Chapter Thirty-Six
Thirty-Six
In the end, he didn’t sleep very long or well.
The whisky and the crackle in Niamh’s lungs kept him from any clean rest, left him tossing and turning beside her, forced on him a state of groggy semiwakefulness shot through with sour dreams that tipped only grudgingly into deeper sleep as dawn began to stain the ceiling above the curtain rail once more.
He woke a couple of hours later. Gifts from the night before—the hangover he deserved like an iron spike through his head, and a bladder strained to bursting.
Niamh snored gently beside him. He went in underwear down the corridor to relieve himself, came back and climbed into bed again, but was by then too viciously awake to do more than lie on his back and sift his throbbing head for anything that wasn’t rage or bitterness or despair.
Get up, Duncan. Get up and find a way to fucking fix this. You’re talking to witches this afternoon. Maybe they can do something. Maybe—
He got abruptly out of bed. Niamh moaned and turned over, but did not wake.
He dressed properly, mouth of the man in the mirror a thin, tight line, and went down to the dining room the girls used at the back of the club.
He found Crammond and Arthur sitting at one of the spartan tables over demolished breakfast platters and mugs of tea.
They appeared to have been waiting for him.
Arthur got up to greet him as he came in, ducked into the kitchen, and ordered another plate, some more tea. Duncan sat down opposite Crammond.
“Morning,” he croaked. Cleared his throat and tried again. “Morning. Thanks for coming over. Sorry I had to call the flat like that.”
“Ah, dinnae pay any attention tae May. Ye ken whit she’s like.”
“Still.”
“Arthur telt me ye’ve had the doctor oot tae Niamh? She awright?”
“Not really.”
Crammond looked down at his plate. Was silent. Arthur came back and sat down at Duncan’s side.
“Eggs and bacon,” he said. “They’ll have it straight out to you. Fresh pot coming, too. Oh yeah, and this came for you first thing by courier.”
He handed over a thick and waxy foolscap envelope with an ornate, wine-colored wax seal across the closing flap.
On the front was written in an elegant hand Sworn Documents Included—For the Private Attention of Duncan Campbell Esq.
Duncan slid a finger under the seal and broke it, lifted the flap, squeezed the envelope from the edges so he could peer inside. He nodded to himself.
“Sworn documents?” Crammond wondered quietly.
“You could call them that, aye.” Duncan fished out one of the big white sheets between his fingers and put it down on the table in front of the other man. Crammond gaped at what was printed on it.
“Ten fuckin’ pound?” He looked at the envelope with fresh respect. “How much is in there?”
“Three hundred. Some of these are fifties.”
“Fuckin’ fifties?” Crammond leaned in closer, dropped his voice to a corrosive hiss. “Three hundred fuckin’ pound? Ye mind tellin’ me whit the fuck this is for?”
“It’s for you.”
A serving woman came out of the kitchen with a tray.
Duncan slid the ten-pound note back into the envelope, closed the flap, and handed the package across the table to Crammond.
The Glaswegian held it as if in a trance, waited until the woman had laid down the tray with its steaming teapot and filled plate, then retreated again to the kitchen.
“Duncan, I—”
“I owe you, Billy. For all this.” Duncan gestured around at where they sat.
“For taking me in and squaring it with Belle. For Mikey Collier and that ambulance ride. This one coming, too. For the Webleys. Most of all, for the risk you took, for standing by a dead man walking like it was no big fucking deal. Is it enough?”
“Is it…?” Goggling at him as if he’d just sprouted fangs. “Is it fuckin’ enough?”
Despite the dull ache of the hangover and everything else that hung over him now, Duncan felt himself grin.
He couldn’t help it. He reached for the plate of bacon and eggs, felt something rising in him that he recognized from his time in the trenches.
Not hope, but a gritted hilarity and sense of purpose that somehow made hope beside the point.
“Tell you what,” he said, deadpan. “If there’s any left once you’ve squared everyone, buy something nice for May, and tell her it’s from me.”
—
Noon found him back on Crawgate. Bacon, eggs, and several mugs of strong tea laced with aspirin had his hangover down to levels where it more resembled focal competence than pain. It was the simple engine that kept him moving forward.
See the witches.
Find out what Hardy and Bainbridge had planned.
Get out of town.
Three more days. Blank out detail and consequence beyond that, because right now none of it mattered.
His plans were laid. Crammond and Arthur briefed, Niamh and Garner reassured that rescue and fresh refuge were coming soon—all they need do was sit tight.
Niamh was disgruntled and foul mouthed about it, small glints of the woman she’d been before her abduction starting to reemerge, and his heart took a tiny tick upward to see it.
Garner just grunted phlegmatically and nodded.
Be careful out there, lad was all he seemed prepared to say on the matter.
Taking it to heart, Duncan stopped off at a tram change on the way, found coins and a call box, rang the number on the card Bainbridge had given him. An anonymous voice at the other end took his name, went away. The archmage picked up the phone a minute later.
“Mr. Silver. Good afternoon, this is a pleasant surprise. But I’m afraid if you’re calling for news of Mimi Rush and her mother, I am no further forward.”
“Well, how long is it going to take?” Ironing his voice of all tone other than brusque demand. The witches might not rate Bainbridge’s scrying abilities, but better not to give him any reason to apply them in the wrong direction. “I don’t have a lot of time.”
“Believe me, Mr. Silver, I appreciate the urgency of your situation.” Urbane, soothing. “And to a very real extent, it is my situation, too. But we cannot afford to move too hastily. If Colonel Hardy and the Commission were to discover that we are allied—”
“We’re not allied yet, Bainbridge. Don’t jump that gun.”
“That is not my intention. But were the colonel to be aware that we are even in contact, the results could be catastrophic for any hope of resolution. You are a woodsman and will doubtless have told your clients on occasion that they must be patient and let you work.”
“You’re not a woodsman.”
“No, of course not. But, like you, I am concerned to find Mimi Rush above all, because she is the key. And the arena I operate in is, in its way, just as fraught with dangers and complications as the Forest. You must give me time to work, Mr. Silver.”
“How much time?”
“Contact me at the beginning of next week. Monday or Tuesday. Better to make it Tuesday. By then, I should have some news at least.”
Duncan said nothing for a couple of seconds. He let the silence hang. Let Bainbridge squirm.
“Tuesday,” he said finally. “You’d better have something pretty fucking concrete for me, or this partnership is dissolved.”
He hung up. Hoped he hadn’t overegged it.
At the bottom of Crawgate, he stopped at the pie shop again, got Cornish pasties this time, and trudged up the hill, trying to shield the package from the worst of the rain with his arm.
The Webleys weighed heavy in his pockets, his hat brim dripped in sullen symphony with the rhythm of his steps, and Niamh’s breathing clawed at his heart.
“Don’t they do that witch’s pie anymore?” asked Nimble Shanks Annie as they unwrapped his offering in the kitchen. “Would have thought that’d be an obvious choice. Good, spicy mix they put in those, really warms your belly for you.”
“I’ll ring and take fucking orders next time.”
Pin-drop silence. The two witches paused and looked at each other. Annie raised an eyebrow elaborately, then busied herself with her pasty. Wolfbane Sally reached across the table and put a carmine-nailed hand on Duncan’s arm.
“What’s happened?” she asked gently.
—
He argued it with them like a bull terrier, jaws clamped and worrying at prey. Got nothing for his pains but weary head shaking and increasingly irritable responses.
“But you’re witches, for Christ’s sake!”
“Witches, yes. Not gods.” Nimble Shanks Annie wiped flecks of pastry from her lips. Brushed her fingers together to rid them of grease. “Magic has no recourse against the Black Crab. It’s written. How many times is it written, Sal? Tell him.”
“She’s right, Duncan.” That awful compassion in Wolfbane Sally’s face again, in her low voice.
It floored him like a punch to the sternum.
“Perhaps if you’d brought her to us when it first began.
But even then. The Black Crab—the body turned against itself, against its owner’s will, against life itself.
Like trying to persuade men not to go to war.
In the end, there is no magic for that.”
“The doctor said there are treatments! Experimental processes with radium—”
“Try them, then,” said Annie.
“There must be something you can do!”