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."
All the men in the room turned to look at me, and I felt suddenly very self-conscious. Maybe I should have kept my mouth shut and continued to play dead, but it was too late for regrets, so I plunged on while they were too stunned to say anything. "I don't really know the situation, so maybe I'm missing something, but from what y'all have said, it sounds like one of your former employees went into business for himself and now may be offering some less pleasant alternatives to your products."