Proven Guilty

Chapter Thirty-six

Every time I opened a way to the Nevernever, it always looked pretty much the same-an uneven vertical rip in the air that let in the sights and sounds and scents of the world on the other side. The longer I wanted the rift to stay open, the bigger I’d rip the hole. More experienced wizards had made a comment or two over the years to suggest that I still had a lot to learn on the subject.

When Lily opened the way to Arctis Tor, I understood why. Light and color shifted over the screen, their flow quickening, deepening. At first nothing else happened. The movie screen was simply a surface. Then the hairs on the back of my neck rose, and a cold wind wafted into my face, bringing with it the dry, sterile scent of winter in high, barren mountains and the high, lonely cry of some kind of wild beast like nothing in the real world.

Deep blue came to dominate the colors on the screen, and a moment later resolved itself into the shapes of mountains towering beneath the light of an impossibly enormous silver moon. They were bleak and hateful stone peaks, wreathed in mist and wrapped in ice and snow. The wind moaned and blew frozen crystals into our faces, then sank into a temporary lull.

The blowing snow cleared just enough to get me my first look at Arctis Tor.

Mab’s stronghold was a fortress of black ice, an enormous, shadowy cube sitting high up the slope of the highest mountain in sight. A single, elegant spire rose above the rest of the structure. Flickers of green and amethyst energy played within the ice of the walls. I couldn’t make a good guess at how big the thing was. The walls and battlements were lined with inverted icicles.

They made me think of the fanged jaws of a hungry predator. A single gate, small in comparison to the rest of the fortress, stood open.

Hell’s bells. How the hell was I supposed to get in there? It was almost a relief when the wind rose again, and blowing snow once more obscured the fortress from view.

It was only then that I realized that the way was open. Lily had brought it forth so smoothly that I hadn’t been able to tell when image gave way to reality. By comparison, my own ability to open a way to the Nevernever was about as advanced as the paintings of a particularly gifted gorilla.

I glanced back at Lily. She gave me a small smile and then gestured with one hand. One of the fiery butterflies fluttering around her altered course and soared over to me. “This much I can do for you all,” she murmured. “It will lead you through the storm, and ward away the cold until you can return here. Do not tarry, wizard. I do not know how long I will be able to hold the way open for your return.”

I nodded. “Thank you, Lily.”

This time her smile was warmer, more like that of the girl she had been before becoming the Summer Lady. “Good luck, Harry.”

Fix took a deep breath and then hopped up onto the stage floor at the base of the movie screen. He turned to offer me a hand up. I took it, stared at the frozen wasteland for a second, and then stepped directly forward, into what had been the screen.

I found myself standing in knee-deep snow, and the howling winds forced my eyes almost shut. I should have been freezing, but whatever enchantment Lily’s blazing butterfly used seemed effective. The air felt almost as warm as that of a ski slope seeing its last day of the season. Thomas, Murphy, and Charity stepped out of a shimmer in the air, and Fix followed them a second later.

“Hey, Fix,” I said. I had to raise my voice to be heard over the wind. “I thought you weren’t coming.”

The Summer Knight shook his head. “I’m not. But it will be easier to stop anything going through from this side,” he said. He regarded us and asked lightly, “You bring enough iron, you think?”

“We’re about to find out.”

“Christ. You’re going to piss off Mab something fierce, bringing iron here.”

“I was doing that anyway,” I assured him.

He nodded, then glanced back at the rift and frowned. “Harry,” he said. “There’s something you should know before you go in.”

I arched an eyebrow and listened.

“We just got word from our observers that there’s a battle underway. The Reds found one of the major headquarters of the Venatori Umbrorum.”

“Who?” Charity asked.

“Secret organization,” I told her. “Like the Masons, but with machine guns.”

“The Venatori sent out a call for help,” Fix continued. “The Council answered it.”

I chewed my lower lip. “Do you know where?”

“Oregon, couple hours from Seattle,” he said.

“How bad is it?”

“So far it’s too close to call. But it’s not good. The Reds had their sorcerous types mucking around with a lot of the Council’s pathways through the Nevernever. A lot of the Wardens got sidetracked from the battle completely.”

“Dammit,” I muttered. “Isn’t there anything Summer can do to help?”

Fix grimaced and shook his head. “Not with the way Mab’s forces are disposed. If we pull enough of our forces from Summer to help the Council, it will weaken us. Winter will attack.” He stared at the looming fortress, glimpsed in half instants through the gusting snow, and shook his head. “The Council’s mind-set is too defensive, Harry. If they keep sitting tight and reacting to the enemy, instead of making the Reds react to them, they’ll lose this war.”

I grunted. “Clausewiz would agree. But I don’t think the Merlin knows from Clausewitz. And this is a long way from over. Don’t count us out yet.”

“Maybe,” he said, but his voice wasn’t confident. “I wish I could do more, but you’d better get going. I’ll hold the door for you.”

I offered him my hand and he shook it. “Be careful,” I said.

“Good hunting,” he replied.

I glanced at my three companions and called, “Ready?”

They were. We followed the burning butterfly through the snow. Without its protection from the elements, I doubt we would have made it, and I made it a point to remember to wear sufficient cold-weather gear in the event that I somehow survived this ongoing idiocy and was crazy enough to come back a second time. Even with the Summer magic to protect us, it was a pretty good hike over unfriendly terrain. I’d done worse in the past, with both Justin DuMorne and Ebenezar, and there are times when having long legs can be a real advantage on rough terrain. Charity seemed all right, too, but Thomas had never been much of an outdoors-man, and Murphy’s height put her at a disadvantage that the unaccustomed weight of her armor and cutlery exacerbated.

I traded a glance with Charity. I started giving Thomas a hand on rough portions of our climb. Charity helped Murphy. At first I thought Murphy might take her arm off out of wounded pride, but she grimaced and visibly forced herself to accept the help.

The last two hundred yards or so were completely open, with no trees or undulation of terrain to shield our approach from the walls of the fortress. I lifted a hand to call a halt at the edge of the last hummock of stone that would shelter us from view. Lily’s butterfly drifted in erratic circles around my head, snowflakes hissing to steam where they touched it.

I peered over the edge of a frozen boulder at Arctis Tor for a long time, then settled back down again.

“I don’t see anyone,” I said, trying to keep my voice down.

“Doesn’t make any sense,” Thomas said. He was panting and shivering a little, despite Lily’s warding magic. “I thought this was supposed to be Mab’s headquarters. This place looks deserted.”

“It makes perfect sense,” I said. “Winter’s forces are all poised to hit Summer. You don’t do that from the heart of your own territory. You gather at strong points near the enemy’s border. If we’re lucky, maybe there’s just a skeleton garrison here.”

Murphy peered around the edge of the stones and said, “The gate’s open. I don’t see any guards.” She frowned. “There are… there’s something on the open ground between here and there. See?”

I leaned next to her and peered. Vague, shadowy shapes stirred in the wind between us and the fortress, insubstantial as any shadow. “Oh,” I said. “It’s a glamour. Illusion, laid out around the place. Probably a hedge maze of some kind.”

“And it fools people?” she asked uncertainly.

“It fools people who don’t have groovy wizard ointment for their eyes,” I said. Then I frowned and said, “Wait a minute. The gate isn’t open. It’s gone.”

“What?” Charity asked. She leaned out and stared. “There is a broken lattice of ice on the ground around the gate. A portcullis?”

“Could be,” I agreed. “And inside.” I squinted. “I think I can see some heavier pieces. Like maybe someone ripped apart the portcullis and blew the gate in.” I took a deep breath, feeling a hysterical little giggle lurking in my throat. “Something huffed and puffed and blew the house in. Mab’s house.”

The wind howled over the frozen mountains.

“Well,” Thomas said. “That can’t be good.”

Charity bit her lip. “Molly.”

“I thought you said this Mab was all mighty and stuff, Harry,” Murphy said.

“She is,” I said, frowning.

“Then who plays big bad wolf to her little pig?”

“I…” I shook my head and rubbed at my mouth. “I’m starting to think that maybe I’m getting a little bit out of my depth, here.”

Thomas broke out into a rippling chuckle, a faint note of hysteria to it. He turned his back to the fortress and sat down, chortling.

I glowered at him and said, “It’s not funny.”

“It is from here,” Thomas said. “I mean, God, you are dense sometimes. Are you just now noticing this, Harry?”

I glowered at him some more. “To answer your question, Murph, I don’t know who did this, but the list of the people who could is fairly short. Maybe the Senior Council could if they had the Wardens along, but they’re busy, and they’d have had to fight a campaign to get this far. Maybe the vampires could have done it, working together, but that doesn’t track. I don’t know. Maybe Mab pissed off a god or something.”

“There is only one God,” Charity said.

I waved a hand and said, “No capital ‘G,’ Charity, in deference to your beliefs. But there are beings who aren’t the Almighty who have power way beyond anything running around the planet.”

“Like who?” Murphy asked.

“Old Greek and Roman and Norse deities. Lots and lots of Amerind divinity, and African tribal beings. A few Australian aboriginal gods; others in Polynesia, southeast Asia. About a zillion Hindu gods. But they’ve all been dormant for centuries.” I frowned at Arctis Tor. “And I can’t think what Mab might have done to earn their enmity. She’s avoided doing that for thousands of years.”

Unless, of course, I thought to myself, Maeve and Lily are right, and she really has gone bonkers.

“Dresden,” Charity said. “This is academic. We either go in or we leave. Now.”

I chewed my lip and nodded. Then I dug in my pockets for the tiny vial of blood Charity had provided, and hunted through the rocks until I found a spot clear enough to chalk out a circle. I empowered it and wrought one of my usual tracking spells, keying it to a sensation of warmth against my senses. Cold as it was, I would hardly mind anything that might make me feel a little less freeze-dried.

I broke the circle and released the spell, and immediately felt a tingling warmth on my left cheekbone. I turned to face it, and found myself staring directly at Arctis Tor. I paced fifty or sixty yards to the side, and faced the warmth again, working out a rough triangulation.

“She’s alive,” I told Charity, “or the spell wouldn’t have worked. She’s in there. Let’s go.”

“Wait,” Charity said. She gave me a look filled with discomfort and then said, “May I say a brief prayer for us first?”

“Can’t hurt,” I said. “I’ll take all the help I can get.”

She bowed her head and said, “Lord of hosts, please stand with us against this darkness.” The quiet, bedrock-deep energy of true faith brushed against me. Charity crossed herself. “Amen.”

Murphy echoed the gesture and the amen. Thomas and I tried to look theologically invisible. Then, without further speech, I swung out around the frozen stone cairn and broke into a quick, steady jog. The others followed along.

I passed the first bones fifty yards from the walls. They lay in a crushed, twisted jumble in the snow, frozen into something that looked like a macabre Escher print. The bones were vaguely human, but I couldn’t be sure because they had been pulverized to dust in some places, warped like melted wax in others. It was the first grisly memorial of many. As I kept going forward, brittle, frozen bones crunched under my boots, lying closer and thicker, and twisted more horribly, as we drew closer to Arctis Tor. By the time we got to the gate, I was shin-deep in icy bones. They spread out on either side in an enormous wheel of horrible remains centered on the gate. Whoever they had been, thousands of their kind had perished here.

Charity’s guess about the portcullis had been bang on. Pieces of it lay scattered about, mixed among the bones. Where the gate arched beneath the fortress walls, there were still more bones, waist-deep on me, and slabs of planed dark ice, the remains of the fortress gate, stuck out at odd angles. The walls of Arctis Tor had been pitted with what I could only assume had been an acid of some kind. There were larger gouges blown out of the walls here and there, but against their monolithic volume, they were little more than pockmarks.

I pushed ahead to the gate, plowing my way through bones. Once there, I caught a faint whiff of something familiar. I leaned closer to one of the craters blown out of the wall and sniffed.

“What is it?” Thomas asked me.

“Sulfur,” I said quietly. “Brimstone.”

“What does that mean?” he asked.

“No way to tell,” I half lied. But my intuition was absolutely certain of what had happened here. Someone had thrown Hellfire against the walls of Arctis Tor. Which meant that the forces of the literal Hell, or their agents, were also playing a part in the ongoing events.

Way, way, way out of my depth.

I told myself that it didn’t matter. There was a young woman inside that frozen boneyard who would die if I did not burgle her out of this nightmare. If I did not control my fear, there was an excellent chance that it would warn her captors of my approach. So I fought the fear that threatened to make me start throwing up, or something equally humiliating and potentially fatal.

I readied my shield, gripped my staff, ground my teeth together, and then continued pushing my way forward, through the bones and into the eerie dimness of the most ridiculously dangerous place I had ever been.