The pale man said nothing.
“I believe his exact words were,” continued the fat man, “‘the King of Thorns.’ I thought it was some kind of lurid nonsense at the time. Some bit of poetry that he was using to try and spook me. But…”
“The Scriptor,” said the pale man.
“Beg pardon?”
“You will call him ‘the Scriptor.’ We do not use his daylight name.”
“You may not, chum, but I do,” laughed the American, but his smile was fragile and fleeting. “Okay, yeah. The Scriptor. Silly damn name, though.”
“So says the ‘king of fear,’” murmured the other. “Or am I mistaken about who you are, Mr. Vox?”
Hugo Vox straightened in his chair and eyed the pale man shrewdly for a few seconds. “Yeah, okay, cards on the table. Call me Hugo. What do I call you, though? ‘King of Thorns’ is a bit clumsy for a casual chat.”
“You may call me Grigor.”
“Good. I prefer first names when I do business.” Vox pursed his lips. “If you know about me, then I guess that means you know about the Seven Kings.”
“Yes.”
“Who told you? The ‘Scriptor’?”
Grigor shook his head. “The Scriptor does not choose to come down here. He calls when he needs his Red Knights.”
The pale man’s voice was strange, heavily accented, and controlled, which made it a challenge for Vox to read inflection and subtext. Even so, he could detect an edge of contempt in Grigor’s phrasing in that last sentence. Certainly disapproval, and maybe more than that.
“So, what, he phoned in about me? Just up and broke his word to me? He told you the secret he swore on his life that he wouldn’t share with anyone?”
The pale man smiled and made a small dismissive gesture with one hand.
“No, uh-uh,” persisted Vox, “we don’t just drop that. How do you know about me?”
“It is the business of the Red Knights to know everything-”
“Yeah, cut the sales pitch. I’m not a rube and you’re not at one with the universe. This is supposed to be a very hush-hush meeting and you are not supposed to know who I am. That information was mine to share or not. The fact that you do know makes me pretty goddamn twitchy about the whole deal. My business associates-”
“Your associates are terrorists, corrupt officials, and mass murderers, Mr. Vox. Let’s not pretend they are anything else.”
“And you’re what? Kermit and the Muppet Babies? You really want to measure dicks to see who gets the bigger boner from screwing the public?”
Grigor looked amused. “What the Red Knights have done, and what we continue to do, has the blessing of the church.”
“Bullshit. It has the blessing of one twisted fuck of a priest who is even scarier than you and me put together, and I know for a fact that the Vatican has no clue what he’s giving his personal blessing to. If they did, they’d go Old Testament all over the Red Order, the Red Knights, and Father-frigging-Nicodemus, and you can put that in the bank.”
Grigor said nothing. He steepled his long fingers and simply stared at Vox. Around them the shadows echoed with the scuttle of rat feet and the distant weeping of women.
“Fuck it,” said Vox and stood up.
“The priest.”
Vox stared at him. “What?”
“The Scriptor did not betray your trust. It was Father Nicodemus who told me your name. It was he who told me about the Seven Kings and what you and your mother are planning. Weaponized versions of the Ten Plagues of Egypt. Father Nicodemus thinks that it is a beautiful plan.”
Vox narrowed his eyes. “How does he know about that?”
“He did not say.”
“No,” muttered Vox. “He wouldn’t. Spooky bastard.”
Vox remained standing for a moment. He looked around and saw milk-white faces watching him from the tunnel mouths. The watchers seemed to be cast in black and white except for their eyes. Like the man on the dais, everyone down in the shadow kingdom had dark red eyes. Vox was only half sure that it was stage dressing designed to create exactly the reaction he was having. Naked fear.
To the pale man, Vox said, “Which means that LaRoque-excuse me, the Scriptor — probably knows, too.”
“The Scriptor and the priest do not have secrets from one another. That is one of the pillars on which the Ordo Ruber was built.”
The Red Order. Vox did not speak the translation aloud, but he knew what it was. LaRoque’s grandfather had told him the whole story decades ago. That sharing had been a betrayal of the strict rules of the Red Order, and knowledge of it was supposed to be a death sentence for anyone not initiated into their ancient brotherhood.
“Okay,” he said, “then let’s both lay cards on the table. You know who and what I am? Fine. Turns out, I know who, and much more importantly, what you are.”
The pale man looked skeptical. “Then who and what am I?”
Vox smiled thinly as he spoke a single word. “Upier.”
He heard gasps and angry mutters from the surrounding shadows. Grigor’s eyes widened briefly and then narrowed to dangerous slits.
Vox held up a hand. “If you’re planning on giving me one of those ‘men have died for less’ speeches, save it for the tourists. We got off on a bad foot here. I’m appropriately skeeved out by you and your troops down here, so you can put that in your win category. Still-to make this completely fair, I think you should be a little more afraid of me.”
Grigor smiled at that. “The Scriptor said that you were brash, but he neglected to tell me that you were a fool.”
“The Scriptor is a paranoid schizophrenic and a fucking moron who couldn’t find his own dick with both hands and a set of printed instructions,” said Vox. “And just so you don’t think I’m blowing smoke up your ass, take a look at what I brought.”
He nodded to the briefcase. Grigor stared down at it with sudden suspicion, his pale lips parting slightly, but he made no move toward the case. Vox nodded approvingly.
“We both know what’s supposed to be in the case,” said Vox. “Contact info for every arms dealer on three continents, and some of my untraceable cell phones. But, since I’m not hideously stupid, the contact information is on a password-protected laptop and the cell phones can’t be activated without a special access code.”
Grigor’s eyes narrowed to lethal slits. “You did not bring them?”
“No,” said Vox, “I did not bring them down here to your deep, dark ultrascary secret lair. Like I said, I’m not stupid. What I brought instead, is a bomb.”
He removed his right hand from his pocket and raised it to show the small black plastic device he held.
“Yup. Detonator. The case also has two pounds of C-4 in it. Probably won’t kill everyone down here, but it’ll turn both of us into clouds of pink mist and bring down a hundred tons of rubble on the rest.
Grigor’s pale face went whiter still and he took an involuntary step backward, forking the sign of the Evil Eye at Vox and barking out a few sharp words in a language Vox could not recognize.
“Okay,” said Vox in a hushed tone that did not carry beyond the small circle of lamplight in which they stood. “Now we know whose dick is bigger. Let’s cut right to the chase. You think I came down here as a gofer for the Scriptor. Pretty apparent now that it isn’t the case. Though the Scriptor thinks it is. He thinks I’m kindly old friend of the family. I can’t begin to tell you how fucked up LaRoque is. He has no insight into people at all. He’s known me his whole life, knows about the Seven Kings, and still thinks I’m just some guy he can send on errands.”
He took a step forward. Grigor tensed, clearly debating whether to attack or run, but Vox showed him the trigger. A red light glowed beneath the arm of the detonator. “Dead man’s switch. I die, you die. Stop thinking bad thoughts and let’s see if we can talk serious business.”
To his credit, and to Vox’s appreciation, Grigor’s body gradually relaxed and he held his ground. Still on the dais, a king of death looming above the king of fear.
