Chapter Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Seven
They reached Adept House without incident.
The woods turned out surprisingly sparse, wide-spaced young beech and birch, not much brush between the slim trunks, and no nasty surprises.
Easy enough to navigate, even by night, even in the rain.
Here and there, faint rustling or the call of a night bird tripped Duncan’s senses, but it was momentary, quickly dismissed.
For the rest, the witch had made a rapid scrying cast in a puddle on cracked concrete outside one of the factory sheds, ascertained that there was nothing in the woods that wanted to stop them, and if they were watched, then the watchers did not make themselves known.
The house loomed out of the murk unexpectedly fast, a cheery assemblage of warmly lit window rectangles through the trees.
They skulked along the edge of the bedraggled lawn, got as close to the house as they could without leaving the trees.
Crouched there under a halfway-decent beech crown that kept the worst of the rain off.
At ground level, rhododendron bushes dominated the brush like some Wellsian alien growth.
It gave them ample cover. Duncan peered out between fleshy, bruise-colored leaves, spotted the ground-floor bay and French windows into the drawing room.
Still no curtains hung; you could see right to the back wall, make out the lit fireplace, the painting hung over it, the door left ajar.
“Is this close enough?” he asked the witch.
“Oh, I should think so, yes. We can stay right here in the trees.”
Duncan checked the Mappin the view seemed to rotate slowly about a center that was perhaps the low table between the two armchairs at the fireplace.
And the flames in the grate wavered through colors from mauve to green and back, passing through a truthful ruddiness only for a few moments at a time.
Annie wiggled her hips a little—gratuitously, he thought—and the Kilner jar wobbled in her lap. He blinked and looked up at her. She gave him a brilliant, girlish smile.
“You’re probably better not to stare too much,” she said. “It’ll make you dizzy.”
“Already is,” he grumbled.
“Don’t focus so much on what’s in it. Just let the whole vision wash over you, like a sunset.” The hips tilted again. “Like any thing of beauty you can’t touch. Oh, look.”
For a mistrustful moment, he stared at her, wondering if he was going to have to fend off her advances. She didn’t seem any less highly sexed than Sal, but surely out here in the rain and woodland wet, she couldn’t…
A slow smile twisted her lips. She nodded down at her lap. “I mean—look, we’re not the only ones who came early.”
He peered at the wavering image again. Disturbance now in the wobbly view, a figure striding into the room, followed more hesitantly by another.
“You’ll need to put your hand there,” the witch told him. “Palm flat to the glass, to feel the vibrations. Like this.”
She shifted her stance and pressed her own hand to one side of the Kilner jar. Warily, he did the same. Instantly, a familiar voice rinsed into his ears.
“…set everything out, have you?” Bainbridge, uncharacteristically brusque, looking around him. There was a sharp, crystalline tone to the way his words came through in Duncan’s ear that made it almost painful to listen. “Whisky, soda?”
“Water as well,” said Jeremy Ewart, audibly diffident. “All there on the table, Luminance.”
Nimble Shanks Annie snorted. Mouthed the word Luminance with broad derision.
“Yes, well.” Bainbridge paced about. “I don’t think Colonel Hardy is the sort of gentleman who’d simply water his whisky.
But you never know. And as for Miss Freeman, who can tell?
She’s not the most stable of females, yes, perhaps just water for her—” He came to a halt.
“Jeremy, what on earth is wrong with you? You’re as jittery as a princess with a navvy’s privates.
If you’re still not feeling well, perhaps you should go home. ”
“No, Luminance—I’m fine. I just…I worry about our dealings with the secular authorities.”
“The secular is always with us, Jeremy. I have taught you this. We cannot transcend it, in this life at least. We must deal with it as best we can. You let me worry about Colonel Hardy.”
“Yes, Luminance.”
“In fact, you’d better get out front, ready to greet him. I sense his approach. He’s come early, it seems. Something serious must have happened. Show him in here as soon as he arrives. But see to it he is alone.”
Ewart nodded jerkily—or that might have been the limitations of the scrying vision—and backed toward the door. He stared nervously for a moment, as it seemed, right out of the Kilner jar and into Duncan’s eyes. Then he was gone. The witch took her hand away, rolled her eyes.
“Oh, Jerry. Princess with a navvy’s prick, indeed. Why don’t you just stare at the bloody water and give the whole game away for us!”
“You think he has?”
They both peered at Bainbridge’s lone figure in the glass for a moment, but the archmage didn’t deign to glance their way. He seemed, as near as Duncan could tell, to be looking at the Tam o’ Shanter painting over the mantelpiece. Heavy sigh of relief from the witch.
“No, we probably got away with it this time.” She snorted again. “Calls himself a luminance? A master mage? I’ve seen more sensitivity in carrots.”
Then they both heard it.
The sound of a car coming up the long drive to the house.
—
Headlights swept pale, cold fingers across and through the trees.
Duncan fought off a trench-bred instinct to duck.
The growl of the motor shifted, grew less intense, as the car made it to the top of the rise.
He caught a couple of brief glimpses as it swept round the final curve—not enough to recognize make or model, only the limousine silhouette—and then the bulk of the house blocked his view, muted the sound.
Duncan heard the engine turned off, an exchange of voices too faint to make out words. Doors slammed.
“Here we go,” he muttered.
“Here we go,” agreed the witch serenely.
They watched the glass together, saw Bainbridge turn about to face the door.
Duncan put his palm to the glass just as the door flew open.
Confused tumult of muffled voices from the hallway, like the splintering of crystals in his ear, nothing coherent he could catch.
Hardy stood in the doorway as if propelled there by the force of the uproar.
“Did you tell him, you jumped-up, traitorous oik?”
Bulky figures crowding behind him. Bainbridge appeared to wave them off.
“Come in, Colonel,” he said mildly. “Jeremy, close the door, please. No, Compton—it’s fine. Really. Leave us alone, all of you. This is just a disagreement between gentlemen. We’ll sort it out. Isn’t that right, Colonel?”
Hardy stood a moment, visibly rigid with rage. Then—an officer calm descending. He turned his head.
“It’s fine, Captain,” he said, in clipped tones. “I’ll be fine. Please wait for me out front.”
He took a couple of steps into the room. Movement behind him in the hallway. Figures moving back. Someone pulled the door quietly closed.
“Now then, Colonel.” Bainbridge turning away, apparently toward the low table Jerry had positioned the carafe on. “Let me get you something to drink, and you can explain what you mean. Did I tell what to whom, exactly?”
“Don’t play the fool with me, Bainbridge. You know damn well who I’m talking about.”