She took them from me with another grimace of pain and said, “Thanks.”

Grey came ambling up over the ground. If the temperature bothered him, he didn’t show it. “Want a hand with those?”

Ascher arched an eyebrow at him. “From you? I think I’m a little smarter than that.”

“You only say that because you think I’m only interested in you for your body.”

“Yes, obviously.”

“Totally unfair,” Grey said, with a disarming smile. “I’m also interested in what you might elect to do with your body.” He added, in a more sober voice, “You’re going to have trouble with clasps and buttons with your fingers like that. I know.”

Ascher squinted at him. She looked at me uncertainly, and then said to Grey, “Probably true.”

She got dressed. Grey helped her, without doing anything untoward, and the rest of the crew joined us a moment later.

“Maybe I should have let you handle that one, Dresden,” she said. “Traded you for the ice thing. Normally when some beastie comes at me, I use fire. Useless here.”

“I’d never have gotten through when it turned up the heat,” I said. “But if you’d like to handle my gate for me, I’m willing.”

“Maybe I will,” Ascher said with a cocky grin.

“Come,” Nicodemus said. He’d picked up his sword. One of its edges was blackened and had been visibly dulled, steel bubbling up like the edges of a pancake when the griddle is too hot. “Defeating the Salamander has surely warned someone of our presence here. The less time wasted, the better.”

And so all of us passed through the Gate of Fire, through a tunnel about thirty feet long that had me briefly worrying about the Murder Holes of Fire, but no threat materialized. We came out of the archway onto another broad expanse of stony cavern.

But this one was covered in ice.

The stalagmites and stalactites were all intact at this gate, and were in fact spread out in a suspiciously regular, almost geometric pattern for a couple of hundred yards, stretching between us and the next gate. They were covered in a thick sheath of old, old ice, which had universally come down from the stalactites to meet the rising stalagmites, forming great columns as thick as I was tall. The ice sparkled in the light cast by the last smoldering remains of the flames at the Gate of Fire, throwing back shimmering spectra of color. The floor, too, was covered in the same shimmering ice, starting about ten feet from the opening from the Gate of Fire. The air was dry and bitterly cold, and I saw Ascher draw a short breath and stop suddenly as it reached her.

I stared out at the glittering, frozen cathedral between us and the Gate of Ice and my palms began to sweat a little. I licked my lips and took a steadying breath as I regarded the passage in front of us.

Michael came to stand at my side and said, “It doesn’t look too bad.”

“Yeah,” I said, “which worries me.”

“Dresden,” Nicodemus said. “The time has come for you to redeem Mab’s word.”

“Hold your demonic horses,” I said, annoyed.

I put my hand forward for a moment, half closing my eyes, reaching out with my wizard’s senses. The air was frigid, as bad as anything you’d find at the South Pole, but that wouldn’t bother me much more than would a cold October evening back home. I sensed no enchantments, which meant little here in the Nevernever, where enchantment could just as easily be a part of the very fabric of reality, and thus no more remarkable or out of place than gravity or air in the mortal world.

I took several cautious steps forward, and put the toes of my left foot down on the edge of the icy floor.

And as if some vast machine had whirled to life, a block of ice the size of a small house plunged down from overhead and smashed onto the floor five feet in front of me, retaining its cut shape, its regular edges. No sooner had it settled than it whirled in place, flopped on its side, and a second house-sized block came rumbling out along the horizontal, sliding along the ice floor to smash into the first block. They parted for an instant, then slammed together again and shattered into dozens of smaller blocks that whirled off on their own, spinning into positions, slamming into one another with the speed and energy of high-speed traffic collisions, rearranging themselves into random, violent stacks every few seconds, each impact resounding through the vast space with enormous grinding crunches.

I stared at the field of gnashing, mashing ice-oliths in dismay, and saw more of the original huge blocks sliding out of the shadows to the side of the cavern, and falling down from overhead.

Dozens and dozens of them.

In seconds, there were thousands of blocks crunching and grinding and smashing away at one another over every foot of the space between me and the Gate of Ice. The air filled with the deafening sounds of impact, as if a glacier had come to life and begun to utter threats.

The smallest of the blocks, if they trapped me between them, would have smashed half of my body into tomato paste.

“Dresden,” Ascher said, and swallowed. “Uh. I’ve decided that maybe you should handle this one.”

Thirty-eight

Giant, angry, crushy blocks of ice, check.

One deity of the ancient world about to be royally pissed off, check.

Pack of rampant bad guys with whom I was about to lose major value, big check.

First things first.

I whirled away from the Gate of Ice, pointed my staff at the distant glow of the Way standing open behind us, unleashed my will and thundered, “Disperdorius!”