by Jim Butcher
“Is that even a real word?” I asked.
“It should be,” he said with a superior sniff. “Little Chicago might be able to handle something if you want to give it a test run.” The skull spun around to face me. “Tell me that this doesn’t have something to do with the bruises on your face.”
“I’m not sure it does,” I said. “I got word today that the Gatekeeper—”
Bob shivered.
“—thinks that there’s black magic afoot in town, and that I need to do something about it.”
“And you want to try to use Little Chicago to find it?”
“Maybe,” I said. “Do you think it will work?”
“I think that the Wright Brothers tested their new stuff at Kitty Hawk instead of trying it over the Grand Canyon for a reason,” Bob said. “Specifically, because if the plane folded due to flawed design, they might survive it at Kitty Hawk.”
“Or maybe they couldn’t afford to travel,” I said. “Besides, how dangerous could it be?”
Bob stared at me for a second. Then he said, “You’ve been pouring energy into this thing every night for six months, Harry, and right now it’s holding about three hundred times the amount of energy that kinetic ring you wear will contain.”
I blinked. At full power, that ring could almost knock a car onto its side. Three hundred times that kind of energy translated to…well, something I’d rather not experience within the cramped confines of the lab. “It’s got that much in it?”
“Yes, and you haven’t tested it yet. If you’ve screwed up some of the harmonics, it could blow up in your face, worst-case scenario. Best case, you only blow out the project and set yourself back to ground zero.”
“To square one,” I corrected him. “Square one is the beginning of a project. Ground zero is the area immediately under a bomb blast.”
“One may tend to resemble the other,” Bob said sourly.
“I’ll just have to live with the risk,” I said. “That’s the exciting life of a professional wizard and his daring assistant.”
“Oh, please. Assistants get paid.”
In answer, I reached down to a paper bag out of sight below the table and withdrew two paperback romances.
Bob let out a squeaking sound, and his skull jounced and jittered on the blue-painted surface of the table that represented Lake Michigan. “Is that it, is that it?” he squeaked.
“Yes,” I said. “They’re rated ‘Burning Hot’ by some kind of romance society.”
“Lots of sex and kink!” Bob caroled. “Gimme!”
I dropped them back into the bag and looked from Bob to Little Chicago.
The skull spun back around. “You know what kind of black magic?” he asked.
“No clue. Just black.”
“Vague, yet unhelpful,” Bob said.
“Annoyingly so.”
“Oh, the Gatekeeper didn’t do it to annoy you,” Bob said. “He did it to prevent any chance of paradox.”
“He…’’ I blinked. “He what?”
“He got this from hindsight, he had to,” Bob said.
“Hindsight,” I murmured. “You mean he went to the future for this?”
“Well,” Bob hedged. “That would break one of the Laws, so probably not. But he might have sent himself a message from there, or maybe gotten it from some kind of prognosticating spirit. He might even have developed some ability for that himself. Some wizards do.”
“Meaning what?” I asked.
“Meaning that it’s possible nothing has happened, yet. But that he wanted to put you on your guard against something that’s coming in the immediate future.”
“Why not just tell me?” I asked.
Bob sighed. “You just don’t get this, do you?”
“I guess not.”
“Okay. Let’s say he finds out that someone is going to steal your car tomorrow.”
“Heh,” I said bitterly. “Okay, let’s say that.”
“Right. Well, he can’t just call you up and tell you to move your car.”
“Why not?”
“Because if he significantly altered what happened with his knowledge of the future it could cause all sorts of temporal instabilities. It could cause new parallel realities to split off from the point of the alteration, ripple out into multiple alterations he couldn’t predict, or kind of backlash into his consciousness and drive him insane.” Bob glanced at me again. “Which, you know, might not do much to deter you, but other wizards take that kind of thing seriously.”
“Thank you, Bob,” I said. “But I still don’t get why any of those things would happen.”
Bob sighed. “Okay. Temporal studies 101. Let’s say that he hears about your car being stolen. He comes back to warn you, and as a result, you keep your car.”
“Sounds good so far.”
“But if your car never got stolen,” Bob said, “then how did he know to come back and warn you?”
I frowned.
“That’s paradox, and it can have all kinds of nasty backlash. Theory holds that it could even destroy our reality if it happened in a weak enough spot. But that’s never been proven, and never happened. You can tell, on account of how everything keeps existing.”
“Okay,” I said. “So what’s the point in sending the message at all, if it can’t change anything?”
“Oh, it can,” Bob said. “If it’s done subtly enough, indirectly enough, you can get all kinds of things changed. Like, for example, he tells you that your car is going to be stolen. So you move it to a parking garage, where instead of getting stolen by the junkie who was going to shoot you and take the car on the street, you get jacked by a professional who takes the car without hurting you—because by slightly altering the fate of the car, he indirectly alters yours.”
I frowned. “That’s a pretty fine line.”
“Yes, which is why not mucking around with time is one of the Laws,” Bob said. “It’s possible to change the past—but you have to do it indirectly, and if you screw it up you run the risk of Paradox-egeddon.”
“So what you’re saying is that by sending me this warning, he’s indirectly working some other angle completely?”
“I’m saying that the Gatekeeper is usually a hell of a lot more specific about this kind of thing,” Bob said. “All of the Senior Council take black magic seriously. There’s got to be a reason he’s throwing it at you like this. My gut says he’s working from a temporal angle.”
“You don’t have any guts,” I said sourly.
“Your jealousy of my intellect is an ugly, ugly thing, Harry,” Bob said.
I scowled. “Get to the point.”
“Right, boss,” said the skull. “The point is that black magic is very hard to find when you look for it directly. If you try to bring up instances of black magic on your model, like Little Chicago is some kind of evil-juju radar array, it’s probably going to blow up in your face.”
“The Gatekeeper put me on guard against black magic,” I said. “But maybe he’s telling me that so that I can watch for something else. Something black-magic related.”
“Which might be a lot easier to find with your model,” Bob said cheerfully.
“Sure,” I said. “If I had the vaguest idea of what to look for.” I frowned, scowling. “So instead of looking for black magic, we look for the things that go along with black magic.”
“Bingo,” Bob said. “And the more normal the better.”
I pulled out my stool and sat down, frowning. “So, how about we look for corpses? Blood. Fear. Those are pretty standard black wizardry accessories.”
“Pain, too,” Bob said. “They’re into pain.”
“So’s the BDSM community,” I said. “In a city of eight million there are tens of thousands like that.”
“Oh. Good point,” Bob said.
“One would almost think you should have thought of that one,” I gloated. “But for the BDSM crowd, the pain isn’t something they fear. So you just look for the fear instead. Real
fear, not movie-theater fear. Terror. And there can’t be a lot of spilled human blood in places with no violent activity, unless someone slips at the hospital or something. Ditto the corpses.” I drummed the fingers of my good hand thoughtfully on the table beside Bob. “Do you think Little Chicago could handle that?”
He considered for a long moment before he said, in a cautious tone, “Maybe one of them. But this will be a very difficult, very long, and very dangerous spell for you, Harry. You’re good for your years, but you still don’t have the kind of fine control you’ll get as you age. It’s going to take all of your focus. And it will take a lot out of you—assuming you can manage it at all.”
I took a deep breath and nodded slowly. “Fine. We treat it as a full-blown ritual, then. Cleansing, meditation, incense, the works.”
“Even if you do everything right,” Bob said, “it might not work. And if Little Chicago turns out to be flawed, it would be very bad for you.”
I nodded slowly, staring at the model city.
There were eight million people in my town. And out of all of them, there were maybe two or three who could stand up to black magic, who had the kind of knowledge and power it took to stop a black wizard. Not only that, but odds were good that I was the only one who could actively find and counter someone before he got the murder-ball rolling. I was also, presumably, the only one who was forewarned.
Maybe it would be better to slow this down. Wait for developments my friends would report to me. Then I could get a better read on the threat, and how to deal with it. I mean, was it worth as much as my life to try this spell, when patience would get me information that was almost as good?
It might not be worth my life, but it would probably cost someone else’s. Black magic isn’t the kind of thing that leaves people whole behind it—and sometimes the victims it kills are the lucky ones. If I didn’t employ the model, I’d have to wait for the bad guys to make the first move.
So I had to do it.
I was tired of looking at corpses and victims.
“Pull together everything you know about this kind of spell, Bob,” I told him quietly. “I’m going to get some food and then we’ll lay out the ritual. I’ll start looking for fear come sundown.”
“Will do,” Bob said, and for once he was serious and didn’t sass me.
Yikes.
I started back up my ladder before I thought about it too much and changed my mind.
Chapter Seven
Ritual magic is not my favorite thing in the whole world. It doesn’t matter what I’m trying to accomplish; I still feel sort of silly when it comes time to bathe and then dress myself up in a white robe with a hood, lighting candles and incense, chanting, and mucking around with a small arsenal of candles, wands, rods, liquids, and other props used in ritual magic.
Self-conscious as I might be, though, the props and the process offered an overriding advantage when it came to working with heavy magic—they freed up my attention from the dozens of little details that I would normally be forced to imagine and keep firmly in mind. Most of the time I never gave the proper visualization a second thought. I’d been doing it for so long that it was practically second nature. That was fine for short-term work, where I had to hold my thoughts in perfect balance only for a few seconds, but for a longer spell I would need an exponentially greater amount of focus and concentration. It took someone with a lot more mental discipline than me to cast a spell through a half-hour ritual without help, and while there were probably experienced wizards who could manage it, few bothered to try it when the alternative was usually simpler, safer, and more likely to work.
I rounded up the props I would need for the ritual, with the elements first. A silver cup, which I would fill with wine, for water. A geode the size of my fist, its internal crystals vibrant shades of purple and green, for earth. Fire would be represented by a faerie-made candle, formed from unused beeswax, its wick braided from the hairs of a unicorn’s mane. Air would be anchored by a pair of hawk-wing feathers wrought from gold with impossibly fine detail and precision by a band of svartalves whose mortal contact sold examples of their craftsmanship out of a shop in Norway. And for the fifth element, spirit, I would use my mother’s silver pentacle amulet.
Other props followed, to engage the senses. Incense for scent and fresh grapes for taste. Tactile forces would depend upon a double-sided three-inch square I’d made from velvet on one side and sandpaper on the other. A rather large, deeply colored opal set within a silver frame reflected back every color of the rainbow, and would hold down the sight portion of the spell. And when I got rolling I would strike my old tuning fork against the floor for sound.
Mind, body, and heart came last. For mind, I would use an old K-Bar military knife as my ritual athame, as I usually did. Fresh droplets of my blood upon a clean white cloth would symbolize my physical body. For heart, I placed several photos of those who were dear to me inside a sack of silver-white silk. My parents, Susan, Murphy, Thomas, Mouse and Mister (my thirty-pound grey tomcat, currently on walkabout), and after a brief hesitation, Michael and his family.
I prepared the ritual circle on my lab floor, carefully sweeping it, mopping it, sweeping it again, then cleansing it with captured rainwater poured from a small, silver ewer. I brought in all the props and laid them out, ready to go.
Then I prepared myself. I lit sandalwood incense and more faerie-candles in the bathroom, started up the shower, then went step by step through a routine of washing, while focusing my mind on the task at hand. The water sluicing over me would drain away any random magical energies, a crucial step in the spell—contaminating the spell’s energy with other forces would cause it to fail.
I finished bathing, dried, and slipped into my white robe. Then I knelt on the floor at the head of the stairs down to the lab, closed my eyes, and began meditating. Just as no other energies could be allowed into the ritual, my concentration had to be of similar purity. Random thoughts, worries, fears, and emotions would sabotage the spell. I focused on my breathing, upon stilling my thoughts, and felt my limbs grow a little chill as my heartbeat slowed. Worries of the day, my aches and pains, my thoughts of the future—all had to go. It took a while to get myself in the proper frame of mind, and by the time I was finished it had been dark for two hours and my knees ached somewhere in the background.
I opened my eyes and everything came into a brilliantly sharp focus that discounted the existence of anything except myself, my magic, and the ritual awaiting me. It had been a long, wearying preparation, and I hadn’t even started with the magic yet, but if the spell could help me nail the bad guys quicker, the hours of effort would be well worth it.
Silence and focus ruled.
I was ready.
And then the fucking phone rang about a foot from my ear.
It is possible that I made some kind of unmanly noise when I jumped. My posture-numbed legs didn’t respond as quickly as I needed them to, and I lurched awkwardly to one side, half falling onto the nearest couch.
“Dammit!” I screamed in sudden frustration. “Dammit, dammit, dammit!”
Mouse looked up from his lazy drowse and tilted his head to one side, ears up and forward.
“What are you looking at?” I snarled.
Mouse’s jaw dropped open into a grin, and his tail wagged.
I rubbed my hand at my face while the phone kept on ringing. It had been a while since I’d done any seriously focused magic like that, and granted, I really don’t get very many calls, but all the same I should have remembered to unplug the phone. Four hours of preparation gone to waste.
The phone kept ringing, and my head pounded in time with it. I ached. Stupid phone. Stupid car crash. I tried to think positive, because I read somewhere that it’s important to do that at times of stress and frustration. Whoever wrote that was probably selling something.
I picked up the phone and growled, “Screw thinking positive,” into the handset.
“Um,” said a woman’s voice. �
�What did you say?”
“Screw thinking positive!” I half shouted. “What the hell do you want?”
“Well. Maybe I have the wrong number. I was calling to speak to Harry Dresden?”
I frowned, my mind taking in details despite my temper’s bid to take over the show. The voice was familiar to me; rich, smooth, adult—but the speaker’s speech patterns had an odd hesitancy to them. Her words had an odd, thick edge on them, too. An accent?
“Speaking,” I said. “Annoyed as hell, but speaking.”
“Oh. Is this a bad time?”
I rubbed at my eyes and choked down a vicious response. “Who is this?”
“Oh,” she said, as if the question surprised her. “Harry, it’s Molly. Molly Carpenter.”
“Ah,” I said. I clapped one palm to my face. My friend Michael’s oldest daughter. Way to role-model, Harry. You sure do come off like a calm, responsible adult. “Molly, didn’t recognize you at first.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
The “s” sound was a little bit thick. Had she been drinking? “Not your fault,” I said. Which it hadn’t been. For that matter, the interruption might have been a stroke of luck. If my head was still too scrambled from that afternoon’s automobile hijinks to remember to unplug the phone, I didn’t have any business trying to cast that spell. Probably would have blown my own head off. “What do you need, Molly?”
“Um,” she said, and there was nervous tension in her voice. “I need…I need you to come bail me out.”
“Bail,” I said. “You’re being literal?”
“Yes.”
“You’re in jail?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Oh my God,” I said. “Molly, I don’t know if I can do that. You’re sixteen.”
“Seventeen,” she said, with sparks of indignation and another thick “s.”
“Whatever,” I said. “You’re a juvenile. You should call your parents.”
“No!” she said, something near panic in her voice. “Harry, please. I can’t call them.”
“Why not?”
“Because I only get the one call, and I used it to call you.”
