by Jim Butcher
I held up a hand and said quietly, “Easy there, Wild Bill. I’ll talk with him. Then we’ll have our sit-down. All nice and civilized.”
Kincaid glanced at me and arched a shaggy, dark-gold eyebrow. “You sure?”
I shrugged a shoulder.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll be back in five minutes.” He paused, then added, “If either of you initiates violence outside of the strictures of a formal duel, you’ll be in violation of the Accords. In addition, you will have offered an insult to the reputation and integrity of the Archive—which I will take personal action to amend.”
The wintry chill in his blue eyes was mostly for Nicodemus, but I got some of it too. Kincaid meant it, and I’d seen him in action before. He was one of the scarier people I knew; the more so because he went about matters with ruthless practicality, unhindered by personal ego or the pride one often encountered in the supernatural set. Kincaid wouldn’t care if he looked into my eyes as he killed me, if that was what he set out to do. He’d be just as happy to put a bullet through my head from a thousand meters away, or wire a bomb to my car and read about my death on the Internet the next morning. Whatever got the job done.
That kind of attitude doesn’t help you when it comes to finding flashy or dramatic ways to do away with your enemies, but what it lacks in aesthetics it makes up in economy. Marcone, whom this whole mess was about, worked the same way, and it had taken him far. You crossed such men at extreme peril.
Nicodemus let out another quiet, charming laugh. He didn’t look impressed by Kincaid. Maybe that was a good thing. Too much pride can kill a man.
On the other hand, from what I’d seen of him, maybe Nicodemus really was that tough.
“Run along, Hellhound,” Nicodemus said. “Your mistress’s honor is quite safe.” He drew an X on his chest. “Cross my heart.”
Maybe it was an inside reference. Kincaid’s eyes flashed with something hot and furious before they went glacial again. He nodded to me, then precisely the same way to Nicodemus, and left.
I’m pretty sure the room didn’t actually become darker and scarier and more threatening when I was left alone with the most dangerous man I’d ever crossed.
But it sure felt that way.
Nicodemus turned that toothy predator’s smile to me as his shadow began to glide around the walls of the entry hall. Circling me. Like a shark.
“So, Harry,” he said, walking closer, “what shall we talk about?”
Chapter
Twenty-nine
“You’re the one who wanted a conversation,” I said. “And don’t call me Harry. My friends call me Harry.”
He turned one hand palm up. “And who is to say I cannot be your friend?”
“That would be me, Nick. I say. Here, I’ll show you.” I enunciated: “You can’t be my friend.”
“If I am to call you Dresden, it is only fair that you should call me Archleone.”
“Archleone?” I asked. “As in ‘seeking whom he may devour’? Kinda pretentious, isn’t it?”
For half of a second, the smile turned into something almost genuine. “For a godless heathen, you are entirely too familiar with scripture. You know that I can kill you, do you not?”
“We’d make a mess,” I said. “And who knows? I might get lucky.”
Really, really, really lucky.
Nicodemus moved a hand in acknowledgment. “But barring luck.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“And you offer such insouciance regardless?”
“Habit,” I said. “It doesn’t make you special or anything, believe me.”
“Oh, I picked the right coin for you.” He started to walk in a slow circle around me, the way you might a car at the dealership. “There are rumors that a certain Warden has been flinging Hellfire at his foes. How do you like it?”
“I’d like it better if it came in Pine Fresh and New Car instead of only Rotting Egg,” I said.
Nicodemus completed his circuit of me and arched an eyebrow. “You haven’t taken up the coin.”
“I would, but it’s in my piggybank,” I said, “and I can’t break the piggy, obviously. He’s too cute.”
“Lasciel’s shadow must be slipping,” Nicodemus said, shaking his head. “It has had years to reason with you, and still you refuse our gifts.”
“What with the curly little tail and the big, sad brown eyes,” I said, as if he hadn’t said anything.
One of his heels hit the ground with unnecessary force, and he stopped walking. He inhaled through his nose and out again. “Definitely the proper coin for you.” He folded his hands carefully behind his back. “Dresden, you have a skewed image of us. We were operating at cross-purposes the first time we met, and you probably learned everything you know about us from Carpenter and his cohorts. The Church has always had excellent propaganda.”
“Actually, the murder, torture, and destruction you and your people perpetrated spoke pretty loudly all by themselves.”
Nicodemus rolled his eyes. “Dresden, please. You have done all of those things at one time or another. Poor Cassius told me all about what you did to him in the hotel room.”
“Gosh,” I said, grinning. “If someone had walked in on us in the middle of that sentence, would my face be red or what?”
He stared at me for a second, and the emotion and expression drained out of his features like dewdrops vanishing under a desert sunrise. What was left behind was little more than desolation. “Harry Dresden,” he said, so softly that I could barely make it out. “I admire your defiance of greater powers than your own. I always have. But tempus fugit. For all of us.”
I blinked.
For all of us? What the hell did he mean by that?
“Have you not seen the signs around you?” Nicodemus asked. “Beings acting against their natures? Creatures behaving in ways that they should not? The old conventions and customs being cast aside?”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “You’re talking about the Black Council.”
He tilted his head slightly to one side. Then his mouth twitched at a corner and he nodded his head very slightly. “They move in shadows, manipulate puppets. Some of them may be on your Council, yes. As good a name as any.”
“Stop playing innocent,” I spat at him. “I saw the leftovers of the Black Council attack on Arctis Tor. I know what Hellfire smells like. One of yours was in on it.”
Nicodemus.
Blinked.
Then he surged forward—fast. So fast that by the time I’d registered that he was moving, my back had already hit the wall that had been twenty feet behind me. He hadn’t been trying to hurt me. If he had, the back of my head would have splattered open. He just pinned me there against the wall with one hand on my throat, tighter and harder than a steel vise.
“What?” he demanded, his voice still a whisper. His eyes, though, were very wide. Both sets of them. A second set, these glowing faintly green, had opened just above his eyebrows—Anduriel’s, I presumed.
“Ack,” I said. “Glarghk.”
His arm quivered for a second, and then he lowered his eyelids until they were almost closed. A moment later he very, very slowly relaxed his arm, allowing me to breathe again. My throat burned, but air came in, and I wheezed for a second or two while he stepped back from me.
I glared up at him and debated slamming him through one of those Corinthian columns by way of objecting to being manhandled. But I decided that I didn’t want to piss him off.
Nicodemus’s lips moved, but an entirely different voice issued from them—something musical, lyrical, and androgynous. “At least it has some survival instinct.”
Nicodemus shook his head as if buzzed by a mosquito and said, “Dresden, speak.”
“I’m not your friend,” I said, my voice rough. “I’m not your damned dog, either. Conversation over.” I took a few steps to one side so that I could move around him without taking my eyes off him, and started to leave.
“Dresden,” Nicodemus said.
“Stop.”
I kept walking.
I was almost out of the room before he spoke again, resignation in his tone. “Please.”
I paused, without turning around.
“I…reacted inappropriately. Especially for this venue. I apologize.”
“Huh,” I said, and looked over my shoulder. “Now I wish I had brought Michael. He’d have fainted.”
“Your friend and his brethren are tools of an organization with its own agenda, and they always have been,” Nicodemus said. “But that’s not the issue here.”
“No,” I said. “The issue is Marcone.”
Nicodemus waved a hand. “Marcone is an immediate matter. There are long-term issues in play.”
I turned to face him and sighed. “I think you’re probably full of crap. But okay, I’ll bite. What long-term issues?”
“Those surrounding the activities of your Black Council,” Nicodemus said. “Are you certain you saw evidence of Hellfire in use at the site of the attack on Arctis Tor?”
“Yes.” I didn’t add the word dummy. Who says I ain’t diplomatic?
Nicodemus’s fingers flexed into the shape of claws and then relaxed again. He pursed his lips. “Interesting. Then the only question is if the contamination is among standing members of our Order or…” He let the thought trail off and glanced at me, lifting an eyebrow.
I followed the logic to the only other people in possession of any of the coins. “Someone in the Church,” I whispered, with a sick feeling in my stomach.
“Historically speaking, we get about half of the coins back that way,” Nicodemus noted. “What would you say if I told you that you and I might have a great many common interests in the future?”
“I wouldn’t say much of anything,” I said. “I’d be too busy laughing in your face.”
Nicodemus shook his head. “Shortsighted. You can’t afford that. Come with me for a week and see if you feel the same way when we’re done.”
“Even assuming I was stupid enough to go anywhere with you for an hour, much less a week, I saw how you treated Cassius. I’m not real eager to slide my nameplate onto his office door.”
“He didn’t adjust to the times,” Nicodemus replied with a shrug. “I wouldn’t have been doing him any favors by coddling him. We live in a dangerous world, Dresden. One adapts and thrives or one dies. Living on the largesse of others is nothing but parasitism. I respected Cassius too much to let him devolve to that.”
“Gosh, you’re chatty,” I said. “You were right. This is so much fun. It’s almost like…”
A horrible thought hit me.
Nicodemus was many things, but he wasn’t a fool. He knew I wasn’t going to sign on for his team. Not after the way he treated me the last time we’d met. He knew that nothing he said was going to sway me. I might have surprised him with that little nugget of information about Arctis Tor, but that could have been an act, too. All in all, odds were high that this conversation was accomplishing absolutely nothing, and Nicodemus had to know that.
So why was he having it? I asked myself.
Because the goal of the conversation doesn’t have anything to do with the subject or the context of the conversation, I answered.
He wasn’t here to talk to me about anything or convince me of anything.
He wanted to talk to me and keep me here.
Which meant that something else was about to happen somewhere else.
Wheels within wheels.
My God, it was a metaphor.
This conversation was a metaphor for the parley as a whole. Nicodemus hadn’t come to talk to us about violations of the Accords. He’d engineered the parley, and his motivation had nothing to do with subverting Marcone’s talents to the service of a Fallen angel.
He was after bigger game.
I whipped my staff toward Nicodemus, slamming my will through it in a surge of panicked realization, screaming “Forzare!” as I did. Unseen force lifted him from his feet and slammed him into one of the huge Corinthian columns like a cannonball. Stone shattered with a deafening crash like thunder, and a lot of rock started to fall.
I didn’t stick around to see how much. It wouldn’t kill him. I only hoped it would slow him down enough for me to get to the others.
“Kincaid!” I shouted as I ran. My voice boomed through the empty halls in the wake of the collapsing rubble. “Kincaid!”
I knew I had only seconds before all Hell broke loose.
“Kincaid, get the kid out of here!” I screamed. “They’re coming for Ivy!”
Chapter
Thirty
My brain flew along a lot faster than my feet.
Given the heavy snow outside, the first line of retreat the Archive would take would be into the Nevernever. The spirit world touches on the mortal world at all places and at all times. It gets weird once you realize that totally alien regions of the Nevernever might touch upon relatively close points in the real world. Crossing into the Nevernever is dangerous unless you know exactly where you’re going—I don’t use it as a fallback very often at all. But if you’ve really got your back to the wall, and you have more experience than I do at crossing over, you can get a feel for the crossing and almost always get to someplace relatively benign.
I figured it was safe to assume that the Archive would be savvy enough to feel comfortable stepping over—in fact, she would have chosen this location for the parley for precisely that reason. The Denarians would know it too, and they didn’t want the Archive to escape their ambush and come back loaded for bear. They would have prepared countermeasures, much as they had for Marcone.
No, scratch that. Exactly the way they had for Marcone, I realized. The huge spell that had been used to tear apart the defenses of the crime lord’s panic room hadn’t simply been a way for the Denarians to secure the bait in this scheme. It had been a field test for their means to cut off the magical energy from a large area, and access to the Nevernever with it—and to imprison something big at the same time.
It was a bear trap, custom-designed for Ivy. They were going to spring that monstrous pentagram again.
Only this time I was going to be standing inside it when it happened.
Fortunately, the Shedd was a lot squattier and more stable than Marcone’s old apartment building had been—though that didn’t mean pieces big enough to kill people wouldn’t fall when the beam ripped through the walls. And though a lot of stonework was used, there was still the danger of fire.
Fire. In an aquarium. Breathe in the irony.
But more important, once that pentagram came up—and it was coming now; I could feel it, a faint stirring of power that slid along the edges of my wizard’s senses like some huge and hungry snake passing by in the darkness—it was going to shut the building off from the rest of the world, magically speaking. That meant that I wasn’t going to be able to draw in any power to use to defend myself, any more than I’d be able to breathe if someone plunged my head underwater.
Usually, when you work a spell, you reach out into the environment around you and pull in energy. It flows in from everywhere, from the fabric of life in the whole planet. You don’t create a “hole” in the field of energy we call “magic.” It all pours in together, levels out instantly, all across the world. But the circle about to go up was going to change that. The relatively tiny area inside the Shedd would contain only so much energy. Granted, it would be a fairly rich spot—there was a lot of life in the building, and it had hosted a lot of visitors generating a lot of emotions, especially the energy given off by all those children. But even so, it was a sealed box, and given the number of people present who knew how to use magic, the local supply wasn’t going to last long.
Try to imagine a knife fight in an airtight phone booth—lots of heavy breathing and exertion, but not for long.
One way or the other, not for long.
That was their plan, of course. Without magic to draw upon, I was pretty much just a scrappy guy with a gun, whereas Nicodemus w
as still a nigh-invincible engine of destruction.
For a few seconds my steps slowed.
Put that way, it almost sounded a little crazy of me to be rushing into this. I mean, I was basically opting for a cage match with a collection of demons, and one that I would have to win within a matter of seconds or not at all—and I hadn’t been all that impressive against the Denarians when I’d had relatively few constraints on what power I could wield against them.
I did some mental math. If the symbol the Denarians were using was approximately the same size as the one at Marcone’s place, it would be big enough to encompass only the Oceanarium itself in the pentagram at its center. Murphy and the others, if they’d stayed where we’d come in, would probably be safe. More to the point, if they’d stayed where they were, they would have no way to enter the Oceanarium.
That meant it would be just me and Ivy and maybe Kincaid—against Nicodemus, Tessa, and every Denarian they could beg, borrow or steal. Those were long odds. Really, really long odds. Ridiculously long odds, really. When you have to measure them in astronomical units, it probably isn’t a good bet.
So, going in there would be bad.
If I didn’t go in, though, it would be just Ivy and Kincaid against all of them. In a deadly business, Kincaid was one of the deadliest, at the top of the field for centuries—but there was only one of him. Ivy had vast knowledge to draw upon, of course, but once she’d been cut off and expended whatever magic she had immediately available to her, the only thing she’d be able to do with all that knowledge would be to calculate her worsening odds of escape.
Every hair on my body tried to stand up all at the same time, and I knew that the symbol was being energized. In seconds it would howl to life.
I guess in the end it came down to a single question: whether or not I was the kind of man who walks away when he knows a little kid is in danger.
I’d been down this road before: Not going in there would be worse.
Heat shimmers filled the air in the hall in front of me as I sprinted toward the Oceanarium.
Fight smarter, not harder, Harry. I drew in power on the way—a lot of power. If there wasn’t going to be any magic available for the taking once the symbol went up, I’d just have to bring my own.