carvings were wards-seriously world-class heavyweight wards. I didn’t know what they did, but I could sense the deadly power behind them, and I tread carefully as I passed deeper into the complex.
The entry tunnel from the Nevernever was more than a quarter of a mile long, sloping gently downward the whole way. There were metal gates every couple of hundred yards, each of them manned by a Warden backed up by a pair of Ancient Mai’s temple-dog statues.
The things were three feet high at the shoulder, and looked like escapees from a Godzilla movie. Carved from stone, the blocky figures sat inert and immobile-but I knew that they could come to dangerous life at an instant’s notice. I tried to think about what it might be like to be facing a pair of aggressive temple-dog statues in the relatively narrow hallway. I decided that I’d rather wrestle an oncoming subway locomotive. At least then it would be over quickly.
I exchanged polite greetings with the Wardens on guard until I passed the last checkpoint and entered the headquarters proper. Then I took a folded map from my duster pocket, squinted at it, and got my bearings. The layout of the tunnels was complex, and it would be easy to get lost.
Where to begin?
If the Gatekeeper had been around, I would have sought him out first. Rashid had been my supporter and ally on more than one occasion, God knew why. I wasn’t on what anyone would call good terms with the Merlin. I barely knew Martha Liberty or Listens-to-Wind. I found Ancient Mai to be a very scary little person. That left Ebenezar.
I headed for the War Room.
It took me the better part of half an hour to get there. Like I said, the tunnel complex is enormous-and after the way the war had reduced the ranks of the Council, it seemed lonelier and emptier than ever. My footsteps echoed hollowly back from stone walls for minutes at a time, unaccompanied by any other sound.
I felt intensely uncomfortable as I paced the Hidden Halls. I think it was the smell that did it. When I’d been a young man, hauled before the Council to be tried as a violator of the First Law of Magic, they had brought me to Edinburgh. The musty, wet, mineral smell of the place had been almost all I knew while I had waited, hooded and bound, in a cell for a full day. I remember being horribly cold and tortured by the knots my muscles worked themselves into after so many hours tied hand and foot. I remember feeling more alone than ever in my life, while I awaited whatever was going to happen.
I had been scared. So scared. I was sixteen.
It was the same smell, and that scent had the power to animate the corpses of some of my darkest memories and bring them lurching back into the front of my thoughts. Psychological necromancy.
“Brains,” I moaned to myself, drawing the word out.
If you can’t stop the bad thoughts from coming to visit, at least you can make fun of them while they’re hanging around.
In a stroke of improbable logic, the War Room was located between the central chambers of the Senior Council and the barracks rooms of the Wardens, which included a small kitchen. The smell of baking bread cut through the musty dampness of the tunnel, and I felt my steps quickening.
I passed the barracks, which would doubtless be empty, for the most part. Most of the Wardens would be out hunting Morgan, as evidenced by the skeleton guard I’d seen at Chandler’s post. I took the next left, nodded to the very young Warden on guard, opened a door, and passed into the War Room of the White Council.
It was a spacious vault, about a hundred feet square, but the heavy arches and pillars that supported the ceiling took away a lot of that room. Illuminating crystals glowed more brightly here, to make reading easier. Bulletin boards on rolling frames took up spaces between pillars, and were covered by maps and pins and tiny notes. Most of them had one or more chalkboards next to them, which were covered in diagrams, cryptic, brief notation, and cruder maps. Completely ordinary office furniture occupied the back half of the vault, broken up into cubicles.
Typewriters clacked and dinged. Men and women of the administrative staff, wizards all, moved back and forth through the room, speaking quietly, writing, typing, and filing. A row of counters on the front wall of the room supported coffeepots warmed by propane flames, and several well-worn couches and chairs rested nearby.
Half a dozen veteran Wardens lay sprawled on couches napping, sat in chairs reading books, or played chess with an old set upon a coffee table. Their staves and cloaks were all at hand, ready to be taken up at an instant’s notice. They were dangerous, hard men and women, the Old Guard, survivors of the deadly days of the early Vampire War. I wouldn’t have wanted to cross any of them.
Sitting in a chair slightly apart from them, staring at the flames crackling in a rough stone fireplace, sat my old mentor, Ebenezar McCoy. He held a cup of coffee in his thick, work-scarred fingers. A lot of the more senior wizards in the Council had a sense of propriety they took way too seriously, always dressed to the nines, always immaculate and proper. Ebenezar wore an old pair of denim overalls with a flannel shirt and leather work boots that could have been thirty or forty years old. His silver hair, what he had left of it, was in disarray, as if he’d just woken from a restless sleep. He was aging, even by wizard standards, but his shoulders were still wide, and the muscles in his forearms were taut and visible beneath age-spotted skin. He stared at the fire through wire-rimmed spectacles, his dark eyes unfocused, one foot slowly tapping the floor.
I leaned my staff against a handy wall, got myself a cup of coffee, and settled down in the chair beside Ebenezar’s. I sipped coffee, let the warmth of the fire drive some of the wet chill out of my bones, and waited.
“They always have good coffee here,” Ebenezar said a few moments later.
“And they don’t call it funny names,” I said. “It’s just coffee. Not frappalattegrandechino.”
Ebenezar snorted and sipped from his cup. “Nice trip in?”
“Got tripped up by someone’s thugs on the Winter trail.”
He grimaced. “Aye. We’ve had our people harassed several times, the past few months. How are you, Hoss?”
“Uninformed, sir,” I said.
He eyed me obliquely. “Mmmm. I did as I thought best, boy. I won’t apologize for it.”
“Don’t expect you to,” I said.
He nodded. “What are you doing here?”
“What do you think?”
He shook his head. “I won’t take you on the strike team, Hoss.”
“You think I can’t pull my weight?”
He turned his eyes to me. “You have too much history with Morgan. This has got to be dispassionate, and you’re just about the least dispassionate person I know.”
I grunted. “You’re sure it was Morgan who did LaFortier?”
His eyes returned to the fire. “I would never have expected it. But too many things are in place.”
“No chance it’s a frame?”
Ebenezar blinked and shot me a look. “Why do you ask?”
“Because if the ass is finally getting his comeuppance, I want to make sure it’s on the level,” I said.
He nodded a couple of times. Then he said, “I don’t see how it could have been done. It looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, odds are it’s a damn duck. Occam’s razor, Hoss.”
“Someone could have gotten into his head,” I said.
“At his age?” Ebenezar asked. “Ain’t likely.”
I frowned. “What do you mean?”
“As a mind grows older, it gets established,” he said, “more set in its ways. Like a willow tree. Supple when it’s young, but gets more brittle as it ages. Once you’ve been around a century or so, it generally ain’t possible to bend a mind without breaking it.”
“Generally?”
“You can’t push it that far,” Ebenezar said. “Push a loyal man into betraying everything he believes in? You’d drive him insane before you forced him into that. Which means that Morgan made a choice.”
“If he did it.” I shook my head. “I just keep asking myself who profits most if we axe Morgan ourselves.”
Ebenezar grimaced. “It’s ugly all the way around,” he said, “but there it is. I reckon you ’gazed him, Hoss, but it ain’t a lie detector. You know that, too.”
I fell silent for a while and sipped coffee. Then I asked, “Just curious. Who holds the sword when you catch him? It’s usually Morgan who does the head chopping.”
