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Soon I was deposited on a soft sofa. There were more voices in the room now, but all I noticed was Owen's hand gripping mine. "I don't know how he got in, but if Katie hadn't spotted him ..."
"What was he trying to steal?" Merlin's voice came from across the room.
"Our research on the Idris situation."
"Then he's definitely worried, or he suspects we are." This time, Merlin's voice came from nearby. Something cool touched my forehead. It smelled good, minty and flowery. "Here, rest this against the lump. It should take down the swelling."
I opened my eyes to see Merlin kneeling beside me. Take away the business suit and put him in robes studded with stars, then grow his beard out to be long and pointy instead of neatly trimmed, and he was right out of a picture book about King Arthur I'd had as a child. "Merlin," I said. I thought I'd been musing silently, but I must have spoken out loud. "Mind if I call you Merlin?"
"Not at all, dear. Now, tell me what you're seeing."
"I see you, and Owen. And your office."
He held a hand in front of my face. "How many fingers am I holding up?"
I squinted at the wavering image. "Two. I think."
He exchanged a look with Owen, then the two of them helped me lie down on the sofa. Merlin put a pillow under my head, while Owen took off my shoes and covered me with a light blanket that I didn't remember being there.
Merlin knelt beside me again. "Katie, I believe you have a mild concussion. You need to rest awhile. I'll give you a cordial that should prevent a very bad headache, and the poultice will keep you from swelling and bruising too badly."
He went away for a moment, then came back and lifted my head gently as he put a small glass to my lips. "Now, drink." I obeyed, and a tangy, sweet liquid flowed down my throat. I sank gratefully back against the pillows.
I didn't fall asleep, but I let myself drift as the voices in the room began speaking to each other, apparently ignoring my presence. They sounded like they were having an emergency meeting. It had to be a meeting about the intruder, which must have had something to do with whatever was threatening the company enough that they'd brought Merlin out of retirement to deal with it. I tried to listen, even though I kept drifting away.
A voice I didn't recognize asked, "How did an intruder get in anyway? I thought that area was secured."
"It is secured," Owen protested. "All I can think is that the intruder tailed someone else into the building and into the department, using an invisibility spell." He groaned and added, "I'd just had Wiggram Bookbinder in, selling me a rare codex. The intruder probably followed him. Or, as desperate as Wig seemed to be, it's entirely possible that the whole thing was a setup to get the spy inside. If Katie hadn't been there to see past that spell, we'd be in big trouble."
"Maybe you'd better meet with your shady sources somewhere other than in a highly secured department," the other voice said, but then he seemed to swallow his argument before he got really wound up.
I soon learned why. "Gentlemen, I believe the real issue at hand is that Mr. Idris has been reduced to espionage," Merlin said, his voice sounding grim. I could only imagine what his face must have looked like. It would be enough to shut anyone up.
"But why?" one of the other voices asked.
"He wants to know what we're planning to do about him," Owen said.
"What are we planning?" another voice asked.
"That's the problem," Owen said with a sigh. "We don't have much to go on. If he'd managed to get his hands on these notes, he would have laughed at how ineffectual we are. All we know is what he was working on when we dismissed him. There's no way of telling what he's doing now until we find a copy of a spell. Even then, we don't have any control over what he does. All we can do is find a way to counter it."
"It's a little late to worry about that, isn't it?" the other voice asked. "We've heard he's already got some spells out there. They're not mass market, but he's got customers. Whatever he's doing has been unleashed on the world, and we don't know what damage will be done before we can develop a counterspell."
"Perhaps some of our panic is premature," Merlin said softly. "We don't know who might buy or use these spells. All we know is what he wanted to market through us, and that our corporate leadership found his ideas distasteful. There's a very good chance that the general magical population will find his ideas equally distasteful."
"But what do we do if people buy and use these spells? Judging by what we saw him doing here, we know his work is dangerous. I can't begin to imagine his work would be any less dangerous without our constraints."
"We need more time," Owen said softly, his voice full of despair. "We're doing everything we can, but it's not enough."
I couldn't help but feel sorry for him. As powerful as he was, it had to be hard to acknowledge that doing everything he could wasn't good enough. I also didn't like the idea of a rogue sorcerer selling bootleg spells, or whatever this guy was doing.
Unfortunately, I knew next to nothing about magic, so there wasn't much I could do to help.
Or was there? I did know a thing or two about business, and this seemed to be as much a business problem as it was a magic problem. In fact, although this business seemed like it belonged to another universe, it wasn't that different from a situation I recalled from my days at the feed-and-seed. Our family had been running that business for nearly a century, as long as the town had been around. Not only had we been supplying the current generation of farmers and ranchers, but we'd supplied their fathers and grandfathers. A few years ago a national chain store had opened in a nearby town, offering lower prices. Farming is a low-margin business at the best of times, so those low prices were tempting to our customers. We just had to remind them why they'd been coming to us all those years, and why that new store wasn't the same.
Holding the poultice pack against my head, I sat up very carefully and waited for the room to steady itself before I said, "It seems to me that your main problem at this point is that you have competition, regardless of what your competition is offering.
Make him compete on your level, and you can reduce the impact he might have."
