“The best solution will be a tonic I can make. Not just a straight truth brew, that might be resisted. I'll need to either purchase the ingredients myself, or you can have an agent acquire them. He's going to think I'm on his side anyway, since I'm not one of his men, so I'll be making use of that. Which would work better, meeting you somewhere or me giving you a list?” It would be slightly risky to give her the list - if he had cared about that at all. No, her knowing the ingredients to the concoction wouldn't be dangerous to him - in fact, it might be useful for her to know he could make something like this. This probably wasn't the first person they’d had trouble questioning after all.
Utterly surprised at his calm acceptance of the situation Stare sat there for a moment, still and wordless. His eyes seemed to betray an anger of what she expected, but else his body language remained as ordinary and sedated. She imagined he was desperately keeping control.
As he spoke of the tonic her heart calmed a little in its manic fluttering. “You think a tonic would be enough?” She asked.
His gift for alchemy was certainly useful. It also meant that he might not need his magic after all, which had been the second of her issues. With the Hollow there was a mighty enchantment, that stopped anyone of the Althanas planet in origin to be unable to do magic. Because she herself was tied to Vitruvion, and her race was originally of Ansaldo's planet, Stare had a rare ability to use magic within it - indeed, it had been one of the first reasons Vitruvion had taken an interest in her, beyond sex. Nevin, however, was of Althanas, and that meant the rules applied to him. Ensuring that he would have been able to use them within would have proved a tricky compromise with Vitruvion - not impossible, but difficult.
“And you are probably better at getting your own plants, right? I'll probably get them wrong. I can give you the names of a couple of very good apothecaries in the city, and the money for them too,” she started to move her hands to her tunic, where a hidden pocket revealed a very heavy coin purse. “I can come with you or leave you to your own, I mean I do have things to do …” she left it open.
Nevin drummed his fingers on the tabletop as he thought, one hand still curled up. “The tonic will be mildly by imbued with magic when I make it, but in truth the major components of it are natural. And unless the mage has a specific resistance against the plant that is the primary part, it will affect him. I'll also be combining it with a mild hallucinogenic, something to make him woozy and unstable. The result being, he'll think of me as someone on his side, an ally, and so won't pay attention enough to stop himself from answering my questions. The magic put in would just be to enhance the efficacy.”
