Chapter Fifty-Two #2
The door slammed open and Fitz came running out onto the roof, wearing biker leathers that hung a little loose on him, because they’d been the closest fit we could find.
I’d shown him how to enchant protection sigils into the leather over the past several months, when I’d been refreshing the ones on my duster.
“Harry!” he said. “Basil and the other gargoyles are at the gates, freaking out about evil! And they turned the wood to stone! Straight-up rock!” He paused. “I think you’re going to need new hinges.”
“We’ll file that under ‘deal with it later,’ ” I said.
“Where do you want me?”
I wanted him downstairs with the other kids. But that was my feelings talking. Fitz wasn’t a child. And he knew enough to be dangerous. “Stick with Matias,” I told him, nodding to the older man. “Watch my back.”
“Got it,” he said, eyes wide.
“Fifteen minutes until sundown,” Bear said, eyeing her pocket watch.
I slammed a fist on the battlement, staring down at the crowd.
Someone, maybe one of the ghouls, maybe not, pointed a finger at me and started shouting, and things got a lot worse, quickly. People started shoving. A woman cried out and went down on her back, striking her head.
And a tall, dark-haired man stepped out from between two of the houses across the street. He took off a baseball cap and a pair of sunglasses and swept me a mocking bow.
Lord Raith.
He gave me a smile that a cat might give a mouse caught out on an open floor. Then he vanished between the houses again.
“Hell’s bells,” I spat. “That’s what’s been going on. He’s been setting this up for months.”
“Who?” Bear said.
“Doesn’t matter,” I said quietly. “Not relevant. What’s done is done. Okay. Okay.” I swallowed. I checked my staff. I wasn’t sure it could bear the kind of energy I’d need to put through it.
So it would have to go through me.
I wasn’t sure I could bear the kind of energy I’d need to use, either. But if I didn’t, innocent people were going to die.
Time to wizard up.
I walked to the center of the roof and told everyone, “Stay back from me. You don’t want to get too close to this.”
“Too close to what?” Fitz called.
“The big time,” I said, and rapped my staff on the stones of the roof, sending out a burst of my will along with it.
Green-gold light swept out from the end of the staff in a circle, rolling over the barely visible carvings in the stones, picking out a circle of glowing sigils around me that formed into a magic circle almost at once.
I could feel the power congeal around me, feel unseen walls snap up in a cylinder above me—and simultaneously thrust down into the castle and the earth below.
The stones beneath my feet began to vibrate.
“Bob,” I said quietly.
The spirit of intellect’s voice came, conducted through the stone beneath me, up the length of the dense wood grain of my staff, to buzz in my ear. “Yeah, boss?”
“You got those ley lines called up?”
Merlin’s fortress, they had called it, this castle.
And it had been built not only to shelter and protect, but to channel magical energy as well.
Its layered enchantments gave it a metaphysical mass far beyond the weight of mere stone.
Magically speaking, it was made of a superdense substance, like the material of a collapsed star.
And like that material, it had its own kind of gravity.
“It’s ready to bring them together,” Bob said. “But…Harry, are you absolutely sure? You haven’t worked with stuff this big before. And even though everything seems to check out, they might not have put this place back together just right, you know? When Marcone brought it here?”
“He had a fallen angel whose province is magic advising him when he did,” I noted. “Marcone is a lot of things, but one thing he isn’t is incompetent.”
I took a deep breath.
A month ago, I wouldn’t have even considered this, much less actually tried it.
Either I’d been healing…or just getting crazier.
Or both. You know.
Things are rarely monolithic.
“Bring it up to power,” I said to Bob.
“Got it, boss,” Bob said nervously. I supposed I couldn’t blame him. Bob was living in the stone of the castle itself now, and I was about to flood that stone with dangerous amounts of energy.
I closed my eyes, shutting out distractions, the shouts from the crowd.
Rocks had begun being thrown, judging from the clack of stone on stone coming from the walls at the castle’s front.
Screams rose, some of fury, some of pain.
I shut those out, too, and sent my senses completely into the stone beneath me.
At first, it was like lying in a dark room, cold enough that I’d lost sensation in my arms and legs.
I started pushing with my will, like testing the muscles of my fingers and limbs.
I breathed in and out slowly, continuing to apply more will against what faced me, sinking my mind into the weave of magical constructs within the stone.
They were old. Stars and stones, I could feel the age bound within the rock, the slow memory of the witness of millennia passing like days.
The rock remembered ice covering the earth and retreating over and over.
The rock remembered rain that lasted for hundreds of thousands of years.
The rock remembered shocks of impact from stone hurtling through the void and the sweeping wind that followed, spinning off in explosions of myriad hurricanes.
The rock remembered eons of molten fire and smoke—all primordial forces that regarded mere flecks of organic matter, like me, the way a mortal would note the passing of a speck of dust in a beam of sunlight.
Dimly, back in my physical body, I felt the stone of the castle begin to shake.
Layer upon layer of memory, of enchantment to enhance that memory, began to envelop me, spreading out over me and pressing down with a heavy, even weight, with a terrible gravity that I knew could have ripped my thoughts to pieces if I allowed it, the superdense supernatural energy showing me that the castle itself had gained its own form of slow and obdurate sentience.
I kept focusing harder and harder, sinking myself into that gravity, holding my thoughts together.
As Bob began activating the castle’s enchantments, that gravity spread out, drawing toward it flowing rivers of natural magical energy in the earth—ley lines—drawing them toward it like a star being drawn into a black hole, like rivers caught in a massive earthquake suddenly forced to a new course.
I planted myself in the rock and stone. Anchored myself in my thoughts, in myself, as that energy coursed over me in a tidal flood of power, because before those forces, I was a speck of dust. But I knew who I was.
I was a man.
I was a father.
I was a protector.
I was imperfect and flawed.
I was stubborn as hell.
I was a fighter.
I was a helper.
I was someone who worked every day to be a better man than I’d been the day before.
I was someone who would not stand by doing nothing when there was a clear need for action.
I was a wizard.
I was Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden.
The enormous power of the energy of conjoined ley lines flowed over me, and I stood before it like a great tree before a flood, balanced and ready, roots sunk deep into the earth beneath me, swaying slightly before the pressure and then stubbornly pushing back.
Power washed through me. Pure power. Power that could bring a forest erupting up through the streets of Chicago. Power that could level it flat. Power that could destroy those who made me afraid. Power that could warp and bend and break reality itself.
Hell’s bells.
In that moment, I knew what it was to be a little-G god.
With power like that, there was no place for fear. No place for anger. No place for passion. No place for outrage. No place for desire.
Only focus.
Only balance.
Only restraint.
Only thought.
Only pure will.
This wasn’t like when a Titan had tried to crush my mind. This power wasn’t being directed and focused upon me with intent. It was simply power, wild and rushing and as primordial as the first day of Creation.
I bent my will to it, not trying to move that power—God, the very thought was so obviously impossible that I’d have been incinerated if I’d tried. I just tried to redirect a tiny portion of it, to guide it around me.
I shaped the channels in my thoughts, years and years of experience in working with spells, with power formulae, with elemental forces, coming together in a whole.
I took that fraction of power, focusing upon it with the forces of Winter, and even with my eyes closed, I could suddenly see the burning white light of Soulfire pouring out of the runes of the staff I held in my left hand.
And then I raised my right hand and sent that energy hurtling into the skies above me, calling, “Ventas tempestas!” at the top of my lungs.
My voice rang out, far too loud, and I opened my eyes to see blinding energy of many colors come washing up through me from the rune circle beneath my feet and go lashing into the sky.
A crash of thunder loud and close enough to shake my chest smashed the air, and over the course of seconds, the water in the air, now being drawn from the icy depths of the lake, condensed into low, thick, angry storm clouds, lit by a continuous rumble of wildly colored lightning.
The storm boiled up out of absolutely nowhere, not a thousand feet above the street, clouds billowing down and closer, continuous thunder growling and echoing like some enormous and furious beast.
I kept my opened right hand over my head, fingers held in a rigid claw, keeping the energy going, containing the energy I’d unleashed through sheer, unbroken concentration.
“Bob!” I screamed over the fury. “Oz me!”
“On it!” Bob chirped through my staff, his voice in a near panic.