Binder made a nonverbal sound of agreement with Grey’s statements.
“I will not walk away from a job once I’ve agreed to it-you know how I operate, Nicodemus,” Grey continued. “But I would sympathize if another professional of less ability and less rigid standards did so.”
Nicodemus regarded Grey thoughtfully for a moment. “Your professional recommendation?”
“The wizard has a point,” Grey said. “He is an annoying, headstrong ass, but he isn’t stupid. It would not be foolish for you to invest some measure of trust to balance what you ask for.”
Nicodemus mused over that for a moment and then nodded his head. “One ought not hire an expert and then ignore his opinion,” he said. Then he turned to the rest of us. “Vault Seven contains, in addition to a standard division of gold and jewels, a number of Western religious icons. It is my intention to retrieve a cup from the vault.”
“A wha’?” Binder asked.
“A cup,” Nicodemus replied.
“All this,” Binder said, “for a cup.”
Nicodemus nodded. “A simple ceramic cup, something like a teacup, but lacking any handle. Quite old.”
My mouth fell open and I made a choking sound at approximately the same time.
Grey pursed his lips and let out a slow whistle.
“Wait,” Ascher said. “Are you talking about what I think you’re talking about?”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Karrin said quietly.
Nicodemus made a face in her direction. “Miss Murphy, please.”
She gave Nicodemus a small, unpleasant smile.
Binder clued in a second later. “The bloody Holy Grail? Is he bloody kidding?”
Valmont turned to me, frowning. “That’s real?”
“It’s real,” I said. “But it was lost more than a thousand years ago.”
“Not lost,” Nicodemus corrected me calmly. “It was collected.”
“The cup that caught the blood of Christ,” Grey mused. He eyed Nicodemus. “Now, what possible use could you have for that old thing?”
“Sentimental value,” Nicodemus said with a guileless smile, and straightened the skinny strands of his grey tie. “I’m something of a collector of such artifacts myself.”
The tie wasn’t a tie, unless you meant it in a very literal sense. It was a length of simple old rope, tied into the Noose-the one that Judas used to hang himself after betraying Christ, if I understood it correctly. It made Nicodemus all but unkillable. I didn’t know if anyone else in the world knew what I knew: that the Noose didn’t protect him from itself. I’d nearly strangled him with it the last time we’d crossed trails-hence his roughened voice.
Grey didn’t look like he believed Nicodemus’s answer, but that hadn’t stopped him from being satisfied with it. He looked around the room and said, “There. You know more than you did. Is it enough?”
“Tessa,” I said. “What’s her beef with you going after the Grail?”
“She wants it for herself, of course,” Nicodemus said. “I’ll deal with Tessa before we launch. It won’t become an issue for the job. You have my personal guarantee.”
Grey spread his hands. “There,” he said. “That’s good enough for me. Binder?”
The stocky little guy screwed up his eyes in thought and nodded slowly. “Ash?”
“All right,” Ascher said. “Sure. That’s enough for me, for now.”
“But. .,” I began.
Ascher rolled her eyes. “Oh, don’t be such a whiny little. .” She turned to Binder. “Git?”
“Git,” he confirmed.
“Don’t be such a whiny little git, Dresden,” Ascher said. “I’m hungry.”
The more I could force Nicodemus to bend, the more of his authority would drain away from him. The more someone else defended him, the more he would stockpile. Time to try another angle. “And you aren’t the only thing in here that is,” I said to Ascher, and pointed at the goat pen. “Before I go anywhere else, I want to know what’s been picking off the livestock.”
“Ah,” Nicodemus said. “That.”
“Yeah, that.”
“Does it matter?”
I glowered at him. “It kind of does,” I said. Then, thoughtfully, I raised my voice to carry a little farther. “Whatever big, ugly, stinking, stupid thing you’ve got hanging around in here with us probably doesn’t deserve to be in this company. Given our goal, I don’t see the point in taking along a mindless mound of muscle.”
Grey winced.
I felt it almost at once. The hairs on the back of my neck suddenly started trying to crawl up onto my scalp. Part of me kicked into a genuine watery-bellied fear reaction, something purely instinctive, a message from my primitive hindbrain: A large predator was staring at me with intent.
“Yeah, got your attention now,” I muttered under my breath. I raised my voice to address Nicodemus. “Point is, Grey’s right. It’s time to share some details. So who is the last guy on the crew?”
“I certainly never meant to frighten anyone,” Nicodemus said. “But I suppose I don’t have the same point of view as you children. I can understand your apprehension.”
Bull. He’d known exactly what he was doing, setting out the goats and letting us get the idea in our heads. From the start, he wanted us to know that he had something big and bad and dangerous hiding in reserve.
“If you don’t mind,” Nicodemus said to the room at large, “I think introductions are in order.”
The nape of my neck was trying to slither away and find a good place to hide when the smell hit me first. It was thick and pungent, bestial-the smell of a large animal in the immediate proximity. A few seconds later, the goats started panicking in their pen, running back and forth and bleating to one another in terror.
“What the hell,” Valmont breathed, looking around uneasily.
I didn’t join her in rubbernecking. I was extending my awareness, my wizard’s senses, searching for the subtle vibration of magical energies at work in the air. I’d never been able to throw up a magical veil so good that it could mask odor, but just because I couldn’t do it didn’t mean that it was impossible. The one huge weakness of veiling magic was that it was still magic. If your senses were sharp, and you were reasonably sure a veil was present, you could find that source of magical energy if you looked hard enough.
I found it after a moment’s intense concentration-about ten feet directly behind me.
I turned kind of casually in my chair, folded my arms, fixed my gaze on the empty space where I’d felt the energy coming from and waited, trying to look bored.
It faded into sight, slowly, an utterly motionless figure. It was human in general shape, but only generally. Muscle covered it in ropy layers and in densities that were too oddly proportioned to be human-so much muscle that you could see its outlines through a thick layer of greyish, straggly hair that covered its body. It was well over nine feet tall. Massive shoulders sloped up to a tree-trunk-sized neck, and its head was shaped strangely as well, sloping up more sharply than a human skull, with a wide forehead and a brow ridge like a mountain crag. Eyes glittered way back in the shadows beneath that brow, glinting like an assassin’s knives from a cave’s mouth. Its features were heavy and brutish, its hands and feet absolutely enormous-and I had met the creature’s like before.
“Stars and stones,” I breathed.
That massive brow gathered, lowered. For a second, I thought there had been distant thunder outside, and then I realized that the nearly subsonic rumbling sound was coming from the thing’s chest.
It was growling.
At me.
I swallowed.
“This,” Nicodemus said into the startled silence, “is the Genoskwa. He, of course, knows you all, having been the first to arrive.”
“Big one, isn’t he,” Binder said, in a very mild voice. “What’s his job?”
“I share Dresden’s concerns about the availability of our target’s vault,” Nicodemus said. “There have, in the past, been rather epic guardians protecting the ways in and out of this particular domain. The Genoskwa has consented to join us in order to serve as a counterweight, should any such protection arise.”