hostile stares all the way up, from both sides. I ignored them, as if they weren’t worth my notice. Alamaya’s calves were a lot more interesting anyway.
We reached the level below the temple and Alamaya turned to me. “My lord will speak to only one, Wizard Dresden. Please ask your retainers to wait here.”
Here. Right next to the Lords of Outer Night, the expired godlings. If I made a mistake, and if this went bad, it was going to go really bad, really fast. The people who had been willing to risk everything to help me would be the first to suffer because of it. For a moment, I thought about cutting a deal. Send them away. Let me face the Red Court alone. I had enough lives on my conscience already.
But then I heard a soft, soft sound from the level above: a child weeping.
Maggie.
It was far too sad and innocent a sound to be the death knell for my friends—but that might be exactly what it was.
“Stay here,” I said quietly. “I don’t think this is going to turn into a John Woo film for a couple of minutes, at least. Murph, take the lead until I get back. Sanya, back her.”
She arched an eyebrow at me, but nodded. Sanya shifted his position by a couple of feet, to stand slightly behind her and at her right hand.
I moved slowly up the last few steps to the temple.
It was a simple, elegant thing: an almost cubic building atop the pyramid, with a single opening the size of a fairly standard doorway on each side. Alamaya went in first, her eyes downcast. The moment she was in the door, she took a step to one side and knelt, her eyes on the ground, as if she were worthy to move no farther forward.
I took a slow breath and stepped past her, to face the king of the Red Court.
He was kinda little.
He stood with his back to me, his hands raised over his head, murmuring in what I presumed to be ancient Mayan or something. He was five-two, five-three, well muscled, but certainly nothing like imposing. He was dressed in a kind of skirt-kilt thing, naked from the waist up and the kneecap down. His hair was black and long, hanging to the top of his shoulder blades. He gripped a bloodied knife in his hand, and lowered it slowly, delicately.
It was only then that I noticed the woman on the altar, bound hand and foot, her eyes wide and hopeless, fixed on that black knife as if she could not look away.
My hands clenched into fists. I wasn’t here to fight, I reminded myself. I wasn’t here to fight.
But I wasn’t here to stand around and let something like this happen, either. And I’ve never had a clear head when it comes to protecting women. Murphy says it makes me a Neanderthal.
She may be right, but I didn’t seize a bone and jump the guy. I just cleared my throat really, really obnoxiously, and said, “Hey.”
The knife paused.
Then the Red King lowered it and turned to face me. And I was forcibly reminded that nuclear warheads come in relatively small packages. He made absolutely no threatening gesture. He didn’t even glare.
He didn’t need to.
The pressure of his eyes was like nothing I had ever felt before—empty darkness that struck at me like a physical blow, that made me feel as if I had to physically lean away from him to keep from being drawn forward into that vacuum and lost to the void. I was suddenly reminded that I was alone, that I had none of my tools, that I was involved in matters way over my head, and that my outfit looked ridiculous.
And all of it was simply his physical presence. It was far too huge for the little body it came in, too large to be contained by the stone of this temple, a kind of psychic body heat that loomed so large that only a fool would not be instantly aware of how generally insignificant he was in the greater scheme of the universe. I felt my resolve being eroded, even as I stood there, and I clenched my jaw and looked away.
The Red King chuckled. He said something. Alamaya answered him, then rose and came to kneel down at his feet, facing me.
The slave on the altar remained in place, crying quietly.
I could hear another, smaller voice coming from behind the altar. Holy crap.