by Jim Butcher
"You think so?"
I couldn't resist jibing him, just a little. "Just think. If you'd messed it up," I said, as Lara slid into the car one long, perfect leg at a time, "you'd be in the limo with Lara ripping your clothes off right now."
Ramirez looked at the car and swallowed. "Um. Yeah. Close one."
"I've met several of the White Court," I said. "Lara's probably the smartest. She's the most civilized, progressive, adaptable. She's definitely the most dangerous."
"She didn't look that tough," Ramirez said, but he was frowning in thought as he said it.
"She's dangerous in a different way than most," I said. "But I think her word is good."
"It is," Ramirez said firmly. "I saw that much."
"It's one of the things that makes her dangerous," I said, and headed for the limo. "Stay cool."
We walked over and I leaned down to see Lara in the back of the limo, seated on one of the dogcart-style seats, all poise and beauty and gorgeous grey eyes. She smiled at me as I looked in, and crooked a finger.
"Step into my limo," said the spider to the fly.
And we did.
Chapter Thirty-Six
The limo rolled right past the enormous stone house that was the chateau proper. It was bigger than a parking garage, and covered with cornices and turrets and gargoyles, like some kind of neo-Medieval castle.
"We're, uh," I noted, "not stopping at the house."
"No," Lara said from the seat facing us. Even in the dark, you could see the glow of her luminous skin. "The conclave is being held in the Deeps." Her eyes glittered at me. "Less walking for everyone, that way."
I gave her a small smile and said, "I like the house. The whole castle-look thing. It's always nice to know you're living somewhere that could withstand a besieging army of Bohemian mercenaries if it had to."
"Or American wizards," she replied smoothly.
I gave her what I hoped was a wolfish smile, folded my arms, and watched the house go by. We turned down a little gravel lane and drove another mile or so before the car slowed and came to a stop. Bodyguard George got out and opened the door for Lara, whose thigh brushed against mine as she got out, and whose perfume smelled good enough to scramble my brain for a good two or three seconds.
Both I and Ramirez sat still for a second.
"That," I said, "is an awfully lovely woman. I thought I should let you know, kid, in case your inexperience had blinded you to the fact."
"Lying," Ramirez stated, blushing. "Evil."
I snickered and slid out of the car to follow Lara—and the three more bodyguards waiting for her—into the woods beside the gravel lane.
The last time I'd found the entrance to the Deeps, I'd been stumbling through the woods, focused on a tracking spell and tripping over roots and hummocks in the old-growth forest.
This time, there was a lighted path, with a red carpet, no less, leading down between the trees. The lights were all of soft blues and greens, small lamps that, upon a closer glance, proved to be elegant little crystal cages containing tiny, humanoid forms with wings. Faeries, tiny pixies, each surrounded by its own sphere of light, trapped and miserable, crouched in the cages.
Between each cage knelt more prisoners—humans, bound by nothing more than a single strand of white silk about their throats tied to a peg driven into the earth in front of them. They weren't naked. Lara wouldn't have gone in for anything that overt. Instead, they each wore a white silk kimono, accented with strands of silver thread.
Men and women, arrayed in a variety of ages, body types, hair colors, every single one of them beautiful, their eyes lowered as they knelt quietly. One of the young men sat shivering and was seemingly barely able to stay upright. His long, dark hair was marred with streaks of brittle white. His eyes were unfocused and he seemed totally unaware of anyone around him. His kimono was torn near the neck, leaving a broad swath of muscled chest exposed. There were raking nail marks, deep enough to draw tiny trickles of blood, all the way across one pectoral. There were repeated teeth marks deep in the slope of muscle between neck and shoulder, half a dozen sets of messy bruises and ugly little gashes. There were more nail marks, four side-by-side punctures, rather than rakes, on the other side of his neck.
He was also obviously, even painfully, aroused beneath the kimono.
Lara paused beside him and rolled her eyes in irritation. "Madeline?"
"Yes, ma'am," said one of the bodyguards.
"Oh, for hunger's sake." She sighed. "Get him indoors before the conclave is over or she'll finish him off on her way out."
"Yes, ma'am," he said, turned aside, and began speaking to nobody. I spotted a wire running to an earpiece.
I kept walking down the long line of kneeling captives and trapped pixies, and got angrier with every step.
"They're willing, Dresden," Lara said a few paces later. "All of them."
"I'm sure they are," I said. "Now."
She laughed. "There is no shortage of mortals who long to kneel before another, wizard. There never has been."
We passed several more kneeling men and women who looked mussed and dazed, though none so badly as the first. We also walked past spaces where there was a peg and a strip of white cloth—but no person kneeling within.
"I'm sure they all knew that they might die by doing it," I said.
She shrugged one shoulder. "It happens at these meetings. Guests have no need to dispose of a body, since as hosts we are responsible for such necessities. As a result, many of our visitors make no effort to control themselves."
"You're responsible, all right." I gripped my staff harder and kept my voice neutral. "What about the little folk?"
"They trespassed upon our land," she replied, her voice calm. "Most would simply have killed them, rather than pressing them into service."
"Yeah. You're all heart."
"Where there is life, there is hope, Dresden," Lara replied. "My father's policies on such matters have changed of late. Death is… gauche, when it can be avoided. Alternative courses are far more profitable and agreeable to all involved. It is for precisely that reason that my father seeks to help create a peace between your folk and mine."
I glanced aside at the shining eyes of a short-haired redhead in her early thirties, absolutely lovely, her kimono still open from whatever had fed on her, the tips of her small breasts taut as she panted, the muscles of a lean stomach still trembling. Behind us, the thralls stretched out into the darkness. Ahead of us, they went on for a hundred yards or more. So many of them.
I started to shudder, but the faces of the women the Skavis and his pretenders had murdered flickered through my mind, and I fought it down. Like hell was I going to let Lara see me look discomfited, no matter how sick the display of the White Court's seductive power made me feel.
The path went for another hundred yards through the woods and stopped at the mouth of a cave. It wasn't large or sinister or dramatic. It was simply a fissure in an almost-flat stretch of ground at the base of a tree, with the hypnotic sway of firelight dancing somewhere below. There were guards outside—set back in the woods, out of obvious sight. I spotted a couple of deer stands, occupied by dark shapes. There were others standing silent sentinel. I assumed that there would be more guards I could not see.
Lara turned to us. "Gentlemen," she said. "If you will wait here for a moment, I will send someone when the White King is ready to receive you."
I nodded once, settled my staff on the ground, and leaned on it a little, saying nothing. Ramirez took his cue from me.
Lara gave me a level look. Then she turned and descended into the Deeps, flawlessly graceful despite her high heels.
"You've met her before," Ramirez noted quietly.
"Yeah."
"Where?"
"Set of a porn movie. She was acting."
He stared at me for a second. Then shrugged in acceptance and said, "What were you doing?"
"Stuntman," I replied.
"Uh…" he said.
<
br /> "I'd been hired by the producer to find out why people involved with the movie were being killed."
"Did you?"
"Yeah."
"So… did you and she…?"
"No," I said. "You can tell from how I'm breathing and possessed of my own will." I nodded toward the entrance of the cave, where a shadow briefly darkened the firelight from below. "Someone's coming."
A young woman in an especially fine white kimono, heavily embroidered with silver thread, emerged from the fissure. I thought she was blond for a second, but that was because of the light. As she approached us with slow, quiet steps, her hair turned blue, then green, passing through the light of the faerie lamps. Her hip-length hair was pure white. She was lovely, very nearly as much so as Lara, but there was none of the predatory sense of hunger in her that I'd come to associate with the White Court. She was slim, and sweetly shaped, and looked quite frail and vulnerable. It took me a second to recognize her.
"Justine?" I asked.
She gave me a little smile. It was oddly disconnected, as if her dark eyes were focused on something other than what she smiled at, and she never looked directly at me. She spoke, her words flecked with little pauses and emphasis on odd syllables, as if she were speaking a foreign language in which she had merely technical proficiency. "It's Harry Dresden. Hello, Harry. You look dashing this evening."
"Justine," I said, accepting her hand as she offered it to me. I bowed over it. "You look… ambulatory."
She gave me a shy smile and spoke in a dreamy singsong. "I'm healing. One day I'll be all better and go back to my lord."
Her fingers, though, tightened hard on mine as she spoke, a quick and measured sequence, to the rhythm of "shave and a haircut."
I blinked for a second and then squeezed back on the beat for "six bits."
"I'm sure any man would be delighted to see you."
She blushed daintily and bowed to us. "So kind, my lord. Would you accompany me, please?"
We did. Justine led us down into the fissure, which proved to be a smooth-walled descent into the earth. From there, our way forward entered a torchlit tunnel, its walls also polished smooth, and from far below us came the music of echoing voices and sounds dancing through the stone, being subtly changed and altered by the acoustics as they came up from below.
It was a long, winding descent down, though the tunnel was wide and the footing steady. I remembered the nightmarish flight from the Deeps the last time I'd been there, while Murphy and I dragged my half-dead half brother all the way up before we'd been consumed in a storm of psychic slavery Lara was whipping up to take control of her father, and through him the White Court. It had been a close one.
Justine stopped about two-thirds of the way down, at a spot that had been marked with a bit of chalk on the floor. "Here," she said in a quiet—but not at all dreamy—voice. "We can't be overheard from here."
"What's going on?" I demanded. "How are you walking around like this?"
"It doesn't matter right now," Justine said. "I'm better."
"You aren't crazy, are you?" I demanded. "You nearly scratched my eyes out that one time."
She shook her head with a frustrated little motion. "Medication. It isn't… Look, I'm all right for now. I need you to listen to me."
"Fine," I said.
"Lara wished me to tell you what to expect," Justine said, dark eyes intent. "Right now, Lord Skavis is below, calling for an end to any plans for negotiations with the Council, citing the work of his son as an illustration of the profit of continuing hostilities."
"His son ?" I said.
Justine grimaced and nodded. "The agent you slew was the heir apparent of House Skavis."
Mouse might have been the one to do the actual killing, but the Accords regarded him as a mere weapon, like a gun. I was the one who had pulled the trigger. "Who is in charge of Malvora?"
"Lady Cesarina Malvora," Justine said, giving me a smile of approval. "Whose son Vittorio will be quite insulted by Lord Skavis's lies about all the hard work he and Madrigal Raith did."
I nodded. "When does Lara want me to make my entrance?"
"She told me that you would know best," Justine said.
"Right," I said. "Take me to where I can hear them talking, then."
"That's going to be a problem," Justine said. "They're speaking Ancient Etruscan. I can follow enough of it to give you an idea what—"
"It isn't a problem," I said.
Is it ? I thought toward Lasciel's shadow.
Naturally not, my host , came the ghostly reply.
Groovy , I thought. Thanks, Lash .
A startled second passed. Then she replied, You are welcome.
"Just get me to where I can hear them," I told Justine.
"This way," she replied at once, and hurried on down the passage, stopping not twenty feet shy of the main cavern. Even so close, I could see very little of the cavern beyond—though I could hear voices raised in speech that sounded strange and sibilant in my ears and English in my head.
"… the very heart of the matter," a rolling basso voice orated. "That the mortal freaks and their ilk stand on the brink of destruction. Now is the time to tighten our grip and neuter the kine once and for all." Lord Skavis, I presumed.
A strong and lazily confident baritone answered the speaker, and I recognized the voice of the remains of the creature who had killed my mother at once. "My dear Skavis," answered Lord Raith, the White King, "I can hardly say that I find the notion of a neutered humanity entirely appealing."
There was a round of silvery laughter, men and women alike. It rippled through the air and brushed against me like an idly ardent lover. I stood fast until it had gone by. Ramirez had to rest a hand on the wall to keep his balance. Justine swayed like a reed, her eyes fluttering shut and then opening again.
Skavis's deep voice resumed. "Your personal amusements and preferences aside, my King, the freaks' biggest weakness has always been the length of time it took them to develop their skills to the most formidable levels. For the first time in history, we have degraded or neutralized their many advantages altogether, partly due to the fortunes of war, and partly thanks to the resourcefulness of the kine in developing their arts in travel and communication. The House of Skavis has proven that we stand holding an unprecedented opportunity to crush the freaks and bring the kine under control at last. Only a fool would allow it to slip between his impotent fingers. My King."
"Only a fool," came a strident woman's voice, "would make such a pathetic claim."
"The Crown," Raith interjected, "recognizes Cesarina, the Lady Malvora."
"Thank you, my King," Lady Malvora said. "While I cannot help but admire my Lord Skavis's audacity, I fear that I have no choice but to cut short his attempt to steal glory not his own from the honorable House of Malvora."
Raith's voice remained amused. "This should be interesting. By all means, elaborate, dear Cesarina."
"Thank you, my King. My son, Vittorio, was on the scene and will explain."
A male voice, flat and a little nasal, spoke up, and I recognized Grey Cloak's accent at once. "My lord, the deaths inflicted upon the freakishly blooded kine indeed happened as Lord Skavis describes. But in fact, it was no agent of his House who accomplished this deed. If, as he claims, his son accomplished it, then where is he? Why has he not come forward to bear testimony in person?"
The words fell on what I could only describe as a glowering silence. If Lord Skavis was anything like the rest of the Whites I'd met, Vittorio needed to bury him fast, or spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder.
"Then who did accomplish this fell act of warfare?" Raith asked, his tone mild.
Vittorio spoke again, and I could just imagine the way his chest must have puffed out. "I did, my King, with the assistance of Madrigal of the House of Raith."
Raith's voice gained an edge of anger. "This, despite the fact that a cessation of hostilities has been declared, pending the discussion of an armistice
."
"What is done is done, my King," Lady Malvora interjected. "My dear friend Lord Skavis was correct in this fact: The freaks are weak. Now is the time to finish them—now and forever. Not to allow them time to regain their feet."
"Despite the fact that the White King thinks otherwise?"
I could hear Lady Malvora's smile. "Many things change, O King."
There was a booming sound, maybe a fist slamming down onto the arm of a throne. "This does not. You have violated my commands and undermined my policies. That is treason, Cesarina."
"Is it, O King?" Lady Malvora shot back. "Or is it treason to our very blood to show mercy to an enemy who is upon the brink of defeat?"
"I would be willing to forgive excessive zeal, Cesarina," Raith snarled. "I am less inclined to tolerate the stupidity behind this mindless provocation."
Cold, mocking laughter fell on a sudden, dead silence. "Stupidity? In what way, O weak and aged King? In what way are the deaths of the kine anything but sweetness to the senses, balm to the Hunger?" The quality of her voice changed, as if she changed her facing in the cavern. I could imagine her turning to address the audience, scorn ringing in her tone. "We are strong, and the strong do as they wish. Who shall call us to task for it, O King? You?"
If that wasn't a straight line, my name isn't Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden.
I lifted my staff and slammed it down on the floor, forcing an effort of will through it to focus the energy of the blow into a far smaller area than the end of the staff. It struck the stone floor, shattering a chunk the size of a big dinner platter with a detonation almost indistinguishable from thunder. Another effort of will sent a rolling wave of silent fire, no more than five or six inches high, down the tunnel floor, in a red carpet of my very own.
I strode down it, Ramirez beside me, the fire rolling back away from our feet as we went, boots striking the stone together. We entered the cavern and found it packed with pale and startled beings, the entire place a wash of beautiful faces and gorgeous wardrobes—except for twenty feet around the entrance, where everyone had hurried away from the blazing herald of our presence.
