Skin Game

Thirty-seven

The lights blew out in showers of sparks and there was an instant, thunderous explosion behind us, and the closed door of the vault rang like an enormous bell. While the thick steel walls of the vault were impenetrable to the shot of the antipersonnel mines, I didn’t want to think about how much metal had just rebounded from them and gone flying off at every angle imaginable, and I wondered if anyone had just died as a result.

There was a great grinding sound, as if some part of the building’s structure had slowly collapsed, somewhere outside the vault, and in the dim red glow of the tear in the fabric of reality, I could barely make out the faces around me.

“Hell’s bells,” I said to Michael. “Binder? His prisoners?”

“I helped him move them,” Michael said at once. “It’s partly why it took me so long to get to you. Once we knew about the mines, we got everyone out of that hallway and back up to the first floor.”

“Where there were only bullets flying around,” Grey said, his voice dry.

I grimaced, but there’d been no help for it. Marcone had set up those mines, not me, and I just had to hope that the initial impact against the vault had robbed the explosively propelled projectiles of most of their strength.

Meanwhile, the torn-cloth ribbon of light in the air of the vault had spread, the Way to the Underworld opening before us, red light pouring into the strong room, and I could see scarlet flames dancing on the far side. The smell of sulfur wafted out of the Way. A moment later, there was a sudden, hot wind driving even more of the scent out of it, and pushing my hair back from my forehead.

As the flames danced and bowed with the wind, I could see a dark shape behind them-a wall rising up maybe forty yards away from us, with a clear arch shape beneath it. The arch was filled with brilliant fire, so dense that I could see nothing beyond it.

Nicodemus stepped up to stand beside me, staring into the Underworld. His dark eyes glittered with scarlet highlights.

“The Gate of Fire,” he murmured. “Miss Ascher, if you please.”

“Um,” Hannah Ascher said. She swallowed. “No one said jack about me being the first one into the Underworld.”

“I’m not sure anyone else could survive in there for more than a moment,” Nicodemus said. “Dresden?”

I squinted at the inferno raging beyond the Way and said, “It’s pretty tough to argue with fire. That’s why wizards like to use it as a weapon. Heat that intense, I could keep it off me for maybe ten or twenty seconds-if you let me get a nap and a meal in before you asked me to deal with the next gate.” I peered more closely. “Look there, in the archway. On the right wall, about five feet up.”

Hannah Ascher stopped next to me, and squinted through the Way. “Is that a lever?”

“Looks like it,” I said. “Walk through, pull the lever. Seems simple enough.”

“A little too simple,” she said, and started taking off her own thorn manacles.

“Sure,” I said. “If you’re immune to fire, it’s a piece of cake.” I blew out my breath. “I can make that sprint before my shields fail. I think. Assuming I don’t trip and fall on anything. I can’t see what the ground is like.”

“Dammit,” she said. “No. No, I guess this is where I earn my cut.” She stared at the Way and dropped the two empty backpacks she carried over one shoulder. Then she took a short breath and stripped out of her black sweater in one smooth motion, revealing a black sports bra beneath.

“Wow,” Grey said. “Nice.”

She rolled her eyes and gave him a short look, then pressed the sweater into my hands. “Hold this for me.”

“Okay,” I said. “Why?”

Her boots and fatigue pants came off next, and Michael resolutely turned slightly to one side and studied an empty section of the strong room’s wall. “Because my clothes wouldn’t survive it, and I would rather not spend the entire rest of the trip without any clothes.”

“I would,” Grey said. “I would rather that.”

“Grey,” I said. “Stop it.”

“We’re wasting time,” Nicodemus said.

Ascher met my eyes for a second, a fairly daring thing to do between two practitioners, and her cheeks flushed a little bit pink before she shucked out of her socks and underwear, motions quick and entirely without artifice. She pressed the rest of her clothes into my hands and said, “Don’t do anything weird with them.”

“I was going to shellac them into a dining set and serve a four-course meal in them,” I said, “but if you’re gonna get all squeamish about it, I guess I’ll just hold them for you.”

Ascher eyed me obliquely. “Did you just ask me out to dinner?”

I felt myself baring my teeth in a smile. Nothing much I like more than a woman with guts. “Tell you what. We both get out of this in one piece, I’ll show you where to buy the best steak sandwich in town,” I said. “Good luck.”

She gave me a quick, nervous smile and turned to the Way. She stared at it for a couple of seconds, licked her lips once, twitched her hands in a couple of nervous little gestures, then clenched her jaw and strode through the Way, naked, into the fires of the Underworld.

Granted, I hadn’t ever seen anyone with quite her degree of precision and power in pyromancy before, but even so, I cringed as she hit the first wall of flame. It surged up to meet her like it had an awareness of its own and was eager to devour her-and had about as much luck as a wave breaking on a stony shore. The fire wreathed her and recoiled, twisted into miniature cyclones that whipped her long dark hair this way and that. The wind from the flame roared and shifted, blowing hard enough to make her balance wobble. She put her hands out to either side of her, like someone walking on slippery ice, and proceeded slowly and carefully. I could see the way that focus and concentration made her spine straight and tense, and no, I was not staring at her ass. To any inappropriate degree.

I realized that Grey was standing beside me, watching her intently, his expression unreadable. He keyed in to my realization, even though neither of us looked at the other, except in our peripheral vision.

“Got to love a woman with guts,” he said.

“You talk too much,” I said.

“How is she doing that?” he asked. “I know the basics, but I’ve never seen anything quite like that.”

“She’s redirecting the energy,” I said. “See how when the waves hit her, they bounce off, all swirly?”

He grunted.

“She’s taking the heat and turning it into kinetic energy as it reaches her aura. It’s impressive as hell.”

“So far,” Grey said. “But why do you say that?”

“Because it’s hard to deal with that much heat, when you’re immersed in it,” I said. “She’s not just stopping it at one point. She’s dealing with it from every angle, and she’s got to be doing the same enchantment about a dozen times at once to stop it all, in successive layers.”

“And that’s hard?”

“Tell you what,” I said. “Why don’t you go play Simon, Concentration, checkers, chess, solitaire, Monopoly, Sudoku, Clue, Risk, Axis and Allies, poker, and blackjack all at the same time, while counting to twenty thousand by prime numbers only, standing on one foot and balancing a Styrofoam cup of hot coffee on your head. And when you can do that, we’ll start you with walking through a small campfire.”

“I can play poker,” Grey said seriously. “So she’s gutsy and she’s good.”

“Yep.”

“Good person to have on your team.”

“Or a bad one to have on the other team,” I said.

His eyes moved to me. They were an almost physical pressure. “Meaning?”

I shook my head and said, “Meaning nothing.”

They stayed on me for a second, and then he shrugged and looked at Hannah Ascher again. Who wouldn’t?

She was almost all the way to the gate before the Salamander made its move.

From the thickest flame beneath the gateway, something that looked like a Komodo dragon made of material from the surface of a star came roaring forth. It moved with the same scuttling speed as a lizard, and Ascher only just managed to skitter to one side and avoid its first rush. The Salamander hissed out its displeasure in a blast-furnace roar, and the light around it grew even brighter and more intense. The flamestorm around Ascher intensified, and she staggered a few steps back, her face tight with concentration. The fire around her swirled and became thicker, a miniature hurricane spinning slowly around her, with her vulnerable flesh as the eye.

The Salamander roared again, and came for her.

“Dammit,” I said.

Michael came to my side and said, “She’s got no weapons.”

“Can you get to her?” I asked my friend.

Michael shook his head, his eyes worried. “She isn’t an innocent in danger. She chose this.”

“Grey?”

“I can’t help her in that,” Grey said. “I wouldn’t last any longer than you would.”

I turned to look at Nicodemus and said, “Help her.”

He eyed me once, and then nodded. Then he drew the sword from his side, narrowed his eyes, took two smooth steps and cast it in a throw.

Swords are not meant for such things. That said, flying pieces of metal with long, sharp edges and pointy ends are inherently dangerous, and Nicodemus had probably spent the idle afternoon, every few decades, throwing a sword around just for fun. After two thousand years of that, he knew exactly what he was doing.

The tumbling blade struck the Salamander on the snout, drawing a line of molten fire along its furnace-flesh and sending up a shower of scarlet sparks. It roared again, in surprised pain, and staggered a few steps to one side, then whirled toward the Way, lashing its tail. A blast of hot, sulfurous wind blew out, making my duster flap wildly and drawing tears from my eyes. Michael lifted a hand to shield his face, his white cloak billowing.

“The lever!” I screamed. “Go for the lever!”

I don’t know if Ascher heard me or just reached the same conclusion I had. When the Salamander turned from her, she sprinted for the gateway and the lever in it. The Salamander saw her and whirled, snapping at her legs, but she was past it, quick and lithe. She flung herself at the lever and hauled down on it-letting out a scream of pain as she did so.

There was an enormous rushing sound, and a vast metallic grinding-and suddenly the flames of the entire room shifted down the spectrum in color and dropped lower. I got what was happening at once. That much fire needs an enormous amount of oxygen to supply it, and the lever had somehow reduced that supply.

The Salamander’s flesh went from yellow-white to a deep orange within seconds, and it let out another roaring blast of heat from its mouth-and then retreated, much more slowly than it had moved a moment before, toward a low hole in one wall of the archway. Its fire and light filled the tunnel beyond the hole for a moment and then faded, and as it did, the flames all around the Gate of Fire withered away and flickered into scraps and remnants.

“Not yet!” called Ascher in a panting, tense voice, as Nicodemus stepped toward the Way. “Give it a couple of minutes to cool off!”

I waited about forty-five seconds and then muttered a spherical shield into life around me, channeling it through my staff. I would rather have had my old shield bracelet, but assembling a decent metalcrafting tool shop takes money and time, and I hadn’t had time to rebuild much of either-and certainly not to the degree I’d been prepared back in my old lab at my apartment.

The spells I’d carved into the new staff were much the same as the ones in my old shield bracelet, if less efficient and less capable of tightly focusing power, but it was much better than I could have managed without any focus at all, and it was sufficient to protect me from harm as I crossed the still smoldering-hot ground.

Passing from the mortal world into the Nevernever is both more and less dramatic than you’d think. There’s no real sensation to it, apart from a mild tingle as you pass through the Way itself, kind of a protracted shiver along your skin. But when I stepped into the Underworld, I knew that I had just crossed an unimaginable distance. My body felt slightly heavier, as if the gravity itself was different from that on Earth. The air was hot and tainted with sulfur and other minerals, and it felt utterly alien in my nose and mouth. The ground around me was all stone, covered in protruding chunks of what might have been still-glowing charcoal, and I could see the melted stumps of what must have been, at one point, stalagmites, their limestone now running like candle wax. Shattered, half-molten remnants of what must have been stalactites fallen from a ceiling out of sight in the darkness overhead were scattered around my line of vision.

Of course. We were in a cave. An unthinkably enormous cavern that stretched out of sight in the glowing light of the Way behind us and that was interrupted by a wall at least forty feet high and the archway set into it in front of us.

I crossed the ground rapidly to Ascher’s side. My shield was good when it came to stopping fire, but it probably wasn’t quite as good as a single one of the layers she’d held in place around her. “Hey,” I said. “You all right?”

“I was sweating,” she said, her face twisted with pain, and she lifted her hands to show me blisters bubbling up in a line along her palms where she had grabbed the lever. The lever itself still glowed red with heat that it hadn’t yet lost. “Dammit. The sweat went into steam and screwed up the last few layers of protection.”

“You just grabbed freaking red-hot metal with your bare hands and you’ve got nothing to show for it but blisters,” I said. “Totally badass.”

A smile fought its way through her expression of pain for a moment, and she said, “Yeah, it really kind of was, wasn’t it? Was that a Salamander?”

“Pretty sure,” I said.

“They’re so much bigger than in those Xanth books.”

“No kidding,” I said. “Maybe Ha-our client got one some hormone treatments.” I offered her the clothes I held cradled in my broken arm. “Shellac free.”

She took them from me with another grimace of pain and said, “Thanks.”

Grey came ambling up over the ground. If the temperature bothered him, he didn’t show it. “Want a hand with those?”

Ascher arched an eyebrow at him. “From you? I think I’m a little smarter than that.”

“You only say that because you think I’m only interested in you for your body.”

“Yes, obviously.”

“Totally unfair,” Grey said, with a disarming smile. “I’m also interested in what you might elect to do with your body.” He added, in a more sober voice, “You’re going to have trouble with clasps and buttons with your fingers like that. I know.”

Ascher squinted at him. She looked at me uncertainly, and then said to Grey, “Probably true.”

She got dressed. Grey helped her, without doing anything untoward, and the rest of the crew joined us a moment later.

“Maybe I should have let you handle that one, Dresden,” she said. “Traded you for the ice thing. Normally when some beastie comes at me, I use fire. Useless here.”

“I’d never have gotten through when it turned up the heat,” I said. “But if you’d like to handle my gate for me, I’m willing.”

“Maybe I will,” Ascher said with a cocky grin.

“Come,” Nicodemus said. He’d picked up his sword. One of its edges was blackened and had been visibly dulled, steel bubbling up like the edges of a pancake when the griddle is too hot. “Defeating the Salamander has surely warned someone of our presence here. The less time wasted, the better.”

And so all of us passed through the Gate of Fire, through a tunnel about thirty feet long that had me briefly worrying about the Murder Holes of Fire, but no threat materialized. We came out of the archway onto another broad expanse of stony cavern.

But this one was covered in ice.

The stalagmites and stalactites were all intact at this gate, and were in fact spread out in a suspiciously regular, almost geometric pattern for a couple of hundred yards, stretching between us and the next gate. They were covered in a thick sheath of old, old ice, which had universally come down from the stalactites to meet the rising stalagmites, forming great columns as thick as I was tall. The ice sparkled in the light cast by the last smoldering remains of the flames at the Gate of Fire, throwing back shimmering spectra of color. The floor, too, was covered in the same shimmering ice, starting about ten feet from the opening from the Gate of Fire. The air was dry and bitterly cold, and I saw Ascher draw a short breath and stop suddenly as it reached her.

I stared out at the glittering, frozen cathedral between us and the Gate of Ice and my palms began to sweat a little. I licked my lips and took a steadying breath as I regarded the passage in front of us.

Michael came to stand at my side and said, “It doesn’t look too bad.”

“Yeah,” I said, “which worries me.”

“Dresden,” Nicodemus said. “The time has come for you to redeem Mab’s word.”

“Hold your demonic horses,” I said, annoyed.

I put my hand forward for a moment, half closing my eyes, reaching out with my wizard’s senses. The air was frigid, as bad as anything you’d find at the South Pole, but that wouldn’t bother me much more than would a cold October evening back home. I sensed no enchantments, which meant little here in the Nevernever, where enchantment could just as easily be a part of the very fabric of reality, and thus no more remarkable or out of place than gravity or air in the mortal world.

I took several cautious steps forward, and put the toes of my left foot down on the edge of the icy floor.

And as if some vast machine had whirled to life, a block of ice the size of a small house plunged down from overhead and smashed onto the floor five feet in front of me, retaining its cut shape, its regular edges. No sooner had it settled than it whirled in place, flopped on its side, and a second house-sized block came rumbling out along the horizontal, sliding along the ice floor to smash into the first block. They parted for an instant, then slammed together again and shattered into dozens of smaller blocks that whirled off on their own, spinning into positions, slamming into one another with the speed and energy of high-speed traffic collisions, rearranging themselves into random, violent stacks every few seconds, each impact resounding through the vast space with enormous grinding crunches.

I stared at the field of gnashing, mashing ice-oliths in dismay, and saw more of the original huge blocks sliding out of the shadows to the side of the cavern, and falling down from overhead.

Dozens and dozens of them.

In seconds, there were thousands of blocks crunching and grinding and smashing away at one another over every foot of the space between me and the Gate of Ice. The air filled with the deafening sounds of impact, as if a glacier had come to life and begun to utter threats.

The smallest of the blocks, if they trapped me between them, would have smashed half of my body into tomato paste.

“Dresden,” Ascher said, and swallowed. “Uh. I’ve decided that maybe you should handle this one.”