neat little building in the business district, with a lawn that was an absolute gaping expanse when you considered the cost of real estate in town. It looked like the kind of building that should be full of people in severely sober business attire, doing things with money and numbers that were too complicated, fussy, and god-awful boring to be widely understood.
As it happened, that was pretty close to the truth.
There was a little guardhouse on the drive in, a fairly recent feature, and a bland-looking man in a bland and expensive fitted suit and dark sunglasses looked up from his book. We stopped at the window and I said, “The purple mustang flies tonight.”
The guard stared at me.
“ Uh … hang on,” I said, and racked my brain. “Sad Tuesdays present no problem to the local authorities?”
He kept staring at me. “State your names, please.”
“Oh come on, Austri,” I said. “Do we have to do this dance every single morning? You know who I am. Hell, we watched the kids play together for an hour last night.”
“I wasn’t on duty then,” Austri said, his tone entirely neutral, his eyes flat. “State your names, please.”
“Once,” I said. “Just once, would it kill you to let security protocol slide?”
He gave me more of that blank stare, a slow blink, and said, “Potentially. Which is why we have security protocols.”
I gave him my most wizardly glower, to no avail. Then I grumbled under my breath, making mostly Yosemite Sam noises, and started fumbling around in my gym bag. “My name is Harry Dresden, Winter Knight, vassal to Molly Carpenter, Lady Winter of the Sidhe Court, and under the protection of her guest-right. This is Thomas Raith, also her guest, friend to Lady Evanna.”
“He is one of Evanna’s lovers,” Austri corrected me meticulously. He nodded at Thomas.
“ ’Sup, Austri,” my brother said.
“Duty,” Austri said seriously, and opened a folder, flipping through a number of profile pages with photographs in the top corner. He stopped on my page, carefully compared the image to me, and then another to Thomas, and nodded. “Passphrase, please.”
“Yeah, one second.” I finally found the folded-up piece of paper with the weekly passphrases on it in the depths of the gym bag. I unfolded it, shook sand off it, consulted it, and read, “ ‘All of my base are belong to me.’ What does that even mean?”
Austri stared at me in frustration for a moment and sighed. Then he looked at Thomas. “And yours?”
“ ‘The itsy-bitsy spider went up the waterspout,’ ” Thomas said promptly, without referencing a cheat card. Because he has nothing better to do with his time than memorize random passphrases.
Austri nodded approvingly, flipped the folder closed, and put it away. “Please wait,” he said. He hit a button and muttered a nearly silent word, which I knew would disarm about two thousand lethal magical wards between me and the front door. Then he nodded at me and said, “You may enter.”
“Thank you,” I said.
He leaned back in his chair a bit, relaxing, and the illusion of unremarkable humanity that covered the svartalf went liquid and translucent. Austri had grey skin with a gymnast’s muscles beneath, a head a little too big for the rest of him, and absolutely enormous black eyes, like that alien in the autopsy video. Beneath the surface illusion, his expression was relaxed and pleasant. “My Ingri would like another playdate with Maggie and Sir Mouse.”
“Maggie would enjoy that as well. I’ll contact Mrs. Austri?”
He nodded. “That is her designated area of responsibility. Cards again tonight?”
“I’d like to, but I can’t commit to it,” I said.
He frowned slightly. “I prefer being able to plan my evening activities.”
“Duty,” I explained.
His frown vanished, and he picked up his book again. “That is different, of course. Please let me know when your duties permit you to spare the time.”
I gave him a nod and went forward.
Austri was the svartalves in a nutshell. Anal-retentive, a ferocious stickler, inhumanly disciplined, inflexibly dedicated to his concepts of honor and duty—but good people once you got to know him. It takes all kinds, you know?
We passed through two more security checkpoints, one in the building’s lobby and another at the elevator that led down to the embassy’s large subterranean complex. One of the other svartalves peered at my driver’s license, then at me, and insisted on measuring my height and taking my fingerprints to further verify that it was actually me and not an impostor wearing a Harry suit.
I guess