Skin Game

Thirty-nine

Michael’s sword swept out of its sheath, and the silver-white fire of Amoracchius filled the archway. He said nothing. He didn’t need to. He took the Sword in a two-handed grip and settled into a relaxed ready position.

Deirdre and Nicodemus immediately split apart, so that they forced Michael to divide his attention between them. She dropped into a fighting crouch, while Nicodemus narrowed his eyes and became very still. Grey regarded Michael impassively, while in his grasp, Anna Valmont turned completely pale and held very still. I felt the Genoskwa’s summer-sausage fingers tighten painfully.

“Now, now, sir Knight,” Nicodemus said, his voice almost a growl. “There’s no need for this to devolve into general mayhem, is there?”

“I will not allow you to harm them,” Michael said.

“Lower the Sword,” Nicodemus said. “Or I will order Grey to kill Valmont.”

“If you do that,” Michael said calmly, “Dresden and I will fight to the death.”

I felt my eyes get a little bit wider, and my voice might not have been as deep and steady as it usually was, but I managed to say, “Right. We’ll fight you. Not each other. In case that wasn’t clear.”

“How assured is your victory?” Michael asked Nicodemus. “How many times has Amoracchius foiled your plans over the centuries?”

“You’ve never beaten me, Knight,” Nicodemus said.

“Almighty God as my witness, and as He gives me grace,” Michael said, “if you harm that woman, I will strike you down.”

“Right,” I said. “Me too.”

Nicodemus gave me an impatient glance and turned his attention back to Michael. “You should have stayed in your little house, quietly retired,” he said. “You didn’t matter there. I didn’t care about you any longer. If you begin a fight here, you will never see your family again.”

Michael smiled faintly. “That is where you are wrong. With God’s blessing, it will take a good many years. But I will see them again.”

“Think where you are, sir Knight,” Nicodemus said, his mouth quirking up into a mocking smile. “The Underworld is a prison for souls. Do you think yours is so great as to escape it?”

“I am not great,” Michael said quietly. “But God is.”

Nicodemus’s smile was like something you’d see on a shark. “One of the great disappointments in killing a Knight is knowing that he or she does not suffer as a result. But you are in the Underworld, Christian. Here, I think, your eternity will be something entirely different than you have been promised.”

“On the one hand, I have your word,” Michael said. “On the other, I have my Father’s. I think I know to which voice I should listen.”

“This is the land of Death,” Nicodemus said. “Death must be part of the offering to let us in. You have been so eager to lay down your life, sir Knight. Perhaps you will do so again, rather than forcing me to slay another.”

Michael’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t think so,” he said. “No force compels you but your own ambition, Nicodemus. You could choose to turn back-and I will not let you destroy a life to serve your purposes.”

“Even if by doing so, you force me to denounce Dresden and his mistress?” Nicodemus asked. “You know the consequences of that, should Mab be shamed by his failure to keep her word-and you are here on his. Should you bring this mission to a halt, Dresden will have broken Mab’s word. I imagine that his death will be a terrible one.”

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.”