by Jim Butcher
I felt my jaw tighten. It took me a moment to make them relax and ask, “Do you have any family?”
“Yes,” she said. “Technically.”
“Technically?”
“The men and women I grew up with, who I knew? They’ve been dead for generations. Their descendants are living all over Italy, in Greece, and there are a few in Algeria—but it isn’t as though they invite their great-great-great-great-great-great-grandaunt to their Christmas celebrations. They’re strangers.”
I frowned, thinking that over, and looked at her. “Strangers.”
She nodded. “Most people aren’t willing to accept a radical fact like the life span of our kind, Harry. There are some families who have—Martha Liberty, for example, lives with one of her multiple-great-granddaughters and her children. But mostly, it ends badly when wizards try to stay too close to their kin.” She bowed her head, apparently studying her sling as she spoke. “I look in on them every five or six years, without them knowing. Keep an eye out for any of the children who might develop a talent.”
“But you had a real family once,” I said.
She sighed and looked out the window. “Oh, yes. It was a very long time ago.”
“I remember my father, a little. But I was raised an orphan.”
She winced. “Dio, Harry.” Her fingers squeezed mine. “You never had anyone, did you?”
“And if I did find someone,” I said, feeling my throat constricting as I spoke, “I would do anything necessary to protect him. Anything.”
Anastasia looked out the window, letting out a hiss of what sounded like anger. “Margaret. You selfish bitch.”
I blinked and looked at her, and nearly got us both killed when a passing car cut me off and I almost couldn’t stop the monster Rolls in time. “You . . . you knew my mother?”
“All the Wardens knew her,” Anastasia said quietly.
“She was a Warden?”
Anastasia was silent for a moment before shaking her head. “She was considered a threat to the Laws of Magic.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that she made it a point to dance as close to the edge of breaking the Laws as she possibly could whenever she got the chance,” Anastasia replied. “It took her all of a year after she was admitted to the Council to start agitating for change.”
I had to focus on the road. This was more than I had ever heard from anyone in the Council about the enigmatic figure who had given me life. My hands were sweating and my heart was thudding. “What kind of change?”
“She was furious that ‘the Laws of Magic have nothing to do with right and wrong.’ She pointed out how wizards could use their abilities to bilk people out of their money, to intimidate and manipulate them, to steal wealth and property from others or destroy it outright, and that so long as the Laws were obeyed, the Council would do nothing whatsoever to stop them or discourage others from following their example. She wanted to reform the Council’s laws to embrace concepts of justice as well as limiting the specific use of magic.”
I frowned. “Wow. What a monster.”
She exhaled slowly. “Can you imagine what would happen if she’d had her way?”
“I wouldn’t have been unjustly persecuted by the Wardens for years?”
Anastasia’s lips firmed into a line. “Once a body of laws describing justice was applied to the Council, it would only be a short step to using that body to involve the Council in events happening in the outside world.”
“Gosh, yeah,” I said. “You’re right. A bunch of wizards trying to effect good in the world would be awful.”
“Whose good?” Anastasia asked calmly. “No one is an unjust villain in his own mind, Harry. Even—perhaps even especially—those who are the worst of us. Some of the cruelest tyrants in history were motivated by noble ideals, or made choices that they would call ‘hard but necessary steps’ for the good of their nation. We’re all the hero of our own story.”
“Yeah. It was really hard to tell who the good guys and bad guys were in World War Two.”
She rolled her eyes. “You’ve read the histories written by the victors of that war, Harry. As someone who lived through it, I can tell you that at the time of the war, there was a great deal less certainty. There were stories of atrocities in Germany, but for every one that was true, there were another five or six that weren’t. How could one have told the difference between the true stories, the propaganda, and simple fabrications and myths created by the people of the nations Germany had attacked?”
“Might have been a bit easier if there’d been a wizard or three around to help,” I said.
She gave me an oblique look. “Then by your argument, you would have had the White Council destroy the United States.”
“What?”
“Your government has drenched its hands in innocent blood as well,” she replied, still calm. “Unless you think the Indian tribesmen whose lands were conquered were somehow the villains of the piece.”
I frowned over that one. “We’ve gone sort of far afield from my mother.”
“Yes. And no. What she proposed would inevitably have drawn the Council into mortal conflicts, and therefore into mortal politics. Tell me the truth—if the Council, today, declared war upon America for its past crimes and current idiocy, would you obey the order to attack?”
“Hell, no,” I said. “The U.S. isn’t a perfect place, but it’s better than most people have managed to come up with. And all my stuff is there.”
She smiled faintly. “Exactly. And since the Council is made up of members from all over the world, it would mean that no matter where we acted, we would almost certainly be faced with dissidence and desertion from those who felt their homelands wronged.” She shrugged—and grimaced in pain before arresting the motion. “I myself would have issues if the Council acted against any of the lands where my family has settled. They may not remember me, but the reverse is not true.”
I thought about what she’d said for a long moment. “What you’re saying is that the Council would have to turn on some of its own.”
“And how many times would that happen before there was no Council?” she asked. “Wars and feuds can live for generations even when there isn’t a group of wizards involved. Settling the conflicts would have required even more involvement in mortal affairs.”
“You mean control,” I said quietly. “You mean the Council seeking political power.”
She gave me a knowing look. “One of the things that makes me respect you more than most young people is your appreciation for history. Precisely. And for gaining control over others, for gathering great power to oneself, there is no better tool than black magic.”
“Which is what the Laws of Magic cover already.”
She nodded. “And so the Council limits itself. Any wizard is free to act in whatever manner he chooses with his power—provided he doesn’t break any of the Laws. Without resorting to black magic, the amount of damage an individual can inflict on mortal society is limited. As harsh an experience as it has created for you, Harry, the Laws of Magic are not about justice. The White Council is not about justice. They are about restraining power.” She smiled faintly. “And, occasionally, the Council manages to do some good by protecting mankind from supernatural threats.”
“And that’s good enough for you?” I asked.
“It isn’t perfect,” she admitted. “But it’s better than anything else we’ve come up with. And the things I’ve spent my lifetime building are there.”
“Touché,” I said.
“Thank you.”
I stroked her fingers with my thumb. “So you’re saying my mother was short-sighted.”
“She was a complex woman,” Anastasia said. “Brilliant, erratic, passionate, committed, idealistic, talented, charming, insulting, bold, incautious, arrogant—and short-sighted, yes. Among a great many other qualities. She loved pointing out the areas of ‘grey’ magic, as she called them, and constantly questioning their
legitimacy.” She shrugged. “The Senior Council tasked the Wardens to keep an eye on her. Which was damn near impossible.”
“Why?”
“The woman had a great many contacts among the Fey. That’s why everyone called her Margaret LaFey. She knew more Ways through the Nevernever than anyone I’ve ever seen, before or since. She could be in Beijing at breakfast, Rome at lunch, and Seattle for supper and stop for coffee in Sydney and Capetown in between.” She sighed. “Margaret vanished once, for four or five years. Everyone assumed that she’d finally run afoul of something in Faerie. She never seemed able to restrain her tongue, even when she knew better.”
“I wonder what that’s like.”
Anastasia gave me a rather worn sad smile. “But she didn’t spend all that time in Faerie, did she?”
I looked up at the rearview mirror, back toward Château Raith.
“And Thomas is the son of the White King himself.”
I didn’t answer.
She exhaled heavily. “You look so different from him. Except perhaps for something in the jaw. The shape of the eyes.”
I didn’t say anything until we got to the apartment. The Rolls went together with the gravel lot like champagne and Cracker Jacks. I turned the engine off and listened to it click as it began to cool down. The sun was gone over the horizon by that time, and the lengthening shadows began to trigger streetlights.
“Are you going to tell anyone?” I asked quietly.
She looked out the window as she considered the question. Then she said, “Not unless I think it relevant.”
I turned to look at her. “You know what will happen if they know. They’ll use him.”
She gazed straight out the front of the car. “I know.”
I spoke quietly to put all the weight I could into each word I spoke next. “Over. My. Dead. Body.”
Anastasia closed her eyes for a moment, and opened them again. Her expression never flickered. She took her hand slowly, reluctantly from mine and put it in her lap. Then she whispered, “I pray to God it never comes to that.”
We sat in the car separately.
It seemed larger and colder, for some reason. The silence seemed deeper.
Luccio lifted her chin and looked at me. “What will you do now?”
“What do you think?” I clenched my fists so that my knuckles popped, rolled my neck once, and opened the door. “I’m going to find my brother.”
Chapter Twenty-nine
Two hours and half a dozen attempted tracking spells later, I snarled and slapped a stack of notepads off the corner of the table in my subbasement laboratory. They thwacked against the wall beneath Bob the Skull’s shelf, and fell to the concrete floor.
“It was to be expected,” Bob the Skull said, very quietly. Orange lights like the flickers of distant campfires glittered in the eye sockets of the bleached human skull that sat on its own shelf high up on one wall of my lab, bracketed by the remains of dozens of melted candles and half a dozen paperback romances. “The parent-to-child blood bond is much more sympathetic than that shared by half siblings.”
I glared at the skull and also kept my voice down. “You just can’t go a day without saying that you told me so.”
“I can’t help it if you’re wrong all the time yet continually ignore my advice, sahib. I’m just a humble servant.”
I couldn’t scream at my nonmaterial assistant with other people in the apartment above me, so I consoled myself by snatching up a pencil from a nearby work shelf and flinging it at him. Its eraser end hit the skull between the eyes.
“Jealousy, thy name is Dresden,” Bob said with a pious sigh.
I paced up and down the length of my lab, burning off frustrated energy. It wasn’t much of a walk. Five paces, turn, five paces, turn. It was a dank little concrete box of a room. Work benches lined three of the walls, and I had installed cheap wire shelving above them. The work benches and shelves were crowded with all manner of odds and ends, books, reagents, instruments, various bits of gear needed for alchemy, and scores of books and notebooks.
A long table in the middle of the room was currently covered by a canvas tarp, and the floor at the far end of the lab had a perfect circle of pure copper embedded in it. The remains of several differently structured tracking attempts were scattered on the floor around the circle, while the props and foci from the most recent failure were still inside it.
“One of them should have gotten me something,” I told Bob. “Maybe not a full lock on Thomas’s position—but a tug in the right direction, at least.”
“Unless he’s dead,” Bob said, “in which case you’re just spinning your wheels.”
“He isn’t dead,” I said quietly. “Shagnasty wants to trade.”
“Uh-huh,” Bob scoffed. “Because everyone knows how honorable the naagloshii are.”
“He’s alive,” I said quietly. “Or at least I’m going to proceed on that assumption.”
Bob somehow managed to look baffled. “Why?”
Because you need your brother to be all right, whispered a quiet voice in my head. “Because anything else isn’t particularly useful toward resolving this situation,” I said aloud. “Whoever is behind the curtains is using the skinwalker and probably Madeline Raith, too. So if I find Thomas, I find Shagnasty and Madeline, and I’ll be able to start pulling threads until this entire mess unravels.”
“Yeah,” Bob said, drawing out the word. “Do you think it’ll take long to pull all those threads? Because the naagloshii is going to be doing something similar to your intestines.”
I made a growling sound in my throat. “Yeah. I think I got its number.”
“Really?”
“I keep trying to punch Shagnasty out myself,” I said. “But its defenses are too good—and it’s fast as hell.”
“He’s an immortal semidivine being,” Bob said. “Of course he’s good.”
I waved a hand. “My point is that I’ve been trying to lay the beating on it myself. Next time I see it, I’m going to start throwing bindings on it, just to trip it up and slow it down, so whoever is with me can get a clean shot.”
“It might work . . .” Bob admitted.
“Thank you.”
“. . . if he’s such an idiot that he only bothered to learn to defend himself from violent-energy attacks,” Bob continued, as if I hadn’t spoken. “Which I think is almost as likely as you getting one of those tracking spells to work. He’ll know how to defend himself from bindings, Harry.”
I sighed. “I’ve got gender issues.”
Bob blinked slowly. “Uh. Wow. I’d love to say something to make that more embarrassing for you, boss, but I’m not sure how.”
“Not my . . . augh.” I threw another pencil. It missed Bob and bounced off the wall behind him. “With the skinwalker. Is it actually a male? Do I call it a he?”
Bob rolled his eyelights. “It’s a semidivine immortal, Harry. It doesn’t procreate. It has no need to recombine DNA. That means that gender simply doesn’t apply. That’s something only you meat sacks worry about.”
“Then why is it that you stare at naked girls every chance you get,” I said, “but not naked men?”
“It’s an aesthetic choice,” Bob said loftily. “As a gender, women exist on a plane far beyond men when it comes to the artistic appreciation of their external beauty.”
“And they have boobs,” I said.
“And they have boobs!” Bob agreed with a leer.
I sighed and rubbed at my temples, closing my eyes. “You said the skinwalkers were semidivine?”
“You’re using the English word, which doesn’t really describe them very precisely. Most skinwalkers are just people—powerful, dangerous, and often psychotic people, but people. They’re successors to the traditions and skills taught to avaricious mortals by the originals. The naagloshii.”
“Originals like Shagnasty,” I said.
“He’s the real deal, all right,” Bob replied, his quiet voice growing more serious.
“According to some of the stories of the Navajo, the naagloshii were originally messengers for the Holy People, when they were first teaching humans the Blessing Way.”
“Messengers?” I said. “Like angels?”
“Or like those guys on bikes in New York, maybe?” Bob said. “Not all couriers are created identical, Mr. Lowest-Common-Denominator. Anyway, the original messengers, the naagloshii, were supposed to go with the Holy People when they departed the mortal world. But some of them didn’t. They stayed here, and their selfishness corrupted the power the Holy People gave them. Voila, Shagnasty.”
I grunted. Bob’s information was anecdotal, which meant it could well be distorted by time and by generations of retelling. There probably wasn’t any way to know the objective truth of it—but a surprising amount of that kind of lore remained fundamentally sound in oral tradition societies like those of the American Southwest. “When did this happen?”
“Tough to say,” Bob said. “The traditional Navajo don’t see time the way most mortals do, which makes them arguably smarter than the rest of you monkeys. But it’s safe to assume prehistory. Several millennia.”
Yikes.
Thousands of years of survival meant thousands of years of accumulated experience. It meant that Shagnasty was smart and adaptable. The old skinwalker wouldn’t still be around if it wasn’t. I upgraded the creature, in my thoughts, from “very tough” to “damned near impossibly tough.”
But since it still had my brother, that didn’t change anything.
“Don’t suppose there’s a silver bullet we can use?” I asked.
“No, boss,” Bob said quietly. “Sorry.”
I grimaced, did a half-assed job of cleaning up the mess I’d made, and began to leave the lab. I paused before I left and said, “Hey, Bob.”
“Yeah?”
“Any thoughts as to why, when LaFortier was being murdered by a wizard, no one threw any magic around?”
“People are morons?”
“It’s damned peculiar,” I said.
“Irrationality isn’t.” Bob said. “Wizards just aren’t all that stable to begin with.”
