Grave Peril by Jim Butcher

Author:Jim Butcher
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Published: 2010-01-29T04:47:04+00:00

Chapter Twenty-three

Back in my lab, it felt a little creepy to be working by candle-light. Intellectually, I knew that it was still full daylight outside, but last night had brought out the instinctive fear of the dark that is a part of being human. I had been wounded. Everything, every shadow, every small sound made me twitch and jerk and look aside.

“Steady, Harry,” I told myself. “You have time before sundown. Just relax and get it over with.”

Good advice. Michael and I had driven around most of the morning, collecting what I would need for the spell. I’d read through Kravos’s journal while Michael drove. Sick stuff. He’d been careful about listing out every step of his rituals, complete with notes on the physical ecstasy he’d experienced during the killings—nine in all. Most of them had been women or children he’d killed with a cruelly curved knife. He’d roped a bunch of young people into his fold with drugs and blackmail, and then thrown orgies where he’d either participate or else channel the energy raised by all that lust into his magic. That seemed to be standard operating procedure for guys like Kravos. Win-win situation.

A thorough man. Thorough in his efforts to kill and corrupt lives to acquire more power, thorough in the documentation of his sick pleasures—and thorough in the listing of his efforts to secure a familiar demon by the name of Azorthragal.

The name had been carefully written, each syllable marked for specific emphasis.

Magic is a lot like language: it’s all about stringing things together, linking one thing with another, one idea with another. After you establish links, then you pour power into them and make something happen. That’s what we call thaumaturgy in the business—creating links between small things and big things. Then, you make something happen on the small scale and it happens on the large scale, too. Voodoo dolls are the typical example for that one.

But simulacra, like a voodoo doll, aren’t the only way to create links. A wizard can use fingernail clippings, or hair, or blood, if it’s fresh enough, or just about any other body part to create a link back to the original being.

Or you can use its name. Or maybe I should say, its Name.

Names have power. Everyone’s Name says something about them, whether they’re aware of it or not. A wizard can use that Name to forge a link to someone. It’s difficult with people. People’s self-concepts are always changing, evolving, so even if you get someone to tell you their full name, if you try to establish the link when they’re in a radically different mood, or after some life-changing event that alters the way they see themselves, it might not work. A wizard can get a person’s name only from their own lips, but if he doesn’t use it fairly quickly, it’s likely to get stale.

Demons, however, are a different matter. Demons aren’t people. They don’t have the problem of having a soul, and they don’t worry about silly things like good and evil, or right and wrong.

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