Skin Game

Thirty-eight

Giant, angry, crushy blocks of ice, check.

One deity of the ancient world about to be royally pissed off, check.

Pack of rampant bad guys with whom I was about to lose major value, big check.

First things first.

I whirled away from the Gate of Ice, pointed my staff at the distant glow of the Way standing open behind us, unleashed my will and thundered, “Disperdorius!”

Magic lanced from my staff, disruptive and hectic, a spear of greenish light wreathed with corkscrewing helixes of green-white energy. The dispersal spell smashed into the Way and tore it to shreds, closing the passage between the mortal world and the Underworld as thoroughly as dynamite brings down a tunnel.

And instantly, the Underworld was plunged into pitch-darkness, broken only by the few smoldering remnants from the Gate of Fire, visible only dimly, at the other end of the tunnel.

I heard several sharp indrawn breaths before I could bring light from my staff and my mother’s pentacle amulet with a murmur and a minor effort of will. Green and blue light, respectively, illuminated the area around me, and spread out for a remarkable distance, reflected endlessly by the Gate of Ice and its thousands of moving parts.

The light revealed Nicodemus’s hard, narrow eyes. “Dresden,” he snapped. “Explain yourself.”

“Sure,” I said. “See, the way I figure it, after I get you through this gate, I’ve got exactly zero utility to you people. It would be a great time for you to stick a knife in my back.”

“That wasn’t the plan,” Nicodemus said.

“Yeah, you’re such a Boy Scout, Nick,” I said, “with the best of intentions. But for the sake of argument, let’s say you weren’t. Let’s say you were a treacherous bastard who would enjoy seeing me dead. Let’s say you realized that here, in the most secure portion of the Underworld, the demesne of a major Power, there’d be no way for Mab to directly observe what you do. Let’s say your plan all along was to kill me and leave me here in the Underworld, maybe even try to pin the whole thing on me so that you don’t have to worry about the client, later-you could just let him tangle with Mab, sit back on your evil ass, and laugh yourself sick over it.”

Something ugly flickered far back in Nicodemus’s eyes. I didn’t know if I’d gotten every single little detail of his plan right, but I was sure I’d been in the ballpark.

“Maybe you can still pull it off,” I said. “But if you do, you’re going to have to find another ride. If I don’t make it to the end of this, there’s no one left to open the Way home-and we all stay down here.”

His jaw tightened, but other than that, his expression didn’t change.

“Christ, Dresden,” Grey complained. “What if you get killed trying to run through that thing? How are we all supposed to get out of here then?”

It was a point that had bothered me, too, but I’d had few options to work with. Besides, given a choice between a psychotically dangerous, bone-crunching obstacle course or Nicodemus at my back with nothing to gain by keeping me alive, I knew damned well which was more likely to result in my death-and once Nicodemus took me out, there was no way he’d choose to leave my friends alive behind me as witnesses to his treachery.

“Well, golly, Goodman. Then I guess it looks like you’ll all be well motivated to genuinely wish me good luck and think positive thoughts,” I said. I turned to the hulking blur that was the Genoskwa. “Starting with you, big guy. Come on over. I need to get a better look at this thing.”

A subterranean growl rumbled through the air, audible even over the grinding of the Gate of Ice.

“Hey,” I said, spreading my hands. “Be that way if you want to. It’s not like that attitude might get all of you trapped in the Underworld forever or anything. I hear, like, two or three whole people made it out of this place. Ever.”

The Genoskwa rippled out from beneath his veil and stalked toward me. I’m pretty sure I only imagined that his footsteps shook the ground beneath my feet as he walked, and I had a sudden desire to flee with my arms out in front of me and my legs rotating in a circular blur. But instead, I stood my ground, eyed the Genoskwa, and thrust out my jaw as it got closer.

Michael laid his hand on his sword and put himself between Anna Valmont and the rest of the group, his expression questioning. I gave my head a quick shake. If Michael drew Amoracchius in earnest against this crew, there would be a fight to the death and that’s all there was to it. I didn’t mind the thought of a fight, but I wanted better ground and better odds if I could get them.

“Nick,” I said, without looking away from the Genoskwa, “run the numbers before your gorilla does something stupid.”

I saw Nicodemus nod his head to one side, and Deirdre suddenly slipped between me and the Genoskwa, facing him, both palms lifted in a gesture of pacification.

“Stop,” she said in a quiet voice. “The wizard is insufferable, but he’s correct. We still need him.”

The Genoskwa could have kicked Deirdre aside like an empty beer can, but instead he slowed, glowering down at her and then, more intensely, at me.

“Arrogant child,” the Genoskwa rumbled. His eyes went to the Gate of Ice and then back toward the now-closed Way. “You think you’re clever.”

“I think I want to get home alive,” I said, “and if I thought that you people would be willing to behave with something approaching sanity for five minutes, stuff like this wouldn’t be necessary. Shut up and play the game, and don’t come crying to me if you aren’t winning. Lift me up. I need to get a look at the whole field if I can.”

“Because that might help.” He lifted one rubbery lip away from his tusks and said to Deirdre, “Rather rot down here than help this one for two minutes.” Then he turned his broad, shaggy back and padded away.

Deirdre turned toward me, her blade-hair rasping and slithering against itself, and shook her head with an expression of faint disgust. “You’ve won the round, boy. There’s no point in doing a victory dance too.”

“Still need the big guy to give me a lift,” I insisted.

“Why?” she demanded.

I jerked a thumb at the Gate of Ice. “They’re moving in a pattern. If I can see the whole field, if I can track the pattern, I can find a way through. But I can’t see over the first row of blocks. So I need to get higher.”

Deirdre stared at me steadily, both sets of eyes on mine, and I dropped my gaze away from hers hurriedly. The last thing I needed, at the moment, was to accidentally find myself in a soul gaze with a Fallen angel or a psychotic murderess with centuries of dark deeds behind her.

“Very well,” she said. “I will lift you.”

“How?” I asked.

Her hair suddenly burst into motion, striking down into the stone of the cavern floor and sending up bursts of sparks where the steely stuff bit deep into the rock. I would have jumped back from her if doing so wouldn’t have put me far enough out onto the ice to get myself smashed flat. Then some more of the blades slithered down to the floor and lay flat, side by side, in several layers. It was like looking at a floor tile made from razor blades.

“Stand there,” Deirdre said. Plenty of strands of her hair were still free and moving slightly. “I will lift you.”

I arched an eyebrow at her. “You’re kidding, right? What happens if you drop me? It’ll be like I fell into a blender.”

“Well, golly, Dresden,” she said, deadpan, “then I guess it looks like you’ll be well motivated to keep your balance and think positive thoughts.”

“Heh,” said Grey.

I glowered at him for a second and then said, “Fine,” and stepped onto Deirdre’s hair, keeping some bend in my knees.

The hair moved and she lifted me slowly, while other razor-blade strands rustled and rasped around me. There was something deliberate about the motion, as if it was taking all of her concentration to prevent herself from slicing me into confetti, and I decided that a comment about split ends and using some chain-saw oil for conditioner could go unspoken.

That’s what I call diplomacy.

She got my feet up maybe ten feet off the ground, which was more than enough for me to be able to look over the entire two hundred yards. I lifted my staff, murmured a word, and willed more light to issue forth from it. The air was filled with droplets of water and tiny chips of ice, where the blocks were smashing into one another, creating a glittering haze over everything, but I could track the motion of the blocks well enough, and in the archway ahead, I could see another lever exactly like the one at the Gate of Fire.

Seemed pretty simple. Get through the grinders. Get to the lever. I scanned the place for some kind of ice-amander, but saw nothing. Nothing that I knew of would be able to survive all the abuse the grinders were dishing out, but that didn’t mean that there wasn’t something I didn’t know about that could handle it just fine.

My imagination promptly treated me to an image of a viscous, blobby monster that could lie flat on the floor in perfect concealment, and be smashed between grinders with no particular trauma and that would melt my face off the second it touched me. Then my imagination showed me my skinless self, flailing around like a victim in a horror movie, getting blood everywhere-for about two seconds. Then I imagined two of the grinders smashing me to jelly that could be readily consumed by osmosis.

My imagination needs therapy.

I closed my eyes for a second and dismissed such flights of fancy. That wasn’t what I needed right now. I needed to find the pattern in the movement between me and the gate, to determine the path I could take to get inside. I opened my eyes again and watched.

It took me several minutes to see where it began. The movement of the nearest blocks began to repeat itself after seventy-five seconds or so. The next row had a similar pattern, though it was happening on a separate cycle. As was the next, and the next, and the one after that.

I stood there watching the patterns for a good fifteen minutes, tracking them, focused, keeping track of every separate motion in my head, in much the same way you had to do with the most complex of spells, and realized that I could simplify the model for each row to a cog with one broken tooth. As long as I entered the row on the beat that the broken tooth was aligned with me, I could breeze through it. So it just became a matter of timing my run so that the openings lined up for me. Theoretically.

I watched for another ten minutes, until I was pretty sure I had it, and could see the patterns aligning to give me my string of openings.

“Harry?” Michael asked, finally.

I held up my hand to silence him, bouncing my hand slightly to help me keep track, following the pattern. The way through was going to open about. . now.

I leapt down to the ground and started running.

I was five strides onto the ice, and through the opening in the first row of grinders, before I realized that I may have miscounted, and that if I had, I would have no opening through the next-to-last row.

There was no help for it. The opening behind me was already gone. I’d just have to adjust on the fly.

I kept moving forward, dashing ahead through a pair of house-sized grinders before they could crash together with me in the middle. I whipped to the diagonal for a couple of rows, and the air got colder and colder as I went ahead. I could stand at the heart of a cavern of ice deep within a glacier, naked and wet from the shower and not shiver, but this cold was beginning to get to me. My breath became a large plume, visible in the air, and the floating chips of ice gathered on my eyelashes, making me fear that if I blinked, they might freeze together.

On I went, going over a single smaller block like a hurdler, and the cold got deeper and deeper, and while the Winter Knight had nothing to fear from slipping on simple ice, the fine, powdery sleet coating the cavern floor from all the grinding impacts did not make things easy, even for me.

One hundred and eighty yards or so, and things went relatively well. Then I found out that I had, indeed, miscounted.

I ran for the place where the opening in the row of spinning, randomly slamming grinders should have been, and realized about a step before I got there that it wasn’t coming.

So I pointed my staff at the more battered-looking of the blocks in front of me, focused my will and shouted, “Forzare!”

Unseen force smashed into the block, sending it spinning wildly away from me. The block into which it had been about to smash went spinning after it, as if the two were attracted by mutual gravity. I followed in their wake, as they smashed into a couple of blocks in the next row, and ice shattered into a cloud of mist and flying chips. Something hit my stomach and something else hit my hand. A section of block came tumbling wildly toward me, and I bounded up into a rolling dive that took me a good six feet off the cavern floor, shouting, “Parkour!”

Then I was through the grinders and into the shelter of the archway.

The cold there was a living thing, something that abruptly doubled me over, my body beginning to shudder and tingle. It took everything I had to lift an arm, secure a hold on the lever with my bare fingers, and haul it steadily down.

There was a loud grinding sound, like ancient, ice-encrusted gears beginning to whir together, and an enormous thumping sound that reminded me of explosives going off at a safe distance. The horrible cold faded almost immediately to something merely Antarctic, and I sank to one knee and peered back the way I had come.

The blocks had ceased their motion, simply dropping to the ground wherever they were moving or spinning or crashing.

I was through.

I stood up and waved my still-lit staff left and right in a broad motion. Then I paused to take stock of myself.

My shirt was bloody and so was my right hand. I lifted my shirt to examine my abdomen and found a small wound there. It took me a minute, but I was able to get my fingers around the end of a splinter of ice approximately the size and shape of a small nail, and I withdrew it in a little squirt of steaming red blood. Ugly, but it hadn’t gone all the way through the muscle and it couldn’t have pierced my abdominal wall. Not dangerous. I checked my right hand. A similar shard of ice had pierced me, but it was smaller and the heat of my blood had evidently melted it away. It wasn’t bad. I’d lost a couple of layers of skin to the frozen metal of the gate’s deactivation lever. That was it.

But, man, I was glad I didn’t have a mirror to look in right about now.

By the time the rest of the crew reached me, the air was merely wintry, and I was on my feet again, and I’d used a small fire spell to sear away the blood that was on the little shard of ice, along with the shard itself.

Michael approached me with his eyes wide and said, “Dear God in Heaven, Harry. That was amazing. I’ve never seen you move so quickly.”

“Yeah,” I said. “There aren’t many perks to being the Winter Knight, but that’s one of them.”

“Did you shout ‘Parkour’?” Michael asked.

“Well, sure,” I said. “That was kinda Parkour-like.”

Michael fought to keep a smile off his face. “Harry,” he said, “I’m almost certain one doesn’t shout ‘Parkour.’ I believe one is supposed to simply do Parkour.”

“Do I criticize your Latin battle cries? No, never once.”

“That is true,” Michael said soberly. He nodded toward my belly. “Are you all right?”

“Flesh wound,” I said. “I’ll get some Bactine on it when we get back. Or let Charity drag out her bottle of iodine.”

“She’d like that,” Michael said, nodding.

“Ugh,” Ascher said, stepping beneath the arch, her arms folded against her stomach. “I hate the cold.”

“Wear looser clothes,” Valmont suggested in a voice so dry that it defied anyone listening to find any snark in it. “Nice moves, Dresden.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I’m auditioning for the sequel to Frogger in a week.”

Nicodemus, Grey, the Genoskwa, and Deirdre entered the archway together a moment later. Which was not even a little suspicious.

Michael turned to me with a quizzical expression on his face, and had begun to form a question when the Genoskwa lunged, powering toward me with ferocious speed, and simply seized me by the upper body, his thumbs pressing against my chest, his hands wrapping around my arms and pinning them at my side.

Michael swore and went for his sword, but Grey suddenly had Valmont by the hair, her head tilted back. Fingers that ended in an eagle’s talons pierced her throat delicately, drawing beads of blood, and he said, “Easy there, sir Knight. We don’t want any needless bloodshed.”

The Genoskwa leaned down to glower at me and rumbled, “Please. Struggle. I would love some needless bloodshed.”

“Nicodemus,” Ascher said, her voice sharp. “What is the meaning of this?”

Nicodemus walked up to the arch arm in arm with Deirdre. “Because we have come to the Gate of Blood, children,” he said. He drew the Bedouin dagger from his belt and its damascene blade glittered in the light of my staff and amulet. “The time has come for one of you to die.”