by Jim Butcher
Demonreach was still for a moment—and then vines abruptly twined up out of the floor. I almost jumped, but stopped myself. It clearly hadn’t done me any harm, apart from what I’d done to myself, and if it wanted to hurt me, I wasn’t going to be able to stop it anyway. So I waited.
The vines twined up into my bag and came out wrapped around Bob’s skull.
“Harry!” Bob squeaked.
“He’s one of mine,” I said in a hard voice. “You hurt him and you can forget me helping you.”
“LITTLE ENTITY,” Demonreach said. “YOU ARE FAMILIAR WITH THE WARDEN. YOU WILL TRANSLATE. YOU WILL NOT BE DAMAGED.”
“Hey!” I said, and took a step between Demonreach and Bob. “Did you hear me, Hopalong? Put down the skull.”
“Harry!” Bob said again. “Harry, wait! It heard you!”
I scowled and turned to look at Bob. He looked like the same old Bob. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” the skull said. The eyelights were flicking everywhere, as if watching dozens of screens at once. “Man, this thing is big! And old!”
“Is it hurting you?”
“Uh, no… no, it isn’t. And it could if it wanted to. It’s just… kind of a lot to take in… .” Then the skull quivered in the grip of the tendrils and said, “Oh!”
“Oh, what?” I asked.
“It’s explaining the problem,” Bob reported. “It had to take it through several levels of dumbing-down before I was able to get it.”
I grunted and relaxed a little. “Oh. So what’s the problem?”
“Hang on. I’m trying to figure out how to dumb it down enough for you to get it.”
“Thanks,” I growled.
“I got your back, boss.” Then Bob bounced up and down in the tendrils a few times. “Hey, Hopalong! Turn this thing around this way!”
Demonreach glowered at the skull.
Bob jiggled a little more. “Come on! We’re on a schedule here!”
I blinked at that. “Damn. You went from scared to wiseass pretty quick there, Bob.”
Bob snorted. “’Cause as big and bad as this thing is, it needs me to talk to you, and that makes me important. And it knows it.”
“LESSER BEINGS ONCE KNEW TO RESPECT THEIR ELDERS,” Demonreach said.
“I respect the crap out of you,” Bob complained. “You want me to help, and I’m telling you how. Now turn me around.”
A sudden breeze passed through the cavern in a long, enormous sigh. And the vines stirred and twisted the skull toward the nearest wall.
Bob’s eyelights brightened to brilliance and suddenly cast double cones of light on the wall. There was a scratchy sound that seemed to emanate from the skull itself, a blur of a sound like an old film sound track warming up, and then the old spotlight-sweeping 20th Century Fox logo appeared on the wall, along with the pompous trumpet-led symphony theme that often accompanied it.
“A movie?” I asked. “You can play movies?”
“And music! And TV! Butters gave me the Internet, baby! Now hush and pay attention.”
The opening logo bit faded to black and then familiar blue lettering appeared. It read: A LONG TIME AGO, PRETTY MUCH RIGHT HERE…
“Okay, come on,” I said. “You’re going to buy me a lawsuit, Bob.”
“Hush, Harry. Or you’ll go to the special hell.”
I blinked at that, confused. I’m not supposed to be the guy who doesn’t get the reference joke, dammit.
On the wall, the black gave way to a star field that panned down to a blue-and-green planet. Earth. Then it zoomed in and in and in until I recognized the outline of Lake Michigan and the other Great Lakes, and came closer still until it got to the outline of the island itself.
Bob is invaluable, but man, he loves his wisecracks and his drama.
The image sank down until it showed a familiar landing point, though it had no ruined town and no Whatsup Dock and no row of wooden piles in the water. It was just a little beach of dirt and sand and heavy, brooding forest growth.
Then a ribbon of light maybe eight feet long split the air vertically. The light broadened until it was maybe three feet wide, and then a figure appeared through it. I recognized the signs—someone had opened a Way, a passage from the Nevernever to the island. The figure emerged, made a gesture with one hand, and the Way closed behind it.
It was a man, fairly tall, fairly lean. He wore ragged clothing in many shades of grey. His grey cloak had a deep hood on it, and it shadowed his features, except for the tip of his nose and a short grey-white beard covering a rather pointy chin.
(Letters appeared at the bottom of the screen. They read: MERLIN.)
“Wait? You saw Merlin?” I asked Bob.
“Nah,” Bob said, “but I cast Alec Guinness. Looks good, right?”
I sighed. “Could you get to the point, please?”
“Oh, come on,” Bob said. “I wrote in this romance triangle subplot and cast Jenna Jameson and Carrie Fisher. There’s a love scene you’re gonna really—”
“Bob!”
“Okay, okay. Fine. Sheesh.”
The movie shifted into fast motion. The grey-clad figure became a blur. It walked about waving its arms, and directed oceans of energy here and there, settling them all in and around the substance of the island itself.
“Wait. Did Demonreach tell you how he did that?”
“No,” Bob said, annoyed. “It’s called artistic license, Harry.”
“Okay, I get it. Merlin built the island. However he did it. Get to the part with the problem.”
Bob sighed.
Merlin walked into the woods in comically fast motion and vanished. Then time passed. The sun streaked by hundreds and then thousands of times, the shadows of the island bowing and twisting, the trees rising, growing, growing old, and dying. At the bottom of the screen, words appeared that read, A LOT OF TIME PASSES.
“Thank you for dumbing that down for me,” I said.
“De nada.”
Then the camera slowed. Again, Merlin appeared. Again, oceans of power rose up and settled into the island. Then Merlin vanished, and more years passed. Maybe a minute later, he appeared again—looking exactly the same, I might add—and repeated the cycle.
“Hold on,” I said. “He did it again? Twice?”
“Ah,” Bob said, as a fourth cycle began on the screen. “Sort of. See, Harry, this is one of those things that you’re going to have trouble grabbing onto.”
“Go slow and try me.”
“Merlin didn’t build the prison five times,” Bob said. “He built it once. In five different times. All at the same time.”
I felt my brows knit. “Uh. He was in the same place, doing the same thing, in five different times at once?”
“Exactly.”
“That does not make any sense,” I said.
“Look, a mortal jail is built in three dimensions, right? Merlin built this one in four, and probably in several more, though you can’t really tell whether or not he built it in a given dimension until you go there and measure it, and the act of measuring it will change it, but the point is: This is really advanced stuff.”
I sighed. “Yeah. I’m getting that. But what’s wrong?”
The shot zoomed out, rising up to give a top-down view of the island, which became a blurry shape. A familiar five-pointed star blazed itself across the surface of the lake, its lines so long that the pentagon shape at its center enfolded the island entirely. Within the pentagon, a second pentacle formed, like the first one drawn in the manner to preserve and protect. The camera tightened in, and I saw that the second pentagon enfolded the entire hilltop where the cottage and ruined tower lay. The camera tightened more, and I saw more pentacles drawn, this time not flat but at dozens of intersecting angles, their centers encircling the dozen tunnels full of evil beings beneath the island.
“These,” Bob said, “represent the original enchantments on the island. This is vastly simplified, of course, but the basic star-and-circle architecture is the same as
the work you do, Harry.”
Then the design blurred and increased, growing denser and more delicate and more brilliant in power, until something twinged in my brain and I had to look away from the diagram.
“Yeah, sorry about that, boss. This is meant to represent the entanglement of the spells being delivered at different times.”
“No wonder it was so complicated,” I muttered.
“And it’s even worse than this,” Bob said. “I’m filtering it down for you. And here’s the problem.”
I forced myself to look back at the projection, and saw those millions upon millions of spells resonating with one another, spreading and interlocking into an impenetrable barrier. It was, I thought, somehow like watching crystals grow. The spells powering the actual construction of it hadn’t been, alone, too much stronger than some of the work I had done—but when they’d been interconnected with their counterparts across time, they’d fed upon one another, created a perfect resonance of energy that had become something infinitely greater than the sum of its parts.
Then I saw the dissonance appear. Bob had chosen to show it as a sullen red light that began to pulse lightly at the westernmost edges of the great design. It began as something faint, but then, like an oncoming headache, started to throb into something larger and more noticeable. Where scarlet and blue light touched, there were ugly flares of energy—flares that I had been sensing ever since I’d gotten to the island. Before long, that scarlet pulse had spread to half the island, and then, abruptly, the screen went white.
Text at the bottom read, NOVEMBER 1.
“By tomorrow,” I said. “Super. But I still don’t see what is wrong, Bob.”
“Energy hits it,” Bob said. “A directed burst of energy, a whole lot of it. It unravels the whole containment spell Merlin laid down and triggers the fail-safe.”
“FIRE,” rumbled Demonreach.
“I figured that one out, thanks,” I said. “But nothing has actually happened to the spells yet?”
“Nope,” said Bob. “That tension that’s building? It’s… Well, think of it as cause and effect, only backward.”
“Huh?”
“What the island is experiencing now is the echo of the moment that burst of energy strikes it,” Bob said. “Only instead of the echo happening after, it’s happening first.”
I stopped and thought. “You’re telling me that the reason the island is about to blow up is… because it’s about to blow up?”
Bob sighed. “Someone hits the island with energy, Harry. But they’ve figured out how Merlin put this place together. They aren’t attacking it in three dimensions. They’re attacking in four. They’re sending power through time as well as through space.”
“So… I have to stop them from attacking the island tomorrow?”
“No,” Bob said, exasperated. “You have to stop them from attacking whenever it is that they actually attack.”
“Uh…”
“Look, the rock they’re throwing hits tomorrow,” Bob said. “But you have to stop them from throwing it at whatever point they’re standing when they throw it.”
“Oh,” I said, blinking. “I get that.”
Bob turned to look at Demonreach. “Do you see what I have to work with here? I had to take that down to throwing a rock before it got through.”
“HIS UNDERSTANDING IS LIMITED,” Demonreach agreed.
“Okay, I’ve had just about enough from both of you,” I said. “If you’re so smart, how come you don’t stop it from happening?”
“THE EXPLANATION WOULD DAMAGE YOU, WARDEN.”
Bob made an impatient sound. “Because that spirit is the island, Harry. The spells, the Well, the physical island, all of it. Demonreach does not exist outside this island. It has no ability to reach beyond itself. The attack is coming from outside the prison. That’s why it needs a Warden in the first place.”
I scowled. “It talked to me in the graveyard last year.”
“It bullied Mab into helping it,” Bob said.
“I DID NOT BULLY. I BARGAINED.”
“Okay, okay,” I said. “I’ll add that to my list, then. Find whoever it is, wherever they are, and stop them from doing something they haven’t done yet.”
“Unless they have,” Bob said. “In which case, well. Kinda too late.”
“Right,” I said tiredly.
I had my own private purgatory full of sleeping monsters.
I had a parasite in my brain that was fixing to burst my skull on its way out of me.
My little island paradise was about to explode with enough energy to cook dark gods and Lord only knew what else hanging around under the island. That meant we were talking about a release of energy in the gigaton range. And if I didn’t stop someone from doing it, the continental shelf was about to have a very bad day.
Oh, right. And I was supposed to kill an insane immortal—or else face the wrath of her mother.
And I had to do it all in the next twenty-four hours. Maybe a little less.
“And the sad part is, this actually feels like having my life back. How bent is that?”
“Harry,” Bob said. “Sunrise in one hour.”
“Right.” I sighed and picked up the skull. I tucked him away into the messenger bag and said to Demonreach, “I’m on it.”
“GOOD.”
I muttered darkly under my breath and turned for the stairs, then started jogging back up them, thinking of all the problems arrayed against me.
Good thing I’d been working out.
Chapter
Eighteen
Okay, for the record: That is one hell of a lot of stairs to go up.
Also for the record: I did them two and three at a time, at a run, and went to the top without stopping.
From there, I went pounding down the hillside, my feet never slipping or faltering, until I got back to the beach, moving at an easy run. The sun was rising behind me, but the solid mass of Demonreach kept it blotted out in shadow, and I could tell only by the light beginning to fill the sky.
Thomas came to his feet as I left the woods, his hands moving to his weapons automatically. I shook my head at him, never slowing down, and said, “Let’s get this tub moving!”
“What did you find out?” he called. He started untying the lines and then leapt nimbly up to the deck of the Water Beetle. Molly appeared from the cabin, looking as though she’d been sleeping a few seconds before.
I ran down the dock and hopped up to the ship’s deck. “A bunch of people are gonna be mad at me, I’ve got some kind of medical issue that’s going to kill me in a while if I don’t deal with it, oh, and the island’s blowing up tomorrow and taking a whole lot of the country with it if I don’t fix it.”
Thomas gave me a steady look. “So,” he said. “Same old, same old.”
“I think it’s nice that there are some things in this world you can rely on,” I said.
My brother snorted and started the Water Beetle’s engines. We backed away from the dock, and then he turned, gunned it, and headed back toward town. Like I said before, the boat isn’t a racing machine, but it’s got some horsepower in it, and as the sun rose properly, we were zooming over the orange-gold water, leaving a huge V-shaped wake behind us, while I stood at the front of the boat, my hands on the railing.
I felt it when the dawn broke, the way you almost always can if you stop to pay attention. Something subtle and profound simply shifted in the air around me. Even if I’d been blindfolded, I would have felt the transition, the way that the winds and currents of energy broadly known as magic began to gust and shift, driven by the light of the oncoming sun.
I wasn’t close enough to any of the Ways to the realms of Faerie to be able to sense whether they had been reopened, but it made sense that they would be. Sunrise tends to disperse and dissolve patterns of magical energy—not because magic is inherently a force of the night so much as because the dawn is inherently a force of new beginnings and renewal.
Every sunris
e tended to erode ongoing enchantments. A spell spread so wide that it curtained the whole of Faerie away from the mortal world would by necessity be rather thin and fragile. When the sun hit it, it would be like about a zillion magnifying glasses focusing light on old newsprint. It would blacken and wither away. My mind treated me to a gruesome little collage of images—the darkest beings of Faerie suddenly pouring forth from every creepy shadow and unsettling alley and dangerous-looking old abandoned building in the city. You’d think my mind would find better things to do, like fantasize about improbably friendly women or something.
Molly came up and stood with me, facing ahead. I looked at her obliquely. The rising sun behind us painted her hair gold but left her face lightly veiled in shadow. She didn’t look young anymore.
I mean, don’t get me wrong; it wasn’t like her hair had gone grey and her teeth fell out. But there had always been a sense of energy and life and simple joy welling up from the grasshopper. It had been her default setting, and I hadn’t realized how much I had loved that about her.
Now her blue eyes looked weary, wary. She wasn’t looking at the beauty in life as much as she once had. Her eyes scanned for dangers both nearby and farther down the road, heavy with caution and made wise by pain—and they had far, far more steel in them than I had ever seen there before.
Months of training with the Leanansidhe while fighting a street war will do that.
Maybe if I’d been tougher on the grasshopper early on, it wouldn’t have come as such a shock to her. Maybe if I’d focused on different aspects of her training, she would have been better prepared.
Maybe, maybe, maybe, but I was kidding myself. Molly’s eyes were always going to end up like that sooner or later—just like mine had.
This business doesn’t play nice with children.
“I told you,” Molly said, never looking toward me. “It’s in the past. Leave it there.”
“You listening to my head, kiddo?”
Her mouth twitched. “Only when I want to hear the roar of the ocean.”
I grinned. I liked that so much better than all the “Sir Knights” I’d been getting lately.
“How much can you tell me?” she asked.