Modern Magick

The Fifth Britain: 4

'I'm building alliances,' said Zareen a little later, once George Mercer had gone. 'Which is the first thing anybody in our situation would do. What can we expect to achieve with exactly three people?'

Jay was not impressed. 'You couldn't have consulted us about this brilliant plan?'

Zareen wasn't impressed either. 'You couldn't have chosen a different pub to have dinner? Or did you think George couldn't see you sitting there?'

Jay shot me a look, which I interpreted to mean it was all my fault.

'Mercer was never going to believe you just wanted to see him, whether we were there or not,' I said, in my own defence.

'Quite,' said Zareen shortly. 'And I wanted to distract him. Note all those questions he was asking?' She smiled mirthlessly. 'You were listening?'

'We were,' I said. 'And I did.'

'If Katalin knew he was with me, so did his superiors. He was sent to bleed me for information, just as I was trying to bleed him. Well, he can take that snippet of gossip back with him and we'll see what they do.'

'They'll agree,' I said. 'It's the perfect way to keep tabs on us.'

'Supposing they want to,' said Jay.

'Why wouldn't they?'

'Why would they?' Jay countered. 'As Zareen has just pointed out, there are exactly three of us. Without the Society at our backs, what can we be expected to achieve that would put Ancestria Magicka in a tizz?'

'We may be only three, but we get results,' I objected. 'Who was it that found out about the Greyer cottage?'

'They did. We may have found it first, but only by about twenty-five minutes — and they were on the trail well before we knew anything about it.'

That was, annoyingly, true. 'Well then, the Redclover brothers and the spire. We did that on our own.'

Jay patted me on the shoulder. 'I'm sure they're quaking in their boots.'

George Mercer had left with a promise to think over Zareen's offer, which Zar had interpreted to mean "receive instruction from his bosses", whoever they were. The rest of their conversation had yielded very little, for they'd put each other on guard by then, and they were both skilled conversational fencers. Zar had dropped lots of intriguing, but not very informative, hints about our recent discoveries, all of which Mercer had failed to follow up on — which might mean that he already knew all about them, or merely that he was too clever to take the bait. Zar treated his various light-hearted queries, jokes and remarks in the same fashion. She hadn't been able to draw him on the subject of his trip to Gloucestershire, either. He'd claimed to have gone there on a mundane errand — picking up a new recruit. It could have been true.

I was privately horrified at the idea of our developing a close association with George Mercer, or anybody else from Ancestria Magicka. It's difficult to pretend to help somebody without actually doing anything useful for them. Sooner or later you do actually have to help, and how was that going to pan out? I didn't want to help them. Neither did Jay. They'd take anything we gave them and find a way to do something terrible with it, and there was no guarantee that we'd glean anything of much use in return.

But Zar was serene. I hoped fervently that she knew what she was doing.

We spent an uneventful night at The Scarlet Courtyard. No one came to spy on us, no one tried to kidnap us, nothing went mysteriously missing... all told it was a bit disappointing. We awoke in the morning feeling a touch let down.