by Jim Butcher
Grey Cloak, maybe? Or his homey, Passenger.
That's when I realized something else: We didn't have even those couple of minutes it would take for the smoke to strangle us. Once the mortal authorities started arriving, whoever was in charge of the ghouls was sure to goad them into a more coordinated rush, and that would be that.
A ghoul's flailing claw ripped through Thomas's jeans and tore into his calf. He lost his balance for a second, caught it again, and kept fighting as if nothing had happened—but blood a little too pale to be human dribbled steadily to the Water Beetle's deck.
I clenched my teeth as the power rose in me. The hairs on my arms stood up straight, and there was a kind of buzzing pressure against the insides of my eardrums. My muscles were tensing, almost to the point of convulsing in a full-body charley horse. Stars swam in my vision as I raised the blasting rod.
"Harry!" Elaine gasped. "Don't be a fool! You'll kill us all!"
I heard her, but I was too far gone into the spell to respond. It had to work. I mean, it had worked once before. In theory, it should work again if I could just get it to be a little bit bigger.
I lifted my face and the blasting rod to the sky, opened my throat, and in a stentorian bellow shouted, "Fuego!"
Fire exploded from the tip of the blasting rod, a column of white-hot flame as thick as my hips. It surged up into the smoke, burning it away as it went, rising into a fiery fountain a good twenty stories high.
All magic obeys certain principles, and many of them apply across the whole spectrum of reality, scientific, arcane, or otherwise. As far as casting spells is concerned, the most important is the principle of conservation of energy. Energy cannot simply be created. If one wants a twenty-story column of fire hot enough to vaporize ten-gauge steel, the energy of all that fire has to come from somewhere. Most of my spells use my own personal energy, what is most simply described as sheer force of will. Energy for such things can also come from other sources outside of the wizard's personal power.
This spell, for example, had been drawn from the heat energy absorbed by the waters of Lake Michigan.
The fire roared up with a thunderous detonation of suddenly expanding air, and the shock wave from it startled everyone into dead silence. The lake let out a sudden, directionless, crackling snarl. In the space of a heartbeat the water between where I stood and the next dock froze over, a sudden sheet of hard, white ice.
I sagged with fatigue. Channeling so much energy through myself was an act that invited trauma and exhaustion, and a sudden weakness in my limbs made me stagger.
"Go!" I shouted to Olivia. "Over the ice! Run for the next dock! Women and children first!"
"Kill them!" shouted a man's voice from the general direction of the attacking ship.
The ghouls howled and leaped forward, enraged to see prey making good their escape.
I leaned on the rail and watched Olivia and company flee. They hurried over the ice, slipping here and there. Crackling protests of the ice sounded under their feet. Spiderweb fractures began to spread, slowly but surely.
I gritted my teeth. Even though Lake Michigan is a cold-water lake, this was high summer, and even in the limited space I had frozen, there was an enormous amount of water that had to be chilled. Imagine how much fire it takes to heat a teakettle to boiling, and remember that it works both ways. You have to take heat away from the kettle's water if you want to freeze it. Now, multiply that much energy by about a berjillion, because that's the amount of water I was trying to freeze.
Olivia and the women and children made it to the far dock and fled in a very well-advised and appropriate state of panic.
"Harry!" Elaine said. Her chain lashed out and struck a ghoul that had slipped by Thomas.
"They're clear!" I cried. "Go, go, go! Thomas, we is skedaddling!"
I stood up and readied my shield bracelet.
"Come on," Elaine told me, grabbing my arm.
I shook my head. "I'm the heaviest," I told her. "I go last."
Elaine blinked at me, opened her mouth to protest, then went very pale and nodded once. She vaulted the rail and ran for the docks.
"Thomas!" I screamed. "Down!"
Thomas hit the deck without so much as looking over his shoulder, and the ghouls closed in.
I triggered the rest of the kinetic rings: all of them at once.
Ghouls tumbled and flew. But I'd bought us only a little time.
Thomas turned and leaped over the side. I checked, and saw that Elaine had reached the other dock. Thomas bounded over the ice like something from one of those Japanese martial arts cartoons, leaped, and actually turned a flip in the air before landing on his feet.
I didn't want to come down too hard on the ice, but I didn't want to wait around until a ghoul ate me, either. I did my best to minimize the impact and started hurrying across.
Ice crackled. On my second step, a sudden, deep crack snapped open beneath my rearmost foot. Holy crap. Maybe I'd underestimated the energy involved. Maybe it had been two berjillion teakettles.
I took the next step, and felt the ice groaning under my feet. More cracks appeared. It was only twenty feet, but the next dock suddenly looked miles away.
Behind me, I heard ghouls charging, throwing themselves recklessly onto the ice once they saw my turned back.
"This is bad, this is bad, this is bad," I babbled to myself. Behind me, the ice suddenly screeched, and one of the ghouls vanished into the water with a scream of protest.
More cracks, even thicker, began to race out ahead of me.
"Harry!" Thomas screamed, pointing over my shoulder.
I turned my head and saw Madrigal Raith standing on the deck of the Water Beetle, not more than ten feet away. He gave me a delighted smile.
Then he lifted a heavy assault rifle to his shoulder and opened fire.
Chapter Twenty-Two
I screamed in order to summon up my primal reserves and to intimidate Madrigal into missing me, and definitely not because I was terrified. While I unleashed my sonic initiative, I also crouched down to take cover. To the untrained eye, it probably looked like I was just cowering and pulling my duster up to cover my head, but it was actually part of a cunning master plan designed to let me survive the next three or four seconds.
Madrigal Raith was Thomas's cousin, and built along the same lines: slim, dark-haired, pale, and handsome, though not on Thomas's scale. Unfortunately, he was just as deceptively strong and swift as Thomas was, and if he could shoot half as well, there was no way he would miss me, not at that range.
And he didn't.
The spellwork I'd laid over my duster had stood me in good stead on more than one occasion. It had stopped claws and talons and fangs and saved me from being torn apart by broken glass. It had reduced the impact of various and sundry blunt objects, and generally preserved my life in the face of a great deal of potentially grievous bodily harm. But I hadn't designed the coat to stand up to this.
There is an enormous amount of difference between the weapons and ammunition employed by your average Chicago thug and military-grade weaponry. Military rounds, fully jacketed in metal, would not smash and deform as easily as bullets of simple lead. They were heavier rounds, moving a lot faster than you'd get with civilian small arms, and they kept their weight focused behind an armor-piercing tip, all of which meant that while military rounds didn't tend to fracture on impact and inflict horribly complicated damage on the human body, they did tend to smash their way through just about anything that got in their way. Personal body armor, advanced as it is, is of very limited use against well-directed military-grade fire—particularly when exposed from ten feet away.
The shots hit me not in a string of separate impacts, the way I had thought it would be, but in one awful roar of noise and pressure and pain. Everything spun around. I was flung over the fracturing ice, my body rolling. The sun found a hole in the smoke and glared down into my eyes. I felt a horrible, nauseated wave of sensation flood over me, and the
glare of light in my eyes became hellish agony. I felt suddenly weak and exhausted, and even though I knew there was something I should have been doing, I couldn't remember what it was.
…
If only the damned light wouldn't keep burning my eyes like that…
"… it wouldn't be so bad out here," I growled to Ramirez. I held up a hand to shield my eyes from the blazing New Mexico sun. "Every morning it's like someone sticking needles in my eyes."
Ramirez, dressed in surplus military BDU pants, a loose white cotton shirt, a khaki bush hat folded up on one side, wraparound sunglasses, and his usual cocky grin, shook his head. "For God's sake, Harry. Why didn't you bring sunglasses?"
"I don't like glasses," I said. "Things on my eyes, they bug me."
"Do they bug you as much as going blind?" Ramirez asked.
I lowered my hand as my eyes finished adjusting, and squinting hard made it possible to bear the glare. "Shut up, Carlos."
"Who's a grumpy wizard in the morning?" Carlos asked, in that tone of voice one usually reserves for favorite dogs.
"Get a couple more years on you and that many beers that late at night will leave you with a headache, too, punk." I growled a couple of curses under my breath, then shook my head and composed myself as ought'to be expected of a master wizard—which is to say, I subtracted the complaining and was left with only the grumpy scowl. "Who's up?"
Ramirez took a small notebook from his pocket and flipped it open. "The Terrible Twosome," he replied. "The Trailman twins."
"You're kidding. They're twelve years old."
"Sixteen," Ramirez contradicted me.
"Twelve, sixteen," I said. "They're babies."
Ramirez's smile faded. "They don't have time to be babies, man. They've got a gift for evocation, and we need them."
"Sixteen," I muttered. "Hell's bells. All right, let's get some breakfast first."
Ramirez and I marched to breakfast. The site Captain Luccio had chosen for teaching trainee Wardens evocation had once been a boomtown, built up around a vein of copper that trickled out after a year or so of mining. It was pretty high up in the mountains, and though we were less than a hundred miles northwest of Albuquerque, we might as well have been camped out on the surface of the moon. The only indications of humanity for ten or twelve miles in any direction were ourselves and the tumbledown remains of the town and the mine Upslope from it.
Ramirez and I had lobbied to christen the place Camp Kaboom, given that it was a boomtown and we were teaching magic that generally involved plenty of booms of its own, but Luccio had overridden us. One of the kids had heard us, though, and by the end of the second day there, Camp Kaboom had been named despite the disapproval of the establishment.
The forty-odd kids had their tents pitched within the stone walls of a church someone had built in an effort to bring a little more stability to the general havoc of boomtowns in the Old West. Luccio had pitched her tent with them, but Ramirez, me, and two other young Wardens who were helping her teach had set up our tents on the remains of what had once been a saloon, a brothel, or both. We'd taught kids all day and evening, and once it had gotten cold and the trainees were asleep, we played poker and drank beer, and if I got enough in me, I would even play a little guitar.
Ramirez and his cronies got up every morning just as bright eyed and bushy tailed as if they'd had a full night's sleep. The cocky little bastards. Breakfast was dished up and served by the trainees every morning, built around several portable grills and several folded tables situated near a well that still held cool water, if you worked the weather-beaten pump long enough. Breakfast was little more than a bowl of cereal, but part of the little more was coffee, so I was surviving without killing anyone—if only because I took breakfast alone, giving the grumpy time to fade before exposing myself to anyone else.
I collected my cereal, an apple, and a big cup of the holy mocha, walked a ways, and settled down on a rock in the blinding light of morning in desert mountains. Captain Luccio sat down beside me.
"Good morning," she said. Luccio was a wizard of the White Council, a couple of centuries old, and one of its more dangerous members. She didn't look like that. She looked like a girl not even as old as Ramirez, with long, curling brown locks, a sweetly pretty face, and killer dimples. When I'd met her, she'd been a lean, leathery-skinned matron with iron grey hair, but a black wizard called the Corpsetaker had suckered her in a duel. Corpsetaker, then in Luccio's current body, had let Luccio run her through—and then Corpsetaker had worked her trademark magic, and switched their minds into the opposite bodies.
I'd figured it out before Corpsetaker had time enough to abuse Luccio's credibility, but once I'd put a bullet through Corpsetaker's head, there hadn't been any way for Luccio to get her original body back. So she'd been stuck in the young, cute one instead, because of me. She had also ceased taking to the field in actual combat, passing that off to her second in command, Morgan, while she ran the boot camp to train new Wardens in how to kill things without getting killed first.
"Good morning," I replied.
"Mail came for you yesterday," she said, and produced a letter from a pocket.
I took it, scanned the envelope, and opened it. "Hmmm."
"Who is it from?" she asked. Her tone was that of one passing the time in polite conversation.
"Warden Yoshimo," I said. "I had a few questions for her about her family tree. See if she was related to a man I knew."
"Is she?" Luccio asked.
"Distantly," I said, reading on. "Interesting." At Luccio's polite noise of inquiry, I said, "My friend was a descendent of Sho Tai."
"I'm afraid I don't know who that is," Luccio said.
"He was the last king of Okinawa," I said, and frowned, thinking it over. "I bet it means something."
"Means something?"
I glanced at Captain Luccio and shook my head. "Sorry. It's a side project of mine, something I'm curious about." I shook my head, folded up the letter from Yoshimo, and tucked it into the pocket of my jeans. "It isn't relevant to teaching apprentices combat magic, and I should have my head in the game, not on side projects."
"Ah," Luccio said, and did not press for further details. "Dresden, there's something I've been meaning to talk to you about."
I grunted interrogatively.
She lifted her eyebrows. "Have you never wondered why you did not receive a blade?"
The Wardens toted silver swords with them whenever there was a fight at hand. I had seen them unravel complex, powerful magic at the will of their wielders, which is one hell of an advantage when taking on anything using magic as a weapon. "Oh," I said, and sipped some coffee. "Actually I hadn't really wondered. I assumed you didn't trust me."
She frowned at me. "I see," she said. "No. That is not the case. If I did not trust you, I would certainly not allow you to continue wearing the cloak."
"Is there anything I could do to make you not trust me, then?" I asked. " 'Cause I don't want to wear the cloak. No offense."
"None taken," she said. "But we need you, and the cloak stays on."
"Damn."
She smiled briefly. The expression had entirely too much weight and subtlety for a face so young. "The fact of the matter is that the swords the Wardens have used in your lifetime must be tailored specifically to each individual Warden. They were also all articles of my creation—and I am no longer capable of creating them."
I frowned and imbibed more coffee. "Because…" I gestured at her vaguely.
She nodded. "This body did not possess the same potential, the same aptitudes for magic as my own. Returning to my former level of ability will be problematical, and will happen no time soon." She shrugged, her expression neutral, but I had a feeling she was covering a lot of frustration and bitterness. "Until someone else manages to adapt my design to their own talents, or until I have retrained myself, I'm afraid that no more such blades will be issued."
I chewed some cereal, sipped some coffee, and said, "It mus
t be hard on you. The new body. A big change, after so long in the first one."
She blinked at me, eyes briefly wide with surprise. "I… Yes, it has been."
"Are you doing okay?"
She looked thoughtfully at her cereal for a moment. "Headaches," she said quietly. "Memories that aren't mine. I think they belong to the original owner of this body. They come mostly in dreams. It's hard to sleep." She sighed. "And, of course, it had been a hundred and forty years since I'd put up with either sexual desire or a monthly cycle."
I swallowed cereal carefully instead of choking. "It sounds, ah, awkward. And unpleasant."
"Very," she said, her voice quiet. Then her cheeks turned faintly pink. "Mostly. Thank you for asking." Then she took a deep breath, exhaled briskly, and rose, all businesslike again. "In any case, I felt I owed you an explanation."
"You didn't," I said. "But thank y—"
Automatic weapons fire ripped the dew-spangled morning.
Luccio was moving at a full sprint before I'd gotten my ass up off the rock. I wasn't slow. I've been in enough scrapes that I don't freeze at the unexpected appearance of violence and death. Captain Luccio, however, had been in a lot more scrapes than that and was faster and better than me. As we ran, there was the continued chatter of weapons fire, screams, and then a couple of awfully loud explosions and an inhuman scream. I caught up to the Captain of the Wardens as we came into sight of the breakfast area, and I let her take the lead.
I'm pigheadedly chivalrous. Not stupid.
The breakfast area was in a shambles. Folding tables had been knocked over. Blood and breakfast cereal lay scattered on the rocky ground. I could see two kids on the ground, one screaming, one simply doubled over in a fetal position, shaking. Others were lying flat, faces in the dirt. Maybe thirty yards away, in the ruins of what had been a blacksmith's shop, the only remaining brick wall was missing an enormous circle of stone—simply gone, probably in one of those weird, silent green blasts Ramirez favored. I could see the barrel of a heavy weapon of some kind lying on the ground, neatly severed about a foot behind its tip. Whoever had been holding it was likely gone with the bricks of the wall.
