Jim Butcher: Changes

She stood at the sink, scrubbing a pan, and looked up at me interestedly. “Oh? What?”

I grunted and thought about the matter carefully for a moment. Molly was not much for combat. It just wasn’t her field. The next few days would certainly be hazardous for me, and I could live with that. But if Molly got involved, they might well be murderous.

I’d seen both sides of the “ignorance is safety” line of thinking in action. I’d seen people die who wouldn’t have if they hadn’t been told about the supernatural and its hazards, and I’d seen them die because they’d been forewarned, and it just wasn’t enough to really impress the scale of the threat upon them. There was just no way to know what would happen.

And because I had no way to know what would happen, I’d come to the conclusion that, absent factors that might make me believe to the contrary, I just wasn’t wise enough to deny them the choice. Molly was a part of my life. This would affect her strongly, in one way or another. The only responsible thing to do was to let her decide for herself how she wanted to live her life. That included endangering it, if that was what she felt was appropriate.

So, much as I had for Murphy, I laid it out for the grasshopper.

By the time I was finished, Molly was kneeling on the floor next to where I sat at the sofa, her blue eyes wide. “Wow, Harry.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Wow.”

“You said that.”

“This changes everything.”

I nodded.

“How can I help?”

I hoped that she hadn’t just chosen to get herself killed. “You tell me. What’s the smart move, padawan?”

She chewed on her lip for a moment and then peered up at me. “We need information. And we need backup. Edinburgh?”

I drank the last swallow of my orange juice, resented its healthiness, and said, “Bingo.”

We took the Ways to Edinburgh, taking advantage of the weird geography of the spirit world to cover a lot more physical distance in the material world. Only certain previously explored routes were safe and reliable, and you had to have some serious supernatural juice to open the door, so to speak, between the real world and the Nevernever, but if you could do it, the Ways were darned handy. The Chicago-to-Edinburgh trip took us about half an hour.

The headquarters of the White Council of wizards is a dull, dim, drafty sort of place—not unlike the insides of the heads of a great many people who work there. It’s all underground, a network of tunnels, its walls covered in carvings of mystic runes and sigils, of stylized designs and genuinely beautiful artistry. The ceilings are kind of low for me in places. Some of the tunnels are pitch-black, but most of them are bathed in a kind of ambient light without a visible source, which is an awfully odd look—sort of like one of those black lights that makes certain other colors seem to glow.

We passed two security checkpoints and walked for another five minutes before Molly shook her head. “How big is this place?” Her subdued voice echoed down the empty tunnels.

“Big,” I said. “Almost as big as the city above, and it has multiple levels. Way more than we actually use.”

She trailed her fingers over an elaborate carving in the stone as we passed it, a mural depicting a forest scene, its edges and lines crisp and clean despite the smoke from occasional torches and the passage of centuries. Her fingers left little trails in the light layer of dust coating the wall. “Did the Council carve it out?”

“Nah,” I said. “That would have been too much like work. Rumor has it that it used to be the palace of the lord of the Daoine Sidhe. That the original Merlin won it from him in a bet.”

“Like, Merlin Merlin?” she asked. “Sword in the stone and so on?”

“Same guy,” I said. “Doubt he was much like in the movies.”

“Wrote the Laws of Magic, founded the White Council, was custodian of one of the Swords and established a stronghold for the Council, too,” Molly said. “He must have been something else.”

“He must have been a real bastard,” I said. “Guys who get their name splashed all over history and folklore don’t tend to be Boy Scout troop leaders.”

“You’re such a cynic,” Molly said.

“I think cynics are playful and cute.”

There was no traffic at all in the main corridor, which surprised me. I mean, it was never exactly crowded, but you usually bumped into someone .

I headed for Warden country. There was a large dormitory set up for the militant branch of the White Council, where I could generally be confident of finding a surly, suspicious face. It was also very possible that Anastasia Luccio, captain of the Wardens, was there. The cafeteria and the administrative offices were nearby, so it was hands down the busiest part of the stronghold.

Warden country and the cafeteria were both empty, though there was a deck of cards spread out on a table in one of the lounges. “Weird,” I muttered. “All the checkpoints are business-as-usual or I’d think something was wrong.”

Molly frowned. “Maybe someone got into the heads of the sentries.”

“Nah. They’re jerks, but they’re not incompetent jerks. No one around here is going to get away with mental buggery for a while.”

“Buggery?” Molly asked.

“Hey, we’re in the United Kingdom. When in Rome.”

We went across the hall to administration and, finally, found someone: a harried-looking woman who sat at an old switchboard—the kind with about a million holes and plugs that had to be manually inserted and removed to run it. She wore a pair of ancient-looking headphones and spoke into an old radio microphone. “No. No, we have no word at this time. When we learn something, you will be informed.” She jerked the wire out, plugged it in under another flashing light, and repeated her spiel. I watched that half a dozen times before I literally waved a hand in front of her face to get her to notice us.

She stopped and blinked up at me. She was a matronly-looking woman, iron grey woven smoothly through her brown hair, which meant that she could be anywhere between forty-five and two hundred years old. Her eyes flicked over me and then Molly, and I saw her body tense. She eased her rolling chair a few inches back from us—like most of the older crew of wizards, she probably regarded me as a sociopath looking for a nice bell tower. The switchboard lights blinked on and off steadily. They were the old kind that made little clicking sounds as they did.

“Ah,” she said. “Wizard Dresden. I am quite busy.”

“It looks like it,” I said. “Wizard MacFee, right? Where is everybody?”

She blinked at me again, as though I had spoken in Ewok. “Why, they’re in the Senior Council’s residence hall. It was the only place big enough for everyone who wished to witness it.”

I nodded pleasantly and tried to remain calm. “Witness what?”

“The ambassador,” MacFee said, impatience touching her voice. She gestured at the switchboard. “You haven’t heard?”

“Was sort of busy yesterday,” I said. “Heard what?”

“Why, the Red Court, of course,” she said. “They’ve sent an ambassador plenipotentiary.” She beamed. “They want to change the cease-fire into a genuine peace. They’ve sent no less than Duchess Arianna Ortega to ask for terms.”

I felt my stomach flutter around inside me.

The duchess was playing dirty. As the Red Court envoy, of course she’d have some advance knowledge about her people’s intentions. There was no way in hell that this was a coincidence. It was too perfect.

If the Red Court was offering a return to the status quo—and older wizards love status quo, let me tell you—and adding in something to sweeten it to boot . . . the Senior Council would never authorize an action that would jeopardize such a peace. Not for some random little girl—and certainly not for the offspring of the White Council’s most famous maybe-psychotic problem child, Harry Dresden, and a half-vampire terrorist.