Chapter Thirty-Three #3
The witch made a modest face. “Wasn’t that hard, honestly. There’s a big part of Jerry that isn’t at all sure he made the right choice when he quit Annie here for the Orb. Easy to work with that. I just had to tie it specifically to you and the current situation.”
“In some ways,” said Annie, wiping her mouth daintily with a crumpled napkin from the table, “Jerry wasn’t such a great loss to the coven. Very…bendable.”
Duncan eyed her with distaste. “So you just bend him and use him and then throw him away?”
Annie raised an eyebrow. “Says the man who hit him in the face for walking too close behind you in the street.”
“That wasn’t—”
“Anyway.” Shooting a lascivious look across at her fellow witch that put a quiver in the pit of Duncan’s stomach. “Not like young Jerry didn’t get his reward from us both earlier this afternoon, am I right, Sal?”
Wolfbane Sal grinned. “He certainly seemed to be enjoying himself.”
“Do you think we worked him too hard, though?”
“Well, I didn’t hear him complain at any point.” Sal pretended to consider. “Though I suppose his voice was a bit muffled now and then, so—”
“Aye—look.” Duncan made a fending-off gesture. “Ladies. Could we talk about your conquests some other time? Is there—”
“Are we embarrassing you, Duncan?” Nimble Shanks Annie spiked a fresh piece of meat and lowered it into the cauldron, turned it this way and that in the bubbling cheese. “You really only have yourself to blame, you know.”
“And how’s that?”
The witch pulled out her piece of meat, offered it to Wolfbane Sal who leaned in and tugged it off the skewer with her bared teeth, winked sidelong at Duncan as she did it. The room felt stuffy and heated, ripe with torrid implication.
“Jerry came to see us last night with this news,” said Annie.
“Very eager, he was. We asked him to come back bright and early this morning so you could meet him, and, well, we’ve had him here all day twiddling his thumbs waiting for you.
We had to do something to keep him entertained. And ourselves, come to that.”
“Good for you,” said Duncan curtly. “I got here as soon as I could. Now—this meeting tomorrow. Is there any way we can get Jerry here to eavesdrop again? Listen in on it the same way?”
“The same way?” The witches exchanged another glance, no longer lewd.
As if someone had opened a window, let in sudden cold air.
Sal shook her head. “There’s no way the Order is going to let him hover in a corridor outside a meeting that important.
Especially after he’s been unreachable for most of today.
He’d just get caught. We need something else. ”
“Perspicacious water?” Annie offered.
Sal pursed her lips. “Could be made to work. But not at much distance.”
“Do you have some?”
“No, not bottled up and ready to go. Ziroonderel downstairs might.”
Annie snorted. “That old fraud? ’Derel’s selling to credulous new agers, not actual witches. There’s less magic in that place than there is up a black cat’s arse.”
“You’re being unkind. She’s still—”
“What’s perspicacious water?”
Both women looked at him. Then at each other. Sal sighed.
“It’s water that…Look, it’s complicated. You know how water refracts light?”
Duncan groped in dim memories of his physical science classes at Cadogan’s. Nodded, unsure.
“Right, well there are ways to make it not only refract, but, uhm—resonate, if you like, communicate with…other bodies of water the same. You could say they get, uh…tangled up. There are angles we’re not privy to here in the physical world, bonds we cannot see or even calculate well, but they work to connect… uhm…”
“It can carry vibrations, too,” said Annie helpfully. “So speech, most noises if they’re loud enough.”
“We ask Jerry to place a carafe of prepared perspicacious water in the room before the meeting. And we give you the rest in a Kilner jar about this big.”
“But you’ll have to be within resonance range.”
“Which, for a volume that small, is about…” Sal raising eyes to the ceiling as she muttered something—invocation, calculation, maybe both—under her breath. “Sixty-five feet.”
Duncan thought about the drawing room he’d talked with Bainbridge in, the bay window, the garden outside.
The room couldn’t be more than about fifteen feet across, wall to window.
And beyond the glass, the lawn stretched a dozen yards at most before the bushes and trees began along its edge.
He could huddle in the brush line unseen easily enough, for as long as the meeting with Hardy took.
Under cover of night, especially in weather as wet and murk-ridden as they seemed destined to suffer, the chances of anyone from the house stumbling on him were pretty low.
“I can manage that,” he said.
Wolfbane Sal beamed like a schoolmarm at a favored pupil.
“Can he, though?” asked Annie sharply. “Bainbridge knows him already. He’ll be attuned.
And by the sound of it, he’s already picked up on resonances from this Fae heart’s blood trick Duncan here somehow survived.
There is more to Duncan Silver than meets the eye.
Well, quite. Even if Bainbridge doesn’t know exactly what it is, what caused it, it’s obviously made an impression.
He may not spot the tangled water—especially if we tincture it with some basil or lady’s mantle—but even at sixty feet, he might be able to sense that Duncan is around. ”
“Duncan is Tyche-warded; I gave him the full deck a week ago—luck in stealth, evasion, chance encounter, prowess. That ought to be enough.”
Nimble Shanks Annie grunted, unconvinced. But she didn’t push the point.
Duncan nodded at Ewart, who had begun to snore lightly. “Does he have to report back in at the house today?”
“Not necessarily,” Annie said. “He can always tell them he went down with a head cold or something, didn’t come in because he was worried it was the flu.”
“Aye, that’s a decent enough excuse.”
“Sal here can even give him a case of the sniffles to fit. Right, Sal?”
Wolfbane Sally picked at her teeth with one witchy fingernail.
“Can do, yeah. Elf bolt ague and drip ought to be about right; I can do that spell in my sleep.” She saw the look he gave her.
“Not actual elf shot, Duncan, it’s just what they call it in the trade.
Easy enough to cook up. He can go home with it tonight. ”
“He’ll need to take this perspicacious water with him, too,” Duncan said somberly. “We can’t risk him coming back here tomorrow, same day as he plants it. Can you get it made in time?”
“If we can’t just get it from downstairs, yes, no problem.” Sal gestured toward a door on the other side of the room, a sanctum Duncan had never seen inside. “I’ve got all the makings in there. Annie, you’ll stay and help?”
“Wouldn’t miss it for the world, dear.” Annie was still watching Duncan with a gleam in her eye that he didn’t much like. “This is starting to look like a legend in the making.”