Skin Game (34 page)

I
just stood there for a moment, still stunned at what Nicodemus had done.

I tried to think of what would have to happen to motivate me to do something like that to Maggie. And it just didn’t click. There was nothing, nothing on earth I wouldn’t do to protect my child.

But you were willing to cut her mother’s throat, weren’t you?
said a bitter little voice inside me.
Are you any better?

Yeah. I was better. What I’d done to Susan had been at least partly her choice, too, and we’d done it to save Maggie and by extension the tens or hundreds of thousands or millions of victims the Red Court would have claimed in the future.

Nicodemus had consigned his daughter to death for what? A room welling up with a golden glow that . . .

Okay.

I’m not what most people think of as a greedy sort of guy, but . . .

All of us rolled forward a few steps, toward that golden light. Even Michael.

“That’s it,” Anna Valmont said quietly.

Ascher swallowed, and let out a nervous little laugh. “What do you think is in there?”

“Fortune and glory, kid,” I said. “Fortune and glory.”

“Dresden, Ascher,” Nicodemus said. “Check the way in for any further magical defenses. Valmont, watch for mechanical booby traps. The
Genoskwa will accompany you and intercede should any guardian appear.”

“I thought once we were through the three gates, we were in the clear,” I said.

“My specific information, beyond here, is limited to inventory,” Nicodemus said. “It is at this point that I had assumed the intervention of more mythic forces, if they were to be had.”

“He’s right,” Valmont said. “You never assume you’re in the clear until you’ve gotten the goods, gotten away, and gotten liquid.”

“Michael,” I said, “come with. Just in case there’s anything big, bad, and smelly that tries to kill me.”

The Genoskwa let out an almost absentminded growl. His beady eyes gleamed reflected golden light.

“Of course,” Michael said. He carried
Amoracchius
at port arms, across the front of his body, grasping the blade lightly in one gloved hand with the other on the handle, rather than sheathing it.

“Grey,” Nicodemus said, “watch the rear. If you see anything coming, warn us.”

“Going to be hard to collect my loot from out here,” Grey said.

“I’ll spell you once I have the Grail.”

Grey nodded, albeit reluctantly. “All right.”

“Dresden,” Nicodemus said.

I took point, with Ascher on my right hand and Valmont on my left. Michael and the Genoskwa followed, a pair of mismatched bookends, though I noted that the Genoskwa was not making threatening noises or gestures at the wielder of
Amoracchius
. The Swords have a way of inspiring that kind of wariness in true villains.

I shook my head and focused on the task at hand, moving forward slowly, my magical senses extended, searching for any hint of wards, spells, or energies or entities unknown. Beside me, I could feel Ascher doing the same thing, though my sense of her was that she was tuned in on a slightly different bandwidth than I was, magically speaking. She was hunting for more subtle traps, illusions, psychic land mines. She wouldn’t be able to detect as many things as I would, but she would probably be better at spotting what she was looking for. Valmont had removed an
old-style incandescent flashlight from her bag, one that was unlikely to fail in our presence unless some serious magical energy started flying. She shone it carefully, slowly on the ground and sweeping the walls ahead of us, watching for the shadows cast by trip wires, or pressure plates, or whatever other fiendish things she would probably know all about finding.

We crossed to the arch, one slow step at a time, and then into the tunnel. I strained my senses to their utmost.

Nothing.

And then we were in Hades’ vault.

. . . it . . .

. . . uh . . .

Imagine Smaug’s treasure hoard. Now imagine Smaug with crippling levels of obsessive-compulsive disorder and fanatic good taste.

It’s a pale description, and in no way a substitute for seeing it in person, but it’s the best I can do, except to say that looking upon Hades’ treasure vault made me feel like a dirty, grubby rat who had gnawed his way into the pantry. And my heart lurched into thunder. And I’m reasonably certain the pupils of my eyes vanished, to be replaced by dollar signs.

The light came primarily from the outstretched hands of two twenty-foot-tall golden statues in the center of the room. I found myself walking to one side, enough to see the details of each statue. Both consisted of the shapes of three women, standing back to back, in a triangle, their arms thrust outward and up, palms lifted to the ceiling. One of the women was an ancient crone. The next was a woman in the full bloom of her strength and maturity. The third was that of a young woman, recently matured out of childhood. The flames of one statue burned golden-green. The other statue’s flames were an icy green-blue.

And just looking at that, my heart started beating faster all over again.

Because I’d met every single one of them. I recognized their faces.

“Is that Hecate?” Ascher murmured, staring up at the statues in awe. “The triple goddess of the crossroads, right?”

I swallowed. “Uh. It . . . Yes, it might be.”

And it might also be Grannies Summer and Winter, Mab, Titania, Sarissa, and Molly Carpenter. But I didn’t say anything about that.

I pulled my eyes down from the statues and forced myself to look around the rest of the vault.

The room was about the size of a football field. The walls were a parquet of platinum and gold triangles, stretching up out of sight overhead. The floor was a smooth surface of white marble shot through with veins of pure, gleaming silver. Corinthian columns supported rooftops straight from ancient Athens in scores of small, separate display areas around the vault. Some of them were raised as much as seven or eight feet off the floor, and had to be reached by stairs of more silver-shot marble. Others were sunken in descending rows in a curling bow that looked almost like a Greek amphitheater, if it had been built with box seating.

I looked at the nearest . . . shrine. Or display case. Or whatever they were.

The spaces between the columns had been filled with walls made from bricks of solid gold. Those were just the backdrop. The
backdrop
.

The nearest case was filled with paintings by Italian Renaissance masters, all working in the theme of divinity, showing images of saints and the Virgin and the Christ. Veneziano. Donatello. Botticelli. Raphael. Castagno. Michelangelo. Freaking da Vinci. Maybe fifty paintings in all, each displayed as meticulously as they might have been in the Louvre, in protected cases, with lights shining just so upon them from oddly shaped lanterns that might have been made from bronze and that put out no smoke whatsoever.

Surrounding the paintings, framing them, was a variety of topiary shapes—except instead of being made from living plants, I saw, after several glances, that they’d been made from emeralds. I couldn’t tell how whatever craftsman had shaped them had done it. Hell, I could barely tell that they weren’t plants at all. A fountain poured water silently into a shining pool in the display’s center, but then I saw that it wasn’t water, but diamonds, tiny and shining, pouring out in streams that somehow gave the impression of liquid.

That fountain could have filled every backpack we’d brought with us, plus all the improvised containers we could manufacture from our clothes. Never mind the emeralds. Never mind the tons of gold. Never
mind the hundreds of millions of dollars in priceless art, paintings that had probably been written off as lost forever.

That was only one of the displays. And, I realized, as I swept my eyes slowly around me, it was one of the more modest ones.

“Okay,” Ascher breathed, her eyes wide. “I don’t know if I’m about to pass out or have an orgasm.”

“Yeah,” I croaked. “Me too.”

Valmont shook off the awe of the place first. She strode over to the diamond-fountain, unzipped her backpack, and held it beneath the spigot in a matter-of-fact gesture, filling it as if it were a bucket.

“Seriously?” Ascher asked her. “You aren’t even going to shop?”

“Highest value for the weight,” Valmont replied tightly. “And they’re small enough to move easily. There’s no point in taking something you can’t sell when you get it back home.”

“But there’s so much,” Ascher breathed.

“Ascher,” I said. After a couple of seconds, I said, louder, “Hannah.”

“Uh, yeah?”

“Go tell Nicodemus that it looks clear. Let’s get our stuff and get gone.”

“Right,” she said. “Right. Gone.” She turned and hurried from the room.

I turned to Michael and the Genoskwa and said, “I’m going to do a quick circuit of the room with Valmont and check for anything else, just in case. Don’t wander anywhere until I give you the high sign.”

Michael nodded slowly. There has never been a backpack made that was big enough for the Genoskwa. But he had several military-style duffel bags looped to a long piece of cargo strapping like you see used on diesel trailers on the highway.

“Come on, Anna,” I said. “Let’s check for more booby traps.” I started walking. Valmont shouldered her pack and came after me. I lifted my staff as we went, pouring out more light, until Valmont had to squint against it, and we walked out of sight of the others. Our shadows faded to mere slips beneath the extreme illumination.

“What’s with the light show?” she asked me.

“Trust me,” I said quietly, and dropped my voice to a bare whisper,
leaning down close to her ear. “When it starts, stay close to me. I’ll protect you.”

Her eyes widened and she gave me a quick nod without saying anything back.

I nodded my approval, then leaned my staff against another Corinthian column, putting enough effort of will into it to make the light continue issuing forth for a while. Then I put a finger against my lips, and beckoned Valmont to follow me.

I cut immediately through the displays to get to the amphitheater, and descended into it, heading for the stage, at the feet of the two enormous statues.

Valmont looked back at my brightly blazing staff in sudden understanding.
Look, everybody, Dresden and Valmont are right there, see? Nowhere near the heart of the collection.

The amphitheater stage, in stark contrast to every other display in the vault, had no overwhelming riches, fantastic jewels, or precious metals. It was stark and bare, with a single block of silver-veined marble rising about four feet off the stage floor in its center.

And upon the marble sat five simple objects.

An ancient wooden placard, its paint so faded that the symbols could not be recognized.

A circlet woven from thorny branches.

A clay cup.

A folded cloth.

A knife with a wooden handle and a leaf-shaped blade.

Why take one priceless holy relic when you could take
five
of them?

And I knew exactly what relic Nicodemus truly wanted.

I turned to Anna and mouthed, “Check it.”

She nodded and hunkered down to examine the block, moving cautiously around it. Meanwhile, I extended my senses toward them, feeling carefully for any enchantments that might be protecting them.

That was a mistake. There weren’t any traps on the objects, but the collective aura of power around them seared my awareness as sharply as if I’d jammed a penny in an electrical outlet. I let out a hiss and leaned back, while my thoughts blazed with the energy focused upon those artifacts—a
combined aura that made the thrumming power of a roused
Amoracchius
seem like a low-wattage lightbulb by comparison.

“My God,” I breathed, before I could remember to remain silent. “These are
weapons
.” I looked slowly around me. “This isn’t a vault. It’s an
armory
.”

Anna Valmont did not respond.

In fact, she didn’t move at all.

I stepped around the block and found her peering at its rear side, her expression focused in concentration. She was entirely frozen.

I then realized that the quality of the light had changed, and I looked up at the flames in the outstretched hands of the two Hecate statues. The flames had ceased flickering. They hadn’t gone out—they’d simply frozen in place.

The hairs on the back of my neck didn’t go up so much as they let out tiny, hirsute whimpers and started trembling as violently as the rest of me.

“You are, of course, correct,” said a basso rumble of a voice from behind me. “This is an armory.”

Slowly I turned.

A man in an entirely black suit stood on the amphitheater stage behind me. He was seven feet tall if he was an inch, with the proportions of a professional athlete and the noble features of a warrior king. His hair was dark and swept back from his face in a mane that fell to the base of his neck. His beard was equally black, though marked at the chin with a single streak of silver. His eyes . . .

I jerked my gaze away from those caverns of utter midnight before I could be drawn into them. My stomach twisted, and I suddenly had to fight not to throw up. Or fall down. Or start weeping.

“Wh—” I stammered. “Wh—wh— Are, uh, y-y-you—”

“In point of fact,” he said, “it is
my
armory, mortal.”

“I can explain,” I blurted.

But before I could try, Hades, the Lord of the Underworld, Greek god of death, seized the front of my duster, and a cloud of black fire engulfed me.

T
he black fire faded and left me standing half crouched down with my arms up around my head. It’s possible that I was making a panicked noise, which I strangled abruptly when I realized that the fire had neither burned nor consumed nor otherwise harmed me in any way at all.

My heart beat very loudly in my ears, and I made myself control my breathing and stand up straight. The terror didn’t fade so much as drop to manageable levels. After all, if I wasn’t dead, it was because Hades didn’t want me dead.

He did, however, apparently want to speak to me in a different room, because we were no longer in the vault.

I stood in a chamber that might have belonged to a Spartan king. The furnishings were few, and simple, but they were exquisitely crafted of nothing but the finest materials. A wooden panel, stained with fine smoke and time, framed a fireplace, and was carved with images of the gods and goddesses of Greece scattered about the slopes of Mount Olympus. Two large chairs of deep, polished red wood and rich black leather sat before the fire, with a low wooden table between them, polished to the same gleaming, deep red finish. On the table was a ceramic bottle. A simple, empty wineglass sat next to it.

I looked around the chamber. A bookcase stood against each wall, volumes neatly aligned, and the spines showed a dizzying variety of languages. There were no doors.

I wasn’t alone.

Hades sat in one of the chairs in front of the fire, holding a second wineglass in one negligent hand. His dark eyes gleamed as he stared at the flames. The light was better in here than it had been out in the vault. I could see several dozen tiny objects moving in a steady circular orbit around his head, maybe eight or ten inches out from his skull. Each looked like a small, dark mass of shadow, trailing little tendrils of black and deep purple smoke or mist and . . .

Oh, Hell’s bells. It was mordite. A substance so deadly that if it simply touched anything alive, it would all but disintegrate it on the spot, devouring its life energy like a tiny black hole. Hades was wearing a
crown
made of it.

On the floor next to Hades was a mass of fur and muscle. Lying flat on its belly, the beast’s shoulders still came up over the arms of the chair, and its canine paws would have left prints the size of dinner plates. One of its heads was panting, the way any dog might do during a dream. The other two heads were snoring slightly. The dog’s coat was sleek and black, except for a single blaze of silver-white fur that I could see on one side of its broad chest.

“Sir Harry,” Hades rumbled. “Knight of Winter. Be welcome in my hall.”

That made me blink. With that greeting, Hades had just offered me his hospitality. There are very few hard and fast rules in the supernatural world, but the roles of guest and host come very close to being holy concepts. It wasn’t unheard of for a guest to betray his host, or vice versa, but horrible fates tended to follow those who did, and anything that managed to survive violating that custom would have its name blackened irreversibly.

Hades had just offered me his protection—and with it, the obligations of a good guest. Obligations like not
stealing
anything from his host, for example. I had to tread very carefully here. Bad Things Would Happen To Me if I dared to violate my guest-right. But I couldn’t help but think that Bad Things Would Happen To Me even faster if I insulted a freaking Greek god by refusing his invitation.

I remember very little of my father, but one thing I do remember is him telling me always to be polite. It costs you nothing but breath, and can buy you as much as your life.

What, don’t look at me like that. I’m only a wiseass to monsters.

And people who really need it.

And when it suits me to be so.

Oh yeah. I was going to have to watch my step very, very carefully here.

“Thank you, Lord Hades,” I said, after a pause. My voice quavered only a little.

He nodded without looking away from the fire, and moved his free hand in a languid gesture toward the other chair. “Please, join me.”

I moved gingerly and sat down slowly in the chair.

Hades gave me a brief smile. He poured wine from the ceramic bottle into the other glass, and I took it with a nod of thanks. I took a sip. I’m not really a wine guy, but this tasted like expensive stuff, dark and rich. “I . . . ,” I began, then thought better of it and shut my mouth.

Hades’ eyes shifted to me and his head tilted slightly. He nodded.

“I feel that I should ask you about the passage of time,” I said. “It is possible that time-sensitive events are occurring without your knowledge as we speak.”

“Very little in the lives of you or your companions has occurred without my knowledge for the past several days,” Hades replied.

I got that sinking feeling that reminded me of all the times I got called in front of the principal’s desk in junior high. “You, uh. You know?”

He gave me a very mildly long-suffering look.

“Right,” I said quietly. “It’s your realm. Of course you know.”

“Just so,” he said. “That was fairly well-done at the Gate of Ice, by the way. Relatively few who attempt it take the time to watch first.”

“Um,” I said. “Thank you?”

He smiled, briefly. “Do not concern yourself with time. It currently passes very, very slowly for your companions at the vault, as compared to here.”

“Oh,” I said. “Okay. That’s good.”

He nodded. He took a sip of wine, directed his gaze back upon the fire and trailed the fingers of one hand down over the nearest head of the dog sleeping beside his chair. “I am not what the current age of man would call a ‘people person,’” he said, frowning. “I have never been
terribly social. If I had the skill, I would say words to you that would put you at ease and assure you that you are in no immediate peril of my wrath.”

“Your actions have already done so,” I said.

The wispiest shade of a smile line touched the corners of his eyes. “Ah. You have a certain amount of perception, then.”

“I used to think so,” I said. “Then I started getting older and realized how clueless I am.”

“The beginning of wisdom, or so Socrates would have it,” Hades said. “He says so every time we have brunch.”

“Wow,” I said. “Socrates is, uh, down here?”

Hades arched an eyebrow. He lifted his free hand, palm up.

“Right,” I said. “Sorry. Um. Do you mind if I ask . . . ?”

“His fate, in the Underworld?” Hades said.

I nodded.

Hades’ mouth ticked up at one corner. “People question him.”

The dog took note that it was no longer being petted, and the nearest head lifted up to nudge itself beneath Hades’ hand again. The Lord of the Underworld absentmindedly went back to petting it, like any man might with his dog.

The second head opened one eye and looked at me from beneath a shaggy canine brow. Then it yawned and went back to sleep.

I sipped some more wine, feeling a little off-balance, and asked, “Why did you, um, intervene in the . . . the intrusion, just now?”

Hades considered the question for a while before he said, “Perhaps I did so to thwart you and punish you. Do not villains do such things?”

“Except you aren’t a villain,” I said.

Dark, dark eyes turned to me. The fire popped and crackled.

“Granted, I’m basing that on the classical tales,” I said. “Which could be so much folklore, or which could have left out a lot of details or wandered off the truth in that much time. But you aren’t the Greek version of the Devil.”

“You’d hardly think so from the television,” Hades said mildly.

“TV rarely does the original stories justice,” I said. “But the stories bear out that you might not be such an awful person. I mean, your brothers got up to all kinds of shenanigans. Like, utterly dysfunctional
shenanigans. Turning into a bull and seducing a virgin? How jaded do you have to be for
that
to sound like fun?”

“Careful,” Hades said, very, very gently. “I do not deny anything you say—but they are, after all, family.”

“Yeah, uh, right,” I said. “Well. My point is that they each had a sphere of responsibility of their own, and yet they seemed to spend a lot of time maybe neglecting that responsibility—which is not my place to judge, sure, but such a judgment might not be without supporting evidence.”

Hades flicked a few fingers in acknowledgment of my statement.

“But the thing is, there’s no stories about you doing that. The others could sometimes show capricious temper and did some pretty painful things to people. You didn’t. You had a reputation for justice, and never for cruelty. Except for that . . . that thing with your wife, maybe.”

Fire reflected very brightly in his dark eyes. “How I stole Persephone, you mean?”

“Did you?” I asked.

And regretted it almost immediately. For a second, I wanted very badly to know a spell that would let me melt through the floor in a quivering puddle of please-don’t-kill-me.

Hades stared at me for a long, intense period of silence and then breathed out something that might have been an extremely refined snort from his nose and sipped more wine. “She came of her own will. Her mother failed to cope. Empty-nest syndrome.”

I leaned forward, fascinated despite myself. “Seriously? And . . . the pomegranate seeds thing?”

“Something of a political fiction,” Hades said. “Hecate’s idea, and my brother ran with it. As a compromise, no one came away from it happy.”

“That’s supposedly the mark of a good compromise,” I said.

Hades grimaced and said, “It was necessary at the time.”

“The stories don’t record it quite that way,” I said. “I seem to recall Hecate leading Demeter in search of Persephone.”

That comment won a flash of white, white teeth. “That much is certainly true. Hecate led Demeter around. And around and around. It was her wedding present to us.”

I blinked slowly at that notion. “A honeymoon free of your mother-in-law.”

“Worth more than gold or jewels,” Hades said. “But as I said, I’ve never been the most social of my family. I never asked the muses to inspire tales of me, or visited my worshipers with revelations of the truth—what few I had, anyway. Honestly, I rarely saw the point of mortals worshiping me. They were going to come to my realm sooner or later, regardless of what they did. Did they think it would win them leniency in judging their shades?” He shook his head. “That isn’t how I operate.”

I regarded him seriously for a moment, frowning, thinking. “You didn’t answer my question.”

“Words are not my strong suit,” he said. “Did you ask the best question?”

I sat back in the chair, swirling the wine a little.

Hades had known we were coming, and we’d gotten in anyway. He’d known who I was. And there was, quite obviously, some kind of connection between Hades and the Queens of Faerie. I sipped at the wine. Add all that together and . . .

I nearly choked on the mouthful as I swallowed.

That won a brief but genuine smile from my host. “Ah,” he said. “Dawn.”

“You
let
Nicodemus find out about this place,” I said.

“And?”

“Mab. This is Mab’s play, isn’t it?”

“Why would she do such a thing?” Hades asked me, mock reproof in his voice.

“Weapons,” I said. “The war with the Outsiders. Mab wants more weapons. Why just get revenge when she can throw in a shopping trip at the same time?”

Hades sipped wine, his eyes glittering.

I stared at him, suddenly feeling horrified. “Wait. Are you telling me that I’m
supposed
to take those things out of here?”

“A much better question,” Hades noted. “My armory exists to contain weapons of terrible power during times when they are not needed. I collect them and keep them to prevent their power from being abused in quieter times.”

“But why lock them away where anyone with enough resources can get them?” I asked.

“To prevent anyone without the skill or the commitment to use them well from having them,” he said. “It is not my task to keep them from all of mortal kind—only from the incompetents.”

Then I got it, and understanding made the bottom of my stomach drop out. “This hasn’t been a heist at all,” I said. “This whole mess . . . it was an
audition
?”

“Another good question. But not the most relevant one.”

I pursed my lips, and tried to cudgel my brain into working. It seemed too simple, but hell, why not take the direct route? “What
is
the most relevant question, then?”

Hades settled back into his chair. “Why would I, Hades, take such a personal interest in you, Harry Dresden?”

Hell’s bells. I was pretty sure I didn’t like the way that sounded, at all. “Okay,” I said. “Why would you?”

He reached out a hand to the middle head of the dog and scratched it beneath the chin. One of the beast’s rear legs began to thump rapidly against the floor. It sounded like something you’d hear coming from inside a machine shop. “Do you know my dog’s name?”

“Cerberus,” I said promptly. “But everyone knows that.”

“Do you know what it means?”

I opened my mouth and closed it again. I shook my head.

“It is from an ancient word,
kerberos
. It means ‘spotted.’”

I blinked. “You’re a genuine Greek god. You’re the Lord of the Underworld. And . . . you named your dog
Spot
?”

“Who’s a good dog?” Hades said, scratching the third head behind the ears, and making the beast’s mouth drop open in a doggy grin. “Spot is. Yes, he is.”

I couldn’t help it. I laughed.

Hades’ eyebrows went up. He didn’t quite smile, but he nonetheless managed to look pleased. “A rare enough sound in my kingdom.” He nodded. “I am a guardian of an underground realm filled with terrible power, the warden of a nation-prison of shades. I am charged with protecting it, maintaining it, and seeing to it that it is used properly. I am
misunderstood by most, feared by most, hated by many. I do my duty as I think best, regardless of anyone’s opinion but my own, and though my peers have neglected their charges or focused upon inconsequential trivialities in the face of larger problems, it does not change that duty—even when it causes me great pain. And I have a very large, and very good dog . . .”