Changes df-12

by Jim Butcher

  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 19

  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 cur
tain 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.

  Enter the Grey Council, which consisted of me and Ebenezar and unspecified others, organized in cells in order to prevent either one of the other Councils from finding out about us and wiping out all of us at once. We were the ones who were trying to be sane in an insane time. The whole affair could backlash on us spectacularly, but I guess some people just aren’t any good at watching bad things happen. They have to do something about it.

  “Yes,” Ebenezar said. “That is who I mean.”

  “I need the Grey Council to help me,” I said.

  “Hoss . . . we’re all sitting under the sword of Damocles waiting for it to fall. The events unfolding in Edinburgh right now could mean the end of organized, restrained wizardry. The end of the Laws of Magic. It could drive us back to the chaos of an earlier age, unleash a fresh wave of warlock-driven monsters and faux demigods upon mankind.”

  “For some reason, sir, I always feel a little more comfortable when I’m sitting under that sword. Must be all the practice.”

  Ebenezar scowled. “Hoss . . .”

  “I need information,” I said, my voice hard. “There’s a little girl out there. Someone knows something about where she is. And I know that the Council could dig something up. The White Council already shut the door in my face.” I thrust out my jaw. “What about the Grey?”

  Ebenezar sighed, and his tired face looked more tired. “What you’re doing is good and right. But it ain’t smart. And it’s a lesson you haven’t learned yet.”

  “What lesson?”

  “Sometimes, Hoss,” he said very gently, “you lose. Sometimes the darkness takes everyone. Sometimes the monster escapes to kill again another day.” He shook his head and looked down. “Sometimes, Hoss, the innocent little ones are murdered. And there’s not one goddamned thing you can do about it.”

  “Leave her to die,” I snarled. “That’s what you want me to do?”

  “I want you to help save millions or billions of little girls, boy,” he said, his own voice dropping into a hard, hard growl. “Not throw them away for the sake of one.”

  “I am not going to leave this alone,” I snapped. “She—”

  Ebenezar made a gesture with his right hand and my voice box just stopped working. My lips moved. I could inhale and exhale freely—but I couldn’t talk.

  His dark eyes flashed with anger, an expression I had seldom seen upon his face. “Dammit, boy, you’re smarter than this. Don’t you see what you’re doing? You’re giving Arianna exactly what she wants. You’re dancing like a puppet on her strings. Reacting in precisely the way she wants you to react, and it will get you killed.

  “I told you long ago that being a real wizard means sacrifice. It means knowing things no one else does,” he said, still growling. “I told you that it meant that you might have to act upon what you knew, and knew to be right, even though the whole world set its hand against you. Or that you might have to do horrible, necessary things. Do you remember that?”

  I did. Vividly. I remembered the smell of the campfire we’d been sitting beside at the time. I nodded.

  “Here’s where you find out who you are,” he said, his voice harsh and flat. “There’s a lot of work to do, and no time to do it, let alone waste it arguing with you over something you should know by now.” He closed his eyes for a moment and took a deep breath, as if bringing himself back under control. “Meet me at the Toronto safe house in twelve hours.” He spoke in a voice of absolute authority, something I’d heard from him only a handful of times in my life. He expected his order to be obeyed.

  I turned my head from him. In the edge of my vision, I saw him scowl again, reach down, and
pick up his own black stone—and suddenly I was sitting on the floor of my lab again.

  I picked up my sending stone wearily and slipped it into my pocket. Then I just lay back on the floor, breaking the circle as I did, and stared up at the ceiling for a little while. I turned my head to my left, and spotted the green, extra-thick three-ring binder where I stored all my files on entities I could summon from the Nevernever.

  No.

  I looked away from the book. When you call things up for information, you’ve got to pay their price. It’s always different. It’s never been pleasant.

  And the thought frightened me.

  This would be the time those beings had been waiting for. When my need was so dire that I might agree to almost anything if it meant saving the child. For her, I might make a deal I would never consider otherwise.

  I might even call upon—

  I stopped myself from so much as thinking the name of the Queen of Air and Darkness, for fear that she might somehow detect it and take action. She had been offering me temptation passively and patiently for years. I had wondered, sometimes, why she didn’t make more of an effort to sell me on her offer. She certainly could have done so, had she wished.

  Now I understood. She had known that in time, sooner or later, there would come a day when I would be more needful than cautious. There was no reason for her to dance about crafting sweet temptations and sending them out to ensnare me. Not when all she had to do was wait awhile. It was a cold, logical approach—and that was very much in her style.

  But there were other beings I could question, in the light blue binder sitting on top of the green one—beings of less power and knowledge, with correspondingly lower prices. It seemed unlikely that I would get anything so specific from them, but you never knew.

  I reached for the blue book, rose, and set about calling creatures into my lab to answer a few questions.

  After three hours of conjuring and summoning, I came up with absolutely nothing. I had spoken with nature spirits in the shape of a trio of tiny screech owls, and with messenger spirits, the couriers between the various realms within the Nevernever. None of them knew anything. I plucked a couple of particularly nosy ghosts who lived around Chicago out of the spirit world, and summoned servants of the Tylwyth Teg, with whose king I was on good terms. I asked spirits of water what they and their kin had seen regarding Maggie, and stared into the flickering lights of creatures of sentient flame, whose thoughts were revealed in the images quivering inside them.