by Tom Holt
‘Basically, yes,’ Cassie replied.
‘And the moment I try and quit or escape, I drop dead on the spot and’
‘Yes.’
Without really knowing what he was doing or why, Colin stirred his tea a few times and drank a mouthful. The milk must’ve been off, because it tasted funny - wasn’t there an old superstition that the presence of the Evil One curdled milk? It’s started already, he thought wildly. How absolutely bloody wonderful.
‘And all this could’ve been avoided,’ he went on - Cassie was trying to hide behind her teacup, but he wasn’t having that’- if you could’ve been arsed to do your job and read the sodding small print.’
‘Mphm.’
‘Great.’ Colin put down his cup, realised he was still holding a digestive biscuit, and closed his hand on it, crushing it into dust. ‘Well, since I’m going to go to Hell anyhow, I might as well do something evil and bad while I’m at it. Such as strangling you.’
Something in his tone of voice, perhaps; because Cassie reacted as though she thought he meant it. She choked on the biscuit that she’d been eating, jumped up out of her chair, sending the cup and tray flying, and backed towards the door. Colin, now he came to think of it, actually had meant it. ‘There’s a saying,’ he said, as he stood up and took a step forward. ‘Something about sheep and lambs,’ he muttered. ‘And hanging.’
‘Now look,’ Cassie gabbled quickly. ‘I’m not promising anything, but maybe if we talked to them really, really nicely’
Colin lunged at her. He wasn’t blessed with particularly good reflexes or anything like that, but the adrenalin was flowing and he had all the motivation that anybody could possibly need. Cassie dodged, of course, but her chair was in the way and she stumbled against it, which slowed her up a bit. In fact, it’d have been a close-run thing if she and Colin hadn’t both suddenly stopped dead in their tracks, dropped to the floor like sacks of potatoes, and immediately fallen asleep.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Connie Schwartz-Alberich had many virtues, but patience wasn’t one of them. Not that the deficiency bothered her in the least. Trees, she reckoned, were designed to be patient; likewise buildings, stalactites and tectonic plates. Human beings, on the other hand, were better suited to bustling about and getting things done, and she was a great believer in playing to one’s strengths.
Now, it seemed, she had a choice. She could wait patiently for her notice to expire, and then she could wait patiently at home for the phone to ring with an enticing new job offer, and then she could resolutely, stoically wither away and die. Or she could get up off her bum and do something.
Define ‘something’. There were all sorts of things Connie could do, such as burst her way into the new boss’s office and restructure his nasal architecture - fun for about five seconds, but not offering any long-term solution. Or she could get on the phone to every contact she had in the trade and plead for an interview, which would help pass the time but was unlikely to do any good. Or
Instead, she’d got on with her work. She went at it like a combine harvester in a cornfield, mowing it down in swathes until there simply wasn’t any more. That was a pity, because it had helped take her mind off the unpleasant choice that was still unresolved. So she decided to go and see Cas Suslowicz. He might have some work she could be getting on with; alternatively, she could torture him with guilt over the fact that she’d been sacked and there was nothing he could do about it. Yes, that’d be fun.
Connie found him, as usual, slumped in his chair, elbows on the desk, surrounded by a mountain range of files, folders, reports, surveys, architects’ drawings and other accumulations of information. Cas loathed paperwork; he was a giant (the shortest giant in the world, but still a giant) and what he liked doing was building things - castles in the air, rainbow bridges, palaces on top of beanstalks, highways to Heaven, anything with a bit of n challenge to it. Trotting up gangplanks with a twenty-ton slab of marble on each shoulder was no bother as far as he was concerned. Filling in a planning application, however, gave him a headache. Pencils broke as soon as he picked them up, and building regulations had been known to make him burst into tears.
‘Connie,’ he said, looking up. ‘I haven’t seen you in ages.’
Of course he hadn’t. Guilt. That was something else he was good at. Maybe it was a giant thing. If your race memory is all about bearing the weight of the world on your shoulders while someone else is bedding in the acroprop, sooner or later you’re going to get into the habit of accepting responsibility for anything that isn’t nailed down.
‘Oh well,’ she said. ‘You look busy.’
Cas groaned and nodded his huge, shaggy head. ‘It’s this rotten job,’ he sighed. ‘Oh, it’s no big deal in itself: Union Bank of Sacramento wants a city in the clouds so they can transfer their registered office there and save a bundle in corporation tax, but the red tape’s appalling. There’s the Federal Aviation Authority, the California state legislature, the Yosemite National Park people, NASA’ He lifted a vast, sausage-fingered hand, and let it fall on his massive knee. ‘I’m telling you,’ he went on, ‘if we’d had all this kind of crap to contend with when we were building Valhalla, Odin and the boys’d still be beating each other up in a Portakabin on the Oslo fjord.’
Connie pursed her lips. ‘You know what, Cas,’ she said. ‘What you need is someone to look after the bullshit for you and let you get on with building things.’
Cas Suslowicz cupped his chin in his palms and roared softly, like a very sad lion. ‘Don’t torture me, please, Connie, it’s not fair. I know perfectly well, you can do all this stuff standing on your head - didn’t I always say you could’ve been really great in civil engineering?’
‘Yes,’ Connie said, with a mild smirk. ‘And you were right, of course.’
‘And now,’ Cas went on wretchedly, ‘those snot-nosed bastards have given you the sack, and you know as well as I do that it’s out of my hands and there’s bugger-all I can do about it. Really, Connie, if it was up to me’
‘But it isn’t,’ she said crisply, ‘so there we are. Cas, why the hell did you and Dennis and Jack have to go and sell the bloody firm to those people? And while we’re on the subject, who exactly are they? Come on,’ she added soothingly, as his brow puckered into a ferocious scowl, ‘I know you’re sworn to secrecy and if you break your oath you’ll get staked out on top of the Caucasus and gnawed at by giant vultures, but you can tell me.’ She paused, then added: ‘I’m your friend.’
Cas grunted like a bull elephant. ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘Don’t start, please. If you could only see the penalty clause they made us sign, you wouldn’t joke about it. I promise you, vultures’d be a picnic in comparison.’ He sighed, and the window-panes rattled. ‘The stupid thing is, they aren’t even interested in the business. They aren’t in it for the goodwill or the client list or anything like that.’
‘Ah,’ Connie said sweetly. ‘I had an idea they were outsiders.’
‘Oh, for’ Cas pulled a terrifying face, which made Connie giggle. ‘You didn’t hear that from me, all right? Look, the plain fact was, we didn’t have any choice. After the Carpenter fuck-up, we had everything go tits-up at once. Half the partners dead or banished, having to hide the office behind a force twelve glamour so that everybody’d think we’d packed up and gone away, the goblins trying to jack the rent up six hundred per cent, losing VogMart and Consolidated Bauxite to the Germans - you know what’s at stake for the partners, Con, we could’ve lost our life savings, houses, every damn thing. It was sell up or be completely screwed. And then these people came along, out of nowhere. We had no choice, really.’
Connie shook her head. ‘All right,’ she said, ‘I’ll let you off the hook this time. Just tell me one thing, though. When you negotiated the deal with them, did you have any meetings in the boardroom?’
Cas looked at her for about five seconds before he answered. ‘No,’ he said, ‘we didn’t. Jack Wells - well, he thought it wou
ldn’t be appropriate. So we went over to their place and did all the talking there.’
‘I see,’ Connie said. ‘Right,’ she went on, ‘give it here.’
‘Give what?’
‘All this bumf you’re getting in such a stew over, for the Sacramento job. I’m at a bit of a loose end right now - I might as well have a go at it as sit in my office staring at the walls.’
A big fat tear, enough to drown a mouse in, welled up in Cas Suslowicz’s right eye and dribbled down his cheek into his beard.
‘Thanks, Con,’ he said. ‘I’m going to miss you, you know that?’
‘Too bloody right you are,’ she replied. ‘And if only you’d tell me who these wankers are, I might be able to’ She smiled and shook her head. ‘It’s all right,’ she said, ‘I’ll behave.’
Arms full of papers, she went back to her office. As usual, Cas had been making mountains out of molehills, a speciality of his in both the figurative and literal senses. A couple of hours of pencil-chewing, phone calls, lateral thinking and little-white-lying broke the back of it, and she’d save the rest of it for tomorrow; it’d give her something to fill her day with, and it wouldn’t do for Cas to get the impression that it had been easy.
Intense concentration always left Connie with a desire for coffee and trivial conversation. She thought about dropping in on Peter Melznic or Benny Shumway, but she decided that what she really needed was a spot of girl talk, which meant either young Cassie or Rosie Tanner down in reception. Then she remembered hearing something about Rosie taking a week off, for some unspecified reason, presumably something to do with the contents of some pair of trousers or other; hence the fact that there’d been an unfamiliar chubby girl in the front office when she last looked. Cassie, then. Hadn’t seen her for a day or so. Maybe there’d been some new development in the mysterious true-love thing. I’ll miss all this when I’ve been slung out, Connie told herself; which is a really sad reflection on how my life’s turned out, but never mind.
Connie’s approach to office-door etiquette was a nicely balanced compromise; she knocked and went straight in without waiting to be asked. ‘Cassie,’ she said, and then stopped dead.
Cassie was lying on the floor. Brief panic; but dead bodies don’t snuggle up like little field-mice in their nests. She was asleep. So was the young man lying next to her - that Hollingshead boy she’d dragged all the way out to Mortlake to see. Connie’s eyebrow started to twitch, but no, it wasn’t like that. They were separated by a discreet measure of carpet, and they both had all their clothes on.
In which case Shit, Connie thought, and backed out of the office at warp speed, shutting the door firmly behind her.
Back on the landing, she tried desperately to think of what she should do. She’d been with JWW long enough to have a pretty good idea what would’ve led to two young people, one male and one female, conking out all al fresco on the office floor; also, now she thought of it, there’d been the crushed remains of teacups. Someone had been playing games with the JWW patent love philtre; hence her alacrity in getting out of there before anybody woke up. The Hollingshead lad was probably no worse than a bad dose of flu, but he was way too young for her; and she was as broad-minded as anybody, but Cassie simply wasn’t her type.
Options. Go away and let chemistry take its course. Knock loudly on the door and wait for an answer before entering. It’d depend a lot, of course, on who had put the philtre in the tea, and why. Ought she to try and warn them both? And how the hell could she do that? One of the main selling points of the JWW philtre was that there was no antidote: once you’d guzzled it and set eyes on someone, that was it, till death did you part. Trying to intervene at this point would be like telling a pinless grenade not to do anything hasty.
If it’d been late on a midwinter afternoon, Connie could’ve turned the lights off, maybe. Would that be enough, or would a vague glimpse of a shadowy outline be sufficient to get the job done? She didn’t know the answer to that one, and besides, it was purely academic. If she’d been brave to the point of crass stupidity, she could’ve tiptoed in and blindfolded them both; but even if she got away with it, for all she knew she’d be screwing up a plan of campaign that Cassie had been working on for days. And besides, Cassie and the Hollingshead boy couldn’t stay blindfolded for ever, and as soon as the blindfold came off, the closest bystander would be It. Not just your bog-standard two-horned dilemma: this bugger had more pointy bits than a porcupine.
Think it through, Connie, think it through. Here is young Cassie and the drippy young man she’s caught up in this daft reincarnated-lovers mess with, and they’re both asleep in there, most probably under the influence of the JWW philtre. Coincidence? She should cocoa. The likeliest explanation - not, unfortunately, the only possible explanation, but ahead of its rivals in the polls - was that Cassie had found out something else about the love problem. Maybe it was distorting the fabric of space-time or threatening civilisation as we know it or something equally melodramatic, and Cassie had come over all noble-as-two-short-planks and resolved to give true love a chemical helping hand. It was, she reflected, the sort of thing she might well do. She was like that. If she was a starship captain stranded in the past by a temporal anomaly, she’d be the sort who blew up the ship and crew to avoid polluting the timelines, instead of ransacking the library computer for two-hundred-year-old winning lottery numbers.
In which case, Connie decided, the best course of action currently open to her would be to set off the fire alarm.
Seventy St Mary Axe had, of course, to comply with all the relevant health and safety regulations, and so there was a fire alarm of the approved type. In case of fire, it said on its little red box, break glass. But there was slightly more to it than that. The freehold of the building was owned by a colony of goblins, off-relations of Mr Tanner, the head of the mining and mineral rights division, and one of the terms under which the building was let stated that after office hours the freeholders were allowed to have the run of the place. Goblins are naturally boisterous creatures; and although the partners had got the business of magically repairing the colossal amount of damage they did down to a fine art, it would have been simply begging for trouble to have a fire alarm that could be set off by breaking something. Consequently, the small glass rectangle on the front of the fire box was only there to keep the government happy. If you wanted to ring the fire bell, you had first to remove the half-dozen levels of goblin-proof enchantments, a procedure which called for a twenty-minute ritual involving a pentagram, a sacred chalice, 200 grams of freshly cut mistletoe and the sacrifice of a small goat. This didn’t matter, since the building was magically fireproofed to the point where the planet would melt away before the JWW office curtains got faintly singed.
There were, needless to say, always little wrinkles and short cuts round everything, if you’d been in the trade long enough to know about them. Back when Connie had first joined the firm, there had been two young clerks in the Media & Entertainments division with an insatiable appetite for merry pranks. To them, the fire alarm was a sort of Holy Grail, a quest whose achievement represented the absolute consummation of all earthly ambitions. After years of trial and error, involving several quite spectacular errors and a four-day trial at the Old Bailey, they found the answer; which was, of course, salamanders. Being spirits of fire whose natural habitat was the cold heart of the flame, they didn’t give off any actual heat, and therefore didn’t trigger the magical protection; as far as the alarm’s sensors were concerned, however, they were close enough for jazz, which meant that a pair of adult females stuffed up the air-conditioning ducts produced an entirely satisfactory result.
Naturally, JWW kept a wide selection of quality salamanders in stock at all times. They lived in a big glass tank in the closed-file store, and Benny Shumway fed them once a week on gunpowder soaked in diesel. Feeling that she was perhaps getting a trifle too old for such things, Connie darted away and came back a few minutes later with a spoon and two
small, glowing amphibians tightly gripped in an oven glove.
The spoon was for levering the grille off the air-conditioning duct. She had to stand on a chair to reach, and one of the salamanders nearly managed to wriggle free and drop down the front of her blouse. Once they were safely installed, she slammed back the grille, hopped off the chair and took cover in the ladies’ toilet.
The last time she, or anyone else, for that matter - had heard the alarm was when the two fun-loving clerks had finally attained their ambition, and the passage of time had taken the cutting edge off the memory. It was loud; it would’ve been loud enough to wake the dead, if the connecting door in Benny’s office hadn’t been soundproofed with two thicknesses of heavy-duty fibre matting. Luckily, after the two clerks’ escapade the alarm had been set to switch itself off after twenty seconds, to prevent structural damage to the building.
The things I do for people, Connie thought, as she unbolted the toilet door. She stepped outside and waited, just in case the corridors filled up with angry, deafened people wanting to know what the racket had been in aid of. She needn’t have bothered, since everybody in the place knew perfectly well that whatever it might have been that set off the alarm, it couldn’t have been a fire.
Even then, she counted to twenty under her breath before reeping back to the door of Cassie’s office. Some people, she knew, were naturally heavy sleepers. It’d be hard to imagine anybody who could sleep through the JWW fire alarm, but given the circumstances she wasn’t taking any chances. She knocked, and waited for a reply.
‘Urn - yes, right, come in.’ Cassie’s voice; and she sounded like she’d just snapped out of a daze or reverie. Fine, Connie thought, and turned the handle.
A strong stomach is pretty well essential to a magical practitioner. The pest controller, for example, has to do a certain amount of disembowelling and hammering stakes into the Undead. The sorcerer has to cope with transformation spells that haven’t quite turned out the way they’re supposed to. Even the mild-mannered minerals-diviner has to do working breakfasts with goblins now and again. Over the years, Connie reckoned she’d seen it all. As she opened the door, however, she realised that she’d only seen most of it, and unfortunately Fate had decided to save the yuckiest sight of all for a special occasion.