Skin Game

by Jim Butcher

  Normally, Mac’s does a brisk trade, but today there was a sign on the door that read: CLOSED FOR PRIVATE PARTY. A second sign hung inside the door, a wooden one, into which the words ACCORDED NEUTRAL TERRITORY had been neatly burned. It meant that the establishment was officially neutral ground under the guidelines of the Unseelie Accords, what amounted to the Geneva Convention of the supernatural world. Mab had written the Accords, and their signatories defied them at peril of the antipathy of the supernatural establishment and, worse, her personal displeasure.

  One corner of the sign was scorched and cracked, which had happened in a battle with Outsiders, who weren’t very civic-minded.

  Mac, bald, lean, and silent, stood behind the bar in his usual crisp white shirt and spotless apron. When Mab entered, he put down the rag he was using to polish the wooden bar, and bowed at the waist, somehow giving the gesture an accent of courtesy rather than obeisance.

  “Barkeep,” Mab replied, and inclined her head considerably more deeply than she had to Nicodemus a few minutes before. “May your patrons be prosperous and honest.”

  Mac, as a rule, rarely uttered multi-syllables. Today, he said, “May your scales always return to balance.”

  Her mouth quirked at the corner and she said, “Flatterer.”

  He smiled and nodded to me. “Harry.”

  “Mac. I haven’t had good food in months. Though, uh, I’m a little short on funds. I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a sandwich and a beer today.”

  He nodded.

  “Thanks.”

  Mab turned to the table nearest the door and gave me a look. It took me a beat to realize what she wanted, and to pull out a chair for her. She sniffed and sat down, folded her hands in her lap, and stared at nothing in particular, dismissing the rest of us from her world as thoroughly as if she had entered a locked room.

  My contact was waiting for me at a table in the back corner, and I walked over to join him. He was a big man by every definition of the word, tall and strong and solid, with a barrel for a chest and a smaller keg of a belly to go with it. His hair and beard were white and silver, though the rosy smoothness of his cheeks belied any indication of old age, and his eyes were blue and bright. He wore a chain-mail shirt and hunting leathers, and a long, hooded red coat trimmed in white fur hung from the back of the chair beside him. A simple, worn-looking broadsword hung at his side, and a large, lumpy leather sack sat on the floor beside him, as natural there as a mail carrier with his bag.

  “Sir Knight,” he said.

  “You’re here as Kringle, seriously?” I asked him.

  Kringle winked at me. “The Winter Knight called for me in his official capacity as an agent of the Winter Court. Mab has the right to summon Kringle. If she’d called for Vadderung, I’d have told her to get in line.”

  Donar Vadderung was the name of the CEO of Monoc Securities, a corporate security interest that provided information and highly skilled specialists to those with a great deal of money. Vadderung had access to more information than anyone I knew, except maybe the Senior Council of the White Council of Wizardry—only he was a hell of a lot smarter about using it. He was also, I was reasonably certain, Odin. The Odin. Or if he wasn’t, he could do an awfully good impersonation. Oh, and also, he was Santa Claus.

  Vadderung is a complicated guy.

  “But you and Kringle are the same person,” I said.

  “Legally speaking, Kringle and Vadderung are two entirely different people who simply happen to reside in the same body,” he replied.

  “That’s just a fiction,” I said, “a little game of protocol.”

  “Little games of protocol are how one shows respect, especially to those with whom one does not get along famously well. It can be tedious, but generally is less trouble than a duel would be.”

  Mac set a couple of his homebrewed beers down on the bar. I rounded them up and returned to the table, putting both bottles out in the middle. Kringle chose one, nodded to the chair across from him, and I sat.

  “To start with, I’m going to assume you know everything I do,” I said.

  His eyes wrinkled at the corners as he took a drink. “That seems wise.”

  I nodded and sipped my own. Wow. Mac’s beer is an excellent argument that there is a God, and that furthermore, He wants us to be happy. I savored it for a couple of seconds and then wrenched my mind back to business. “I want to float some thoughts at you and see if you think they’re sound.”

  “By all means.”

  “First,” I said, “Nicodemus is after something powerful. I don’t know what it is, but I do know that if I can get him to tell us what he’s after, it’s going to be a lie. He’d never let anyone know his true goal if he could help it.”

  “I concur,” Kringle said.

  I nodded. “He’ll assemble a crew. Some of them will be his people, and some of them will be outside specialists, but I’m pretty sure at least one of them is going to be a plant—they’ll look all independent but they’ll have one of those Coins on them and one of the Fallen whispering in their ears.”

  “I would consider that a high probability,” Kringle said.

  “Third,” I said, “he’s going to betray me at some point along the line. He’s proactive, and obsessed with control, so he’ll be the one who wants to stick the knife in first. He knows the limits Mab has placed on me, so he’ll want to do it after I’ve gotten him to wherever he wants to go, but before we finish the job, to guarantee him the first blow.”

  “Also sound reasoning,” Kringle said.

  “Dammit,” I said. “I had hoped I was wrong about something. If I’m to follow Mab’s rules, my options are limited.”

  Kringle’s eyes went to the slender figure at the table by the door. “May I offer you a word of advice, based purely upon my knowledge of the Queen’s nature?”

  “Sure.”

  “Mab moves in mysterious ways,” he said, looking back at me with a grin. “Nasty, unexpected, devious, patient, and mysterious ways. I don’t think she’d throw away a piece as valuable as you on a lost cause. Look for an opening, a weakness. It will be there.”

  “Have you seen this guy in action?” I asked. “Nicodemus Archleone is . . . He’s better than me. Smart, dangerous, ruthless, and experienced. All by himself, he’d be bad enough. I’ve never even seen him go to his bench. All the other Denarians whip out their Fallen buddies left and right, but Nicodemus, as far as I can tell, mostly uses his to chauffeur him around. I’ve got no idea what Anduriel can do, because Nick has never had to fall back on him.”

  “Perhaps that’s because Nicodemus understands just as well as you do where true power comes from,” Kringle said.

  I arched an eyebrow at that. “Knowledge,” I said. I thought about it, putting pieces together. “Wait. You’re telling me that he doesn’t use Anduriel in fights because Anduriel isn’t a fighter.”

  “Any of the Fallen are absolutely deadly in battle,” Kringle said severely, “even hampered as they are. But the Master of Shadows doesn’t prefer to operate that way, no.”

  Nicodemus’s control over the gang of superpowered lunatics was starting to make more sense now. “Master of Shadows. That’s an old, old phrase for a spy master.”

  “Exactly,” Kringle said. “Nicodemus knows very nearly as much as I do. Anduriel has the potential to hear anything uttered within reach of any living being’s shadow, and sometimes to look out from it and see.”

  My eyes widened and I looked down at my own shadow on the table.

  “No,” Kringle said. “That’s why Mab remains here, to secure this conversation against Anduriel. But you must exercise extreme discretion for the duration of this scenario. There are places Anduriel cannot reach—your friend Carpenter’s home, for example, or your island, now that you have awakened it. And the Fallen must know to pay attention to a given shadow, or else it’s all j
ust a haze of background noise—but you can safely assume that Anduriel will be listening very carefully to your shadow during this entire operation. Anything you say, Nicodemus will know. Even writing something down could be compromised.”

  “Hell’s bells,” I said. If that was the case, communicating with my friends would just get them set up for a trap. Man, no wonder Nicodemus was always a few steps ahead of everyone else. “I’m . . . going to have to play the cards really damned close to my chest, then.”

  “If I were you, I’d hold them about three inches behind my sternum, just to be sure,” Kringle said.

  I swigged beer and drummed my fingers on the table. “Yeah,” I said. “Okay. Good to know. But it’s not enough. I need another advantage.”

  “I never find having too many advantages any particular burden.”

  “What would be perfect is a plant of my own,” I said. “Someone Nicodemus doesn’t see coming. But to work that angle, I’d have to know who he was getting together, someone he already planned to have in place.”

  Kringle took on the air of a professor prompting a stumbling protégé. “How could you work with this theoretical person, without the ability to speak with him, to coordinate your efforts?”

  “Hide it in plain sight,” I said, “disguised as something else. Code.”

  “Interesting. Go on.”

  “Uh . . . ,” I said. “He’d be taking his cues from me, so mostly he’d be the one asking me questions. Tell him to refer to me as ‘wizard’ just before he asks a question relating to the situation at hand. The first word of my response would be the answer. Then we could make the actual conversation sound like something else entirely. We play along until it’s time for me to make my move. Then I use the phrase ‘game over’ and we hit them.”

  Kringle took a pull of his beer. “Not bad. Not perfect, but then, it never is.” He set his bottle aside and reached down into the sack by his foot. He rummaged for a moment and then produced a large envelope, which he offered to me.

  I regarded it carefully. Gifts have an awful lot of baggage attached to them among the Fae, and both Kringle and I were members of the Winter Court. “I didn’t get you anything,” I said.

  He waved his other hand negligently. “Consider it a belated holiday gift, free of obligation. That island is a tough delivery.”

  “Prove it,” I said. “Say ‘ho, ho, ho.’”

  “Ho, ho, ho,” he replied genially.

  I grinned and took the envelope. I opened it and found a photo and a brief description inside.

  “Who is this?”

  “A covert operative, a mercenary,” Kringle replied. “One of the best.”

  “I’ve never heard of him.”

  He arched an eyebrow. “Because he’s covert?”

  I bobbed my head a bit in admission of the point. “Why am I looking at his picture?”

  “There are four operatives who could play one role Nicodemus needs filled in this venture,” he said. “Two of them are currently under contract elsewhere, and the third is presently detained. That leaves Nicodemus only one option, and I know he won’t exercise it until the last possible moment—and he’s not far away.”

  “You think if I get to him first, I can hire him?”

  “If I make the introduction and we establish your communication protocol under Mab’s aegis? Yes.”

  “But if he’s a mercenary, he can by definition be bought. What’s to stop Nicodemus from outbidding me?”

  Kringle sat back in his seat at that, considering the question. Then he said, “If you buy this man, he stays bought. It’s who he is.”

  I arched an eyebrow. “You’re asking me to trust a stranger’s professional integrity?”

  “I wouldn’t do that,” Kringle said. “I’m asking you to trust mine.”

  I exhaled, slowly. I took a long pull of beer.

  “Well, hell,” I said. “What’s the world coming to if you can’t trust Santa Claus?” I leaned forward, peering at the printed summary and said, “So let’s meet with Goodman Grey.”

  Forty-five

  I hadn’t quite finished the “r” sound in “game over” before Grey had crossed forty feet of intervening space and was on top of Ursiel and the Genoskwa.

  One second, Grey was standing there, looking smug and anticipatory. The next, there was a blur in the air and then a creature was clawing its way up Ursiel’s back. It was about the size and vaguely the shape of a gorilla, but the head on its shoulders might have belonged to some kind of hideous werewolf-bulldog hybrid, and grotesquely elongated claws tipped its hands. Its weird golden eyes were Grey’s. Before Ursiel could realize that he was under attack, the Grey-creature was astride its ursine back, fangs sinking into the huge hump of muscle there, oversized jaws locked into place. The huge bear-thing reared up onto its hind legs, only for Grey to reach around to its head with gorilla-length arms and sink nine-inch claws like daggers into its eyes.

  Ursiel and the Genoskwa let out an ear-tearing roar of agony.

  I whirled the heavy end of my staff toward Nicodemus and snarled, “Forzare!” The hailstone flew at him like a bullet, but though the shock of Grey’s betrayal was still evident on his face, Nicodemus’s superb reflexes were still in fine operating order, and he dropped into a lateral roll, dodging the missile.

  Michael shouted, “Harry!” and hauled me to one side an instant before an orb of absolutely searing white heat appeared precisely where my head had been. The blast coming off of it was so intense that it singed the hair on that side of my head. I turned my head to see Ascher and Lasciel lifting her other hand, preparing to hurl a second sphere at me.

  “You get Nick,” I panted.

  “Seems fair,” Michael said.

  In the background, Ursiel continued to roar and thrash. I couldn’t see how it was going for Grey, but Ursiel crashed off of the stage and into a display featuring at least a dozen statues of various saints and holy figures, reducing them to rubble and scattering fabulously valuable gems in every direction.

  The second sphere came flying at me and I countered by lifting my staff and shouting, “Defendarius!” A broad wall of force shimmered into being in front of me, and the sphere smashed against it and exploded into a cloud of flame that spread out along its length and breadth, as if seeking a way around it. The heat was viciously intense, and enough of it would have burned through the shield—but it was a question of volume. Ascher had struck at me with pinpoint precision and intensity. I’d countered her with raw power, using a shield big enough to spread the heat over a wide enough area to keep it from burning through.

  Ascher let out a snarl of frustration and hurled another sphere. Her thinking was obvious—if she could keep pouring fire onto me and force me to hold up shield after shield against it, eventually she could either burn through it or exhaust my ability to keep holding it up. I’d have taken that fight against a lot of practitioners: There are relatively few wizards on the White Council who can stay with me in terms of pure magical horsepower. But while there are plenty of wizards who could wear themselves out pounding on my shields, I had a pretty solid intuition that Ascher could keep throwing fire until I was a gasping heap on the ground, especially with Lasciel’s knowledge and experience backing her up. Worse, Lasciel knew me, inside and out.

  Or at least, she had known me. So it was time to use a few tricks I’d developed since we’d parted ways.

  In the past, I’d worn rings designed to store a little excess kinetic energy every time I moved my arm. Then I could let loose the saved energy all in one place to pretty devastating effect when I really needed to do it. I hadn’t had the resources I needed to make new rings, but I’d carved the same spell in my new wizard’s staff.

  Seventy-seven times.

  It wasn’t as handy as my layered rings had been—instead of being broken up into multiple units, the energy of the
spell was all stored in one reservoir, so I only had the one shot.

  But it was a doozy.

  So as another white-hot sphere splashed into flame against my shield, I whirled the butt end of the staff where the energy storage spells were carved toward Ascher, focused my concentration on the shield, braced my feet, and shouted, “Arietius!”

  The staff bucked in my hands like a living thing and shoved my shoes several inches across the floor as the stored energy unleashed itself and drove into the rear of my shield. For a second, I worried about the staff shattering—I had never tried it with this much stored energy before, and there was always the chance that I had exceeded the design tolerance of the spell at some point. If I had, I would be the center of my own spectacular and splintery explosion. But my work was good and the staff functioned perfectly. I held the structure of the shield together and let the energy from the staff drive it forward, toward Ascher, and suddenly a large, obdurate, and extremely solid invisible wall was rushing at her like an oncoming freight train, shedding a trail of fire in its wake.

  I had never lowered the shield, and my actions had been obscured by all the fire chewing away at it—so Ascher recognized the danger a second too late, and that was where her inexperience showed. She might have real power and a gift with fire, but in a fight there’s no time to think your way through spells and counterspells. Either you’ve done your homework or you haven’t, and despite the advantage of having Lasciel in her corner, Ascher wasn’t ready for something like this. She was focused entirely on offense, not on protecting herself as well, and couldn’t come up with a counter in time.

  The wall hit her with about the same force as an oncoming garbage truck, and blew her right out of the veil of purple mist that clung to her naked form. She flew back off the stage in a windmill of flailing limbs, and crashed into a display of particularly fine ecclesiastical robes and garments, most of which burst into flame as the sheath of shimmering heat around her body brushed against them.