by Jim Butcher
“The Watchman?” I stammered.
Mab’s head moved slightly with the words, but it was Grimalkin’s mewling voice that actually spoke. “The Prince of the Host is all pomp and ceremony, and when he moves it is with the thunder of the wings of an army of seraphim, the crash of drums, and the clamor of horns. The Trumpeter never walks quietly when he can appear in a chorus of light. The Demon Binder takes tasks upon his own shoulders and solves his problems with his own hands. But the Watchman…” Mab smiled. “Of the archangels, I like him the most. He is the quiet one. The subtle one. The one least known. And by far the most dangerous.”
I sorted through what knowledge I had of the archangels. It was meager enough, but I knew that much, at least. “Uriel,” I said quietly.
Mab lifted a finger and continued speaking through the malk. “Caution is called for, Emissary mine. Were I in your position, I would speak his name sparingly, if ever.”
“What has he done to me?” I asked her.
Mab stared at me with iridescent eyes. “That is a question only you can answer. But I can say this much: He has given you the potential to be more of what you are.”
“Huh?”
She smiled, reached to the bench on the other side of her body, and produced my blasting rod. “The return of your property,” the malk said. “The need to keep it from you has passed.”
“Then I was right,” I said, accepting it. “You took it. And you took the memory of it happening.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I deemed it proper,” she replied, as if speaking to a rather slow-witted child. “You would have risked your own life-and my purpose-to protect your precious mortals had I not taken your fire from you. Summer would have tracked and killed you two days ago.”
“Not having it could have gotten me killed, too,” I said. “And then you’d have wasted all that time you’ve put in trying to recruit me to be the next Winter Knight.”
“Nonsense,” Mab said. “If you died, I would simply recruit your brother. He would be well motivated to seek revenge upon your killers.”
A little cold feeling shot through me. I hadn’t realized that Mab knew who he was. But I guess it made sense. My godmother, the Leanansidhe, had been tight with my mother, one way or another. If Lea had known, then it might make sense that Mab did, too. “He isn’t a mortal,” I said quietly. “I thought the Knights had to be mortals.”
“He is in love,” Grimalkin mrowled for Mab. “That is more than mortal enough for me.” She tilted her head. “Though I suppose I might make him an offer, while you yet live. He would give much to hold his love again, would he not?”
I fixed her with a hard gaze and said, “You will stay away from him.”
“I will do as I please,” she said. “With him-and with you.”
I scowled at her. “You will not. I do not belong to y-”
The next thing I knew I was on my knees in the center aisle, and Mab was walking away from me, toward the door. “Oh, but you do, mortal. Until you have worked off your debt to me you are mine. You owe one favor more.”
I tried to get up, and I couldn’t. My knees just wouldn’t move. My heart beat far too hard, and I hated how frightened I felt.
“Why?” I demanded. “Why did you want the Denarians stopped? Why send the hobs to kill the Archive? Why recruit me to save the Archive and Marcone in the event that the hobs failed?”
Mab paused, turned, casually showing off the gorgeous curves of her calves, and tilted her head at me. “Nicodemus and his ilk were clearly in violation of my Accords, and obviously planning to abuse them to further his ambition. That was reason enough to see his designs disrupted. And among the Fallen was one with much to answer for to me, personally, for its attack upon my home.”
“The Black Council attack on Arctis Tor,” I said. “One of them used Hellfire.”
Mab showed me her snow-white teeth. “The Watchman and I,” Grimalkin mewled for her, “had a common enemy this day. The enemy could not be allowed to gain the power represented by the child Archive.”
I frowned and thought of the silver hand that had batted the fallen angel and his master sorceries around as if he’d been a stuffed practice dummy. “Thorned Namshiel.”
Mab’s eyes flashed with sudden, cold fury and frost literally formed over every surface of the chapel, including upon my own eyelashes.
“There are others yet who will pay for what they have done,” Mab snarled in her own voice. It sounded hideous-not unmelodious, because it was as rich and full and musical as it ever had been. But it was filled with such rage, such fury, such pain and such hate that every vowel clawed at my skin, and every consonant felt like someone taking a staple gun to my ears.
“I am Sidhe,” she hissed. “I am the Queen of Air and Darkness. I am Mab.” Her chin lifted, her eyes wide and white around the rippling colors of her irises-utterly insane. “And I repay my debts, mortal. All of them.”
There was an enormous crack, a sound like thick ice shattering on the surface of a lake, and Mab and her translator were gone.
I knelt there, shaking in the wake of hearing her voice. I realized a minute later that I had a nosebleed. A minute after that, I realized that there was a trickle of blood coming out of my ears, too. My eyes ached with strain, as if I’d been outdoors in bright sunlight for too many hours.
It took me still another minute to get my legs to start moving again. After that I staggered to the nearest bathroom and cleaned up. I spent a little while poking at my memory and trying to see if there were any holes in it that hadn’t been there before. Then I spent a while more wondering if I’d be able to tell if she had taken something else.
“Jesus Christ,” I breathed, shivering.
Because though I hadn’t been in on the original attack on Mab’s tower, and when I did attack it I had been unwittingly serving Mab’s interests, the fact remained that I had indeed offered her the same insult as Thorned Namshiel. The lacerating fury that turned her voice into razor blades could very well be directed at me in the near future.
I hurried out of the chapel and went down to the cafeteria.
Being bullied into eating dinner sounded a lot more pleasant than it had a few minutes ago.
The doctor came into the waiting room at ten seventeen that night.
Charity came to her feet. She’d spent much of the day with her head bowed, praying quietly. She was beyond tears, at least for the moment, and she put a sheltering arm around her daughter, pulling Molly in close to her side.
“He’s in recovery,” the doctor said. “The procedures went…” The doctor sighed. He looked at least as tired as either of the Carpenter women. “As well as could be expected. Better, really. I hesitate to make any claims at this point, but he seems to be stable, and assuming there are no complications in the next hour or two, I think he’ll pull through.”
Charity bit her lip hard. Molly threw her arms around her mother.
“Thank you, Doctor,” Charity whispered.
The doctor smiled wearily. “You should realize that…the injuries were quite extensive. It’s unlikely that he’ll be able to fully recover from them. Brain damage is a possibility-we won’t know until he wakes up. Even if that isn’t an issue, the other trauma was severe. He may need assistance, possibly for the rest of his life.”
Charity nodded calmly. “He’ll have it.”
“That’s right,” Molly said.
“When can I see him?” Charity asked.
“We’ll bring him up in an hour or two,” the doctor said.
I cleared my throat. “Excuse me, Doc. Is he going to be on a respirator?”
“For the time being,” the doctor said. “Yes.”
I nodded. “Thank you.”
The doctor nodded to us, and Charity thanked him again. He left.
“Okay, grasshopper,” I said. “Time for us to clear out.”
“But they’re going to bring hi- Oh,” Molly said, crestfallen. “The
respirator.”
“Better not to take any chances, huh?” I asked her.
“It’s all right, baby,” Charity said quietly. “I’ll call home as soon as he wakes up.”
They hugged tightly. Molly and I started walking out.
“Oh,” Molly said, her voice very tired. “I did that homework.”
I felt pretty tired, too. “Yeah?”
She nodded and smiled wearily up at me. “Charlemagne.”
I called Thomas, and he gave me and Molly a ride to Murphy’s place.
The night was clear. The cloud cover had blown off, and the moon and the stars got together with the snow to turn Chicago into a winter wonderland months ahead of schedule. The snow had stopped falling, though. I suppose that meant Mab had turned her attention elsewhere. Thomas dropped me off a short distance away, and then left to drive the grasshopper back to her home. I covered the last hundred yards or so on foot.
Murphy lives in a teeny little house that belonged to her grandmother. It was just a single story, with two bedrooms, a living room, and a little kitchen. It was meant for one person to live in, or possibly a couple with a single child. It was certainly overloaded by the mob of Wardens who had descended on the place. Luccio’s reinforcements had arrived.
There were four Wardens in the little living room, all of them grizzled veterans, two young members in the kitchen, and I was sure that there were at least two more outside, standing watch behind veils. I was challenged for a password in an amused tone by one of the young Wardens when I came in the kitchen door. I told him to do something impolite, please, and asked him where Luccio might be.
“That’s anatomically unlikely,” the young man replied in a British accent. He poured a second cup of steaming tea and said, “Drink up. I’ll let her know you’re here.”
“Thanks.”
I was sipping tea and sitting at Murphy’s table when Luccio came in a few minutes later. “Give us the room, please, Chandler, Kostikos.”
The younger men cleared out to the living room-a polite illusion, really. The house was too small to provide much in the way of privacy.
Luccio poured herself a cup of tea and sat down across from me.
I felt my shoulders tense up a little. I forced myself to remain quiet, and sipped more tea.
“I’m concerned,” Luccio said quietly, “about the Archive.”
“Her name is Ivy,” I said.
She frowned. “That’s…part of my concern, Harry. Your personal closeness with her. It’s dangerous.”
I lifted my eyebrows. “Dangerous? I’m in danger because I’m treating her like a real person?”
Luccio grimaced as if tasting something bitter. “Frankly? Yes.”
I thought about being diplomatic and polite. Honest, I really did. But while I was thinking about it, I accidentally bumped the button that puts my mouth on autopilot, because it said, “That’s a load of crap, Captain, and you know it.”
Her expression went still as the whole of her attention focused on me. “Is it?”
“Yes. She’s a kid. She’s alone. She’s not some computer database, and it’s inhuman to treat her like one.”
“Yes,” Luccio said bluntly. “It is. And it’s also the safest way to deal with her.”
“Safest for who?” I demanded.
Luccio took a sip of tea. “For everyone.”
I frowned down at my cup. “Tell me.”
She nodded. “The Archive…has been around for a long time. Always passed down in a family line, mother to daughter. Usually the Archive is inherited by a woman when she’s in her early to mid-thirties, when her mother dies, and after she’s given birth to her own daughter. Accidents are rare. Part of the Archive’s nature is a drive to protect itself, a need to avoid exposing the person hosting it to risk. And given the extensive knowledge available to it, the Archive is very good at avoiding risky situations in the first place. And, should they arise, the power available to the Archive generally ensures its survival. It is extremely rare for the host of an Archive to die young.”
I grunted. “Go on.”
“When the Archive is passed…Harry, try to imagine living your life, with all of its triumphs and tragedies-and suddenly you find yourself with a second set of memories, every bit as real to you as your own. A second set of heartaches, loves, triumphs, losses. All of them just as real-and then a third. And a fourth. And a fifth. And more and more and more. The perfect memory, the absolute recall of every Archive that came before you. Five thousand years of them.”
I blinked at that. “Hell’s bells. That would…”
“Drive one insane,” Luccio said. “Yes. And it generally does. There is a reason that the historical record for many soothsayers and oracles presents them as being madwomen. The Pythia, and many, many others, were simply the Archive, using her vast knowledge of the past to build models to predict the most probable future. She was a madwoman-but she was also the Archive.
“As a defense, the Archives began to distance themselves from other human beings, emotionally. They reasoned that if they could stop adding the weight of continuing lifetimes of experience and grief to the already immense burden of carrying so much knowledge, it might better enable them to function. And it did. The Archive keeps its host emotionally remote for a reason-because otherwise the passions and prejudices and hatreds and jealousies of thousands of lifetimes have the potential to distill themselves into a single being.
“Normally, an Archive would have her own lifetime of experience to insulate her against all these other emotions and memories, a baseline to contrast against them.”
I suddenly got it. “But Ivy doesn’t.”
“Ivy doesn’t,” Luccio agreed. “Her grandmother was killed in a freak accident, an automobile crash, I believe. Her mother was a seventeen-year-old girl who was in love, and pregnant. She hated her mother for dying and cursing her to carry the Archive when she wanted to have her own life-and she hated the child for having a lifetime of freedom ahead of her. Ivy’s mother killed herself rather than carry the Archive.”
I started feeling a little sick. “And Ivy knows it.”
“She does. Knows it, feels it. She was born knowing exactly what her mother thought and felt about her.”
“How could you know this about her…” I frowned, thinking. Then said, “Kincaid. The girl was in love with Kincaid.”
“No,” Luccio said. “But Kincaid was working for Ivy’s grandmother at the time, and the girl confided in him.”
“Man, that’s screwed up,” I said.
“Ivy has remained distant her whole life,” Luccio said. “If she begins to involve her own emotions in her duties as the Archive, or in her life generally, she runs the serious risk of being overwhelmed with emotions and passions which she simply is not-and cannot be-psychologically equipped to handle.”
“You’re afraid that she could go out of control.”
“The Archive was created to be a neutral force. A repository of knowledge. But what if Ivy’s unique circumstance allowed her to ignore those limitations? Imagine the results of the anger and bitterness and desire for revenge of all those lifetimes, combined with the power of the Archive and the restraint of a twelve-year-old child.”
“I’d rather not,” I said quietly.
“Nor would I,” Luccio said. “That could be a true nightmare. All that knowledge, without conscience to direct it. The necromancer Kemmler had such a spirit in his service, a sort of miniature version of the Archive. Nowhere near as powerful, but it had been studying and learning beside wizards for generations, and the things it was capable of were appalling.” She shook her head.
I took a sip of tea, because otherwise the gulp would have been suspicious. She was talking about Bob. And she was right about what Bob was capable of doing. When I’d unlocked the personality he’d taken on under some of his former owners, he’d nearly killed me.
“The Wardens destroyed it, of course,” she said.
No, they hadn’t. Just
in DuMorne, former Warden, hadn’t destroyed the skull. He’d smuggled it from Kemmler’s lab and kept it in his own-until I’d burned him to death, and taken it from him in turn.
“It was just too much power under too little restraint. And it’s entirely possible that the Archive could become a similar threat on a far larger scale. I know you care about the child, Harry. But you had to be warned. You might not be doing her any favors by acting like her friend.”
“Who’s acting?” I said. “Where is she?”
“We’ve been keeping her asleep,” Luccio said, “until you or Kincaid got here.”
“I get it,” I said. “You don’t think I should get close to her. Unless you’re worried about what’s going to happen when you wake her up and she’s really scared and confused.”
Luccio’s cheeks flushed and she looked away. “I don’t have all the answers, Dresden. I just have concerns.”
I sighed.
“Whatever,” I said. “Let me see her.”
Luccio led me into Murph’s guest bedroom. Ivy looked very tiny in the double bed. I sat down beside her, and Luccio leaned over to gently rest her hand on Ivy’s head. She murmured something and drew her hand away.
Ivy let out a small whimper and then blinked her eyes open, suddenly hyperventilating. She looked around wildly, her eyes wide, and let out a small cry.
“Easy, easy,” I said gently. “Ivy, it’s all right. You’re safe.”
She sobbed and flung herself tight against me.
I hugged her. I just rocked her gently and hugged her while she cried and cried.
Luccio watched me, her eyes compassionate and sad.
After a long while Ivy whispered, “I got your letter. Thank you.”
