Dead Beat(59)

That made sense. My old mentor, Ebenezar McCoy, was a member of the Senior Council. He had a couple of longtime friends on the Council, but that didn't give him a majority vote. If he wanted to get anything done, he had to talk someone from the Merlin's bloc into casting their vote with him-either that, or convince the Gatekeeper, a wizard who habitually abstained from voting, to take a stand with him. If Ebenezar had convinced Ancient Mai and the Gatekeeper to vote with him in favor of action, the Merlin would have little choice but to move.
And just because the Merlin was a master of wards and defensive magic did not mean that he couldn't kick some ass if he needed to. You don't get to be the Merlin of the White Council by collecting bottle caps, and Arthur Langtry, the current Merlin, was generally considered to be the most powerful wizard on earth.
I had seen for myself what Ebenezar McCoy was capable of. A couple of years ago he had pulled an old Soviet satellite out of orbit and brought it down into the lap of Duke Ortega, the warlord of the Red Court. He'd killed a ton of vampires in doing it.
He'd also killed people. He'd taken the force of life and creation and used it to wipe out the lives of mortals-victims of the Red Court's power. And it wasn't the first time he'd done it. Ebenezar, I'd learned, held an office that did not officially exist-that of the White Council's assassin. Known as the Blackstaff, he had a license to kill, as well as to break the other Laws of Magic when he deemed it necessary. When I learned that he was violating and undermining the same laws he'd taught me to obey, to believe in, it had wounded me so deeply that in some ways I was still bleeding.
Ebenezar had betrayed what I believed in. But that didn't change the fact that the old man was the strongest wizard I'd ever seen in action. And he was the youngest and least powerful of the Senior Council.
"What happened?" I asked quietly.
"There was no evidence of the presence of the Red King or his entourage, but other than that the attack went as planned," Morgan said. "We assaulted the vampires' stronghold and took our people back with us."
Luccio's face twisted in sudden and bitter grief.
"It was a lure," I said quietly. "Wasn't it?"
"Yes," she said quietly. "We moved out and took our wounded to the hospice in Sicily."
"What happened?"
"We were betrayed," she said, and her words carried more sharp edges than a sack of broken glass. "Someone within our ranks must have reported our position to the Red Court. They attacked us that night."
"When was that?" I asked.
Luccio frowned, then glanced across the table at Ramirez.
"Three days ago, Zulu time," Ramirez provided quietly.
"I've not slept," Luccio said. "Between that and all the travel, I lose track." She took another drink of ale and said, "The attack was vicious.
They were coming for the Senior Council, and their sorcerers managed to cut us off from escaping into the Nevernever for nearly a day. We lost thirty-eight Wardens that day, in fighting all over Sicily."
I sat there for a moment, stunned. Thirty-eight. Stars and stones, there were only about two hundred Wardens on the Council. Not every wizard had the kind of talent that made them dangerous in a face-to-face confrontation. Most of those who did were Wardens. In a single day, the Red Court had killed nearly 20 percent of our fighting force.
"They paid for it," Morgan rumbled quietly. "But …  they seemed almost mad to die in order to kill us. Driven. I saw four different death curses unleashed that day. I saw vampires climb over mounds of their own dead without so much as slowing down. We must have taken twenty of their warriors for every loss of our own." He closed his eyes and his sour face was suddenly masked with very real and very human grief. "They kept coming."
"We had many wounded," Luccio said. "So many wounded. As soon as the Senior Council was able to open the ways into the Nevernever, we retreated to the paths through Faerie. And we were pursued."
I sat up straight. "What?"
Morgan nodded. "The Red Court followed us into the territory of the Sidhe," he said.
"They had to know," I said quietly. "They had to know that by pressing the attack in Faerie itself they would anger the Sidhe. They've just declared war on Summer and Winter alike."
"Yes," Morgan said in a flat voice. "But it didn't stop them. They attacked us as we retreated. And … " He glanced at Luccio as if in appeal.
She gave him a firm look and said to me, "They had called demons to assist them." She inhaled slowly. "Not simply beasts from the Nevernever. They had gone to the Netherworld. They had called Outsiders."
I took a longer drink of Mac's ale. Outsiders. Demons were bad enough, but they were at least something I was fairly familiar with. The reaches of the Nevernever, the world of spirit and magic that surrounds the mortal world, are filled with all kinds of beings. Most of them really don't give a damn about mortal affairs, and we are nothing but a remote and unimportant curiosity to them. When beings of the spirit world are interested in mortal business, it's for a good reason. The ones who like to eat us, hurt us, or generally terrify us are what wizards commonly refer to as demons, as a general term. They're bad enough.
Outsiders, though, were so rarely spoken of that they were all but a rumor. I wasn't really clear on all of the details, but the Outsiders had been the servants and foot soldiers of the Old Ones, an ancient race of demons or gods who had once ruled the mortal world, but who had apparently been cast out and locked away from our reality.
There was a specific Law of Magic against contacting them-Thou Shalt Not Open the Outer Gates. No one wanted to be the one suddenly suspected of opening ways for the Outsiders to enter the mortal world. The Wardens absolutely did not play around with violations of the Laws of Magic. Their entire purpose in life was to protect the Council-first from violators of the seven Laws, and then from everyone else.
I eyed the folded grey cloak on the table in front of me.
"I thought only mortal magic could call up Outsiders," I said quietly.
Luccio said quietly, "You are correct."
My stomach lurched a little. Someone had told the Red Court where to find the Council. Someone had blocked off their escape route to the Nevernever so strongly that the most powerful wizards on the planet had required a full day to open them again. And someone had begun calling up Outsiders in numbers, sending them to attack the White Council.
The Council is not what it was, Cowl had said. It has rotted from the inside. It will fall. Soon.
"The Wardens fell back to fight a holding action against the Red Court so that our wounded could escape to safety," Luccio reported, her crisp voice at odds with her weary eyes. "That was when they loosed the Outsiders upon us. We lost another twenty-three Wardens in the first moments of combat, and many more were wounded." There was silence while she took a long pull from her bottle, emptying it, then setting it down sharply on the table, anger flickering in her eyes. "If Senior Council members McCoy and Liberty had not come to our aid, we might have all died there. Even with them, we managed to hold them only long enough for the Gatekeeper and the Merlin to raise a ward behind us, to give us time to escape."
"A ward?" I blurted. "Are you telling me that they stonewalled an entire army of vampires and demons? With one ward?"
"You don't get to be Merlin of the White Council by collecting bottle caps," Ramirez said, his voice dry.
I glanced aside at Ramirez. He grinned at me and swigged beer.
"McCoy was injured," Luccio continued.
Ramirez snorted. "Who wasn't?"
Luccio snapped, "Carlos."
He lifted a hand in surrender and settled back onto his chair again, but his grin never faded.
"There were many injuries," Luccio continued. "But as the hospice in Sicily had been taken, we diverted the worst cases to a hospital we control in the Congo." She stared at her bottle for a moment. Her mouth opened, and then she closed it again. She closed her eyes.
Morgan frowned at her. Then he put a hand on Luccio's shoulder, looked at me, and said, "The vampires knew."
I got a sick, twisting feeling in my stomach. "Oh, God."
"It was daylight there," Morgan said. "And the place was a fortress of the Merlin's wards. There was no way for the vampires to breach it from the Nevernever, and nothing short of a demon lord could have broken through them." His mouth twisted, and his eyes glittered with rage and hate. "They sent mortals against us. Against men and women lying injured, unconscious, helpless in their beds." The anger in his voice seemed to strangle him for a moment.
"But … " I said. "Look, I know what it's like going up against mortals you don't want to kill. It's difficult, but they can be stopped. Fought. Bullets and explosives can be defended against."
"Which is why they used gas," Ramirez said quietly, stepping in where Morgan's and Luccio's voices had failed. His own tone was serious. His grin had vanished. "A nerve agent, probably sarin. They deployed it against the entire hospital, the people we had protecting it, and six square blocks of city around it." He put his own bottle down and said, "No one survived."
"My God … " I whispered.
There was dead silence.
"Ebenezar?" I asked in a whisper. "You said he was wounded. Was he … "