Death Masks

I grabbed a heavy, warm robe off its hook, shoved aside one of my rugs, and opened the trapdoor leading down to the subbasement. A folding ladder-staircase led down to the damp stone chamber beneath, where I kept my lab, and I padded down it, my robe’s hem dragging against the wooden steps.

I started lighting candles. My lab, barring a brief bout of insanity, generally reflects the state of my own mind-cluttered, messy, unorganized, but basically functional. The room isn’t large. Three worktables line three of the walls in a U shape, and a fourth table runs down the center of the U, leaving a narrow walkway around it. Wire utility shelves line the walls above the tables. Piled on the shelves and tables are a vast array of magical ingredients, plus that sort of miscellaneous domestic clutter that in households of more substance always winds up in a big drawer in the kitchen. Books, notebooks, journals, and papers line the shelves, together with containers and boxes and pouches full of all sorts of herbs, roots, and magical ingredients, from a bottle of snake hisses to a vial of milk-thistle extract.

At the far end of the room there was a patch of floor kept completely clear of all clutter. A copper ring set into the stone of the floor, my summoning circle, resided there. Experience had shown me that you never can tell when you might need a ritual circle to defend yourself from magical attack, or for its other most obvious use-keeping a denizen of the Nevernever a temporary prisoner.

One of the shelves had less on it than the others. At either end rested a candleholder, long since overrun with many colors of melted wax until they were nothing but mounds, like a honeybee Vesuvius. Books, mostly paperback romances, and various small and feminine articles took up the rest of the shelf, but for where a bleached human skull sat in the middle. I picked up a pencil and rapped it against the shelf. "Bob. Bob, wake up. Work to be done."

Twin points of orange and gold light kindled in the shadows of the skull’s eye sockets, and grew brighter as I went about the room lighting half a dozen candles and a kerosene lamp. The skull rattled a little, and then said, "It’s only a few hours from dawn, and you’re just starting up? What gives?"

I started getting out beakers and vials and a small alcohol burner. "More trouble," I said. "It’s been one hell of a day." I told Bob the Skull about the television studio, the vampire’s challenge, the hit man, the missing Shroud, and the plague-filled corpse.

"Wow. You don’t do things halfway, do you, Harry?"

"Advise now; critique later. I’m going to look into things and whip up a potion or two, and you’re going to help."

"Right," Bob said. "Where do you want to start?"

"With Ortega. Where is my copy of the Accords?"

"Cardboard box." Bob said. "Third shelf, on the bottom row, behind the pickling jars."

I found the box and pawed through it until I had found a vellum scroll tied shut with a white ribbon. I opened it and peered down at the handwritten calligraphy. It started off with the word Insomuch, and the syntax got more opaque from there.

"I can’t make heads or tails of this," I said. "Where’s the section about duels?"

"Fifth paragraph from the end. You want the Cliff’s Notes version?"

I rolled the scroll shut again. "Hit me."

"It’s based on Code Duello," Bob said. "Well, technically it’s based on much older rules that eventually inspired the Code Duello, but that’s just chickens and eggs. Ortega is the challenger, and you’re the challenged."

"I know that. I get to pick the weapons and the ground, right?"

"Wrong," Bob said. "You pick the weapons, but he gets to choose the time and location."

"Damn," I muttered. "I was going to take high noon out in a park somewhere. But I guess I can just say that we’ll duel with magic."

"If it’s one of the available choices. It almost always is."

"Who decides?"

"The vampires and the Council will pick from a list of neutral emissaries. The emissary decides."

I nodded. "So if I don’t have it as an option I’m screwed, right? I mean, magic, wizard, kind of my bag."

Bob said. "Yeah, but be careful. It’s got to be a weapon that he can use. If you pick one he can’t, he can refuse it, and force you to take your second choice."

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning that regardless of what happens, if he doesn’t want to fight you in magic, he won’t have to. Ortega didn’t get to be a warlord without thinking things through, Harry. Odds are that he has a good idea what you can do and has planned accordingly. What do you know about him?"

"Not much. Presumably he’s tough."

Bob’s eyelights stared at me for a minute. "Well, Napoleon, I’m sure he’ll never overcome that kind of tactical genius."

I flicked my pencil at the skull in annoyance. It bounced off a nose hole. "Get to the point."

"The point is that you’d be better off taking something you can predict."

"I’m better off not fighting to begin with," I said. "Do I need to get a second?"

"You both do," Bob said. "The seconds will work out the terms of the duel. His should be getting in touch with yours at some point."

"Uh. I don’t have one."

Bob’s skull turned a bit on its shelf and banged its forehead gently into the brick wall a few times. "Then get one, dolt. Obviously."

I got another pencil and a pad of yellow lined paper and wrote To do across the top, and Ask Michael about duel underneath it. "Okay. And I want you to find out whatever you can about Ortega before dawn."

"Check," Bob said. "I have your permission to come out?"

"Not yet. There’s more."

Bob’s eyelights rolled. "Of course there’s more. My job sucks."

I got out a jug of distilled water and a can of Coke. I opened the can, took a sip, and said, "That corpse Murphy showed me. Plague curse?"

"Probably," Bob agreed. "But if it was really that many diseases, it was a big one."

"How big?"

"Bigger than that spell the Shadowman was using to tear hearts out a few years ago."

I whistled. "And he was running it off of thunderstorms and ceremonial rites, too. What would it take to power a curse that strong?"

"Curses aren’t really my thing," Bob hedged. "But a lot. Like maybe tapping into a sorcerous ley line, or a human sacrifice."

I sipped more Coke, and shook my head. "Someone is playing some serious hardball then."

Bob mused, "Maybe the Wardens used it to get nasty on a Red Court agent."