Dead Beat df-7

by Jim Butcher

  And besides. She was a girl.

  Unless she proved herself to be some kind of monstrous thing that just looked like a girl, I wasn't going to hit her. On some rational level, I knew my attitude was dangerously illogical, but that didn't change anything. I don't hit girls.

  I had the feeling she was quick enough to beat me, as she stood over me with the magical equivalent of a cocked and readied gun sparkling through the metal mesh over her right palm. I could feel the air vibrating with a low, steady note of power, and her stance was both confident and wary.

  One thing I was pretty sure of-she was here to talk. If she'd wanted to kill me, she could have done it already. So I stayed sitting, set my staff aside, very slowly, and mildly raised both hands. "Take it easy there, cowgirl," I said. "You got me dead to rights."

  I couldn't see her face within the depths of the hood, but I heard a dry note of amusement in her voice. "Take off the bracelet, please. And the ring on your right hand."

  I arched a brow. The ring was spent, and probably didn't have enough juice left in it to push her back a step, but I'd never run into anyone who had noticed it before. Whoever she was, Kumori knew how wizards operated, and it made me even more sure that she was hiding her face because she was someone I might recognize-someone on the White Council.

  I slipped the bracelet off my left hand and lowered it slowly to the stair beside me, but getting that ring off was going to be problematic. "I can't get the ring off," I said.

  "Why not?" Kumori asked.

  "Fingers on my left hand don't work anymore," I said.

  "What happened?"

  I blinked at her for a second. The question had been polite. In fact, if I didn't know any better, I'd have taken her tone for actual interest.

  "What happened to your left hand?" she asked, her tone patient.

  I answered her as politely as I could while staring at her, trying to figure her out. "I was fighting vampires. There was a fire. Burned my hand so bad the doctors wanted to take it off. There's no way I can get the ring off unless you want to come over here and take it yourself."

  She was still for a moment. Then she said, "It might be easier if you would agree to a truce for the duration of this conversation. Are you willing to give your word on it?"

  She wanted a truce, which meant that she had indeed come to talk, rather than to execute me. There sure as hell wouldn't be any harm in agreeing to a truce, and it might prevent hostilities that could be triggered by raw nerves. "In exchange for yours," I said. "This conversation and half an hour after its conclusion."

  "Done," Kumori said. "You have my word."

  "And you have mine," I said.

  She lowered her hand at once, taking the odd mesh over it and its sparkling energies into the deep sleeves of her robe. I didn't take my eyes off her as I reclaimed my shield bracelet and fixed it back onto my wrist. "All right," I said. "What did you want to talk about?"

  "The book," she said. "We still want your copy."

  "You'll have to talk to the Corpsetaker," I said. "He and his ghoul took it from me last night. But if you go looking, he looks like a girl in her early twenties. Great dimples."

  The hood shifted, as though Kumori had tilted her head to one side. "You know of the source of the Corpsetaker's name?"

  "I figure he's a body switcher," I said. "I've heard necromancers can do that kind of thing. Move their consciousness from one body to another.

  Exchange with some poor sucker who can't protect themselves. Corpsetaker was in that old professor's body. I figure he swapped with his assistant, and then killed the old man's body with the girl's mind inside."

  The hood nodded, conceding me the point. "But I have difficulty believing your story. Had the Corpsetaker taken the book from you, he would have killed you as well."

  "Wasn't for lack of trying," I said, and gestured at my leg. "He was overconfident, and I was a little bit lucky. He got the book, but I got away."

  She was silent for a moment and then said, her voice thoughtful, "You're telling me the truth."

  "I'm bad at lying. Lies get all confusing. Can't keep them straight."

  Kumori nodded. "Then let me make you this offer."

  "Join or die?" I guessed.

  She exhaled softly through her nose. "Hardly. Cowl has a certain amount of respect for you, but he believes you too raw to make some sort of alliance feasible."

  "Ah," I said. "Then you'll probably go to the second offer I always get. Go away and you won't kill me."

  "Something like that," Kumori said. "You have no real idea of what is going on here. Your ignorance is more dangerous than you know, and your continued involvement in this matter could cause disastrous consequences."

  "What do you want me to do?" I asked.

  "Withdraw from the field," she said.

  "Or what?"

  "Or you will regret it," she said. "That isn't a threat. Simply a fact. As I said, Cowl has a certain respect for you, but he will not be able to protect you or treat you gently should you continue to involve yourself. If you stand in his way, he will kill you. He would prefer it if you stood clear."

  "Gosh. That's so altruistic of him." I shook my head. "If he kills me, he'll have my death curse to contend with."

  "He has already contended with such curses," Kumori said. "Many times. I advise you to retire from the field."

  "I can't do that," I said. "I know what you people are doing. I know about the Darkhallow. I know why you're doing it."

  "And?"

  "And I can't let that happen," I said. "Insurance in Chicago is expensive enough without adding in a petulant new deity tearing up the real estate."

  "Our goals are not so different," Kumori said. "Grevane and the Corpsetaker are madmen. They must be stopped."

  "From what I've seen of old Cowl, he's a couple of french fries short of a Happy Meal too."

  "And you would do what?" Kumori asked. "Prevent them from reaping the bounty of the Darkhallow? Take the power for yourself?"

  "I want to make sure nobody takes it," I said. "I don't particularly care how I get it done."

  "Truly?" she asked.

  I nodded. "Now here's where I make you an offer."

  She hesitated, clearly taken off guard. "Very well."

  "Bail," I told her. "Leave Cowl and the Sociopath Squad to their squabbling. Give me what information I need to stop them."

  "He'd kill me in a day," she said.

  "No," I told her. "I'd take you to the White Council. I'd get you protection."

  She stared at me from within her hood, utterly silent.

  "See, Kumori, you're sort of a puzzle," I said. "Because you're working with these necromancers. In fact, I'm willing to bet you aren't bad at necromancy yourself. But you went out of your way to save someone's life the other night, and that just doesn't jive with that crowd."

  "Doesn't it?" she said.

  "No. They're killers. Good at it, but they're just killers. They wouldn't take a step out of their way to help someone else. But you went way the hell out of your way to help a stranger. It says that you aren't like them."

  She was silent for a moment more. Then she said, "Do you know why Cowl has made a study of necromancy? And why I have joined him?"

  "No."

  "Because necromancy embraces the power of death, just as magic embraces the power of life. And as magic can be twisted and perverted to cruel and destructive ends, necromancy can be turned upon its nature as well. Death can be warded off, as I did for the wounded man that night. Life can be served by that dark power, if one's will and purpose are strong."

  "Uh- huh," I said. "You got involved with the darkest and most corruptive, insanity-causing forces in the universe so that you could jump-start wounded bodies to life."

  She moved her hand, a sudden, slashing motion. "No. No, you idiot. Don't you see the potential here? The possibility to end death."

  "Uh. End death?"

  "You will die," she said. "I will die. Cowl will die. Everyone n
ow walking this tired old world knows but one solid, immutable fact. Their life will end. Yours. Mine. Everyone's."

  "Yeah," I said. "That's why they call us 'mortals.' Because of the mortality."

  "Why?" she asked.

  "What?"

  "Why?" she repeated. "Why must we die?"

  "Because that's the way it is," I said.

  "Why must that be the way it is?" she said. "Why must we all live with that pain of separation? With horrible grief? With rage and loss and sorrow and vengeance ruling the lives of every soul beneath the sky? What if we could change it?"

  "Change it," I said, my skepticism clear in my voice. "Change death."

  "Yes," she said.

  "Just… poof. Make it go away."

  "What if we could?" she said. "Can you imagine what it would mean? If mere age would not lay mankind low after his threescore and ten, how much better would the world be? Can you imagine if da Vinci had continued to live, to study, to paint, to invent? That the remarkable accomplishments of his lifetime could have continued through the centuries rather than dying in the dim past? Can you imagine going to see Beethoven in concert? Taking a theology class taught by Martin Luther? Attending a symposium hosted by Albert Einstein? Think, Dresden. It boggles the mind."

  I thought about it.

  And she was right.

  Supposing for half a second that what she said might be possible, it would mean… Hell. It would change everything. There would be so much more time, and for everyone. Wizards lived for three or even four centuries, and to them even their own lives seemed short. What Kumori was talking about, the end of death itself, would give everyone else the same chance to better themselves that wizards enjoyed. It would, in a single stroke, create more parity between wizards and the rest of mankind than any single event in history.

  But that was insane. Setting out to conquer death? People died. That was a fact of life.

  But what if they didn't have to?

  What if my mother hadn't died? Or my father? How different would my life be today?

  Impossible. You couldn't just drive death away.

  Could you?

  Maybe that wasn't the point. Maybe this was one of those things in which the effort meant more than the outcome. I mean, if there was a chance, even a tiny, teeny chance that Kumori was right, and that the world could be so radically changed, wouldn't I be obliged to try? Even if I never reached the goal, never finished the quest, wouldn't the attempt to vanquish death itself be a worthy pursuit?

  Wow.

  This question was a big one. Way bigger than me.

  I shook my head and told Kumori, "I don't know about that. What I know is that I've seen the fruits of that kind of path. I saw Cowl try to murder me when I got in his way. I've seen what Grevane and the Corpsetaker have done. I've heard about the suffering and misery Kemmler caused-and is still causing today, thanks to his stupid book.

  "I don't know about something as big as trying to murder death. But I know that you can tell a tree from what kind of fruit falls off it. And the necromancy tree doesn't drop anything that isn't rotten."

  "Ours is a calling," Kumori said, her voice flat. "A noble road."

  "I might be willing to believe you if so much of that road wasn't paved in the corpses of innocents."

  I saw her head shake slowly beneath the hood. "You sound like them. The Council. You do not understand."

  "Or maybe I'm just not quite arrogant enough to start rearranging the universe on the assumption that I know better than God how long life should last. And there's a downside to what you're saying, too. How about trying to topple the regime of an immortal Napoleon, or Attila, or Chairman Mao? You could as easily preserve the monsters as the intellectual all-stars. It can be horribly abused, and that makes it dangerous."

  I faced her down for a long and silent second. Then she let out a sigh and said, "I think we have exhausted the possibilities of this conversation."

  "You sure?" I asked her. "The offer is still open. If you want to get out, I'll get the Council to protect you."

  "Our offer is open as well. Stand aside, and no rancor will follow you."

  "I can't," I said.

  "Nor can I," she said. "Understand that I do not wish you any particular harm. But I will not hesitate to strike you down should you place yourself in our path."

  I stared at her for a second. Then I said, "I'm going to stop you. I'm going to stop you and Cowl and Grevane and Corpsetaker, and your little drummers too. None of you are going to promote yourself to god-hood. No one is."

  "I think you will die," she said, her tone even, without inflection.

  "Maybe," I said. "But I'm going to stop you all before I go. Tell Cowl to get out of the way now, and I won't hunt him down after all of this is over. He can walk. You too."

  She shook her head again and said, "I'm sorry we could not work something out."

  "Yeah," I said.

  She hesitated. Then she asked me, her voice soft and genuinely curious, "Why?"

  "Because this is what I have to do," I said. "I'm sorry you aren't going to let me help you."

  "We all act as we think we must," she said. "I will see you by and by, Dresden."

  "Count on it," I said.

  Kumori left without another word, gliding silently down the stairs and out of sight.

  I sat there for a moment, aching and tired and more scared than I had sounded a minute before.

  Then I got up, shoved my pain and my fear aside, and hobbled out to the Blue Beetle.

  I had work to do.

  Chapter Thirty

  I went back to my car, got in, and headed out to find a few things I would need to make the summoning of the Erlking marginally less suicidal. Serious summoning spells have to be personalized both to the entity to be summoned and to the summoner, and it took me a little while to find enough open businesses to get it all. Traffic on the streets grew steadily worse as the afternoon wore on, slowing me down even further.

  More ominous than that, the tenor of the city had begun to slowly, steadily change. What had been an atmosphere of bemused enjoyment of an unanticipated holiday from the daily grind had turned into annoyance. As the sun tracked across the sky and the power still hadn't come back on, annoyance started turning into anger. By high noon, there were police visible on every street in cars, on motorcycles, on bicycles, and on foot.

  "That all for ya?" asked an enterprising vendor. He was a potbellied, balding gardener selling fresh fruit and vegetables from the back of a pickup on a corner, and he was the only one I'd seen who wasn't trying to gouge Chicagoans in their moment of trial. He put the pumpkin I'd chosen in a thin plastic bag as he did, and took the money I offered him.

  "That's everything," I said. "Thanks."

  Shouting broke out somewhere nearby, and I looked up to see a whip-thin young man sprinting down the sidewalk across the street. A pair of cops chased him, one of them shouting at his uselessly squealing radio.

  "Christ, look at that," the vendor said. "Cops everywhere. Why do they need the cops everywhere if this is just a power outage?"

  "They're probably just worried about someone starting a riot," I said.

  "Maybe," the vendor said. "But I hear some crazy things."

  "Like what?" I asked.

  He shook his head. "That terrorists blew up the power plant. Or maybe set off some kind of nuke. They can disrupt electronics and stuff, you know."

  "I think someone might have noticed a nuclear explosion," I said.

  "Oh, sure," he said. "But hell, maybe somebody did. Practically no phones, radio is damned near useless. How would we know?"

  "I dunno. The big boom? The vaporized city?"

  The vendor snorted. "True, true. But something happened."

  "Yeah," I said. "Something happened."

  "And the whole damned city is getting scared." The vendor shook his head as more shouting broke out farther down the block. A police car, lights and sirens wailing, tried to bull through the traffic
to move toward the disturbance, without much success.

  "Getting worse," the vendor observed. "This morning it was all smiles. But people are getting afraid."

  "Halloween," I said.

  The vendor glanced at me and shivered. "Maybe that's part of it. Maybe just because it's getting darker. Clouding over. People get spooked sometimes. Just like cattle. If they don't get the lights on, tonight might be bad here."

  "Maybe," I said. I juggled the bag with my staff, trying to work out how to carry them both back down the street to the Beetle.

  "Here," said the vendor. "I'll help you, son."

  "Thank you," I told him, though to be honest I felt embarrassed that I actually wanted his help, much less needed it. "That old Bug there."

  He walked the fifty feet down the sidewalk with me. He dropped off the sack in the front-end trunk of the VW, nodded at me, and said, "About time I got my old self out of here anyway, I think. Getting tense around here. Thunderstorm's coming in."

  "Newspaper weatherman said it was supposed to be clear," I said.

  The vendor snorted and tapped his nose. "I lived around this old lake all my life. There's a storm coming."

  Boy was there. In spades.

  He nodded to me. "You should get home. Good night to stay in and read a book."

  "That sounds nice," I agreed. "Thanks again."

  I nudged the Beetle out into traffic by virtue of being more willing to accept a fender-bender than anyone else on the road. I had everything I needed to try to whistle up the Erlking, but it had eaten up a lot of my day. I'd tried to call Murphy's place every time I'd stopped the car, but I never got a line through to Thomas and Butters, and now, with the afternoon sun burning its way down toward the horizon, I had run out of daylight.

  It was time to rendezvous with the Wardens, so I headed for McAnally's.

  Mac's tavern was tucked in neatly beneath one tall building and surrounded by others. You had to go down an alley to get to the tavern, but at least it had its own dinky parking lot. I managed to find a spot in the lot and then limped down the alley to the tavern, taking the short flight of steps down to the heavy wooden door.