Owen flinched, a flush spreading upward from his collar, and he nodded. "I'll keep at it."
"Minerva?"
She shrugged. "Still nothing. I'm not getting any portents, one way or another, which means the situation is still in flux. We can influence the outcome."
"We'll get the sales force out on the streets, with verifiers to see where and how this stuff is selling," Mr. Hartwell said. "I can even call in some old debts and get customer names, so we know who to track." He must not have wanted Merlin coming down on him, so he was being proactive with the information.
"Good," Merlin said curtly. "If he succeeds here, then we know he'll continue trying.
We can notallow this to succeed. We had these problems in my time, and it nearly tore Britain apart. I've read enough of the history I've missed to know the same thing has happened here, and fairly recently." That caught my attention. Had there been other magical wars the rest of the world didn't know about? Then maybe this situation wasn't as dire as I'd feared, since we'd all clearly survived. I made a mental note to go back to reading those books Owen had loaned me.
"But this is the first challenge we've faced that's come in business form," Merlin continued. "That gives it the slightest aura of legitimacy, which makes it appealing to those who might be wavering between light and dark. Few of those would sign up for the side of evil in a magical war, but give them a legitimate-looking product, and they'll be tempted. Corrupt them a little bit, and it's easy to corrupt them further. We must stop this now." I felt a surge of magical charge at his words and shivered.
Okay, so maybe the situation was as dire as I feared.
I racked my brain for a way I could help, but I was getting nothing. I couldn't see a
"Don't do bad magic" campaign going over too well. But what else could we do if we couldn't imply that the competition had shoddy spells? As I'd said, the people who'd be into this sort of thing already knew this was bad and didn't care.
I rewound the meeting to that point in my brain, searching for anything I might be able to use. Something Owen had said triggered a vague memory of something recent that hadn't been important or meaningful enough to think about at the time.
But now it just might do the trick.
I was almost afraid to bring it up. What if they'd already considered, and then rejected, this idea long ago? Or worse, what if they'd considered and tried it, and it hadn't worked? It was so obvious, but I'd learned that what was obvious to me wasn't always obvious to people who for all intents and purposes lived in an entirely different world.
Oh hell, it was worth a shot. I cleared my throat. "I might have an idea."
sixteen
Every head in the room turned to stare at me, and for a second I thought I should have kept my mouth shut. "You may have already thought of this, but I haven't heard anyone bring it up yet." I licked my lips and wished I had a glass of water handy for wetting my suddenly dry throat. "My world has its own powers, you know. And like magic, some of them can be used for good or for evil. For example, lawyers."
I got a room full of blank looks. Surely I wasn't going to have to explain the concept of lawyers to them. "What do lawyers have to do with stopping the misuse of magic?" Mr. Hartwell asked.
"Lawyers can stop just about anything. Tie it up in court, and nobody gets anywhere for ages. That could buy you the time you need to come up with a better way of fighting this. I'm no expert, but you might have an intellectual property case."
"What's that?" Owen asked. The flicker of hope in his eyes gave me the courage to keep going.
"Anything an employee develops while working here belongs to the company, not to the employee. Surely you have some language to that effect in employment agreements."
Owen nodded. "Especially in R and D."
"The point of that is to keep an employee from developing something on company time, using company resources, then selling it himself. And that seems to be what Idris is doing. He's taking something he developed here and using it to create his own products. You might be able to make him stop that."
"How do we do that?" Merlin asked.
"I'm not sure, but I may know someone who would know. I'll have to check. It could take a couple of days." I was going out on a limb here, basing my grand idea for saving the world on a blind date my roommate had once had, but this situation sounded exactly like the one he'd described in his dinner table conversation.
