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- “Gentlemen,” Nicodemus said, his voice raised and slightly tense. And then he paused, frowning, his head cocked partly to one side, as if trying to identify a distant sound.
- Ascher suddenly looked up, frozen in the act of scratching her arm again, and said, “Dresden? Do you feel that?”
- The itching on the back of my neck resolved itself into a full-on creepy sensation, the awareness of someone watching me. I closed my eyes and extended my other senses, reaching out with my talent to feel for magic in the air around me—and found the eavesdropping spell almost at once.
- Ascher had already given us away with her comment, so there was no point in being cute about it. “Someone’s listening in on us,” I breathed, coming to my feet.
- “Where?” Nicodemus spat.
- Ascher pointed to the far end of the slaughterhouse. “There, not far. Just outside, I think.”
- The sensation abruptly vanished as the spell winked out of existence—but not before I’d found the spell’s focus—the thaumaturgic version of the bug that had been planted so that the eavesdropper could hear us.
- “Binder,” Nicodemus said at once.
- Binder had already produced a hoop of wire from his suit coat’s pocket. He moved to a clear space of floor, gave it a toss with a flick of his wrist, and the wire unreeled and unfolded into a circle almost three feet across. It landed on the floor even as Binder spoke a few words, and filled with amber light.
- Binder was a chump sorcerer, but he had one trick that he could do really, really well—summoning a small army of creatures from the Nevernever that he had somehow bound to his will. It took him less than two seconds to whistle up the first of his suits—humanoid figures dressed in something that resembled a badly fitted suit, their proportions and features looking almost normal, until one looked at them a little more closely. The demonic servitor flung itself up out of the circle like an acrobat emerging from a trapdoor in the stage, and Binder tapped his foot down onto the circle of wire in perfect time, releasing the suit from the circle’s confinement as it tumbled clear. Then he lifted his foot and dropped it down again in metronomic time as a second suit emerged from the Nevernever, and a third, and a fourth, and so on.
- “Spell’s gone,” Ascher reported. “He heard us. He’s running.”
- “He’s heard too much,” Nicodemus said, and turned to Binder. “Can your associates track him?”
- “Like bloodhounds,” Binder confirmed.
- Nicodemus nodded. “Kill him.”
- Binder let out a short whistle and cocked a finger in the direction Ascher had indicated. The suits needed no more indication than that. They bounded off in that direction with greater than human agility.
- I jerked my head at Karrin and stalked away from the table.
- “What?” she hissed.
- In answer, I dug into the bandages over my arm until I found the object, hidden from me until I had finally focused my attention on it—a rounded, black Pente stone that had been worked into the bandages when they had been reapplied. There were a number of familiar runes painted over its dark surface in metallic gold. I’d used the exact same spell design myself more than once, back in the day, when I’d been learning how it worked.
- “What’s that?” Karrin asked.
- “The bug,” I hissed quietly. “The one the listener was using to hear us. It got put in the bandages over my arm when it was reset.”
- Her eyes widened. “But . . .”
- “Yeah,” I said, and watched as more of the suited servitors poured forth from the Nevernever to streak into the night in pursuit. “It’s Butters. They’re going to kill him.”
- Skin Game Chapter 26, Page 211-213
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