Proven Guilty (The Dresden Files 8)

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.