SMALL FAVOR tdf-10

by Jim Butcher

  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

  M y 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 wa
y 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 was 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.

  Usually I draw in power only when it’s ready to flow directly out of me again, channeling the energy through my mind and into the structure of a spell. This time I brought it in without ever letting it out, and it built up as a pressure behind my eyes. My body temperature jumped by at least four or five degrees, and my muscles and bones screamed with sudden pain while my vision went red and flickered with spots of black. Static electricity crackled with every single motion of my limbs, bright green and painfully sharp, until it sounded like I was running across a field of bubble wrap. My head pounded like every New Year’s hangover I’d ever had, all in the same spot, and my lungs felt like the air had turned to acid. I concentrated on keeping my feet underneath me and moving. One step at a time.

  I pounded through the entry to the Oceanarium, felt a shivering sensation as I ran right through a veil I had not sensed was there, and all but barreled into a demonic figure crouched down on the floor. I skidded to a stop, and there was an instant of surprise as we stared at each other.

  The Denarian was basically humanoid, as most of them were, a gaunt, even skeletal grey-skinned figure. Spurs of bone jutted out from every joint, slightly curved and wickedly pointed. Greasy, lanky hair hung from its knobby skull to its skinny shoulders, and its two pairs of eyes, one very human brown and one glowing demonic green, were both wide and staring in shock.

  It was crouched amidst the preparations of a spell of some kind-a candle, a chalk circle on the floor, a cup made from a skull and filled with water-and it wore a heavy canvas messenger bag slung across one shoulder. One hand was still down in the bag, as if it had been in the midst of drawing something out of it when I’d come charging up.

  Fortunately for me, my mind had been in motion. His had been tangled up in whatever spell he was doing, and he was slower to get back into gear than I was.

  So I kicked him in the face.

  He went down with a grunt, and a chip of broken tooth skittered across the floor. I didn’t know what spell he was getting together, but it seemed a good bet that I didn’t want him to finish it. I broke his circle with my will as I crossed it with my body, unleashing a ripple of random and diffused energies that had never had the chance to coalesce into something more coherent. I knocked his skull goblet into one of the enormous nearby tanks with my staff as I raised it and pointed one end of it at the stunned Denarian, snarling, “Forzare!”

  Some of that searing storm of power I was holding in screamed out of my body and down through my staff, hurtling at the Denarian, an invisible cannonball surrounded by a cloud of static discharge. It was more power than I’d meant to unleash. If it hit him it was going to throw him halfway across Lake Michigan.

  But while the Denarian’s mortal set of eyes may have still been blank with shock and surprise, the glowing green set was bright with rage. The thorny Denarian lifted his left hand in a sweeping gesture, made a rippling motion of his fingers, drawing his hand toward his mouth, and…

  …and he just ate my spell.

  He ate it. And then that gaunt, skeletal face spread in a toothy smile.

  “That,” I muttered, “is incredibly unfair.”

  I lifted my left hand just as the Denarian crouched and vomited out a spinning cloud of black threads that came whirling through the air in dozens of tiny, spiraling arcs. I brought up my shield, but none of the threads actually came down to touch me-they landed all around me instead, i
n a nearly perfect circle.

  And an instant later my shield stuttered and shorted out. I still had the energy for it-I hadn’t been cut off. But somehow the Denarian’s weird spell had disrupted the magic as it left my body. I tried to throw another bolt of force at him, and got to feel supremely silly, waving my staff around to absolutely zero effect.

  “Interruptions,” the Denarian said in an odd accent. “Always the interruptions.”

  His left hand returned to rummaging in his bag, while his mortal eyes went back to the now-scattered remnants of the spell, evidently dismissing my existence. The green eyes remained focused on me, though, and darkness suddenly gathered around the forefinger of his upraised right hand.

  Time slowed down.

  Dark light leapt toward me.

  Sheer defiance made me step forward, trying to brush past the little spinning columns of shadow that surrounded me, only to find them as solid as steel bars, and colder than a yeti’s fridge. I threw my magic against those bars to no avail as a shaft of dark lightning streaked toward my heart.

  Something happened.

  I don’t know how to describe it. I was trying to slam another bolt of force between the bars of my conjured prison when something…else…got involved. Ever been carrying something and had someone intentionally, unexpectedly jostle your elbow? It felt something like that-a tiny but critically timed nudge just as I threw my will into a last futile effort of defiance.

  Power screamed as it wrenched its way out of my body. It shattered the black-thread bars of my prison and left a streak of metallic light on the air behind it for an instant, reflective, like a trail of liquid chrome. It caught the falling Denarian in a massive silvery simulacrum of my own fist.

  I actually felt my fingers close over the gaunt, skeletal, grey-skinned figure, felt the numerous spurs of bone jutting from its joints press painfully into my flesh. I flung it away from me with a cry, and the huge silver hand flung the Denarian into the nearest wall, ripping through several feet of expensive stone terracing and carefully simulated Pacific Northwest.