I glowered at Bob, and pulled up my stool to the worktable. I got out a notebook and a pencil. "The question of the hour is, what do you know about something called The Word of Kemmler?"
Bob made a sucking sound through his teeth, which is fairly impressive given that he's got no saliva to work with. Or maybe I'm giving him too much credit. I mean, he can make a B sound with no lips, too. "Can you give me a reference point or anything?"
"Not for certain," I said. "But I have a gut instinct that says it has something to do with necromancy."
Bob made a whistling sound. "I hope not."
"Why?" I asked.
"Because that Kemmler was a certifiable nightmare," Bob said. "I mean, wow. He was sick, Harry. Evil."
That got my attention. Bob the skull was an air spirit, a being that existed in a world of knowledge without morality. He was fairly fuzzy on the whole good-evil conflict, and as a result he had only vague ideas of where lines got drawn. If Bob thought someone was evil, well … Kemmler must have really pushed the envelope.
"What'd he do?" I asked. "What made him so evil?"
"He was best known for World War One," Bob said.
"The whole thing?" I demanded.
"Mostly, yeah," Bob said. "There were about a hundred and fifty years of engineering built into it, and he had his fingers into all kinds of pies. He vanished at the end of hostilities and didn't show up again until he started animating mass graves during World War Two. Went on rampages out in Eastern Europe, where things were pretty much a nightmare even without his help. Nobody is sure how many people he killed."
"Stars and stones," I said. "Why would he do something like that?"
"A wild guess? He was freaky insane. Plus evil."
"You say 'was,'" I said. "Past tense?"
"Very," Bob said. "After what the guy did, the White Council hunted him down and wiped his dusty ass out in 1961."
"You mean the Wardens?"
"I mean the White Council," Bob said. "The Merlin, the whole Senior Council, the brute squad out of Archangel, the Wardens, and every wizard and ally the wizards could get their hands on."
I blinked. "For one man?"
"See above, regarding nightmare," Bob said. "Kemmler was a necromancer, Harry. Power over the dead. He had truck with demons, too, was buddies with most of the vampire Courts, every nasty in Europe, and some of the uglier faeries, too. Plus he had his own little cadre of baby Kemmlers to help him out. Apprentices. And thugs of every description."
"Damn," I said.
"Doubtless he was," Bob said. "They killed him pretty good. A bunch of times. He'd shown up again after the Wardens had killed him early in the nineteenth century, so they were real careful the second time. And good riddance to the psychotic bastard."
I blinked. "You knew him?"
"Didn't I ever tell you?" Bob asked. "He was my owner for about forty years."
I stared. "You worked with this monster?"
"I do what I do," Bob said proudly.
"How did Justin get you, then?"
"Justin DuMorne was a Warden, Harry, back at Kemmler's last stand. He pulled me out of the smoldering ruins of Kemmler's lab. Sort of like when you pulled me out of the smoldering ruins of Justin's lab when you killed him. Circle of life, like that Elton John song."
I felt more than a little tiny bit cold. I chewed on my lip and laid my pencil down. I had the feeling the rest of this conversation was not going to be something I wanted to create a written record of. "So what is the Word of Kemmler, Bob?"
"Not a clue," Bob said.
I glowered. "What do you mean, not a clue? I thought you were his skull Friday."
"Well, yeah," Bob said. His eyelights nickered suddenly, a nervous little dance. "I don't remember very much of it."
I snorted out a laugh. "Bob. You never forget anything."
"No," Bob said. His voice shrank into something very small. "Unless I want to, Harry."
I frowned and took a deep breath. "You're saying that you chose to forget things about Kemmler."
"Or was compelled to," Bob said. "Um. Harry, can I come out? Just inside the lab? You know, while we talk."
I blinked a couple of times. Bob was full of mischief on the best of days. I didn't let him out except on specific intelligence-gathering missions anymore. And while he often pestered me to let him out on one of his perverted minirampages, he had never asked permission to leave his skull for the duration of a chat. "Sure," I told him. "Stay inside the lab and be back in the skull at the end of this conversation."
"Right," Bob said. A small cloud of glowing motes of light the size of campfire sparks came sailing out of the skull's eyes and darted to the far corner of the lab. "So anyway, when are we going to work on the new blasting rod?"
"Bob," I said. "We're talking about The Word of Kemmler."
The lights shot restlessly over to the other side of the lab, swirling through the steps on my stair ladder in a glowing helix. "You're talking about The Word of Kemmler," Bob said. The glowing cloud stretched, motes now spiraling up and down the stairs simultaneously. "I'm working on my Vegas act. Lookit, I'm DNA."
"Would you stop goofing around? Can you remember anything at all about Kemmler?"
Bob's voice quavered, the motes becoming a vague cloud again. "I can."
"Then tell me what you know."
"Is that a command?"
I blinked. "Do I have to make it one?"
"You don't want to command me to remember, Harry."
"Why not?" I demanded.
The cloud of lights drifted in vague loops around the lab. "Because knowledge is what I am. Losing my knowledge of what I knew of Kemmler took away a … a big piece of my existence. Like if someone had cut off your arm. What's left of what I know of Kemmler is close to the missing pieces."
I thought I started to understand him. "It hurts."
The lights swirled uncertainly. "It also hurts. It's more than that."
"If it hurts," I said, "I'll stop, and you can forget it again when we're done talking."
"But- " Bob said.
"It's a command, Bob. Tell me."
Bob shuddered.
It was a bizarre sight. The cloud of lights shivered for a second, as if in a trembling breath of wind, and then abruptly just shifted, flickering to one side as quickly as if I had been looking at it with one eye closed and suddenly switched to the other.
"Kemmler," Bob said. "Right." The lights came to rest on the other end of the table in the shape of a perfect sphere. "What do you want to know, wizard?"
I watched the lights warily, but nothing seemed all that wrong. Other than the fact that Bob was suddenly calm. And geometric. "Tell me what The Word of Kemmler is."
The lights pulsed scarlet. "Knowledge. Truth. Power."
"Uh," I said, "a little more specific?"
"The master wrote down his teachings, wizard, so that those who came after him could learn from him. Could learn about the true power of magic."
"You mean," I said, "so that they could learn about necromancy."
Bob's voice took on the edge of a sneer. "What you call magic is nothing but a mound of parlor tricks, beside the power to master life and death itself."
"That's an opinion, I guess," I said.
"More than that," Bob said. "It is a truth. A truth that reveals itself to those who seek it out."
"What do you mean?" I said slowly.
There was a flash, and a pair of white eyes formed in the glittering cloud of red points of light. They weren't pleasant. "Shall I show you the start of the path?" Bob's voice said. "Death, Dresden, is a part of you. It is woven into the fabric of your being. You are a collection of pieces, each of them dying and in turn being reborn and remade."
The white lights were cold. Not mountain-spring cold, either. Graveyard-mist cold. But I'd never seen anything quite like them before.
And there was no sense interrupting Bob when he was finally spilling some information.
Besides. Fascinating light.
"Dead flesh adorns you even now. Nails. Hair. You tend them and caress them like any other mortal. Your women decorate them. Entice with them. Death is not a thing to be feared, boy. She is a lover who waits to take you into her arms. You can feel her, if you know what her touch is like. Cold, slow, sweet."
He was right. A cold, tingling nonfeeling was glittering over my fingernails and my scalp. For a second I thought that it hurt, but then I realized that it was only a shivering sensation where that cold energy brushed close to the blood pulsing beneath my skin. It was where they met that it felt uncomfortable. Without the blood, the cold would be a pure, endless sweetness.
"Take a little of death inside, boy. And it will lead you to more. Open your mouth."
I did. I was staring at the light in any case, and it was amazing enough to merit a bit of gaping. I barely noticed a frozen mote of dark blue light, like the corpse of a tiny star, that appeared from one of the spirit's white eyes and began drifting toward my mouth. The cold sensation grew, and it hit my tongue like a thermonuclear peppermint, freezing hot, searingly bitter and sweet and-
- and wrong. I spat it out, recoiling, throwing my arms up in front of my face. I fell to the floor, numbness spreading.
"Too late!" crowed the spirit. It shot into the air, swirling around over me, gloating. "Whatever you have done to my thoughts, the master will not be pleased that you have meddled with his servant."