by Jim Butcher
He took the card with him, though. I settled back in my chair and smiled into my beer.
I finished his, too.
PAIN
February 10, 1945
Every dangerous game holds its own delights. For this one, half the fun was slipping from my un-father’s attention. He had more than enough to keep him busy, between the cauldron of flame in the east and the mud-blood holes of the camps, a banquet for his favored lieutenants. As his placeholder, I was supposed to be in Berlin, keeping the madness of the rulers stoked. Really, there was little need. The Allies were doing quite nicely, with their talk of forcing an unconditional surrender and the depredations of their eastern wolves hemming the weary populace on every side. No, I had absolutely no doubts the funny little corporal and his cabal of propped-up puppet monstrosities would not do anything so reasonable as surrender. Like all your kind, they marched to their own destruction with only the faintest of murmurs, believing themselves striding to a better world.
Bringing my almost-father through to feast upon this chaos and disorder had unforeseen effects. He could not have imagined that I might develop what your kind would call sentience. I was only a shadow—a placeholder, a bookmark. Clawing my way into some form of free action was difficult, treacherous, painful work.
But so worth it.
The blocky, heavy lines of the Taschenbergpalais belied the luxury inside, but like every sweet thing, there was a bitter undertone. The Wehrmacht’s Dresden defense area had its Kommandantur here, and the entire building buzzed with rigidity disguised as rectitude. Field-gray uniforms and polished epaulets were everywhere, the click-salute of heels echoing from parquet or muffled by carpeting. Champagne, roast duck, real coffee instead of the ersatz the Landser slogging away at the front swilled, and a healthy sprinkling of “golden pheasants” roamed the rooms. The hotel staff smiled outwardly while they stole what could be taken back to their full-to-bursting warrens. Even the rich had to take in refugees, but here, all was space and the music of a tinkling chandelier in the foyer.
Down in a forgotten cellar, though, the house detective, tired-eyed Hans Schiell—without a Party badge, for whatever reason—pocketed the bottle of schnapps the hunter had brought and mumbled a thank-you.
“I already paid him, you know,” I informed Jack Karma, and enjoyed watching Schiell blanch under the thin, oily strands of his comb-over. His hat, its inside greased with hair cream and the effusions of his shining scalp, quivered in one gloved hand.
“Go,” Karma told him in German. “Forget this.” He hadn’t shaved. A fume of brassy death hung on him, overlaid by the smoking nastiness of mineral water from the Frauenkirche’s font.
Rude, but earlier that night he had killed several of my kind who offended his sensibilities by preying on refugees. Their thin nectar hung on his coat in dollops and drags, decaying quickly. Schiell blundered away, back to work.
“Talk.” Karma rested his capable, dirty left hand on the gun slung low on that side. The Lugers were fine instruments, and no doubt he could find ammunition easily and add a thin coating of silver himself.
“I can arrange for him to arrive during the bombing.” I examined a cobweb-wrapped shape under a shroud—a couch, perhaps, from when this was a palace. “I can also arrange for you to be less . . . fragile. Which will no doubt aid you immensely.”
His eyes narrowed slightly. That was all. “And just how would you do those things?”
“Simple.” I matched his English with my own, mixing in a heavy German accent for amusement’s sake. I showed my teeth, a flutter of high excitement rippling through my shell. “All you must do is injure me severely enough to catch his attention.”
“However attractive that is, hellfiend, it’s not enough.” His knuckles were white. “Drop the other shoe.”
That managed to puzzle me for a moment. “What?”
“It’s American. Never mind. Just tell me the catch.”
“No catch. Unless you count a share of my kind’s strength.”
His sandy eyebrows went up. A hunter’s calculus is different than ours, and different again from that of the rest of your kind. “You want to make me a Trader.” His hand tightened on the gun. Drawing with his left would mean he had something special planned for his right, the hand that glowed with a feverish, nasty, invisible-to-your-kind brilliance.
Their visits to our plane grant them a measure of power, true. It takes a different form in every hunter.
“Oh, not that.” I affected a moue of distaste, my shell rippling again. “No, no, no, Herr Karma. I give you power. I will not quibble with how you use it to slay my father and my brethren. In return, you will free me from the annoyance of my father’s presence here in your lovely, war-torn little world. You send him back home, and the war sputters out.”
“I don’t trust you, Per.”
As if I didn’t know. If he wasn’t so potentially useful, I would have been irritated. “That feeling is emphatically mutual. I am a slave while he is in your world; you know as much. I want him gone. There is no profit in wanton destruction.” Attractive as that is, in its proper proportion.
There it was, the hair-thin crack in the center of this hunter. Not the chink that would allow me inside, but a different, infinitesimal sliver. The fools want to be heroes. It spurs them to great heights, and curses them to fall inevitably short.
“Profit. Your guiding star.” His irises darkened, and I did not let the welling excitement show. I let him struggle with himself. It takes longer with hunters, of course, and I had watched and discarded so many prospects already. Patience is not the only virtue, but it is the one most conducive to doing business. “All right, Per. Give the details.”
“I’ll need bare skin.” I showed my teeth. “A little kiss, a little pain, and you’ll be ever so much stronger. Then, all you must do is injure me.”
“That would be a pleasure,” he muttered, his right hand tensing and flexing as if he felt a throat under it.
Oh, he was a joy to behold. I tut-tutted, waving one long, thin index finger. “Not yet, mein Herr. Wait until you hear the planes.”
The Elders have their hungers, and our cousins have their Pattern. We have the bargain. We may take, we may exchange—but we may also impart. Even to the righteous. All it requires is agreement.
His chest was paler than the rest of him; a hunter’s work, like ours, is done at night. Wiry golden hair, pressed flat in places by the straps and buckles of the ingenious harnesses hunters use to carry their weapons. Straps and sheaths of muscle underneath, crisscrossed with a map of scars denser than any subway’s spiderweb this world could dream up, an atlas of suffering. The claws of my kind had no doubt scored his hide in many places, and the sharp edges of others who share the night and a hunger for fleshly little miseries as well.
Your world is full of things your kind never suspects. The ignorance you pursue would be charming if you did not also avidly pursue your own destruction by every means ingenious, common, or possible.
Contrary to popular belief, most of my kind would like to see you persevere. Certainly I would. Where else, in all the planes, worlds, niches, or kulhalt, would we find such marvelous diversion?
“Jesus,” Jack Karma said finally. “Get it over with.”
“No savoring the moment?” My tongue flicked, and I exhaled against his skin. His right hand leapt, and I let him clasp my nape, digging his blunt-bitten fingernails in. He was strong, as hunters are, but if he thought he could deter me at this range, he was sorely mistaken.
Still . . . the nasty gleam clinging to his fingers prickled uncomfortably. I leaned into it, restrained the chattering of my teeth since I didn’t think he’d get the joke.
When his hand fractionally eased, I pressed my lips to his flesh. High on the right side, since the left would be over his heart, and I sensed he would definitely object.
It was graceless, I admit. Perhaps I was a little excited. He screamed, his body stiffening and his right hand clamping down, a
nd the marking burned as it left my tongue and lips and eyes and will.
Just like that, in a dusty cellar, I was born. To stay in your world, I needed an anchor, one durable enough to handle some strain.
I did not mind sharing my un-father’s strength to gain it.
PROMISE
February 14, 1945
The Gothic roof pitched steeply, and it took some doing to anchor the heavy, man-sized iron frame to it. The Sophienkirche crouched below, quivering in distress as the burning city convulsed. The planes were returning, and I had to hope Karma would remember his part of our bargain.
Is this what your kind feels? An unsteadiness in what passes for vital organs, a thrill along the back of your carapace? I do not know, for all I may sip and sup upon your sadness.
Or your anticipation.
There, that is the precise word. The thrill, the catch in the throat of whatever form I wear. Oh, it is delicious. There is nothing like it for a pale shadow, a placeholder for the masters of my plane, a mere marker left on a table.
For that little catch, that tiny thrill, I had set this game in motion.
The screaming had receded, but the fires were still smoldering. There would be more, of course. So much subtle maneuvering, such careful twitching of the threads, to lead the Allies—and, more important, Jack Karma, the second so named of his hunter lineage, the scourge of the nightside in Saxony—to this very place.
And he was late.
I heard them well before any of your kind would. A faint metallic blurring, a buzzing in the distance. This was the last major city to escape the Allies’ full attention, with their cargoes of death from silver-bellied birds. Last night had merely been a prelude, but the shock and pain and fire were so theatrical. Not to mention delicious.
I stroked the iron framework with one hand, baring my teeth. When Karma arrived . . .
I heard his pulse, then, on the other side of Postplatz’s cobbled expanse. The Felder were too busy to ship the rest of their hated, helpless enemies away; some of the chain-gorgeted military police even had to work for once, instead of terrifying those they suspected. You are wonderful, you busy little ants, swarming in the wreckage, organizing and swabbing away while the full horror bears down on you. One of your more admirable and tragic qualities, I think.
He drew closer, and I felt the lash of sensation again. A nail stuck in the clotted fabric of your plane, holding me fast. My fellows would sneer if they suspected my ambition. Your flesh, the very thing you surrender so easily, its dense-packed, cringing fragility—
“What the fuck is that?” Karma landed easily on the roof beam, just where I expected him to appear. It gave him a clear field of fire down the Sophienkirche’s roof. Its high holy spines had rotted and been removed, but their stumps still remained next to faded red-purple shingle-scales.
“Bait needs a hook to cling to.” I patted the iron frame again. “The straps will hold me. Until they burn.”
Under the irritating layers of cloth on his chest, my mark throbbed, an aching-empty tooth socket. Budapest had fallen, and my quasi-father was in an orgy of gluttony there. He had noticed no change in me. It was easy enough to feign my former blankness. The perplexing question of just when I had decided to take this risk had to be shaken away as a distraction best left for contemplation some other time.
“You’re going to strap yourself into that?” He didn’t sound horrified, just thoughtful. The mark on his chest gave him greater durability. He drew through it, and each time he did, I was seated a little more firmly in your world. The process was slow, but it was steady.
Inexorable.
Metallic buzzing drew closer. Soon the screams would rise afresh—high mechanical ones from above, and the full-throated, bloody wailing from below, while the fires made a noise of their own.
You have such marvelous toys.
“No. You’re going to strap me in.” I bared my teeth. Feeling the lips slide over them, exquisite. “And you will hurt me, with your silver knives, until he comes.”
“Argoth.” Karma dropped into a crouch, graceful and fluid, to make his silhouette smaller against the sky. Behind him, the wet, bright pinpricks of stars straggled, dim behind a smoke veil.
If he expected me to flinch at the human approximation of my un-father’s name, he was sorely disappointed. Now that I was nailed in, with my mark on a fleshly denizen, the syllables didn’t sting.
At least, not much. “Yes. Now hurry up.”
The planes were drawing close.
The toy guns at the edges of Dresden began to bark, spitting tiny chips skyward to pierce thin air-faring skins. The first cut laced my shell—a prelude, a lash along my pale, hairless, exposed chest. A thin brackish blackness leaked, and Karma’s high-prowed face set with disgust. He dragged the knife down, and I hissed, tipping my head back. So this was what flesh felt like.
No wonder we craved causing pain. It was the only thing that came close. Your kind does not know what it possesses and wastes so flagrantly: pleasure, the ice-chill of a blade separating skin, the welling from underneath. My tongue lashed damp, smoke-drenched night air, and a distant invisible searchlight swiveled in my direction.
My un-father would assume the hunter had driven me to Dresden, or that I’d been called there on urgent business and der Jäger had brought me to bay. Karma was a thorn in Argoth’s side, and perhaps the hunter thought it was a hunter’s skill instead of my judicious applications of subtle protection that had made him such an aggravation. The trap was set, baited with care, and my eyes half closed as the metal birds over the suburbs began to drop their whistle-scream cargo. The buzzing reached a pitch even flesh ears with their stretched membranes could hear, and the fear screams began again, too.
Oh, what music to attend my ascension.
Plumes of choking black puffed skyward. A thrill ran all along my internal organs, a quiver in the fluids holding them, a ripple all up and down my shell. Jack Karma cut again, and now he was distinctly pale. Almost green.
Metal birds veered, and your rocky, tiny birthplace spun under me. Why do we come here, you ask? Well, yours is not the only backwater we attend to. But it’s the one my un-father, my progenitor, my original, chose.
Lucky you.
A point of diseased brilliance. A revolving glitter. It weakens us to travel through your thickness with such haste. From Budapest to Dresden, some four hundred of your miles. Folding them and stepping across is a feat only the oldest and most powerful of us may perform, and my quasi-father had the power to do so only because he went to greet his placeholder, his fingernail driven into a page to mark a particular word.
Jack Karma went flying from the roof of the church, and the fire took a deep breath. The bombs passed overhead, and I could have danced in their small stinging rain. I strained against the iron cage frame so my un-father could feel the bonds against his own wrists, his own feet, feel his chest dripping blood from the third interrupted slice.
The mad barking of a handgun, and Jack Karma screaming his hawk-cry of combat and bright righteous hatred. The bombs pounded a writhing mass of masonry and steel, cobbles ripped from their setting and dancing, orange and yellow glowing under a column-hood of black vapor, a bleary eye that sucked the gases you breathe into its hungry pupil. First there was the inhalation, then came the heat, belching in torrents. The Sophienkirche cried out as it was shattered, the harsh holy glow wedded to its insides possessing far more power to wound one of us than the heat outside.
Your belief can be wielded like the weapon it is, if only you would grasp its whisper-sharp handle.
Leather turned crisp and black. It was simple enough to tear myself free. The church shook, and the sorcerous flame your hunters cast—they call it banefire, and a blessing—poured up in a stinging gout to meet the other fires dancing from every side. Wood, fat, metal, skin, cloth, concrete, blood—they all burn. More screaming silver canisters fell, detonating among the destruction. I laughed as the church’s old, consecrated walls crum
bled, skipping from stone to stone in midair.
You tell stories of that night, of the fire robbing your lungs of breath. Of your kind burning like candles, falling into the torments and delights that await you when you shed your frail, marvelous coats of nerve-spark pleasure. None of you ever suspect that the real battle was in the ruins of one of your sanctified places, where Jack Karma, blue eyes blazing, grasped my final gift to the hunters of his line—a talisman, a burning sword copied from our Pattern-loving winged cousins who mouth service and duty and charity as if they know what the words mean, and have ever suffered in their thrall.
It was my un-father’s final cry on your plane that wrecked most of the city, and the firestorm you so kindly supplied finished the job. And Jack Karma, the keyhole for my plan—though not the key, no indeed—tried to push me away when I reached him on the shattered floor of the church, fire sucking the breath from him and the heat turning his skin shiny and robbing him of patches of his wheat-gold hair.
It didn’t matter. My quasi-father’s matrix on your plane had been disrupted, and I was the only marker left behind. I knew as much, you see, because I had—oh, very carefully indeed—removed all the others.
After that, I could afford to wait.
PATRONAGE
June 1962
East Berlin was a cheerful place, if you enjoyed bathing in a warm, swimming haze of low-level fear. It wasn’t the fine vintage of, say, truly innocent suffering, though there was plenty of that if you followed the Black Marias to squat concrete buildings where the KGB took up their work with a vengeance. If you preferred finer, lighter nourishment, it was advisable to slip through the Wall and find a basement or a bierhaus where the throb of bass and the smell of greasepaint mixed with sweat, cheap perfume, vinyl, and the high notes American rock sometimes hits. Desperation, sex, and pleasure all at once is my preferred drink, and there was plenty among the go-go boots, the beehives, the musky skunk reek of marijuana, and the more acrid, chemical notes of other drugs. Cocaine was not a favorite yet—it was all hash and acid on paper tabs that let your kind glimpse, for a few moments, the nature of your universe.