Peace Talks (The Dresden Files 16)

“I didn’t know,” I said in a much quieter voice. “Who did you lose?”

“Austri,” Evanna said, “who has served our family faithfully for seven hundred years.”

That hit me like a punch in the gut. Austri had been weird, but he’d been a decent guy, and a man who loved his children very much.

“Hell’s bells,” I said. “I … I’m sorry for your loss.”

Evanna nodded at me once.

She led me down a hall I’d never been down, and into what could only have been a war room.

It was a huge chamber with twenty-foot ceilings broken into specific organized areas. In one corner was an armory that bristled with weapons—not only modern ones, not only archaic ones, but weapons that I could not so much as identify. Across from it was a medical triage, biologically isolated behind transparent plastic curtains. Svartalves in very normal-looking medical scrubs were moving about busily on the other side.

One gurney sat silently, ignored. There was a small figure on it, completely covered with a bloodstained sheet. Austri.

I turned my eyes past that to a small vehicle park, containing a number of cars, what looked like a chariot, a Viking longboat that appeared to be made out of some kind of glimmering silver, and a number of objects that, again, defied definition. At the far end of the room was what must have been a command-and-control area, with a number of tables in circled ranks around a central work area, glowing with the light of dozens of sheets of thin crystal that the svartalves were using like monitor screens.

While I was goggling, Etri approached, wearing the usual outfit for a male svartalf who wasn’t pretending to be human—a brief loincloth. He looked awful. There was a swelling bruise on one of his cheekbones and what had to have been an incredibly painful burn on one bare shoulder. His huge dark eyes were not calm. There was an anger in them so deep that I could all but feel the earth trembling beneath his feet.

He held up his right hand. Evanna lifted her left, rested her hand against his for a moment, and said, “My lord brother.”

“Sister,” Etri replied. He looked at me. “What did you learn?”

“He seems ignorant of events,” she said.

Etri actually scowled for a second. Then he said, “You are sure?”

“As sure as I may be,” Evanna said.

“I am ignorant,” I said. “For crying out loud, do you think I’d try to kill you, or help kill you while my own daughter was right here in your stronghold?”

Etri looked at me and made a growling sound. Then a svartalf called out in their native tongue, and Etri looked over his shoulder toward the command center. “I must go. Sister, please excuse me.” He turned to walk away and said, over his shoulder, “Transparency is our policy with allies. Show him.”

“Show me what?” I asked.

“This way,” Evanna said, and walked deeper into the war room, to the last section—a series of cubes about five feet square, made of thick, heavy bars of some kind of dark metal I couldn’t identify, walled off behind a couple of layers of similar bars—a detention area.

We had to pass through a couple of gates to get inside, and they locked behind us with heavy, very final-sounding thumps of metal on metal. Only one of the cells within was occupied, and it was surrounded by a number of very alert-looking, very heavily equipped svartalves, each carrying some kind of organic-looking, swirly implement made of something like silver and wearing body armor.

“The assassin,” Evanna said without emotion. “A creature well-known to be your frequent ally.”

My heart suddenly fell out of my chest.

The shirtless man curled on the floor of the cage had been beaten savagely. He was shuddering with pain, and maybe shock. There was hardly an inch of skin showing that wasn’t covered in bruises and cuts and drying blood. One of his feet had been … I don’t know what. It looked as if he’d gotten it caught in some kind of industrial machine. It was twisted at an impossible angle and seemed to be given shape only by the shoe containing it.

I recognized the shoe.

I’d seen it on the beach that morning.

The assassin lifted his head toward us. He was missing teeth from a mouth caked with blood. His face was grotesquely swollen, one eye completely shut.

It was my brother.

It was Thomas.

8

My brother stared back at me. His face twitched in the beginning of a sad, helpless little smile, but the gesture made him wince in pain even as he formed it. His head sank down again and he lay shuddering, too weak to look up.

I stood there staring in shock for a really long, silent moment. I could feel the pressure of Evanna’s attention on me.

“I know he visited here sometimes,” I said. My brother lived his life terrified that he was slowly killing Justine, feeding on her life force. So he would find other willing partners, sometimes. Which was, in his situation, maybe the most moral thing he could have done.

When you’re an incubus, life is weird like that.

“He visited me, specifically,” Evanna said, “as well as some of the other women of the Court, from time to time. My people have always been enamored of beauty, above all.” She took a step closer to the cage and said, to Thomas, “And this wondrous creature did not make love so much as he made art. Blindingly beautiful, passionate art.” Her voice turned harder. “Blinding, indeed. Such a waste.”

I looked down, closed my eyes, and pictured the cells, then the war room, then the swiftest un-burnt route out of the svartalf embassy. I tried to add in everything I knew about where the security forces were, because depending on the answer to my next question, I might be about to take them all on.

That’s the thing about living behind all that security: If it can keep threats out, it can just as easily keep you in.

“What will happen to him?” I asked.

“Justice,” Evanna replied, a distinct note of contempt in the word. “He began his attack seven minutes after the official treaty period for the peace summit went into effect. By the law of the Accords, that makes his offense one that must be judged by the guidelines outlined within. A neutral emissary will be appointed to investigate and serve as arbiter of his fate.”

I focused my eyes hard on my toes and relaxed a little. If this was a matter to be handled by the Accords, it meant that there was time. An emissary would have to be chosen, consented to by both the svartalves and the White Court, and the following inquiry would take time. Which meant I didn’t have to go out in a blaze of glory, or at least gory, that very moment.

Evanna walked closer to the cage and lowered herself to sit on her ankles, facing Thomas. “Austri was a dear friend. Were it up to me alone, I would entomb you in stone with just enough air to give you time to feel yourself gasping to death, Thomas Raith. You will die for this. Or there will be a war such as this world has not seen in a millennium.”

And then she spat on him.

My hands clenched hard on the solid oak of my staff, and I took half a step forward.

Instantly, the four guards trained their weapons on me. And considering I didn’t even know what the hell they were or what they were supposed to do, it might have been just a little bit dicey to try to defend myself against them.

And besides. The Accords were in play. While they were, I was basically a one-man nation, with my actions reflecting upon the White Council as a whole—and upon the Winter Court, to boot. For Pete’s sake. I was two one-man nations: not for purposes of power, only for potential disaster.