Phoenix and Ashes (59 page)

“You
are in great danger,” the Fire Elemental repeated. “And the maze we
were in is nothing to the maze that holds you tight in tangles of magic.”

“Yes
I am,” she agreed, shivering. “I don’t think I can escape
from this by myself. I need help. Will you, can you help me?”

“That
depends,” the Elemental said, measuringly. “You must show by your
intelligence that you deserve help.”

Fire—most
difficult of the Elements. Dangerous to try and control. More dangerous to lie
to. But win its loyalty—

“I
have to break the coercions,” she said flatly. “And I have to break
free of
here
, and get back to the real world again.”

But
the Elemental simply regarded her gravely. Finally, “Or—?” he
prompted.

Fire
is the hardest to hold, most difficult to understand, likeliest to rebel, and
is impressed only by—
intellect. This Elemental was showing
remarkable patience by those standards. She pummeled her brain. What could she
do to get out of the coercions? If she broke them, Alison would know.
She’d already tried stretching them. What else was there? If she looked
around herself a certain way, she could actually
see
them here,
tangling around her in a rat’s nest of bindings like—

She
blinked, and looked again.
Like—a—maze
—just as he
told me.

She
took a deep breath. She couldn’t solve the thing in the
“real” world, but—here?

“What
happens if I thread my way out of the coercions?” she asked the Fire
Elemental.

He
grinned broadly, and nodded, the flames that were his hair brightening.
“Then her spells will no longer hold you, and yet, they will not be
broken. So she will not be aware that her spells no longer hold you. But do you
think you can solve this?”

“I
have to,” she replied grimly. “I’ll see if wall-following
will do it. It might take longer, but it’s the surest.”

She
focused her concentration until the tangles of the spells that confined her
became clear, concentrated further, willing the tangles to take on the tangible
form of walls and passageways.

The
magician imposes his will, his way of seeing on the Plane of Magic, and the
Plane reflects what he wills. She couldn’t will herself out of this,
because the mind and will that had set the spells was stronger than she was.
But she could force it to take on a semblance of something she could deal with
.

She
found herself at the heart of another maze. She didn’t like the look of
the walls that surrounded her, either; they were dark and repellent and she
didn’t want to touch them, but wall-following meant keeping one hand on
either the left or the right-hand wall and following it, no matter what, and
after a moment of thought, she put her hand on the left-hand wall, and stepped
into the shadowy, intimidating darkness of the maze itself.

The
Fire Elemental came with her, which surprised her a little, though it was
heartening to have company. She hadn’t expected it, and since he brought
light with him, this meant she could actually see where she was going.

That
was an advantage. Seeing the walls that made up the maze clearly was not an
advantage.

They
felt
like something alive—but not pleasant. Faintly warm,
pulsing, a touch slimy. But worse than the feel was the look; a suggestion of
faces there, and not nice faces, either. She didn’t ask if the walls were
alive; that was fairly obvious. “Can they feel?” she asked instead.

“Oh
yes,” came the reply; grim, and with a dangerous edge to it.

“Are
they in pain?” she continued. Not that she wanted to know—except
that she did.

“Oh,
yes,” softly, yet somehow grimmer still.

She
made another two turnings; the faces in the walls were set in frozen
expressions of despair. “Can I free them?” she asked. Not that she
wanted to, but—

But
nothing should suffer if it doesn’t have to
.

The
Fire Elemental stopped, looking at her with an expression of utter
astonishment. “Why would you desire to do that?” he asked.

“Because
if I can, I should,” she replied, knowing that this was the right answer.
Not the most expedient, and perhaps not the wisest, but the right answer.
“This—this is wrong. If I can make it right, then it’s my
duty to. I have power, and power begets responsibility.”

And
the walls began to murmur.

She
shivered at the sound, which carried something of the tone of those revenants
in it. But the Fire Elemental straightened, and spread his arms wide, the
little flamelets that danced over him rising from his outstretched limbs.
“Hear, my lesser brothers of Earth? Do you hear this child of Flame? You
are in thrall to a Dark Master of Earth. She is not bound to you; she has no
responsibility to you, and yet—she would free you.”

A
single, enormous face formed on the wall immediately in front of her. The eyes
were closed and remained closed; she was just as glad. She had the feeling that
if those eyes opened and looked at her, she’d be sick with fear.

It
wasn’t an ugly or deformed face; in fact the features were quite regular.
But there was something about it that made her wish she wasn’t looking at
it. Something dark and cruel, something that loved pain, and was bargaining
with her only because it had no choice.

“We
hear,” said the chorus of voices, which now came from the single face,
although the lips didn’t move. “Why?”

“Because,”
the Fire Elemental replied, with pride welling in every word, “she is
better
than your mistress.”

The
face in the wall did not react one way or another to this statement.

“How
can I free you?” she asked, her voice trembling, yet determined.

“Break
her defenses, and you will free us,” came the reply, in a low and ugly
rumble. “Swear that you will!”

Be
very careful what you promise
! came the thought.
This is the Elemental
world, and words have more weight here than in the real world
. If she
promised—and failed—there would be a different sort of price to
pay, and there was no telling what that price would be, only that it could be
very expensive.

And
you do not want to owe an unknown penalty to a negative Elemental
.

“I
promise I will try,” she said instead. “If you will give me the key
to this place that holds me.”

The
face became very still for a moment, as if all of the creatures speaking
through it were consulting with one another. Then it spoke again. “Follow
the Tree,” it said, “The counter-Tree. The Tree of Death.”

And
it faded back into the wall again, but Eleanor knew exactly what it
meant—it was a riddle, probably given to her in that form because
she
had not promised to do anything but try, but not a very clever one. She was to
trace the opposite path of the Tree of Life; fortunately, the Tree of Life happened
to be one of the major Tarot layouts as well as the key to the Kabala, or she
wouldn’t have known what the face in the wall meant. Mentally she
retraced her steps from the center of the maze, and realized with relief that
she would only have to go back and change her last turning.

“Why
are you here with me?” she asked, as she set out on the new pattern,
greatly relieved that she was no longer going to have to touch those walls.

“Because,
although I cannot help you directly, I have a function I
can
perform
for you,” he said, and tilted his head to the side, expectantly.

A
function he can perform for me
—Abruptly, she realized that he
already had.

“You—you
are an intermediary!” she exclaimed, stopping dead in her tracks.
“You can negotiate with the other Elements!”

He
nodded, gravely. “That is my function. And if you can make your way from
this place—”

“I
will,” she replied, fiercely. “And when I do—I have some
ideas.”

A
faint smile flickered over the being’s face. “I rather thought as
much,” he said, and gestured. “Lead on.”

She
did; and something else occurred to her as she followed the path of the
anti-Tree.

Alison
had made a very grave mistake, by throwing her into this place, this state. She
probably thought that she was imprisoning Eleanor further, and it must have
been that Alison had drugged her. The opiates had a long history of being used
to access occult states, which was why people who had no business
being
in such a state used them as “easy” ways to attain knowledge. Maybe
Alison had assumed being drugged was going to make her easier to handle, and
that would have been true, if she had not been learning discipline and control
all this time, and if she had not already been traveling in the Tarot realm.
And Alison was accustomed to thinking only in terms of
commanding
and
coercing
the creatures of her Element; it must not have even crossed her mind that
Eleanor might find allies—or at least, something willing to bargain with
her—here.

Alison
would have done better to have bound and gagged her. If Eleanor got her way,
Alison would live to regret that error.

But
first, she still had to escape from the spell-maze, before Alison delivered her
physical body to whatever fate the Earth Master had in mind.

August 12,1917
Longacre Park, Warwickshire

By the time Reggie
reacted to Eleanor’s flight, it was too late. She was out of sight before
he could get to his feet, and in the end, all he could find of her was the
gloves she had left on the bench beside him.

He
could not hope to find her, not now. He had no idea where she had run
to—and even if he left the ball and went straight to The Arrows, what was
he to do there? Force his way inside? Demand that they produce her? If her
stepmother had gone to such lengths to hide her, there was no reason on earth
why she should conjure the girl up simply because he demanded it.

Slowly
and cautiously, Reg. The first one over the barricades is the first one shot
.

With
light and music and laughter spilling out of the doors and windows above him,
he returned to the garden bench to try and make some sense of what had just
happened. One moment, she had been talking with him, perfectly
sensibly—the next, she was fleeing as if pursued by demons. And yet, it
couldn’t have been what
he
said that sent her running away,
could it?

Hadn’t
she managed to choke out that she
loved
him before she ran?

Surely
her stepmother’s hold over her could not control her here, in the privacy
of Longacre’s gardens—

Unless—

He
shook his head at the thought. No, surely not. Surely it was not possible that
Alison Robinson was a magician.

Was
it?

He
was completely unwilling to drop his barricades now. If Alison Robinson was a
magician—heaven alone only knew what she had set in motion to try and
ensnare him for one of her daughters. There might be a spell just waiting for a
break in his defenses.

By
the time he found Lady Virginia just paying her farewells to her cronies as the
guests began to depart, and got her to come down into the garden with him, the
traces of—yes—
magic
were almost too faint for her to read.
All she could say for certain was that both Earth magic of the darker sort and
Fire magic had left a hint of “scent” behind.

“Back
inside, please,” his godmother said when she’d finished.
“It’s altogether too damp and chilly for my bones. Let’s
adjourn to the library; there should still be a fire there.”

Somewhat
reluctantly, he agreed. He still wanted to go tearing after Eleanor, but he
knew that would be the wrong thing to do. He had no plan of action, and to go
into this without a plan was asking for trouble.

The
Earth—well, dark magic of some sort—he had expected. But who was
the Fire? The only mages here were Air—

Unless—Eleanor?

When
he spoke his thoughts aloud, incredulously, Lady Virginia only shrugged, as she
extended her toes towards the library fire. “Magicians are always more
vulnerable to magic than other folk,” she pointed out. “If the girl
is
an Elemental Mage, then her stepmother would have an easier time of
it in trying to control her. The hardest creature to affect by magic is someone
who has none of it at all.”

He
fidgeted with the cane he had taken from the stand near the door, and longed to
be able to pace as he used to at times like these. To think of poor Eleanor,
down there, in that repellent woman’s hands—

She
looked at him sharply. “Reginald,” she said, very slowly,
“Are you in love with this girl?”

He
would have thought it was obvious to a far less astute person than his
godmother, but he replied, “Yes. Yes, I am.”

“Your
mother won’t like it,” Lady Virginia cautioned. “She’s
common.”

“So
are the Americans that keep marrying into the peerage,” he snapped,
feeling an entirely irrational surge of irritation. “And so are the other
two girls, and Mater would have no trouble at all throwing me to one of
them!”

“Ah,
but the Americans have fortunes—large fortunes,” his godmother
retorted. “Even if the girl inherited, and there’s no guarantee of
that, she’s prosperous, but no heiress. And Alison Robinson is in
Burke’s, so presumably so are her daughters.”

“
Is
she
?” he replied. “Someone with the name she’s claiming
is, but anyone can claim to be a member of a family one is never going to
encounter. And I didn’t find any mention of Carolyn, Lauralee, or either
of Alison’s marriages in Burke’s, if she is who she claims to
be.”

“She
was vetted by Alderscroft—” Lady Virginia began, and before she
could continue, her jaw tightened. “Alderscroft, who would swear his
second-best hunter was a member of the peerage if he thought it would serve the
cause. I begin to smell a rat, Reginald. Alderscroft may have used her before,
and certainly knows she lives in Broom, so he might have told her to keep an
eye on
you
, without bothering to tell me about it, may I add. But it
is as certain as the sun rising in the east that she decided to aggrandize herself
as soon as she saw the situation. I
knew
there was something about
that woman that I did not like.”