Witches Incorporated

by K. E. Mills

  Sir Alec’s wintry smile appeared again, brief as ever. “You, Mister Dunwoody, are my pruning shears.”

  Pruning shears? “I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”

  “The wizard in question has proven himself remarkably… stubborn,” said Sir Alec. “Not only does he steadfastly decline to willingly co-operate with our investigation, he has managed to acquire for himself a shadbolt, to ensure his lack of assistance.”

  What? Gerald stared, disbelieving. “Is he mad?”

  “Better say desperate,” said Sir Alec. “Or greedy beyond any reason.”

  “But not even the thaumaturgical black market deals in shadbolts. Does it?”

  Sir Alec sighed. “It deals in everything, Mister Dunwoody. No matter how ill-advised, distasteful or patently illegal. If one can pay, one can purchase.”

  “Yes, but a shadbolt?”

  “Clearly our friend next door gambled that his rewards would compensate for any… personal inconvenience.”

  “Next door? You mean he’s—”

  “Through there. Yes,” said Sir Alec, nodding at the small room’s other exit. “Waiting for you.”

  Gerald felt his skin crawl. “For me?”

  “Indeed.” Sir Alec frowned. “We can’t break his hex, Mister Dunwoody. Whoever designed this particular shadbolt used some… regrettable… incants. After due consideration it’s been decided that we need your particular and peculiar talents to loosen our man’s tongue.”

  Oh. “I see.”

  “So in you go. I’ll be here, watching through the scryer. Ready to lend a hand should assistance be required.”

  “Yes, sir,” he said. “Ah… Sir Alec? I’m only guessing because I’ve never done this before, but—forcibly breaking a shadbolt. That’s not going to be pleasant.”

  “Not for our treacherous friend, no,” Sir Alec agreed. “But I’m inclined to feel he should’ve thought of that before he betrayed his country.”

  “Yes. Only, was he thinking about betraying his country? Or was he just thinking about the money. Getting himself out of debt.”

  Sir Alec raised an eyebrow. “I don’t know. Is it relevant?”

  “Well… yes. I think it is.”

  “Mister Dunwoody, you are an agent of the Ottosland government,” said Sir Alec, impatient. “Committed to its service and the defence of the nation’s sovereignty. You just signed a contract to that effect. And now you’re being asked to honour that contract. Are you telling me you’re not able to fulfil your obligation?”

  “No,” said Gerald. His hands were sweaty. “No, I’m not.”

  “Then fulfil it,” said Sir Alec. “The clock is ticking, Mister Dunwoody. Lives are depending on what you do next.”

  Dizzy, he nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  The nameless Second Grade wizard jumped as the door into his small room opened.

  “Hello,” said Gerald, closing it behind him. “I’m Gerald.”

  The wizard looked at him, uncertain. “William.”

  “Hello, William.”

  William frowned. “So, what are you? My lawyer?”

  “Lawyer?” he said, feeling ill. “No, I’m a wizard. Like you.”

  “Ha. If you can turn around and walk out of here, you’re not like me,” sneered William.

  There was a second chair in this room. Gerald sat down and pressed his hands between his knees. “Look. William. They’ve sent me in here to break your shadbolt.”

  “Then you’re wasting your time,” said William, dismissive. Beneath the bravado he stank of fear. “My shadbolt’s the best a small fortune can buy. Guaranteed to make me unbreakable.”

  Gerald looked at him. Let me out, let me out. I don’t want to be here. “No-one’s unbreakable, William.”

  Arms folded across his chest, William sat back. “I am.”

  “No, you’re not. Trust me.”

  “All right. Fine. Go on, then, Gerald,” said William, shrugging. “Give it your best shot. The others failed. You will too.”

  Deeply apprehensive, Gerald closed his eyes and let his senses unfurl. He felt the shadbolt straight away, saw it in his mind’s eye as a series of chains and padlocks looped and secured around William’s etheretic aura. It was ingenious. Complicated. Diabolically strong. But so was he—and he could sense how to break it. In fact he could break it quite easily, in one fell swoop, if he didn’t mind sending William insane. Or killing him.

  He opened his eyes. “William, you need to listen to me. Deactivate the shadbolt and tell Sir Alec whatever he needs to know. Because I really, really don’t want to hurt you.”

  William snickered, even as his fingers crept towards his mouth. “You won’t. You can’t.”

  Gerald stared at his hands, pressed almost bloodless now between his knees. “Sir Alec,” he said, just loudly enough for the scrying crystal to pick up. “I don’t want to do this.”

  “He’s not an innocent casualty, Mister Dunwoody,” said Sir Alec, seemingly out of thin air. “He’s a willing accomplice. The kind of man who creates innocent casualties. Your compassion should be reserved for them.”

  “Even so…”

  “I told you once this was not a job for the faint-hearted. I told you there were times when you’d have to be a scalpel. This, Mister Dunwoody, is one of those times.”

  A scalpel. Pruning shears. A dustpan and brush. How many euphemisms were there for what he’d become?

  “Please, William,” he said, not caring that Sir Alec could hear his desperation. “Tell us what you did. All of it. And after that we can work things out.”

  William’s eyes were the colour of dirty dishwater. Filled with unease now, his gaze jittered from side to side. His fingernails were so badly bitten they’d started to bleed. “Can’t. Can’t. No talking. That’s the deal.”

  “Mister Dunwoody.”

  Gerald flinched. Sighed. “I’m sorry, William.” Looking with his mind’s etheretically-tuned eye, he reached for the first strand of the shadbolt… and snapped it.

  William howled like a dog run over by a carriage.

  Fighting a wave of nausea, he leaned forward. “William, please, I’m begging you. Save yourself. Talk.”

  William sobbed, and shook his head.

  He snapped another strand of the shadbolt. William toppled sideways off his chair to the floor, blubbering, all bravado burned away in white-hot flames of pain. Gerald stared down at him… and remembered the cave.

  I can’t do this. I’m not Lional.

  “I can’t do this,” he said out loud, to Sir Alec. “If that means I’m in breach of contract then fine. Sue me. But I can’t—I won’t—do this.”

  Without waiting for a reply he got off the uncomfortable wooden chair and walked to the small room’s other door, the door that would let him get out of this place. He turned the handle, pulled it open…

  … and found himself outside the wrought-iron gates of the haunted house. The morning mist was heavy. Fading into the distance, the muffled clip-clop of hooves and the creak of wooden wheels as the cart that had deposited him here returned to the railway station.

  And as he stared at the gates, numbed beyond any thought or feeling, they swung wide and soundless, inviting him to enter. Cold despite his overcoat, gloved hands thrust deep in its pockets, he walked unhindered up the gravel driveway to the mist-shrouded, ivy-covered house. Banged the gargoyle doorknocker. Nodded to the very proper butler who answered the door.

  “I’m Gerald Dunwoody. I believe I’m expected.”

  “Certainly sir,” said the butler. “Sir Alec is in the parlour. Please, follow me.”

  And yes, Sir Alec was in the parlour, a buttercup yellow and fresh dairy-cream room. Seated in a blue-and-white striped wingback armchair and conservatively, nondescriptly dressed in a grey pinstripe suit, he was sipping tea from an elegant porcelain cup. He looked up as the butler announced his visitor.

  “Ah. Mister Dunwoody,” he said, unnervingly expansive and genial. “So good of you to join me. Come i
n. Sit down. Would you care for some refreshment?”

  Standing just inside the doorway, Gerald shook his head. “No, thank you,” he said, struggling not to sound as dazed as he felt. “Sir Alec, what was that? Lional… the hexed gates… that wizard, William? What just happened?”

  Sir Alec considered him over the rim of the teacup. “What do you think happened?”

  “I don’t know, I—I thought it was real, then I thought I was dreaming, and then—” He shook his head again. “I don’t know. I’m assuming it was… all part of the test?”

  Sir Alec nodded. “Correct.”

  “And I passed?”

  Not even this warm, cosy room could thaw Sir Alec’s smile. “Well… let’s just say you didn’t fail.”

  Oh. Well. That was good… wasn’t it?

  “Do sit down, Mister Dunwoody,” added Sir Alec, much less genially. “I’m not fond of repeating myself.”

  He dropped onto the parlour’s couch. “Sorry, sir. So, if I’ve passed, and I’m a janitor, then what happens now?”

  “Now, Mister Dunwoody?” Sir Alec put down the cup. “Now I have a job for you.”

  “A job?” he repeated. He still felt not quite real. “Already?”

  “Certainly,” said Sir Alec. “The government’s not in the habit of paying agents to loll about. It’s time, Mister Dunwoody, for you to get your feet slightly damp.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Anyway,” said Monk, bounding back through the dining room doorway, slightly out of breath and looking ever-so-slightly flustered, “it’s going to be a while before I can fix the place up. I mean, Great-uncle Throgmorton may have left me the house but unfortunately his bequest didn’t include the dosh for repairs and modernisation and so forth.”

  “Huh,” said Emmerabiblia, as Monk slid into his seat at the table. “At least Great-uncle Throgmorton remembered you exist. You and Aylesbury. He didn’t leave me so much as a copper penny, the female-hating old miser. I hardly call that fair.”

  Swallowing a groan, Melissande reached for her half-nibbled bread roll. She was fond of Monk’s sister, she really was, but for the last three weeks all Bibbie could talk about was the gross unfairness of Great-uncle Throgmorton’s will. And really, once you’d agreed fifty or sixty times about the unspeakable rottenness of mingy old men who were stuck in the middle of last century, what else was there to say? Apart from Oh for the love of Saint Snodgrass, do shut up! and that would only lead to unpleasantness… which wasn’t a good idea. They had enough on their plates without adding hurt feelings to the menu.

  “I know, I know, it’s not fair,” said Monk, impatiently sympathetic. Then he turned. “The thing is, Mel, Great-uncle Throgmorton was a die-hard old fogie. Women as Decorative Objects, Seen but Seldom Heard, that kind of thing. Not to be trusted with money or property or anything remotely smelling of business.”

  “Yes,” she replied, with heroic restraint. “Bibbie has mentioned that, in passing. Very outdated of him.”

  “Still,” he added, “you’re welcome to come and live here with me, Bibbie. I already told you that. It’s a big house, we could rattle around in it together and never bump into each other from one week to the next.”

  Bibbie pulled a face. “No, thank you very much. If you want someone to pick up your discarded socks and cook your meals and dust cobwebs off the ceilings then you can blasted well pay for the privilege, Monk. I have no intention of being your housekeeper.”

  “What?” Monk adopted an air of wounded disbelief. “Bibs, how can you even suggest it? I’m not Aylesbury, I’d never treat you like that! I’m the nice brother, remember?”

  Even though she was still cross, Bibbie smiled, a little. “Well. Nicer than Aylesbury, anyway,” she conceded. “But I’m still not moving in. You spend most of your time staggering about in a thaumaturgical haze. I’d have to start cooking and cleaning and picking up your socks out of self-preservation and I have much better things to do with myself.”

  “That’s it, ducky,” said Reg, chortling on the back of the fourth dining chair. “You tell him.”

  Now Monk was looking put out. “What better things?” he muttered. “It’s not like you’re solving the great metaphysical mysteries of our time, are you?”

  Which was exactly the wrong thing to say. Melissande, wincing, debated pitching the remains of her dinner roll at him. Bibbie didn’t bother debating, she just went ahead and threw her untouched bread, hard.

  “Hey!” said Monk indignantly as the missile whizzed past his head to explode in a shower of crumbs against the peeling-papered wall behind him. “Don’t do that!”

  “I’ll do it if I want!” Bibbie retorted. “Every time you say something horrible I’ll throw something at you, I swear. Starting with bread rolls and working my way up to—to elephants! You’re just like Aylesbury, Monk. You’re as bad as Great-uncle Throggie, and if you think I’m going to sit here and—”

  “Deary, deary me,” said Reg, sidling closer along the back of her chair. “I suppose this brings back fond family memories, does it?”

  Melissande spared her a sharp glance. “No.”

  But of course it did. Well. Memories, anyway. Most of them… difficult. Dinner in New Ottosland’s palace with Lional and Rupert, so often a volatile affair. Of course, then it had been Lional doing the throwing and the shouting with Rupert ducking and herself cast in the thankless role of peacemaker. Usually with very little success.

  She felt her insides squeeze tight. Lional.

  Enough time had gone by now that she could get through two or three whole days at a stretch without once thinking of him. Guilt and regret ambushed her less frequently. But the pain was still there, buried deep and lingering. She thought it might never completely go away. She wasn’t sure if she wanted it to. If the pain went away it might take Lional with it.

  And whatever else he was… whatever he became… he was my brother and part of me still loves him. Still wants to love him.

  Which was, perhaps, the hardest thing of all to reconcile.

  Bibbie and Monk were still spatting, dredging up nursery-tales of cross and double-cross, of who got the biggest scone at tea-time and who was never allowed to stay up late on Fireworks Night and who really put the fizzing incant in Nanny’s sugar bowl which led to everyone getting spanked.

  It was all so very silly.

  Melissande picked up her nibbled dinner roll, pulled it in half and took aim at her business partner and her business partner’s brother, who was also her young man. At the moment. More or less. Sometimes, it seemed, far less than more. His Research and Development work for Ottosland’s government tended to swallow Monk alive, and hardly ever spat him out again. And even when they did spend time together, a part of his attention was always… somewhere else. Off in the ether. Reg called it the peril of being involved with a genius. For herself, she preferred to call it tactless.

  She tossed the bread.

  As one, brother and sister turned on her. “Don’t do that!” they chorused, and even though Bibbie was magnificently fair-haired and Monk was dashingly dark, they were in that moment of unified outrage as alike as two peas in a dilapidated pod.

  “Why not?” she demanded. “You’re carrying on like five-year-olds, the pair of you, so why should I be left out? What are you fighting over, anyway? Monk’s already got a housekeeper, Bibbie.” She looked at him. “Haven’t you? You must have a housekeeper. I mean, you’ve got a butler. And obviously someone’s cooked dinner.” She waved a hand at the table, littered with their emptied bowls of mock turtle soup. “And I’m pretty sure I didn’t imagine the footman who helped serve the first course. So obviously you’ve got hordes of servants catering to your every whim.”

  “And huddling in corners making fun of you,” Reg added. “Don’t forget that. Better than a circus you are, sunshine.”

  Monk gave her a dirty look then cleared his throat. “Yes. Well. The servants. The thing is…”

  “They don’t belong to Monk,” said B
ibbie. “Not this lot, at any rate.”

  Melissande frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean they aren’t the servants he inherited from Great-uncle Throgmorton. They’re on loan, every last one of them.”

  “On loan?” she said blankly. “What are you talking about? Servants aren’t—aren’t library books. You don’t just borrow them.”

  “Not usually, no,” said Monk, harassed. “It was an emergency.”

  “So where did they come from?”

  “Mother,” said Bibbie, and giggled.

  “You borrowed your mother’s butler?” she said, incredulous. “And her footman? What about her cook?”

  Monk hunched into his dinner jacket. “Yes, the cook too. Actually, the under-cook. I didn’t leave Mother to starve, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “But why? Honestly, Monk, you’re starting to sound like Gerald. What’s going on? What happened to the staff who came with the house?”

  Reg hooted. “I’ll tell you what happened, madam. He scared them away, butler to boot boy, with his experiments and his smelly smoke.”

  “Is that true, Monk?” Melissande demanded. I don’t believe it, I don’t believe it. Except that she did. This was Monk, after all. “Is that why every one of your great-uncle’s servants gave notice? Are you experimenting again?”

  Now Monk was looking distinctly evasive. “Well—”

  “You are!” she said, and leaned sideways to poke a finger in his shoulder. “That’s why you keep dashing out of the room, isn’t it? You’ve got one of your madcap inventions percolating somewhere in this house, haven’t you?”

  Monk’s expression shifted from evasive to bolshy. “So what if I have? It’s what I do, Mel. I invent things.”

  “Things that get you into a lot of trouble!”

  “Things that save lives!” he retorted. “And expand our knowledge of the etheretic plane!”

  “Things that aren’t sanctioned by the Department!” she groaned. “Things that get you hauled over the coals, put on probation and rapped over the knuckles till you can’t hold a pen! Monk, you raving idiot, are you out of your mind?”