A tear rolled down Deirdre’s cheek as she smiled, and the demonform faded away, until a blade-thin girl remained, staring up at him. “I love you, Father.”
Nicodemus’s rough voice cracked a little. “I know,” he said, very gently. “And that is the problem.”
And he struck with the curved Bedouin dagger.
It was an angled thrust, up beneath the sternum and directly into the heart. Deirdre never broke eye contact with him, and never moved a muscle. The blade sank in to the hilt, and the only reaction she gave was a slight exhalation. Then she moved, leaning closer to Nicodemus, and kissed his mouth.
Then her legs buckled and she sank slowly down. Nicodemus went with her, down to his knees, and held her gently, the jeweled hilt of the dagger standing out sharply from her body.
“Mother of God,” Michael breathed. “He just. .”
Nicodemus held her for maybe two minutes, not moving. Then, very carefully, he laid the body down on the cavern floor. He withdrew the knife with equal care. He dipped two fingers into the wound, felt around for a moment, and then withdrew something small and covered with blood and gleaming. A silver coin. He cleaned his daughter’s blood from it and from the dagger with a handkerchief. He pocketed the Coin, sheathed the knife, and rose, calmly, to walk back toward the rest of us. His face was as blank as the stone floor beneath his feet. Everyone stared at him in shock. Even Grey looked surprised.
“Mother of God, man,” Michael breathed. “What have you done?”
Nicodemus stared at Michael with steady eyes and spoke with quiet contempt. “Did you think you were the only one in the world willing to die for what he believes, sir Knight?”
“But you. .” Michael looked like he might be near tears himself. “She just let you do it. She was your child.”
“Did your own precious God not ask the same of Abraham? Did he not permit Lucifer to destroy the children of Job? I, at least, have a reason for it.” He gestured curtly at Grey and the Genoskwa and said, “Release them.”
Grey let go of Valmont at once. The Genoskwa turned me loose only reluctantly, and gave me a little push as he did it that nearly knocked me to the ground.
Michael’s mouth opened and closed. “I could have talked to her,” he said.
“If he’d given you the chance,” I said. “That was the whole point of the hostage drama. To make sure you were focused somewhere else.”
Nicodemus stared at me coldly.
“He was worried that you might say something, Michael. That in the moments before she knew she was going to die, Deirdre’s faith might have wavered. Particularly if someone like you was there to offer her an alternative.”
Nicodemus inclined his head to me, very slightly. Then he said, “You have never beaten me, sir Knight. And you never will.”
“You’re insane,” Michael said quietly, sadly.
Nicodemus had begun to turn away, but he paused.
“Perhaps,” he said, his eyes distant. “Or perhaps I’m the only one who isn’t.”
Anna Valmont moved to my side and said quietly, “Look.”
I looked.
Deirdre’s corpse stirred.
No, that wasn’t right. There was movement at the corpse, but the body wasn’t moving. Instead, a faint, silvery glow seemed to begin radiating from it. Then there was motion, and the glow coalesced into a humanoid shape, which after a moment refined itself into a translucent silvery shade in the shape of Deirdre. She sat up from the corpse, separating herself from it, and rose to her feet. She turned and paused, frowning down at the body, and then lifted her own hand and stared at it.
Behind her, the same silvery glow that had surrounded the body began to suffuse the solid stone image of an archway carved in the next wall. It spread to the edges of the carving where a silvery translucent lever appeared, in the same place the lever had been on the previous two gates.
Deirdre’s shade turned to look at her father. She smiled, sadly. Then she turned and drifted over to the lever. She wrapped ghostly hands around it and pulled it slowly down. The light in the stone intensified, becoming brighter and brighter, until there was a flash and it was gone, taking Deirdre’s shade and the stone alike with it, leaving an open archway in their place.
Light poured from the archway.
Golden light.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Nicodemus said, his voice calm, “we have done it.”
Forty
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.