? Those spells that had stymied one of the most advanced research tools known to wizardry and baffled the collected knowledge of centuries? Those were just the ruined part of the island.
What the hell was I going to find in the part that was working?
One second I was alone in the ruined cottage, and the next, there was a presence filling the doorway, looking down at me through the empty space where the roof should have been. It was huge, maybe twelve feet tall, and roughly humanoid in shape. I couldn’t see much of it. It was covered in what looked like a heavy cloak that covered it completely. Two points of green fire burned from within the cloak’s hood. It simply stood, unnaturally still, staring down at me, though the cool night breeze over the lake stirred the edges of its cloak.
Demonreach. The manifested spirit of the island.
“Uh,” I said. “Hi.”
The burning eyes shifted from me to Bob on the table. And then Demonreach did something it had never done before.
It spoke.
Out loud.
Its voice was a rumble of heavy rocks scraping together, of summer thunder rolling in from over the horizon. The voice was huge. Not loud. That didn’t do it justice. It just came from everywhere, all at once. The surface of my partly drunk coffee buzzed and vibrated at the all-pervasive sound. “ANOTHER ONE.”
“Meep,” Bob squeaked. The lights vanished from the eye sockets of the skull.
I blinked a bunch of times. “You… you’re talking now?”
“NECESSITY.”
“Right,” I said. “Um. So… you’re having some trouble, I guess?”
“TROUBLE,” it said. “YES.”
“I came to help,” I said, feeling extremely lame as I did. “Um. Is that even possible?”
“POTENTIALLY,” came the answer. Then the vast form turned. It took a limping step. The ground didn’t so much tremble at the weight as shift slightly beneath the sheer, overwhelming presence of the ancient spirit. “FOLLOW. BRING THE MEMORY SPIRIT.”
“. . . meep…” Bob whimpered.
I grabbed the skull in shaking hands and stuffed it into the messenger bag. I grabbed a chemical light from the storage boxes on the table, snapped it, and shook it to life as I hurried to catch up. I had an instinct about where we were headed, but I asked to be sure. “Uh. Where are we going?”
Demonreach kept walking, slow paces that nonetheless forced me to scurry to keep up. “BELOW.”
The spirit walked to the ruined circle of the lighthouse and lifted a shadowy arm in a vague gesture. When it did, the ground of the circle rippled and quivered, and then what had appeared to be solid stone began to run down, pouring itself into a hole like sand falling through an hourglass. In seconds, an opening the size of the trapdoor to my old lab had formed in the stone, and stairs led down into the darkness.
“Oh,” I said. I’d known there were caves beneath the island, but not how I had gotten there or where I could find them. “Wow. What’s the game plan here, exactly?”
“THE WELL IS UNDER ATTACK,” came the surround-sound answer. “IT MUST BE DEFENDED.” Demonreach started toward the stairs. There was no way it should have fit down them, but it moved as though that wasn’t going to be an issue.
“Wait. You want me to fight off something you can’t stop?” I asked.
“IT IS TIME FOR YOU TO UNDERSTAND.”
“Understand what?”
“OUR PURPOSE, WARDEN,” it said. “FOLLOW ME.”
Then it went down the stairs and vanished into the unknown.
“Here there be monsters!” Bob whispered, half hysterically. “Run! Run already!”
“Think it’s a little late for that,” I said.
But for a second there, I thought about taking his advice. Some part of me wondered what Tibet looked like this time of year. For a minute, it seemed like an awesome idea to go find out.
But only for a minute.
Then I swallowed, gripped the plastic glow stick in fingers that felt very slippery for some reason, and followed Demonreach down into the dark.
Chapter
Sixteen
I don’t know how far down those stairs went.
I’m not even kidding. I’m not taking poetic license. The stairs went down twelve steps, took a right angle, and went down twelve more, took another right-angled turn, and went down twelve more, and so on. I stopped counting in the low two hundreds and resorted to my awareness of the island to feel out the rest of them. Duh. Seventeen hundred and twenty-eight—twelve cubed.
The stairs were about eight inches each, which meant eleven hundred feet and change, straight down. That was well below the water level of the lake. Hell, it was below the bottom of the lake. The staircase echoed with deep, groaning sounds pitched almost too low to be heard. In the wan light of the chemical glow stick, the place took on a kind of amusement-park fun-house atmosphere, where you suddenly realize that you’ve been routed into a circle with no apparent way out.
“Down, down to goblin town you go, my lad!” I sang in a hearty, badly pitched baritone. I was panting. “Ho, ho, my lad!”
Demonreach’s glowing eyes flicked toward me. Maybe irritated.
“Oh, come on,” I said. “You never saw the Rankin-Bass animated version of The Hobbit? The one they made before they did the movies in New Zealand?”
It didn’t answer.
“Harry,” Bob muttered at me. “Stop trying to piss it off.”
“I’m bored,” I said. “And I’m not looking forward to coming back up. I get that we’re going a long, long way down, but couldn’t we use an elevator?
Ooh, or a fireman’s pole. Then it’d be like going down to the Batcave. Way more fun.” I raised my voice a little. “And more efficient.”
Maybe it was my imagination, but when I said that last, I thought I saw Demonreach’s steady pace slow for a thoughtful second or two.
Nah.
“Hey, how come you called me Warden?” I asked. “I mean, I’ve been a Warden, but there are a lot of other guys who are better at it than me. I’m not exactly the poster child.”
“WARDEN,” Demonreach said. “NOW THERE ARE MANY. FIRST THERE WAS ONE.”
I counted down the last ten steps out loud, stopped at two, and jumped over the last one to the floor beneath with both feet. My hiking boots clomped on the stone.
We had reached a small chamber, the floor and walls lined in the same stone used in the lighthouse and cottage. I put a hand on them and could feel them quivering with power, with the dissonance of conflicting energies. Actually, looking back, I saw that at some point, the walls of the stairway, and the stairs themselves, had begun to be constructed of the same material—every single stone of it invested with impossible amounts of power and skill.
“Uh,” I said. “Question?”
Demonreach had stopped at a stone doorway shape in the wall. It was surrounded with larger stones covered in intricate carving. The burning eyes turned toward me.
“Um. Who made this place?”
It didn’t speak. It pointed to the door. I looked. There was a sign in the middle of it, a sigil. It wasn’t something I recognized as part of any set of runes that I knew, but I knew I’d seen it somewhere before. It took me several seconds of sorting through memories to run it down—I’d seen it on the spine of a very, very, very old journal on my mentor’s bookshelf.
“Merlin,” I said quietly. “That’s whose sign that is, isn’t it?”
Demonreach did not respond. Why say YES when silence will do?
I swallowed. The original Merlin was the real deal, Arthur and Excalibur and everything. Merlin had, according to legend, created the White Council of Wizards from the chaos of the fall of the Roman Empire. He plunged into the flames of the burning Library of Alexandria to save the most critical texts, helped engineer the Catholic Church as a vessel to preserve knowledge and culture during Europe’s Dark Ages, and leapt tall cathedrals in a single bound. There were endless stories about Merlin. Popular theory among contemporary wizards was that they were more apocryphal than accurate. Hell, I’d always figured it that way, too.