Chapter Thirty-Four
Thirty-Four
The storm hung grumbling over Erlsley all afternoon.
It spiked the gray horizon with wires of white fire, lashed the city unmercifully with rain, dimmed down the light to a premature evening gloom.
The witches busied themselves preparing their perspicacious water—Ziroonderel, it seemed, had none in stock downstairs—while Duncan went out to buy a map and make a couple of phone calls that couldn’t be overheard.
It earned him a freshly drenched hat and coat, but by then he was beyond caring.
On the Somme, he’d not infrequently been wetter than this for days at a time, and basted in cold mud into the bargain. You got used to it.
You got used to anything in time.
First call—the Doorbell Club. They found Arthur for him, brought him to the phone.
“Trouble?” the sharpshooter asked warily.
“Not exactly. But I could do with the use of Mikey Collier and that ambulance again. It’s for tomorrow night. Local stuff only. Think we can swing it?”
“Sure. I can ask Cobb. Doubt his brother’s using it at the moment. Bloody thing’s more like a family heirloom than a means of transport, spends all its time parked up under tarpaulin in that shed of theirs. Neither of them really likes to drive.”
“And Collier? He likely to have any other commitments?”
Arthur snorted. “Any chance to get behind a wheel, Mikey Collier is in. He’ll need paying, of course. So will the Cobbs. You want me to speak to Billy?”
“If you see him. But I’ll try him myself, too.”
“Right…” An odd hesitancy on the line. Duncan felt a premonitory chill down the back of his neck.
“Is there a problem, Arthur?”
Awkward pause.
“Hope not,” the sharpshooter said. “But your girl’s been coughing pretty hard. Belle wants to call the house doctor. She’s worried about her girls catching something.”
Duncan weighed his options. They weren’t many.
“Fair enough,” he said finally. “But Niamh already saw a doctor in the summer. I don’t think it’s anything infectious.”
“I’ll tell them that.”
Duncan rang off, dialed Crammond’s home number. A chirpy female voice answered, turned abruptly frosty when he identified himself.
“He’s gone out, Duncan. You know how it is. And I don’t think you should be calling here like this.”
“Believe me, May, I wish I had another choice. Can you tell him I need a little help? If he calls round tomorrow morning, I’ll hash it out with him.”
“You mean to that…club?” Ice on the line. “I don’t like him spending time there, Duncan.”
“I won’t keep him long.”
Silence, more ice. Duncan waited for a cable to snap somewhere under the weight.
“Well, then, I’ll tell him,” she said stiffly. He heard her gather breath for her parting shot. “But I’m going to tell him what I think, too.”
“Tell him whatever you want, May. Just give him the message.”
In the faint hiss on the line, he could feel that she still wasn’t done. He didn’t want to antagonize her, for Crammond’s sake and his own. He waited.
Rain drummed audibly off the roof of the call box. He turned his head to watch it stitch and trickle down the fogged glass panels.
“You’re ill luck, Duncan,” she spat out at last. “You know that? Ill luck and a crow’s shadow at noon, my mother used to say.
I see it in you, I feel it like creeping cold on my nape.
There’s something black and twisted following you, Duncan, and I don’t want Billy anywhere near you when it catches you up. ”
She slammed down the phone.
He rolled his eyes. Tapped for the operator, gave her the region and number for his final call, the out-of-town option, the long shot.
“Capstone Park House,” said a mannered male voice.
“This is Duncan Silver.”
Slight shift in tone, perhaps a faint warmth, though nothing you could warm your hands at. “And how may we help you, Mr. Silver?”
“It’s complicated. Would you please inform the viscount that I’d like to speak with him at his earliest convenience?”
—
According to the ordnance survey of east Erlsley, Adept House backed onto woodland that sprawled the best part of a mile north before it ended beside a canal.
Eastward, it ran sparse between factory sites that had mostly been abandoned on general principles since the Unbinding, but which, at least to Duncan’s knowledge, were relatively untroubled by Huldu incursion.
The deep Forest didn’t begin for another five or six miles to the east.
“I can get through on this side,” he said, pointing at the eastern approach and the lack of contour lines.
“It’s flat ground; it’s why they built there.
Going to be a lot more overgrown now than it shows here, but it’s still better.
North is going to be too steep, up from the canal and then down again.
Going to be slipping and sliding on my arse the whole time if I try it in this weather. ”
“Our arses,” Nimble Shanks Annie corrected him. “I’ll be coming with you.”
“You will not. This is likely to be dangerous.”
“Oh, dangerous, is it? You don’t say! Pan’s aching balls, Sal, these woodsmen really are something, aren’t they?”
She looked at Wolfbane Sal, who shrugged with uncharacteristic awkwardness. No help there. Annie rolled her eyes, turned on Duncan again.
“Listen, sonny, you think going to the Forest is something you people invented in the last five years? People like me have been going to the Forest for spells and woodcraft, for witchery and ancient wisdom, for bloody fucking centuries before you were even born! I was facing down the Fae over woodland spell songs while you were still in short trousers.”
Sal snorted. “Lot less facing down, more top-to-tailing, as I recall.”
“You shut up.”
“What, you’re going to pretend—”
“It doesn’t make any difference, ladies!” Duncan waited until he was sure he had their attention. “I’m going alone. That’s the end of it.”
Annie set her jaw. “Remind me again whose perspicacious water this is?”
“That’s not the point!”
“That is entirely the point. You think you’ll just pick up that jar and shake it and that’s all there is to it? Scrying through elemental tangle isn’t something you learn overnight. You are going to need guidance, young man, whether you like it or not.”
“She’s right, Duncan.”
“I notice you’re not volunteering,” he retorted.
Sal smiled and popped a last remaining cube of ham from the cooling fondue into her mouth, chewed it down with gusto. “Mhmm, well. Scrambling around in the wet and dark really isn’t my forte, darling. I’d just slow you down. Annie here is quick and…nimble. Famed for it, in fact.”
“Legs on me like you wouldn’t believe,” Annie agreed, grinning. “Like a girl half my age. Have a look if you want.”
Duncan grunted, defeated, and went back to the map, while Jeremy Ewart watched from the sidelines with fairly obvious envy and chagrin.
—
They sent Ewart home not long after. He took his share of the tangled water in a tightly sealed Kilner jar about the volume of a battlefield canteen, strapped into a leather carrying satchel he said he could bring into the house the next day with no problem.
“You don’t have to get it all into the carafe,” Annie told him. “It can take dilution up to about a third. But anything more than that, and we’ll struggle to get a connection. Just watch your back, Jerry. Don’t get caught. If you do, it’s all for nothing.”
“They won’t catch me, Mistress Spence.” Ewart blew his nose into a tattered handkerchief with the Order’s mark on it. He was already in the grip of Sal’s elf bolt ague and drip. “You can depend on me in all things.”
He walked out of the apartment with a shiny cannon fodder look on his face that gave Duncan more of a wrench than he’d want to admit.
It was an expression he’d seen too often on young faces in the trenches in the early days.
He listened to Sal wish him well in the hallway, watched Nimble Shanks Annie sit on the sofa and pick absently at the long stringy leavings of melted cheese from the fondue cauldron.
“It doesn’t bother you?” he asked. “Sending him out into the firing line like this?”
The thin witch shrugged. “We’re all in the firing line on this one. Thought you’d be used to the idea, a man like you. Did you worry so much about the men you led into machine gun fire on the Somme?”
Duncan said nothing.
“Besides which.” Licking cheese grease from her fingertips. “Little fucker ran out on me for his phallus-obsessed masters. I confess I’m feeling a limited sense of responsibility for how his choices have worked out. I’m not his mother, you know.”
“Evidently not.”
“It’s what a lot of them are looking for, of course.
Acolytes, apprentices, herb runners—for a lot of them, it’s just a second shot at the womb.
But then, of course, boys will be boys, and boys must tear free of Mother’s apron strings in order to become men, so it’s a bumpy ride at the best of times. ”
“You could stick to female acolytes.”
“Yes, some of the sisters do that.” The witch sniffed. “Girls are great to train, it’s true. I just don’t really like fucking them as much.”
Wolfbane Sal swept back into the room, retying her gown under her ample chest, grinning toothily. “Well, guess who was very uncomfortable leaving Duncan here alone with us both.”
They both looked at him intently, like a couple of crows eyeing up a tasty piece of carrion.
“You’re sure Jerry’s going to hold up?” he asked deflectively.
“I think he’s had his faith in the Order of Prick and Pussy sufficiently shaken, yes,” Annie said with relish. “Then again, wouldn’t be the first time he’s reneged on an allegiance to us, would it?”
“Oh, stop your gnawing, both of you. He’s going to be fine.”
“Aye, Sal, so you say. But what if he starts acting suspicious, or leaves that water somewhere it gets found? Bainbridge gave me the impression he can sense—”