“And these benign spirits can turn on you.”
“Always a concern, with any Other. If something goes wrong, if I allow too many people to go out into the cold instead of sitting here and someone gets hurt, or if the business starts to suffer here due to a lack of customers, my credit with these same spirits might become strained, and they might take issue. At the very least, I’d get less free coffees. At worst, I might find events conspiring to take my position from me, or I might even get drawn and quartered in the streets.”
More grotesque imagery. It made me think of Molly’s fate.
I leaned back. “Wouldn’t practitioners be making those sorts of mistakes more often?”
“It happens from time to time. A handful of occurrences a year, for a given area. But these things are rarely sudden, and they can take a variety of forms. As it’s rarely a single monumental mistake, errors like this tend to cause a long series of events that can be tied together, telling very plausible stories. Building racism or intolerance in a sub-community, peaking in a mob assault. A high-risk investor’s accounts bottom out all at once, causing financial ruin. You’d be surprised at what’s believable, when looked at from outside, or how easy it is to let this happen. One can unknowingly offend one subset of Others while trying to please another, or spend too much credit and overdraw their accounts.”
I nodded. “And the… bigger events? We were just talking about the equivalent of nukes.”
“Most areas are stable. A lord or lords sit in power, well situated, unlikely to change more than once every fifty to a hundred years, if that. In smaller areas, things are typically enforced within the community, and it’s too much effort for too little gain, to cross too many lines and take such risks. The only places where you’re liable to see anything dramatic are places that are on the brink of great change, or places undergoing that change… places where people see an opportunity to seize greater status or better positions. That change helps to hide things.”
“Like a girl being beaten and tortured in the woods might be explained away as a side effect of the Hillsglade House dispute,” I said. My tone was a bit harder than I’d intended. Though we were out of earshot, I could see the blonde girls glance my way.
“Yes,” Laird said, just as calm as he’d been before. “Getting around to your question, things that are hard to explain away tend to end in people disappearing, rather than bodies being found. The locals will then clean up, and they will be upset with the culprit for the inconvenience and the risk.”
“Why are you telling me all this?” I asked.
“I want you to trust me, Blake. We may be enemies, but that doesn’t preclude trust and respect, much less an open dialogue.”
I glanced again at the metal side of the napkin dispenser. Rose was still absent.
Laird finished off his coffee, then set it down on the table. He opened his pocket watch, then closed it.
“I take it that’s your implement,” I said.
“And my familiar,” he said. “After a fashion.”
He opened the pocketwatch to show me. As before, I saw the openings that revealed the inner workings.
After two seconds, however, other hands slipped out from beneath the hour, minute and second hands. One went backwards, while the other went slow. He rested the end of the pocketwatch on the table, and I could feel the steady tick of it being transmitted across the surface, akin to the beating of a heart.
“Implements can be familiars?” I asked.
“Unconventional, but a police dog was off the table, and I wouldn’t want to spend the rest of my life dealing with any Other that would need to take such a large and inconvenient mortal form. Not that this one is so weak.”
“So… it’s talking to you?”
“It can, but just now it was doing me the service of telling me the time. I can’t take too long, I’m expecting a call from the coroner and a meeting with Macguin,” he said. “We might have some room for conversation before I go, but first I’m going to need to top up my coffee. Can I get you anything?”
I shook my head.
“I was thinking we could talk about a deal. Something to keep things safe and calm for everyone involved. If we went that route, I could protect you and buy you time to find a way out, if one exists. Maybe ruminate on that, so we can jump straight into the conversation at the first opportunity.”
“Sure,” I said.
He stood from his chair, empty cup in hand.
I turned in my seat to watch Laird join the line. With the crude little diagram in sugar, there was a bit of a crowd at the other end of the coffee shop, with people gathering and waiting for their coffees at the one end of the counter, the general line, people finding seats and people coming and going. Twenty or so people in all, but still a good number.
“I don’t trust him,” Rose said, the words distorted.
I glanced at the dispenser. Sure enough, I could see her blurry reflection. I murmured my reply, “I don’t either.”
Word had apparently gotten around. People were glancing my way, gathering around Laird. I withdrew my cell phone from my pocket and raised it to my ear. I’d get enough stares without talking to myself.
Rose said, “I went to go get the little black book. Dramatis Personae. I’ve got others in a grocery bag. I didn’t like how incomplete our knowledge was, so I did more digging. Behaim’s Circle, a gender-neutral term for covens, specializes in chronomancy, with a secondary focus in augury.”
I could recall reading that, but I’d been skimming, to see where the real threats were, and my focus had been on Essentials. “Chrono… time?”
“And omens.”
“Explains the pocketwatch,” I replied.
“The little black book says that grandmother thought the watch was a zeitgeist. Not in the pop culture term, either. A literal zeitgeist, a spirit of time. Those are his tools, the means he uses, so if he’s going to try something, it’s going to work in a way related to them. Both concretely and abstractly.”
“Keep going,” I said.
“With implements, the shape it takes is an indicator in how the practitioner works. A wand is very direct, pointing to things, aimed at specifics. A staff is more dramatic, cumbersome. A fan might be more personal, an accessory, directing things inward. Pens are focused on labels and premeditation.”
“It’s symbolic,” I said. I watched Laird order his coffee. “Abstract. I can work with that. I’ve spent enough time around artists, I think I can do ass-pull interpretations.”
“A watch. It’s less direct than the objects Essentials gave as examples. It doesn’t suggest anything particular.”
“It’s a… way of seeing how the world works on a fundamental level. For someone who does the omen thing, I can sort of understand that.”
“Right. But what’s he pulling here, if he’s pulling anything?”
“He might be getting more information out of us than we’re getting. Which I wouldn’t mind.”
“I’ve got an ugly feeling,” Rose said. “Like he’s playing us. You know?”
“Yeah,” I said. I didn’t take my eyes off Laird. “It doesn’t feel like it’s just a little bit of information gathering.”