Death Masks df-5

by Jim Butcher

  "Handle yourself," Michael said. "Like you did tonight? Harry, if we hadn't been there-"

  "What?" I snapped. "I'd have been dead. It isn't like it isn't going to happen sooner or later. There are enough bad guys after me that one of them is eventually going to get lucky. So what else is new."

  "You don't understand," Michael said.

  "I understand all right," I said. "One more wacky B-horror-movie reject tried to kill me. It's happened before. It'll probably happen again."

  Shiro said, without looking up from his sword, "Ursiel did not come to kill you, Mister Dresden."

  I considered that in another pregnant silence. The lamps buzzed a little. Shiro's cleaning cloth whispered over the steel of his sword.

  I watched Michael's face and asked, "Why was he there then? I'd have put down money that it was a demon, but it was just a shapechange. There was a mortal inside it. Who was he?"

  Michael's gaze never wavered. "His name was Rasmussen. Ursiel took him in eighteen forty-nine, on his way to California."

  "I saw him, Michael. I looked in his eyes."

  Michael winced. "I didn't know that."

  "He was a prisoner in his own soul, Michael. Something was holding him. Something big. Ursiel, I guess. He's one of the Fallen, isn't he?"

  Michael nodded.

  "How the hell does that happen? I thought the Fallen aren't allowed to take away free will."

  "They aren't," Michael said. "But they are allowed to tempt. And the Denarians have more to offer than most."

  "Denarians?" I asked.

  "The Order of the Blackened Denarius," Michael said. "They see an opportunity in this matter. A chance to do great harm."

  "Silver coins." I took a deep breath. "Like the one you wrapped up in blessed cloth. Thirty pieces of silver, eh?"

  He nodded. "Whoever touches the coins is tainted by the Fallen within. Tempted. Given power. The Fallen leads the mortal deeper and deeper into its influence. Never forcing them. Just offering. Until eventually they have surrendered enough of themselves and-"

  "The thing gets control of them," I finished.

  Michael nodded. "Like Rasmussen. We try to help them. Sometimes the person realizes what is happening. Wants to escape their influence. When we face them, we try to wear the demon down. Give the person taken the chance to escape."

  "That's why you kept talking to it. Until its voice changed. But Rasmussen didn't want to be free, did he?"

  Michael shook his head.

  "Believe it or not, Michael, I've been tempted once or twice. I can handle it."

  "No," Michael said. "You can't. Against the Denarians, few mortals can. The Fallen know our weaknesses. Our flaws. How to undermine. Even warned and aware of them, they have destroyed men and women for thousands of years."

  "I said I'll be fine," I growled.

  Shiro grunted. "Pride before fall."

  I gave him a sour glance.

  Michael leaned forward and said, "Harry, please. I know that your life has not been an easy one. You're a good man. But you are as vulnerable as anyone. These enemies don't want you dead." He looked down at his hands. "They want you."

  Which scared me. Really scared me. Maybe because it seemed to disturb Michael so much, and very little disturbs him. Maybe because I had seen Rasmussen, and would always be able to see him there, trapped, wildly laughing.

  Or maybe it was because part of me wondered if it would be so impossible to find a way to use the power the coin obviously offered. If it had made some random schmuck on the way to pan for gold into a killing machine that it took all three Knights of the Cross to handle, what could someone like me do with it?

  Beat the living snot out of Duke Paolo Ortega. That's for sure.

  I blinked, refocusing my eyes. Michael watched me, his expression pained, and I knew that he'd guessed at my thoughts. I closed my eyes, shame making my stomach uneasy.

  "You're in danger, Harry," Michael said. "Leave the case alone."

  "If I was in so much danger," I responded, "why did Father Vincent come and hire me?"

  "Forthill asked him not to," Michael said. "Father Vincent - disagrees with Forthill on how supernatural matters are to be handled."

  I stood up and said, "Michael, I'm tired. I'm really damned tired."

  "Harry," Michael chided me.

  "Darned," I mumbled. "Darned tired. Darn me unto heck." I headed for the door and said, "I'm heading home to get some sleep. I'll think about it."

  Michael stood up, and Shiro with him, both of them facing me. "Harry," Michael said. "You are my friend. You've saved my life. I've named a child for you. But stay out of this business. For my sake, if not for your own."

  "And if I don't?" I asked.

  "Then I'll have protect you from yourself. In the name of God, Harry, please don't push this."

  I turned and left without saying good-bye.

  In this corner, one missing Shroud, one impossibly and thoroughly dead corpse, one dedicated and deadly vampire warlord, three holy knights, twenty-nine fallen angels, and a partridge in a pear tree.

  And in the opposite corner, one tired, bruised, underpaid professional wizard, threatened by his allies and about to get dumped by his would-be girlfriend for John Q. Humdrum.

  Oh, yeah.

  Definitely bedtime.

  Chapter Eight

  I fumed and brooded all the way back to my apartment, the Beetle's engine sputtering nervously the whole time. Mister was sitting at the top of the steps, and let out a plaintive meow as I shut and locked up my car. Though I kept my blasting rod and shield bracelet ready in case any vanilla goons were waiting around with more silenced guns, I was fairly confident no preternasties were hanging around in ambush. Mister tended to make lots of noise and then leave whenever supernatural danger was around.

  Which just goes to show that my cat has considerably more sense than me.

  Mister slammed his shoulder against my legs, and didn't quite manage to trip me into falling down the stairs. I didn't waste any time getting inside and locked up behind me.

  I lit a candle, got out some cat food and fresh water for Mister's bowls, and spent a couple minutes pacing back and forth. I glanced at my bed and wrote it off as a useless idea. I was too worked up to sleep, even tired as I was. I was already chin deep in alligators and sinking fast.

  "Right, then, Harry," I mumbled. "Might as well do some work."

  I grabbed a heavy, warm robe off its hook, shoved aside one of my rugs, and opened the trapdoor leading down to the subbasement. A folding ladder-staircase led down to the damp stone chamber beneath, where I kept my lab, and I padded down it, my robe's hem dragging against the wooden steps.

  I started lighting candles. My lab, barring a brief bout of insanity, generally reflects the state of my own mind-cluttered, messy, unorganized, but basically functional. The room isn't large. Three worktables line three of the walls in a U shape, and a fourth table runs down the center of the U, leaving a narrow walkway around it. Wire utility shelves line the walls above the tables. Piled on the shelves and tables are a vast array of magical ingredients, plus that sort of miscellaneous domestic clutter that in households of more substance always winds up in a big drawer in the kitchen. Books, notebooks, journals, and papers line the shelves, together with containers and boxes and pouches full of all sorts of herbs, roots, and magical ingredients, from a bottle of snake hisses to a vial of milk-thistle extract.

  At the far end of the room there was a patch of floor kept completely clear of all clutter. A copper ring set into the stone of the floor, my summoning circle, resided there. Experience had shown me that you never can tell when you might need a ritual circle to defend yourself from magical attack, or for its other most obvious use-keeping a denizen of the Nevernever a temporary prisoner.

  One of the shelves had less on it than the others. At either end rested a candleholder, long since overrun with many colors of melted wax until they were nothing but mounds, like a honeybee Vesuvius. Books, mostly pa
perback romances, and various small and feminine articles took up the rest of the shelf, but for where a bleached human skull sat in the middle. I picked up a pencil and rapped it against the shelf. "Bob. Bob, wake up. Work to be done."

  Twin points of orange and gold light kindled in the shadows of the skull's eye sockets, and grew brighter as I went about the room lighting half a dozen candles and a kerosene lamp. The skull rattled a little, and then said, "It's only a few hours from dawn, and you're just starting up? What gives?"

  I started getting out beakers and vials and a small alcohol burner. "More trouble," I said. "It's been one hell of a day." I told Bob the Skull about the television studio, the vampire's challenge, the hit man, the missing Shroud, and the plague-filled corpse.

  "Wow. You don't do things halfway, do you, Harry?"

  "Advise now; critique later. I'm going to look into things and whip up a potion or two, and you're going to help."

  "Right," Bob said. "Where do you want to start?"

  "With Ortega. Where is my copy of the Accords?"

  "Cardboard box." Bob said. "Third shelf, on the bottom row, behind the pickling jars."

  I found the box and pawed through it until I had found a vellum scroll tied shut with a white ribbon. I opened it and peered down at the handwritten calligraphy. It started off with the word Insomuch, and the syntax got more opaque from there.

  "I can't make heads or tails of this," I said. "Where's the section about duels?"

  "Fifth paragraph from the end. You want the Cliff's Notes version?"

  I rolled the scroll shut again. "Hit me."

  "It's based on Code Duello," Bob said. "Well, technically it's based on much older rules that eventually inspired the Code Duello, but that's just chickens and eggs. Ortega is the challenger, and you're the challenged."

  "I know that. I get to pick the weapons and the ground, right?"

  "Wrong," Bob said. "You pick the weapons, but he gets to choose the time and location."

  "Damn," I muttered. "I was going to take high noon out in a park somewhere. But I guess I can just say that we'll duel with magic."

  "If it's one of the available choices. It almost always is."

  "Who decides?"

  "The vampires and the Council will pick from a list of neutral emissaries. The emissary decides."

  I nodded. "So if I don't have it as an option I'm screwed, right? I mean, magic, wizard, kind of my bag."

  Bob said. "Yeah, but be careful. It's got to be a weapon that he can use. If you pick one he can't, he can refuse it, and force you to take your second choice."

  "Meaning what?"

  "Meaning that regardless of what happens, if he doesn't want to fight you in magic, he won't have to. Ortega didn't get to be a warlord without thinking things through, Harry. Odds are that he has a good idea what you can do and has planned accordingly. What do you know about him?"

  "Not much. Presumably he's tough."

  Bob's eyelights stared at me for a minute. "Well, Napoleon, I'm sure he'll never overcome that kind of tactical genius."

  I flicked my pencil at the skull in annoyance. It bounced off a nose hole. "Get to the point."

  "The point is that you'd be better off taking something you can predict."

  "I'm better off not fighting to begin with," I said. "Do I need to get a second?"

  "You both do," Bob said. "The seconds will work out the terms of the duel. His should be getting in touch with yours at some point."

  "Uh. I don't have one."

  Bob's skull turned a bit on its shelf and banged its forehead gently into the brick wall a few times. "Then get one, dolt. Obviously."

  I got another pencil and a pad of yellow lined paper and wrote To do across the top, and Ask Michael about duel underneath it. "Okay. And I want you to find out whatever you can about Ortega before dawn."

  "Check," Bob said. "I have your permission to come out?"

  "Not yet. There's more."

  Bob's eyelights rolled. "Of course there's more. My job sucks."

  I got out a jug of distilled water and a can of Coke. I opened the can, took a sip, and said, "That corpse Murphy showed me. Plague curse?"

  "Probably," Bob agreed. "But if it was really that many diseases, it was a big one."

  "How big?"

  "Bigger than that spell the Shadowman was using to tear hearts out a few years ago."

  I whistled. "And he was running it off of thunderstorms and ceremonial rites, too. What would it take to power a curse that strong?"

  "Curses aren't really my thing," Bob hedged. "But a lot. Like maybe tapping into a sorcerous ley line, or a human sacrifice."

  I sipped more Coke, and shook my head. "Someone is playing some serious hardball then."

  Bob mused, "Maybe the Wardens used it to get nasty on a Red Court agent."

  "They wouldn't," I said. "They wouldn't use magic like that. Even if technically it was the diseases that killed the guy, it's too damn close to breaking the First Law."

  "Who else would have that kind of power?" Bob asked me.

  I turned to a fresh page and sketched out a rough version of the tattoo on the corpse. I held it up to show it to Bob. "Someone who didn't like this, maybe."

  "Eye of Thoth," Bob supplied. "That the tattoo on the corpse?"

  "Yeah. Was this guy in someone's secret club?"

  "Maybe. The eye is a pretty popular occult symbol though, so you can't rule out the possibility that he was an independent."

  "Okay," I said. "So who uses it?"

  "Plenty of groups. Brotherhoods connected to the White Council, historic societies, a couple of fringe groups of occult scholars, personality cults, television psychics, comic book heroes-"

  "I get the point," I said. I turned to a fresh page and from razor-sharp memory sketched out the symbol I'd seen on the demon Ursiel's forehead. "Do you recognize this?"

  Bob's eyelights widened. "Are you insane? Harry, tear that paper up. Burn it."

  I frowned. "Bob, wait a minute-"

  "Do it now!"

  The skull's voice was frightened, and I get nervous when Bob gets frightened. Not much can scare Bob out of his usual wiseass-commentator state of mind. I tore up the paper. "I guess you recognize it."

  "Yeah. And I'm not having anything to do with that bunch."

  "I didn't hear that, Bob. I need information on them. They're in town, they've taken a shot at me, and I'm betting they're after the Shroud."

  "Let them have it," Bob said. "Seriously. You've got no idea the kind of power this group has."

  "Fallen, I know," I said. "Order of the Blackened Denarius. But they have to play by the rules, right?"

  "Harry, it isn't just the Fallen. The people they've taken are nearly as bad. They're assassins, poisoners, warriors, sorcerers-"

  "Sorcerers?"

  "The coins make them effectively immortal. Some of the Order have had a thousand years to practice, and maybe more. That much time, even modest talents can grow teeth. Never mind everything experience would have taught them, everything they could have found to make themselves stronger over the years. Even without infernal superpowers, they'd be badass."

  I frowned, and tore the bits of paper into smaller bits. "Badass enough to manage that curse?"

  "There's no question that they'd have the skill. Maybe enough that they wouldn't need as big a power source."

  "Great," I said, and rubbed at my eyes. "All right, then. Big-leaguers all around. I want you to track down the Shroud."

  "No can do," Bob said.

  "Give me a break. How many pieces of two-thousand-year-old linen are in town?"

  "That's not the point, Harry. The Shroud is -" Bob seemed to struggle to find words. "It doesn't exist on the same wavelength as me. It's out of my jurisdiction."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "I'm a spirit of intellect, Harry. Of reason, logic. The Shroud isn't about logic. It's an artifact of faith."

  "What?" I demanded. "That doesn't make any sense."
r />   "You don't know everything, Harry," Bob said. "You don't even know a lot. I can't touch this. I can't come anywhere near it. And if I even try, I'll be crossing boundaries I shouldn't. I'm not going up against angels, Dresden, Fallen, or otherwise."

  I sighed, and lifted my hands. "Fine, fine. Is there someone I can talk to?"

  Bob was quiet for a moment before he said, "Maybe. Ulsharavas."

  "Ulsha- who?"

  "Ulsharavas. She's an ally of the loa, an oracle spirit. There's details about halfway through your copy of Dumont's Guide to Divinationators."

  "How are her prices?"

  "Reasonable," Bob said. "You've got everything you need for the calling. She isn't usually malicious."

  "Isn't usually?"

  "The loa are basically good guys, but they all have their darker aspects, too. Ulsharavas is a pretty gentle guide, but she's been harsh before. Don't let your guard down."

  "I won't," I said, and frowned. "One more thing. Swing by Marcone's place and see if there's anything interesting there. You don't have to go all David Niven; just take a look around."

  "You think Marcone's involved in this one?"

  "His thugs already took a poke at me. I might as well find out whatever I can. I give you permission to leave in pursuit of that information, Bob. Get back before dawn. Oh, do we still have that recipe for the antivenom to vampire spit?"

  A cloud of orange lights flowed out of the skull, across the table, and then up the stairs. Bob's voice, oddly modulated, floated back to me. "Red notebook. Don't forget to light the wardflame while I'm gone."

  "Yeah, yeah," I muttered. I gave Bob a minute to clear my wards, then got down a three-candle holder with green, yellow, and red candles on it. I lit the green one and set the candleholder aside. I got out Dumont's Guide and read over the entry for Ulsharavas. It looked pretty simple, though you couldn't be too careful whenever you called something in from the Nevernever.

  I took a couple of minutes to gather what I'd need. The oracle spirit couldn't put together a body for herself, not even a nebulous cloud of light, like Bob could. She required a homunculus to manifest in the mortal world. Dumont recommended a newly dead corpse, but as the only one I was likely to find was my own, I needed a substitute. I found it in another box and plopped it down in the center of my summoning circle,