Chapter Nineteen
Chapter
Nineteen
“So how come we do an hour a day, instead of two hours every other day?” Fitz asked, panting.
We were in the gym and had finished up a pretty intense leg day. My knees were complaining at me, but not enough to make me think I’d actually hurt them. I just wasn’t as young as I used to be.
“Because getting stronger isn’t about just pushing hard,” I said. “It’s a lot more important to push steady. Come back again and again. Push too hard, you don’t have a chance to recover, the muscles don’t get to grow, injuries are more likely. It’s a tortoise and hare thing.”
“Turtles and hair?” Fitz asked. “What the hell?”
“We’ll have to cover some Aesop,” I said. “Lot of good practical knowledge in there.” I tossed him a protein shake in a box and took one for myself.
“Harry,” he said. He frowned down at the shake, took a deep breath, then faced me and said, “I’m sorry. I tried to use magic that night. With the ghouls. I kept gathering it, but I couldn’t hold it all together. It just…slipped right through my fingers.”
I shook my head. “It’s hard to do it when you have to think your way through every step. It takes time and practice to turn it all into reflex so you can use it under pressure. Most wizards are even older than me before they can do magic smoothly in a fight.”
“A lot of the Wardens are younger than you.”
“Everyone has different talents,” I said.
“Things they’re good at naturally. The Council recruits Wardens from among the wizards with natural gifts at evocation.
” I shook my head. “Honestly, in a lot of ways they’re the weakest. Evocation gets things done in a hurry, and if you’ve got to fight there’s nothing like it—but it’s short-term, and it’s got really limited application.
Better to be an enchanter, like Ancient Mai. Or a diviner like the Merlin.”
“Diviner?”
“Wizard who specializes in getting, using, and disseminating information,” I said. “It’s where I’ve worked hardest to shore up my weaknesses as a practitioner. Knowledge is power, kid. Especially for us.”
He drank half of his shake and nodded thoughtfully. “Like me with shades. That’s where my talent is.”
“Prezactly,” I said. “I want you to start putting in half an hour at the range after we lift. Only use force and fire for now.”
“So almost every day,” Fitz said. “ ’Cause to grow I need regular practice.”
“Discipline, discipline, discipline,” I said, nodding. “Without discipline, you don’t use power. It uses you. You wind up doing things only out of strong emotion, without reason and balance. People get hurt. Most likely yourself.”
Bear thumped into the gym. She had moved with a little more bounce and energy ever since the fight with the ghouls. “Seidrmadr,” she said quietly. “There’s trouble. You’d better come down.”
“Come on, Fitz,” I said. “Let’s go deal with some conflict.”
—
I got downstairs and found a delegation from the magical community waiting for me, headed up by Artemis Bock.
Bock was the owner of Bock Ordered Books, a social locus of the city’s magical community, and we hadn’t always seen eye to eye.
He wasn’t really anything more than the most minor practitioner imaginable, and that mostly because he had read a lot of books.
He was knowledgeable on theory, though, savvy to the magical world, and generally one of those guys the Wardens looked in on now and then.
He was comfortably overweight, somewhere in his fifties, wearing jeans and a button-down shirt and a cardigan.
He had a handful of his cronies from the store with him, two of the old salts I sometimes saw playing chess at Mac’s—and a young couple who had been through a beating.
“Bock,” I said calmly, as I came down the stairs to the grand hall. The kids staying in the castle had half days of school in one of the meeting rooms upstairs, so the place was largely empty except for a couple of the Knights of the Bean who were hanging around on duty, playing cards.
“Dresden,” he said brusquely, nodding. “We need to talk.”
I gestured at the nearest table and said, “Come on in. Sit down. Fitz, see if the kitchen has any of that hot cider the Ordo made for us left.”
“Got it,” Fitz said and hurried out.
Bock shepherded the young couple into the seats next to him and settled down across from me.
“Okay,” I said. “Introductions?”
“This is Roger and Bess,” Bock said quietly. “They’re Kin.”
Kin was a general term for people who had supernatural beings somewhere a few generations back in their ancestry.
Generally speaking, it got applied to people who were pretty much no different from vanilla mortals, except for being a little weird and having family knowledge of the supernatural world, and maybe some of the most minor abilities.
You probably know some people who are Kin.
Visit any Renaissance fair and you’ll see some.
Also, those folks with the really good dyed hair, where you can’t see any roots growing in? Probably them, too.
Roger was a thin kid, early twenties, glasses, kind of stork-like, with an Adam’s apple that extended almost as far as his chin.
He had absolutely black hair and nutmeg-colored skin.
His lip had been split, and one of his wrists had been sprained or broken and was heavily wrapped.
Bess was a tiny moonfaced pale thing, stocky and curvy.
Her hair was silver despite her youth, and very long, though tied back in a tail.
She wasn’t looking up, but her face was heavily bruised and I could see more bruises spreading out toward her collarbones from her shoulders.
“Hi, guys,” I said gently. “I’m Harry Dresden.”
“We know who you are,” Bess said in a whisper.
I looked at Bock. “What happened?”
“Roger and Bess run a little bakery in the bazaar outside Mac’s,” Bock said. “They had stayed open a little late, and it was after dark when they were packing up.”
I eyed the couple. “That so?”
“They said they wanted to buy some food,” Roger said. His voice was surprisingly deep for his build. “When Bess opened up her basket, they just took it.”
“Roger tried to get the food back,” Bess said. “I mean…we’re trading for everything right now. We can’t afford to lose stock. It’s how we’re getting along.”
“Sure,” I said, frowning. “What happened?”
“They, uh.” Roger swallowed.
Fitz showed up just then with a tray of steaming paper cups.
He gave one to me and started passing them out to the guests.
Roger and Bess gripped theirs with both hands, as if they needed the warmth.
I took a sip of mine. Cider. Excellent. The ladies from the Ordo Lebes had gone out of their way for me and the others in the castle since the battle.
“Take your time,” I said to them.
“They called us freaks,” Bess said quietly. “And then they beat us with broom handles.” She held up one of her arms to show me purple stripes.
I exhaled slowly. “Hell’s bells. Do you know them?”
The young couple shook their heads. “And it was dark when they got there. You know how it is at night now.”
“We’ve been getting a lot of that kind of attention,” Bock said quietly. “Outside Mac’s. At my store. Normies throwing things. Calling people names. Like playground bullies. But it hadn’t ever gone to something like this.”
“I’m sorry,” I said to the young couple. I looked up at Bock. “You go to the police?”
Bock rolled his eyes. “Some of them give us the same kind of looks. You know?”
Chicago had been given a very rude awakening when Ethniu had shown up and begun mowing down skyscrapers, and when monsters from a dozen different mythoses (mythoi?) had shown up and begun hunting down the city’s residents.
A lot of people had moved out in a massive human wave—some because the town had been wrecked, and some because they had seen horrible things out of make-believe come to life.
Those who had stayed had done so because they were tougher than most, or poorer than most, which in many ways was the same thing.
I had been fearing this. People, afraid, tend to band together—draw into tribes. One of the glues that hold tribes together is fear of other tribes. And there was plenty of reason to fear the supernatural and those connected to it these days.
I looked at the wounded kids. If the cops didn’t have time to hunt down murdering ghouls, they wouldn’t have time to deal with roving bands of bullies, either.
“Look, Dresden,” Bock said quietly. “We aren’t really here looking for help. We’re here because you need to understand why we’re going to do what we’re about to do.”
I frowned at Bock and the committee behind him. “What are you talking about?”
“We’re going to take steps,” he said in a quiet, firm voice. “Nothing deadly. But we’re not going to just let ourselves get beaten, either.”
“You mean to use magic,” I said quietly.
He nodded.
“The Wardens won’t like that,” I said.
“They aren’t going to know,” he said.
“Aren’t they?”
He smiled without mirth. “Not from you, at least. Or we’ll tell them about Fitz.”
Fitz, now standing behind me, made a quiet sound that could have been a growl.
Bock spread his hands. “I’m not looking for trouble with you,” he said. “Honestly. But we’ve all been through too much. What happened to Roger and Bess is going to happen to other people, too, unless we do something about it.”
I drummed my fingers on the tabletop twice and then took a long, slow sip of cider, using the time to think.
Working in a group, a circle of low-powered practitioners could be much more effective than any of them operating alone.
They could get up to any amount of serious mischief.
Especially if they were motivated by fear, they could put together a number of extremely unpleasant hexes or curses, ranging from nightmares to your classic voodoo doll scenario to burning down a building around the curse’s subject.
That kind of magic wasn’t just dangerous—it had a tendency to spiral out of control and result in greater and greater chaos.
The Rule of Three wasn’t exactly as concrete as one of Newton’s laws—but what went around did tend to come around, sooner or later, when magic was involved.
“What you’re planning,” I said quietly, “it could get out of hand. If it does, it will draw the attention of the Wardens, even if I don’t say anything.”
“We’re willing to take that chance,” Bock said seriously.
“It will also piss me off. Personally.”
That made the two old salts exchange an unsettled glance.
“We’ll take our chances with that, too,” Bock said. “Dresden, we can’t just do nothing. You know how predators will react to that.”
I sighed. He wasn’t wrong about that. Once they’d gotten easy pickings, they’d be back for more. I smoothed my hand over my forehead slowly. “Okay. Okay, let’s take a step back here,” I said. “Look, the problem is, you don’t want your people roughed up, yeah?”
“Yes.”
“Suppose I send a couple of Knights of the Bean down every night toward evening,” I said. “Couple of armed men should discourage gangs of simple street toughs.”
“Or encourage them to show up with more weapons,” Bock objected.
“Arty,” I said quietly. “What you’re talking about doing…it could get out of hand. Easy. Really easy. It could do bad things to you. I know what I’m talking about here. If you lean into vengeance and slip over the line into black magic, you might never know it when you lose control.”
“We can’t just stand there,” he said.
“No, you can’t,” I said. “Let me send you some support. This is the right time for us to stand together.”
Bock pressed his lips together warily. “We don’t have to listen to you,” he said. “You don’t run this town.”
“Of course I don’t,” I said. “But I’ve seen a lot more of how bad it can get than any of you have. I’m begging you. Let me send help.”
Bock glanced back at his crew. Then looked at Roger and Bess.
The young couple were studying me warily.
“What happens if it doesn’t help?” Bock demanded.
“Then we will take more steps,” I said. “But we’ll do it together.”
He exhaled slowly. He looked at least as tired as I felt. Every face in his crew was weary, wary, and determined.
“Okay,” he said finally. “We’ll try it your way. For now.”
“Fitz,” I said. “Get me the KotB roster. We’ll send people over starting tonight.”