Fifteen
Karrin, Valmont, and I showed up at the slaughterhouse at dawn. As I came up the stairs and out onto the catwalk, Jordan and one of the other squires were hastily walking apart, with the mien of teenagers who hadn’t been doing something they were supposed to do. Jordan was tucking a small notebook into his pocket as he did.
“Hi, Jordan,” I said brightly. “Whatcha doin’?”
He glowered at me.
I walked up to him, smiled down, and said, “Let me see the notebook, please.”
Jordan continued glowering at me. He looked aside at the other squire, who by now was standing forty feet away at an intersection of two strips of catwalk, evidently where he was supposed to be standing guard. The other squire resolutely ignored Jordan.
I held my hand out and said, “Humor me. I’m going to stand here until you cooperate or Nicodemus comes looking.”
Jordan’s lips twisted into an unpleasant grimace. Then he took the notebook from his pocket and slapped it into my hand.
“Thanks,” I said, opening it to the page that had evidently been written on most recently, and read.
10 goats now.
The reply was written in a blocky, heavy hand—presumably the other squire’s.
SO WHAT?
So one went missing last night, and another one in the last hour. Where did they go?
DID YOU TELL THE LORD ABOUT IT?
Yes, of course.
WHAT DID HE SAY?
Nothing.
THEN THAT’S WHAT YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO KNOW.
Something is in here with us. Dangerous. Can’t you feel it?
SHUT UP AND DO YOUR JOB.
But what i—
And the script ended in a hasty scrawl.
I finished reading it and eyed Jordan. “You have to wonder about it when your boss doesn’t want any questions, kid.”
Karrin cleared her throat, pointedly.
“Oh, I want them,” I drawled. “I’m just not answering them right away.” I passed the notebook back over to Jordan. “That what Nick has the goats in here for, then, eh? He’s feeding something.”
Jordan’s face went pale but he didn’t respond in any way.
“Your boss, kid,” I said. “He’s hurt a lot of good people. Killed some of them.”
For a second I flashed back on a memory of Shiro. The old Knight had given his life in exchange for mine. Nicodemus and company had killed him, horribly.
I still owed them for that.
Something of that must have shown in my face, because Jordan took a step back from me, swallowed, and one of his hands slipped toward the sling of his shotgun.
“If you were smart,” I said, “you’d get away from this place. Comes time for the balloon to go up, Nicodemus is going to feed you into the meat grinder the second it becomes convenient for him. I don’t know what he’s promised you guys—maybe Coins of your own, someday. Your very own angel in a bottle. I’ve done that. It’s not all it’s cracked up to be.”
Jordan, in addition to looking worried, also looked skeptical.
Not a lot of guys who pick up a Blackened Denarius manage to put it back down again, I guess.
“Take it from me,” I said. “Whatever you’ve been told—the Fallen are bad news.” I nodded to him and walked past him. Karrin and Valmont hurried to keep pace with me as I descended toward the factory floor.
“What was the point of that?” Karrin asked.
“Sowing seeds of discord,” I replied.
“They’re fanatics,” she said. “Do you really think you’re going to convince them of anything now?”
“He’s a fanatic,” I said. “He’s also a kid. What, maybe twenty-three? Someone should tell him the truth.”
“Even when you know he isn’t going to listen?”
“That part isn’t mine to choose,” I said. “I can choose to tell him the truth, though. So I did. The rest is up to him.”
She sighed. “If he gets the order, he’ll gun you down without blinking.”
“Maybe.”
“There are only ten goats in the pen today,” she noted.
“Yeah. The guards think something is in here with them, taking them.”
“They think? But they haven’t seen whatever it is?”
“Apparently not.”
Karrin looked around the warehouse. At least eight or ten hard-looking men with weapons were standing with a clear view of the goat pen. “I find that somewhat disturbing.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Tell me about it. There’re only so many ways to hide. I’ll see if I can spot it.”
“Do you think it was here with us yesterday?”
“Yeah. Probably.”
She muttered something under her breath. “That’s not too creepy or anything. Can’t you just wizard-Sight it?”
“I could,” I said. A wizard’s Sight, the direct perception of magic with the mind, could cut through any kind of illusion or glamour or veil. But it had its drawbacks. “But the last time I did that, I got a look at something that had me curled into a ball gibbering for a couple of hours. I don’t think we can afford that right now. I’ll have to use something more subtle.”
“Subtle,” Valmont said. “You.”
I sniffed and ignored that remark, as it deserved.
“Ah,” Nicodemus said, as we reached the pool of light around the conference table. “Mr. Dresden. I’m glad to see you here on time. Will you have doughnuts?”
I looked past him to the snack table. It was indeed piled with doughnuts of a number of varieties. Some of them even had sprinkles. My mouth started a quick impression of a minor tributary.
But they were doughnuts of darkness. Evil, damned doughnuts, tainted by the spawn of darkness . . .
. . . which could obviously be redeemed only by passing through the fiery, cleansing inferno of a wizardly digestive tract.
I walked around the table to the doughnut tray, eyeing everyone seated there as I did.
Nicodemus and Deirdre were present, looking much as they had yesterday. Binder and Ascher sat there, too, a little way down the table, speaking quietly to each other. Binder, in his dark, sedate suit, was eating some kind of pastry that didn’t look familiar to me.