"Why do you ask?" I said.
"Well," Bob said, his tone careful, "you're complimenting me, which is never good. Plus lighting all of your candles with matches."
"So?" I said.
"So you can light all the candles with that stupid little spell you made up," Bob said. "And you keep dropping the box because of your burned hand. So it's taken you seven matches now to keep lighting those candles."
I fumbled and dropped the matchbox again from my stiff, gloved fingers.
"Eight," he said.
I suppressed a growl, struck a fresh match, and did it too forcefully, snapping it.
"Nine," Bob said.
"Shut up," I told him.
"You got it, boss. I'm the best at shutting up." I lit the last few candles, and Bob said, "So did you come down here to get my help when you start working on your new blasting rod?"
"No," I said. "Bob, I've only got the one hand. I can't carve it with one hand."
"You could use a vise grip," the skull suggested.
"I'm not ready," I said. My maimed fingers burned and throbbed. "I'm just… not."
"You'd better get ready," Bob said. "It's only a matter of time before some nasty shows up and-"
I shot the skull a hard look.
"All right, all right," Bob said. If he had hands, the skull would have raised them in a gesture of surrender. "So you're telling me you still won't use any fire magic."
"Stars and stones." I sighed. "So I'm using matches instead of my candle spell and I'm too busy to get the new blasting rod done. It's not a big deal. There's just not much call for blowing anything up or burning it to cinders on my average day."
"Harry?" Bob asked. "Are your feet wet? And can you see the pyramids?"
I blinked. "What?"
"Earth to Dresden," Bob said. "You are standing knee-deep in de Nile."
I threw the matchbook at the skull. It bounced off halfheartedly, and the few matches left in tumbled out at random. "Keep your inner psychoanalyst to your damned self," I growled. "We've got work to do."
"Yeah," Bob said. "You're right, Harry. What do I know about anything?"
I glowered at Bob, and pulled up my stool to the worktable. I got out a notebook and a pencil. "The question of the hour is, what do you know about something called The Word of Kemmler?"
Bob made a sucking sound through his teeth, which is fairly impressive given that he's got no saliva to work with. Or maybe I'm giving him too much credit. I mean, he can make a B sound with no lips, too. "Can you give me a reference point or anything?"
"Not for certain," I said. "But I have a gut instinct that says it has something to do with necromancy."
Bob made a whistling sound. "I hope not."
"Why?" I asked.
"Because that Kemmler was a certifiable nightmare," Bob said. "I mean, wow. He was sick, Harry. Evil."
That got my attention. Bob the skull was an air spirit, a being that existed in a world of knowledge without morality. He was fairly fuzzy on the whole good-evil conflict, and as a result he had only vague ideas of where lines got drawn. If Bob thought someone was evil, well… Kemmler must have really pushed the envelope.
"What'd he do?" I asked. "What made him so evil?"
"He was best known for World War One," Bob said.
"The whole thing?" I demanded.
"Mostly, yeah," Bob said. "There were about a hundred and fifty years of engineering built into it, and he had his fingers into all kinds of pies. He vanished at the end of hostilities and didn't show up again until he started animating mass graves during World War Two. Went on rampages out in Eastern Europe, where things were pretty much a nightmare even without his help. Nobody is sure how many people he killed."
"Stars and stones," I said. "Why would he do something like that?"
"A wild guess? He was freaky insane. Plus evil."
"You say 'was,'" I said. "Past tense?"
"Very," Bob said. "After what the guy did, the White Council hunted him down and wiped his dusty ass out in 1961."
"You mean the Wardens?"
"I mean the White Council," Bob said. "The Merlin, the whole Senior Council, the brute squad out of Archangel, the Wardens, and every wizard and ally the wizards could get their hands on."
I blinked. "For one man?"
"See above, regarding nightmare," Bob said. "Kemmler was a necromancer, Harry. Power over the dead. He had truck with demons, too, was buddies with most of the vampire Courts, every nasty in Europe, and some of the uglier faeries, too. Plus he had his own little cadre of baby Kemmlers to help him out. Apprentices. And thugs of every description."
"Damn," I said.
"Doubtless he was," Bob said. "They killed him pretty good. A bunch of times. He'd shown up again after the Wardens had killed him early in the nineteenth century, so they were real careful the second time. And good riddance to the psychotic bastard."
I blinked. "You knew him?"
"Didn't I ever tell you?" Bob asked. "He was my owner for about forty years."
I stared. "You worked with this monster?"
"I do what I do," Bob said proudly.
"How did Justin get you, then?"
"Justin DuMorne was a Warden, Harry, back at Kemmler's last stand. He pulled me out of the smoldering ruins of Kemmler's lab. Sort of like when you pulled me out of the smoldering ruins of Justin's lab when you killed him. Circle of life, like that Elton John song."
I felt more than a little tiny bit cold. I chewed on my lip and laid my pencil down. I had the feeling the rest of this conversation was not going to be something I wanted to create a written record of. "So what is the Word of Kemmler, Bob?"
"Not a clue," Bob said.
I glowered. "What do you mean, not a clue? I thought you were his skull Friday."
"Well, yeah," Bob said. His eyelights nickered suddenly, a nervous little dance. "I don't remember very much of it."
I snorted out a laugh. "Bob. You never forget anything."
"No," Bob said. His voice shrank into something very small. "Unless I want to, Harry."
I frowned and took a deep breath. "You're saying that you chose to forget things about Kemmler."
"Or was compelled to," Bob said. "Um. Harry, can I come out? Just inside the lab? You know, while we talk."
I blinked a couple of times. Bob was full of mischief on the best of days. I didn't let him out except on specific intelligence-gathering missions anymore. And while he often pestered me to let him out on one of his perverted minirampages, he had never asked permission to leave his skull for the duration of a chat. "Sure," I told him. "Stay inside the lab and be back in the skull at the end of this conversation."
"Right," Bob said. A small cloud of glowing motes of light the size of campfire sparks came sailing out of the skull's eyes and darted to the far corner of the lab. "So anyway, when are we going to work on the new blasting rod?"
"Bob," I said. "We're talking about The Word of Kemmler."
The lights shot restlessly over to the other side of the lab, swirling through the steps on my stair ladder in a glowing helix. "You're talking about The Word of Kemmler," Bob said. The glowing cloud stretched, motes now spiraling up and down the stairs simultaneously. "I'm working on my Vegas act. Lookit, I'm DNA."
"Would you stop goofing around? Can you remember anything at all about Kemmler?"
Bob's voice quavered, the motes becoming a vague cloud again. "I can."