Chapter Text
Eustace Stickler was, in spite of his name, not very particular about most things – for instance about where his money came from. He’d do any job for cheap, and he had some particular skills to help him with that, but no great ability in marketing them. He fell on hard times about every other week or so. Only very recently had he managed to establish a steady income, although on the lower end of making ends meet. So if someone happened to hand him a wad of cash and told him that he could keep all of that if he poured a certain liquid into a certain glass and made sure a certain man drank from it… then, well, who was he to decline? Any moral questions about these kinds of things were solely between the person paying for the pouring and the person doing the drinking and he was merely a tool. A tool with a lot more money in its pocket than before. Which he certainly wasn’t going to complain about.
~*~
Havelock Vetinari, Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, rarely felt the need for a drink. But balls were an awful nuisance and the odd glass of good wine certainly helped with his mood if diplomatic reasons made them unavoidable – although drinking did not nearly as much for his mood as a Watch Commander adorned with a plume of feathers. Vetinari secretly grinned at the dukely helmet that stood out from the crowd, bobbing this way and that. Vimes had forgone the regal tights, though, in an act of flagrant defiance, and Vetinari needed to talk to him about that…
‘Wine, sir?’ a soft voice asked right next to him.
Vetinari looked up at a gangly young man bearing a silver tray. He was not regular palace staff – lavish events like these, rare as they were in his home, always required a few extra hands. Which was a terrible waste of tax money... Gladly, Vetinari picked up the glass he was offered. And he was all the gladder for it when he spotted Lady Virginia Butterly in the crowd. Frankly, her towering hair was hard to miss. She was from an old family, rather recently widowed, and very determined to move on from her poor late husband – whose cause of death was still highly speculated about. Sudden heart failure, it said on the medical report. The terrible grief of losing a husband notwithstanding, Lady Butterly had, during the last couple of months, dropped not particularly subtle hints that she might be interested in the perennially vacant position at Vetinari’s side. He had delicately deflected all of them, but that hadn’t deterred her so far, and he feared that he had to get a bit more obvious about his utter lack of interest.
The gangly waiter had now reached her, and as she took a glass from his tray, she locked eyes with Vetinari across the room and raised it in a silent toast. He just gave a slight nod, then took a sip of his drink, sloshing it around in his mouth to let the taste bloom, and watching Lady Butterly make her way towards him at a very determined pace in spite of the surrounding crowd.
Only when Vetinari swallowed the wine, he noticed something prickly in his mouth. He smacked his tongue against his palate a few times and… Yes, there was definitely a sharp taste there which did not belong. Instinctively, his eyes searched for Vimes’ feathers in the crowd – and found them close by. The commander had apparently been roped into a conversation with some of the Überwaldian diplomats.
Lady Butterly was still fast approaching. She had already stretched out her hand to greet him, when Vetinari, pretending not to have noticed her intention, took a couple of steps to the side, and grabbed Vimes by the wrist to turn him around. A tiny electrical shock surged through him at the touch. Vimes shuddered and frowned, suggesting that he had felt the shock, too.
‘What the… Ah, ‘ello, sir.’
‘Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen,’ Vetinari addressed the gaggle of diplomats, ‘but I have something rather urgent to discuss with His Excellency.’
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Lady Butterly stop, abject disappointment on her face.
‘You alright, sir?’
Vetinari swallowed the I don’t know that lay on his tongue and instead said: ‘Find the archchancellor and meet me in my office, Vimes. Quickly, please.’
Vimes, picking up on the urgency in his voice, nodded sharply and walked away at a brisk pace. Vetinari looked over his shoulder to make sure that Lady Butterly didn’t follow him, but he couldn’t make her out in the crowd anymore, not even her hair. Which was probably for the best.
~*~
Sam Vimes was concerned. When the patrician dragged him away from a party he had been very particular about Vimes attending, that wasn’t a very good sign. The involvement of the Archchancellor of the Unseen University didn’t bode well either.
‘Now, Havelock, what’s the matter?’
Mustrum Ridcully made himself comfortable in a chair while Vimes remained standing. He eyed Vetinari suspiciously. The man appeared calm and collected on the surface but there was something going on underneath, Vimes was sure of it. Delicately, the patrician put a wine glass down on his desk.
‘I believe that my drink has been spiked.’
Vimes stomach turned. Poison? Again? ‘I’ll get Mossy,’ he said, and was already turning to leave, but Vetinari held him back with a gesture.
‘I believe that won’t be necessary, commander. I am well-versed in toxicology and know my way around pretty much any poison. Besides, I feel perfectly healthy. Therefore I assume, whatever it is, it must be something else.’ He looked over to Ridcully. ‘Perhaps something magic.’
Vimes managed to supress a moan, but he closed his eyes in frustration. Great. When the bloody wizards got involved, things always went tits up one way or another.
‘Hm, let’s see, then,’ the Archchancellor hummed with infuriating serenity, before he leaned forwards to grab the glass.
‘Don’t touch it, man!’ Vimes barked. ‘We’ll need to check it for fingerprints.’
Vetinari threw him a strange look. Not reproach – Vimes intimately knew what his reproachful glare looked like. This was different. There was something hungry in his gaze, something restless, something… wanting. Something that wasn’t right.
Without touching the glass itself, Ridcully stuck a finger into the wine – and immediately, it lit up from the inside. Tiny sparks of glitter swirled around in the dark liquid like gold leaf. ‘That’s magic, alright’, Ridcully confirmed. ‘One of those cheap potions you can get on the streets nowadays if you know who to ask. It’s a disgrace the way magic is being peddled like a common bag of slate these days. The Watch should do something about that.’
‘The Watch is,’ Vimes snarled, rather defensively. These potions had indeed become a problem. They could have any effect – from giving you a cute pair of cat ears for a night to making you strip naked under a full moon and pledge your life to Grar, the Greater Deamon of Asgaloth with a blood sacrifice. Their effects usually didn’t last long, but could have dire consequences. So far, the Watch hadn’t had much luck with tracking down the source, not least because interviewing wizards was a bloody nightmare. They never stayed on topic but always found a way to go on and on about their latest fascination with extradimensional drawers or similar. And every ten minutes they needed a break for either food, a pipe, or a nap. They were, he had to admit, still chasing phantoms. ‘Now what does that one do?’
Ridcully closed his eyes and stirred the wine with his finger, making it slosh against the glass. ‘Ah. Hmhm. Ah. Yes. I see.’ He harrumphed, then pulled his finger back and dried it painstakingly on a handkerchief.
‘What?’ Vimes almost shouted.
‘That one is quite common, I hear.’ Ridcully scratched his beard. ‘It’s, er, a love potion. Of sorts.’
‘Of sorts?’ Vimes asked. ‘What does that mean?’
‘It means, Commander Vimes, that when I say love I use that word euphemistically.’
Vimes found it increasingly hard to keep his anger in check and Ridcully’s pointed use of complicated words didn’t help. But before he could say anything ill-advised, Vetinari interrupted them.
‘So it’s a drug for facilitating sexual intercourse?’ he clarified, and Vimes, shockingly, had the impression that he had to make a conscious effort to keep his voice steady.
‘An egregious, iniquitous use of magic!’ Ridcully complained. ‘But yes. It is rather straight forward: You have to, er… do that with the first person you touch after consumption within a few hours or…’
‘Or?’ Vimes growled.
‘Or you die.’
They all stared at the wine glass in silence.
‘Is there any way around it?’ Vetinari finally asked.
Ridcully shrugged his shoulders. ‘We could try to construct a counterpotion but that could take days. More time than you have, anyway.’
‘But maybe something to consider for the future?’ Vimes growled. ‘Seeing as you are so concerned with these potions being sold underhand.’
‘Whoever makes these – and I’ll tell you again, commander, that no self-respecting wizard of our university would – has great variety. Barely two potions seem to have the exact same effect. It is impossible to deconstruct, analyse and counter every single one. We shall examine this one.’ Ridcully looked Vetinari over. ‘But it will be too late for you, I’m afraid. Do you know who you touched?’
Vetinari gave the archchancellor one of his humourless, lightning-fast smiles. ‘You have been very helpful, Mustrum. Don’t let me detain you.’
‘Well, alright, keep it to yourself.’ Ridcully rose from his seat. ‘And don’t worry in case you don’t know – you’ll feel yourself drawn to that person soon enough, when the spell takes proper effect. Also, I heard it can be fun. Er. Anyway. Good luck.’
He walked out without any haste whatsoever, leaving the room in a deafening silence.
‘I, er…’ Vimes cleared his throat awkwardly, then pointed at the wine glass. ‘I’ll take that to Cheery so she can look for fingerpr-‘
‘It was you, Vimes.’
He heard the words, but his brain refused to process them. As a result, he froze in place.
‘What?’
‘The first person I touched after drinking the wine. It was you.’
All of a sudden, his mouth went dry, making him swallow a couple of times.
‘This isn’t the time for jokes, sir,’ he croaked.
‘Do you know me to be the joking type of person, commander?’
Oh gods. He remembered the tiny electrical shock when Vetinari had touched him earlier. Without meaning to, he rubbed two fingers across his wrist where he thought he could still feel it tingle. ‘Oh. Er. Right.’
‘I apologise. I do not mean to inconvenience you.’
‘Incon…?’ That pulled him right out of his shock. ‘Really, sir? Someone drugged you! To force you to sleep with them! Inconvenience… How can you be so calm about this?’
‘Outrage would hardly be helpful right now.’ Vetinari shifted in his chair somewhat awkwardly. ‘I will not ask anything of you, Vimes, of course, not with this. But I admit that I do not wish to die if it can be helped.’
‘Ha!’ Vimes couldn’t really believe he was about to say this, but… ‘As if I’d let you die, sir, even if you wanted me to. If I weren’t so invested in keeping you alive I could have saved myself a lot of hassle over the years.’
‘Quite. But this…’
‘We’ll figure it out. Now…’ He had to focus on the work for as long as he could – it kept all other thoughts at bay for a little while longer. So Vimes took a handkerchief from his pocket and gingerly picked up the wine glass with it. ‘I’m going to get that damn thing downstairs to Angua so she can bring it to Cheery. And then… Well. Then I’ll come back.’
Vetinari nodded slowly. ‘Tell Sergeant Angua that she might be interested in securing Lady Butterly’s fingerprints to compare them.’
‘Lady Butterly?’
Vimes knew her vaguely from some of the functions he’d been made to attend. Sybil had gone to school with her, of course, as she seemed to have gone to school with any woman her age and from her social class. She wrote her letters.
The thought of Sybil made Vimes’ fist clench. Still.
‘She has a motive, I believe.’
Focus, Sam, he told himself. Your boss has been magically poisoned.
‘Oh. Right,’ he mumbled. ‘I’ll let Angua know. Be back in a minute.’
‘Meet me upstairs. In my private chamber.’
Vimes froze. Oh gods. His private chamber… Don’t think about it!, he told himself. Don’t think about until you have to! Do the work! So he nodded sharply. ‘Yes, sir!’