by Jim Butcher
As the blood dripped down into the chalice, I reached out to the place in my mind where the archangel’s gift resided, and poured soulfire into my blood. Silver-white sparks began to stream from the cuts and accompanied the blood down into the chalice, filling it with supernatural power far in excess of what my blood, a common source of magical energy, contained on its own.
I lifted the chalice in my right hand and the silver bell in my left. Droplets of blood and flickering sparks of soulfire fell on the silver, and when it rang again, the sound was piercing, the tone so perfect and pure that it could have shattered glass.
“Hear me!” I called, and my soulfire-enhanced voice rang out in a similar fashion, sharp and precise, strong and resonant. Small stones fell from a broken section of the tower wall. “I am magi, one of the Wise! I make of my blood this gift to you, to honor your strength and to show my respect! Come forth!” I set the bell down and prepared to break the circle and release the spell. “Come forth!” I bellowed, even louder. “COME FORTH!”
I simultaneously broke the circle, released my will, and poured out the scarlet and silver fire of my enhanced blood onto the stone of the hilltop.
Animals of the forest erupted into screams and howls. Birds exploded from their sleeping places to swarm in the skies above me. Half a dozen tree branches snapped all together in the rushing wind, the sounds crackling over the stony hilltop like rifle shots.
And, an instant later, a bolt of viridian lightning crashed down out of a completely clear sky and struck the ground in the center of the empty shell of the old lighthouse.
There was little enough in the lighthouse that could burn, but some brush and grasses grew there. Their light danced and flickered on the walls, if only for a few seconds—and then suddenly revealed an indistinct and solid shape inside.
I took a slow breath and rose to my feet, facing the lighthouse. It was a rare thing for such an entity to take material form, and I had thought it so unlikely to happen that I had scarcely bothered to plan for it.
The woods all around me rustled, and I darted my eyes left and right without moving.
Animals had appeared. Deer were the largest and most obvious, the stags’ horns wicked in the moonlight. Foxes and raccoons were there, too, as well as rabbits and squirrels and all manner of woodland creatures, predator and prey alike. They were all staring at me with obvious awareness that was far more than they should have had, and all of them were eerily still.
I did my best not to think about what it might be like to be overrun and chewed to death by hundreds of small wild animals. I turned my eyes back to the tower, and waited.
The dark shape, indistinct in the heavy shadows, moved and came closer, until it looked like . . . something that was not quite human. Its shoulders were too wide, its stance too crooked, and it walked with a slow, limping gait, drag-thump, drag-thump. It was covered with what appeared to be a voluminous dark cloak—oh, and it was eleven or twelve feet tall.
Yikes.
Green eyes the same color as the bolt of unnatural lightning burned inside the darkness of the cloak’s hood. They faced me and flashed brighter, once, and a gust of wind washed down onto me, almost taking me from my feet.
I gritted my teeth against it and endured, until a moment later it died away.
I looked at the dark shape for a moment, and then nodded. “Right,” I said. “I get you.” I reached for my will, infused it with a meager portion of soulfire, and hurled my right hand forward, calling, “Ventas servitas!”
Wind festooned with ribbons of silver light rushed from my outstretched hand, crashing into the figure. It didn’t move the thing—the entity was far too massive for that—but the wind cast the grey cloak back as sharply as a ship’s flag caught in a gale, making the fabric snap and pop.
My evocation died away, and the entity’s cloak settled down again. Once more, its eyes flashed, and the earth beneath my feet and slightly behind me erupted, solid rock splitting and cracking. Sharp shards flew up from the supernatural impact, and I instantly felt half a dozen hot, stinging cuts on my legs and back.
“Ow,” I muttered. “At least they weren’t in any tender spots, I guess.” Then again I summoned my will and soulfire, this time focusing on the earth near the entity. “Geodas!” I shouted, and the earth beneath the entity twisted and screamed, suddenly opening into a sinkhole.
The entity never moved. It just stood there on empty air, as if I hadn’t literally pulled the ground out from under it.
The entity’s eyes kindled to life again, but this time I had anticipated it. Flame gathered before it in a lance and rushed toward me, leaving a coating of sudden frost and ice on the ground beneath it as it came. But my own will had reached down into the ground below me, and found the water from the stream that fed the cottage’s little well. I drew it up through the cracks the entity had created in the rock, taking advantage of the work it had done, with a shout of, “Aquilevitas!” A curtain of water rose up to meet the onrushing flame, and they consumed one another, leaving only darkness and a cloud of steam.
I lifted a hand and my soulfire-enhanced will and shouted, “Fuego!” A column of silver-and-blue flame as thick as my chest roared across the ground and struck the entity hard in the center of its mass.
It rocked back at the impact. Not much. Maybe half an inch, though that column of fire would have blown apart a brick wall. But I had moved it that half an inch. There was no doubt about that.
Weariness was slowly seeping into my limbs as the entity stared at me. I forced myself to stand straight and face the being without blinking—and without looking weak.
“You want to keep it up?” I asked it aloud. “I could do this all night.”
The entity stared at me. Then it walked closer. Drag-thump. Drag-thump.
I was not at all scared. Even a little. The only reason my mouth was so dry was all that fire that had been flying around.
It stopped five feet away, towering over me.
And I realized that it was waiting.
It was waiting for me to act.
My heart pounded harder as I bowed my head respectfully. I don’t know why I said what I did, exactly. I just know that my instincts screamed at me that it was the right thing to say, my voice infused with my will.
“I am Harry Dresden, and I give thee a name, honored spirit. From this day on, be thou called Demonreach.”
Its eyes flashed, burning more brightly, sending out tendrils and streams of greenish fire in a nimbus around its head.
Then Demonreach mirrored my gesture, bowing its own head in reply. When it looked up, its head turned briefly toward the cottage. Then the wind rose again, and darkness fluttered over the hilltop.
When it passed, I was alone, the hilltop empty of entity and animal alike. I was also freezing.
I staggered toward my clothes and gathered them up, shaking so hard that I thought I might just collapse on the ground. As I rose with my gear in my arms, I saw a light flickering in the cottage.
I frowned and shambled over to it. The door, like the windows, had long since rotted away, and there was very little roof to speak of—but the cottage did have one thing in it that still functioned.
A fireplace.
A neat stack of fallen wood was burning in the fireplace, putting off a cheery warmth, its golden flames edged with flickers of green at their very edges.
I blinked at the fire for a moment, and then made my way over to it, reveling in the warmth as I dressed again. I glanced up, searching for that alien presence. I found it immediately, still there, still alien, still dangerous, though it no longer seemed determined to drive me away.
I slid will into my voice as I said, simply, “Thank you.”
The gentle wind that sighed through the trees of Demonreach may have been a reply.
Or maybe not.
Chapter Thirty-seven
I didn’t return to the dock by the same route I’d taken to the tower. There was a much shorter, easier way, down what lo
oked like a sheer rock wall. It proved to have an ancient narrow gully worn into the stone, almost completely hidden by brush. The gully’s floor had a thin layer of silt in it, leaving little room for plants to grow, and was as easy to traverse as a sidewalk, even in the dark. Following it brought me back to the island’s shoreline in half the time it had taken to go up.
I didn’t wonder how I’d known about the path until I stepped out of the woods and saw the dock again. I hadn’t been that way before. I hadn’t known it existed. Yet when I decided to take that trail, the knowledge had come to me as completely and immediately as if I had lived there for years: pure information.
I paused and looked around me. I knew not to walk directly to the dock from where I stood. There was a large hornet’s nest in the earth at the base of a fallen tree, and I would risk arousing their anger if I accidentally crushed it while walking by. I also knew that a grumpy old skunk was trundling its way back to its den, thirty yards in the other direction, and that it would happily douse me with musk if I came anywhere close.
I glanced over my shoulder, back toward the tower, casting out my supernatural senses. The island’s awareness continued being that same constant presence I’d felt ever since leaving the tower. I considered going back, taking the old stairs this time, to see what would happen, and immediately I understood that there was a cottonmouth that made its home in a large crack on the twenty-sixth step. If I delayed the trip until later in the morning, the snake would be out on the stones, sun-bathing to build up its body heat for the day.
The dawn was approaching, and the sky had begun to lighten from black to blue. I could see the tower standing, lonely and wounded, but unbowed, a black shape against the sky. Demonreach began to awaken to the first trills of songbirds.
I walked down to the dock, thoughtfully, and walked out to where the Water Beetle was moored. “Molly,” I called.
Feet pounded on the deck, and Molly burst up out of the ship’s cabin. She flew across the distance between us, and nearly tackled me into the water on the far side of the dock with the enthusiasm of her hug. Molly, the daughter of two ferocious warriors, was no wilting violet. My ribs creaked.
“You came back,” she said. “I was so worried. You came back.”
“Hey, hey. I need my rib cage, kid,” I said, but I hugged her in return for a quiet moment, before straightening.
“Did it work?” she asked.
“I’m not exactly sure. God, I need something to drink.” We both boarded the Water Beetle, and I went below and removed a can of Coke from a cabinet. It was warm, but it was liquid, and more important, it was Coke. I guzzled the can’s contents and tossed it into the trash bin.
“How’s Morgan?” I asked.
“Awake,” Morgan rumbled. “Where are we?”
“Demonreach,” I said. “It’s an island in Lake Michigan.”
Morgan grunted without emphasis. “Luccio told me about it.”
“Oh,” I said. “Oh, good.”
“Miss Carpenter says you were attempting a sanctum invocation.”
“Yeah.”
Morgan grunted. “You’re here. It worked.”
“I think so,” I said. “I’m not sure.”
“Why not?”
I shook my head. “I thought that when a bond was formed with the land in question, it gave you access to its latent energy.”
“Yes.”
Which meant that my magic would be subsidized by the island, whenever I was here. I’d get a lot more bang for my buck, so to speak. “I thought that was all it did.”
“Generally,” Morgan said. I saw him turn his head toward me in the dim cabin. “Why? What else has happened?”
I took a deep breath and told him about the hidden trail, the hornets, and the skunk.
Morgan sat up in his bunk by the time I got to the end. He leaned forward intently. “You’re sure you aren’t mistaken? Confrontations with a genius loci can leave odd aftereffects behind.”
“Hang on,” I said.
I went back to the woods where I knew the hornets were, and found their nest in short order. I retreated without crushing anything and went back to the boat.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m sure.”
Morgan sank back onto the bunk as if he was being slowly deflated. “Merciful God,” he said. “Intellectus.”
I felt my eyebrows go up. “You’re kidding.”
Molly muttered a couple of candles to light so that we could see each other clearly. “Intell-whatsis?” she asked me.
“Intellectus,” I said. “Um. It’s a mode of existence for a very few rare and powerful supernatural beings—angels have it. I’m willing to bet old Mother Winter and Mother Summer have it. For beings with intellectus, all reality exists in one piece, one place, one moment, and they can look at the whole thing. They don’t seek or acquire knowledge. They just know things. They see the entire picture.”
“I’m not sure I get that,” Molly said.
Morgan spoke. “A being with intellectus does not understand, for example, how to derive a complex calculus equation—because it doesn’t need the process. If you showed him a problem and an equation, he would simply understand it and skip straight to the answer without need to think through the logical stages of solving the problem.”
“It’s omniscient?” Molly asked, her eyes wide.
Morgan shook his head. “Not the same thing. The being with intellectus has to be focused on something via consideration in order to know it, whereas an omniscient being knows all things at all times.”
“Isn’t that pretty close?” Molly asked.
“Intellectus wouldn’t save you from an assassin’s bullet if you didn’t know someone wanted to kill you in the first place,” I said. “To know it was coming, you’d first need to consider the question of whether or not an assassin might be lurking in a dark doorway or on top of a bell tower.”
Morgan grunted agreement. “And since beings of intellectus so rarely understand broader ideas of cause and effect, they can be unlikely to realize that a given event might be an indicator of an upcoming assassination attempt.” He turned to me. “Though that’s a terrible metaphor, Dresden. Most beings like that are immortal. They’d be hard-pressed to notice bullets, much less feel threatened by them.”
“So,” Molly said, nodding, “it might be able to know anything it wants to know—but it still has to ask the right questions. Which is always harder than people think it is.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Exactly.”
“And now you’ve got this intellectus, too?”
I shook my head. “It’s Demonreach that has it. It stopped when I got out over the water.” I tapped my finger against my forehead. “I’ve got nothing going on in here at the moment.”
I realized what I had said just as the last word left my mouth, and glanced at Morgan.
He lay on the bunk with his eyes closed. His mouth was turned up in small smile. “Too easy.”
Molly fought not to grin.
Morgan pursed his lips thoughtfully. “Can the entity feed you any other information, Dresden? The identities of those behind LaFortier’s murder, for example.”
I almost hit myself in the head with the heel of my hand. I should have thought of that already. “I’ll let you know,” I said, and went back to the shore.
Demonreach sensed me at the same time as I perceived it, and the mutual sensation felt oddly like a hand wave of acknowledgment. I frowned thoughtfully and looked around the island, concentrating on the issue of LaFortier’s killer.
Nothing sprang to mind. I tried half a dozen other things. Who was going to win the next World Series? Could I get the Blue Beetle out of impound yet? How many books had Mister knocked off my shelves in my absence?
Zip.
So I thought about hornet’s nests, and instantly felt certain that there were thirty-two of them spread around the hundred and fifty or so acres of the island, and that they were especially thick near the grove of apple trees on the isl
and’s northern side.
I went back to the boat and reported.
“Then it only exists upon the island itself,” Morgun rumbled, “like any other genius loci. This one must be bloody ancient to have attained a state of intellectus, even if it is limited to its own shorelines.”
“Could be handy,” I noted.
Morgan didn’t open his eyes but bared his teeth in a wolf’s smile. “Certainly. If your foes were considerate enough to come all the way out here to meet you.”
“Could be handy,” I repeated, firmly.
Morgan arched an eyebrow and gave me a sharp look.
“Come on, grasshopper,” I said to Molly. “Cast off the lines. You’re about to learn how to drive the boat.”
By the time we made it back to the marina, the sun had risen. I coached Molly through the steps of bringing the Water Beetle safely into dock, even though I wasn’t exactly Horatio Hornblower myself. We managed to do it without breaking or sinking anything, which is what counts. I tied off the boat and went onto the dock. Molly followed me anxiously to the rail.
“No problem here, grasshopper. Take her out for about ten minutes in a random direction that you choose. Then turn off the engine and wait. I’ll signal you when I’m ready for you to pick me up.”
“Are you sure we shouldn’t stay together or something?” she asked anxiously.
I shook my head. “Tracking spells can’t home in too well over water,” I said. “And you’ll know if someone’s coming for you from a mile away. Literally. Keep Morgan out there, and you should be as safe as anywhere.”
She frowned. “What if he gets worse?”
“Use your noggin, kid. Do whatever you think is most likely to keep you both alive.” I started untying the line. “I shouldn’t be gone more than a couple of hours. If I don’t show, the plan is the same as when I went up to the tower. Get yourself vanished.”
