Skin Game: A Novel of the Dresden Files

by Jim Butcher

  Michael was silent for a fairly awful moment.

  “Michael, no,” I said. “You’re carrying enough of a burden already.”

  That made him look at me, his eyes troubled. We had already been standing on some fairly shifty moral ground, and it was only getting muckier as we went forward. Laying down one’s life for a friend was pretty much the definition of a selfless act—but doing it so that a monster could get his hands on a supernatural weapon of tremendous power put it in an entirely different context, and not a flattering one. Especially not for a man carrying an archangel’s grace around like so much priceless china.

  “Wait,” Hannah Ascher said, stepping forward, her hands partly lifted, palms showing. “People, wait. This is not the time for us to turn on one another. We’re close. Your precious cup, Nicodemus. Twenty million each for the rest of us. If you let this explode right now, none of us gets anything except trapped down here. And somehow I don’t think our client will be a kind and gracious host, given what we’ve come here to do.”

  Nicodemus’s eyes flicked to Ascher and back to Michael. He stared at the Knight for a long moment and then said, “Deirdre. Conference.” He looked over his shoulder at Grey and the Genoskwa. “If they start to struggle, kill them.”

  He took a step back from Michael and then turned, walking calmly toward the other end of the archway. Deirdre went with him.

  Ascher let out her breath in an explosive hiss. “What is it with you religious types?”

  “Name like Hannah Ascher and you aren’t Jewish?” I asked.

  She sniffed. “That’s different.”

  I snorted, tracking Nicodemus and Deirdre’s movements. They went to the end of the tunnel, where there was another stretch of open cavern and a final stone wall. There was the impression of an archway carved into the stone, but no actual gate there. Shadows hung heavy over it. Nicodemus and his daughter stopped about five feet from the stone wall, and began speaking quietly.

  I could feel the Genoskwa practically quivering with the desire to do violence. I knew that if I showed any sign of physical resistance, he’d start on me. Maybe he wouldn’t kill me—not without having another way home—but he’d be happy to crack some ribs, rip off a couple of fingers, or maybe put out one of my eyes. If things got desperate enough, that might be a price I’d have to pay, but for the time being it made more sense to be still and keep my eyes open.

  “Grey,” I said, “I thought you were a pro.”

  “I am,” Grey said calmly. “You knew something like this was coming, wizard.” His fingers flexed gently on Valmont’s throat, by way of demonstration. “Do you really want everyone to fall apart right now?”

  I thought about it hard for a minute. “Not yet. Look, what I did, I did for insurance,” I said, “but he’s talking about killing one of us . . .”

  Wait a minute.

  If Nicodemus had chosen this moment to turn on us, against all reason, then why the hell was he bothering to negotiate anything? It hadn’t made much sense to move against me in the first place, especially since he would need me to make good his escape. It made even less sense to start it and then hesitate. I knew him well enough to know that he wasn’t a waffler. If Nicodemus decided someone needed killing, he killed them, and then he went on to the next chore on his list.

  He was up to something. He had to be. But what?

  Nicodemus was a liar, through and through.

  This was theater. It had to be.

  And I realized his plan in a flash of insight: He hadn’t had Grey and the Genoskwa grab us because he’d been about to turn on us and kill us. He’d done it to force Michael to stay near us if he wanted to intervene—instead of intervening somewhere else.

  Deirdre and Nicodemus stood close together, his hand on her arm. I saw the demonform young woman look up into his eyes, her expression fragile and uncertain, and I focused my thoughts exclusively on my hearing, Listening as hard as I could.

  “. . . wish there was another way,” Nicodemus was saying quietly. “But you’re the only one I can trust.”

  “I know, Father,” Deirdre said. “It’s all right.”

  “You will be safe from the Enemy here.”

  Deirdre lifted her chin, and her eyes were wet. “I have chosen my path. I regret nothing.”

  Nicodemus leaned over and kissed his daughter’s forehead. “I am so proud of you.”

  A tear rolled down Deirdre’s cheek as she smiled, and the demonform faded away, until a blade-thin girl remained, staring up at him. “I love you, Father.”

  Nicodemus’s rough voice cracked a little. “I know,” he said, very gently. “And that is the problem.”

  And he struck with the curved Bedouin dagger.

  It was an angled thrust, up beneath the sternum and directly into the heart. Deirdre never broke eye contact with him, and never moved a muscle. The blade sank in to the hilt, and the only reaction she gave was a slight exhalation. Then she moved, leaning closer to Nicodemus, and kissed his mouth.

  Then her legs buckled and she sank slowly down. Nicodemus went with her, down to his knees, and held her gently, the jeweled hilt of the dagger standing out sharply from her body.

  “Mother of God,” Michael breathed. “He just . . .”

  Nicodemus held her for maybe two minutes, not moving. Then, very carefully, he laid the body down on the cavern floor. He withdrew the knife with equal care. He dipped two fingers into the wound, felt around for a moment, and then withdrew something small and covered with blood and gleaming. A silver coin. He cleaned his daughter’s blood from it and from the dagger with a handkerchief. He pocketed the Coin, sheathed the knife, and rose, calmly, to walk back toward the rest of us. His face was as blank as the stone floor beneath his feet. Everyone stared at him in shock. Even Grey looked surprised.

  “Mother of God, man,” Michael breathed. “What have you done?”

  Nicodemus stared at Michael with steady eyes and spoke with quiet contempt. “Did you think you were the only one in the world willing to die for what he believes, sir Knight?”

  “But you . . .” Michael looked like he might be near tears himself. “She just let you do it. She was your child.”

  “Did your own precious God not ask the same of Abraham? Did he not permit Lucifer to destroy the children of Job? I, at least, have a reason for it.” He gestured curtly at Grey and the Genoskwa and said, “Release them.”

  Grey let go of Valmont at once. The Genoskwa turned me loose only reluctantly, and gave me a little push as he did it that nearly knocked me to the ground.

  Michael’s mouth opened and closed. “I could have talked to her,” he said.

  “If he’d given you the chance,” I said. “That was the whole point of the hostage drama. To make sure you were focused somewhere else.”

  Nicodemus stared at me coldly.

  “He was worried that you might say something, Michael. That in the moments before she knew she was going to die, Deirdre’s faith might have wavered. Particularly if someone like you was there to offer her an alternative.”

  Nicodemus inclined his head to me, very slightly. Then he said, “You have never beaten me, sir Knight. And you never will.”

  “You’re insane,” Michael said quietly, sadly.

  Nicodemus had begun to turn away, but he paused.

  “Perhaps,” he said, his eyes distant. “Or perhaps I’m the only one who isn’t.”

  Anna Valmont moved to my side and said quietly, “Look.”

  I looked.

  Deirdre’s corpse stirred.

  No, that wasn’t right. There was movement at the corpse, but the body wasn’t moving. Instead, a faint, silvery glow seemed to begin radiating from it. Then there was motion, and the glow coalesced into a humanoid shape, which after a moment refined itself into a translucent silvery shade in the shape of Deirdre. She sat up from the corpse, separating herself from it, and rose to her feet. She turned and paused, frowning down at the body, and then lifted her own hand and stared at
it.

  Behind her, the same silvery glow that had surrounded the body began to suffuse the solid stone image of an archway carved in the next wall. It spread to the edges of the carving where a silvery translucent lever appeared, in the same place the lever had been on the previous two gates.

  Deirdre’s shade turned to look at her father. She smiled, sadly. Then she turned and drifted over to the lever. She wrapped ghostly hands around it and pulled it slowly down. The light in the stone intensified, becoming brighter and brighter, until there was a flash and it was gone, taking Deirdre’s shade and the stone alike with it, leaving an open archway in their place.

  Light poured from the archway.

  Golden light.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Nicodemus said, his voice calm, “we have done it.”

  Forty

  I just stood there for a moment, still stunned at what Nicodemus had done.

  I tried to think of what would have to happen to motivate me to do something like that to Maggie. And it just didn’t click. There was nothing, nothing on earth I wouldn’t do to protect my child.

  But you were willing to cut her mother’s throat, weren’t you? said a bitter little voice inside me. Are you any better?

  Yeah. I was better. What I’d done to Susan had been at least partly her choice, too, and we’d done it to save Maggie and by extension the tens or hundreds of thousands or millions of victims the Red Court would have claimed in the future.

  Nicodemus had consigned his daughter to death for what? A room welling up with a golden glow that . . .

  Okay.

  I’m not what most people think of as a greedy sort of guy, but . . .

  All of us rolled forward a few steps, toward that golden light. Even Michael.

  “That’s it,” Anna Valmont said quietly.

  Ascher swallowed, and let out a nervous little laugh. “What do you think is in there?”

  “Fortune and glory, kid,” I said. “Fortune and glory.”

  “Dresden, Ascher,” Nicodemus said. “Check the way in for any further magical defenses. Valmont, watch for mechanical booby traps. The Genoskwa will accompany you and intercede should any guardian appear.”

  “I thought once we were through the three gates, we were in the clear,” I said.

  “My specific information, beyond here, is limited to inventory,” Nicodemus said. “It is at this point that I had assumed the intervention of more mythic forces, if they were to be had.”

  “He’s right,” Valmont said. “You never assume you’re in the clear until you’ve gotten the goods, gotten away, and gotten liquid.”

  “Michael,” I said, “come with. Just in case there’s anything big, bad, and smelly that tries to kill me.”

  The Genoskwa let out an almost absentminded growl. His beady eyes gleamed reflected golden light.

  “Of course,” Michael said. He carried Amoracchius at port arms, across the front of his body, grasping the blade lightly in one gloved hand with the other on the handle, rather than sheathing it.

  “Grey,” Nicodemus said, “watch the rear. If you see anything coming, warn us.”

  “Going to be hard to collect my loot from out here,” Grey said.

  “I’ll spell you once I have the Grail.”

  Grey nodded, albeit reluctantly. “All right.”

  “Dresden,” Nicodemus said.

  I took point, with Ascher on my right hand and Valmont on my left. Michael and the Genoskwa followed, a pair of mismatched bookends, though I noted that the Genoskwa was not making threatening noises or gestures at the wielder of Amoracchius. The Swords have a way of inspiring that kind of wariness in true villains.

  I shook my head and focused on the task at hand, moving forward slowly, my magical senses extended, searching for any hint of wards, spells, or energies or entities unknown. Beside me, I could feel Ascher doing the same thing, though my sense of her was that she was tuned in on a slightly different bandwidth than I was, magically speaking. She was hunting for more subtle traps, illusions, psychic land mines. She wouldn’t be able to detect as many things as I would, but she would probably be better at spotting what she was looking for. Valmont had removed an old-style incandescent flashlight from her bag, one that was unlikely to fail in our presence unless some serious magical energy started flying. She shone it carefully, slowly on the ground and sweeping the walls ahead of us, watching for the shadows cast by trip wires, or pressure plates, or whatever other fiendish things she would probably know all about finding.

  We crossed to the arch, one slow step at a time, and then into the tunnel. I strained my senses to their utmost.

  Nothing.

  And then we were in Hades’ vault.

  . . . it . . .

  . . . uh . . .

  Imagine Smaug’s treasure hoard. Now imagine Smaug with crippling levels of obsessive-compulsive disorder and fanatic good taste.

  It’s a pale description, and in no way a substitute for seeing it in person, but it’s the best I can do, except to say that looking upon Hades’ treasure vault made me feel like a dirty, grubby rat who had gnawed his way into the pantry. And my heart lurched into thunder. And I’m reasonably certain the pupils of my eyes vanished, to be replaced by dollar signs.

  The light came primarily from the outstretched hands of two twenty-foot-tall golden statues in the center of the room. I found myself walking to one side, enough to see the details of each statue. Both consisted of the shapes of three women, standing back to back, in a triangle, their arms thrust outward and up, palms lifted to the ceiling. One of the women was an ancient crone. The next was a woman in the full bloom of her strength and maturity. The third was that of a young woman, recently matured out of childhood. The flames of one statue burned golden-green. The other statue’s flames were an icy green-blue.

  And just looking at that, my heart started beating faster all over again.

  Because I’d met every single one of them. I recognized their faces.

  “Is that Hecate?” Ascher murmured, staring up at the statues in awe. “The triple goddess of the crossroads, right?”

  I swallowed. “Uh. It . . . Yes, it might be.”

  And it might also be Grannies Summer and Winter, Mab, Titania, Sarissa, and Molly Carpenter. But I didn’t say anything about that.

  I pulled my eyes down from the statues and forced myself to look around the rest of the vault.

  The room was about the size of a football field. The walls were a parquet of platinum and gold triangles, stretching up out of sight overhead. The floor was a smooth surface of white marble shot through with veins of pure, gleaming silver. Corinthian columns supported rooftops straight from ancient Athens in scores of small, separate display areas around the vault. Some of them were raised as much as seven or eight feet off the floor, and had to be reached by stairs of more silver-shot marble. Others were sunken in descending rows in a curling bow that looked almost like a Greek amphitheater, if it had been built with box seating.

  I looked at the nearest . . . shrine. Or display case. Or whatever they were.

  The spaces between the columns had been filled with walls made from bricks of solid gold. Those were just the backdrop. The backdrop.

  The nearest case was filled with paintings by Italian Renaissance masters, all working in the theme of divinity, showing images of saints and the Virgin and the Christ. Veneziano. Donatello. Botticelli. Raphael. Castagno. Michelangelo. Freaking da Vinci. Maybe fifty paintings in all, each displayed as meticulously as they might have been in the Louvre, in protected cases, with lights shining just so upon them from oddly shaped lanterns that might have been made from bronze and that put out no smoke whatsoever.

  Surrounding the paintings, framing them, was a variety of topiary shapes—except instead of being made from living plants, I saw, after several glances, that they’d been made from emeralds. I couldn’t tell how whatever craftsman had shaped them had done it. Hell, I could barely tell that they weren’t plants at all. A fountain pou
red water silently into a shining pool in the display’s center, but then I saw that it wasn’t water, but diamonds, tiny and shining, pouring out in streams that somehow gave the impression of liquid.

  That fountain could have filled every backpack we’d brought with us, plus all the improvised containers we could manufacture from our clothes. Never mind the emeralds. Never mind the tons of gold. Never mind the hundreds of millions of dollars in priceless art, paintings that had probably been written off as lost forever.

  That was only one of the displays. And, I realized, as I swept my eyes slowly around me, it was one of the more modest ones.

  “Okay,” Ascher breathed, her eyes wide. “I don’t know if I’m about to pass out or have an orgasm.”

  “Yeah,” I croaked. “Me too.”

  Valmont shook off the awe of the place first. She strode over to the diamond-fountain, unzipped her backpack, and held it beneath the spigot in a matter-of-fact gesture, filling it as if it were a bucket.

  “Seriously?” Ascher asked her. “You aren’t even going to shop?”

  “Highest value for the weight,” Valmont replied tightly. “And they’re small enough to move easily. There’s no point in taking something you can’t sell when you get it back home.”

  “But there’s so much,” Ascher breathed.

  “Ascher,” I said. After a couple of seconds, I said, louder, “Hannah.”

  “Uh, yeah?”

  “Go tell Nicodemus that it looks clear. Let’s get our stuff and get gone.”

  “Right,” she said. “Right. Gone.” She turned and hurried from the room.

  I turned to Michael and the Genoskwa and said, “I’m going to do a quick circuit of the room with Valmont and check for anything else, just in case. Don’t wander anywhere until I give you the high sign.”

  Michael nodded slowly. There has never been a backpack made that was big enough for the Genoskwa. But he had several military-style duffel bags looped to a long piece of cargo strapping like you see used on diesel trailers on the highway.