Phoenix and Ashes (9 page)

“If
I am to carry out this assignment, you shall have to manufacture an appropriate
background for me,” the wretched woman went on, to Maya’s dismay.
“You’ll have to find an impoverished line in Burke’s with a
daughter called Alison of the proper age, one that might well have decided that
ungenteel comfort was preferable to leaking roofs and no proper plumbing. And
then you’ll have to arrange a proper introduction to his mother, by
letter if nothing else.”

“That
will take time, I’m afraid,” said Alderscroft, sounding apologetic.

“I
can wait,” she replied gaily, with a delicate little laugh. “After
all, a job worth doing is worth doing properly. Thank you, my lord. This is
much preferable to investigating the occasional foreigner on a walking tour
through Shakespeare country.” That sweet little laugh grated on
Maya’s nerves. One Earth Master to another—that woman was
altogether too well shielded. But then, London was unbearable for an Earth
Master without being shielded… and although it would have been much more
polite
to forego her shields within the Exeter Club, she wasn’t a member of the
Lodge, so she couldn’t know that it was safe to do so. So that was no
good reason to mistrust her, or at least, it was not a reason that Alderscroft
would accept.

The
creature was back to harping on that introduction. Maya had seen more than her
share of social climbers in India, and she knew another one the moment she saw
her. Though she might not be able to
read
Mrs.Robinson, she
didn’t have to in order to recognize those signs.

Doesn’t
she have daughters
?
Oh yes… planning on marrying into the
family, are you, my dear
?
If you can manage it, that is. Well, there
was the one saving grace of Reggie’s condition; he was so heavily blocked
that the Robinson woman could run him down with a locomotive-sized love spell
and he’d be impervious to it. He was, in fact, the mirror opposite to an
Elemental Master now, he was powerfully unmagical. She could throw spells at
him for a week, and all that would happen would be that they would be swallowed
up without a trace. And as for simple vamping—

Our
Reggie’s had every sort of woman there is fling themselves at his head by
now. He’s not going to think much of a couple of provincial belles
hanging out for a title and a fortune. And if you can’t recognize that,
dear lady, you are an utter fool
.

And
sure enough, she was back on that so-precious introduction again. “It
probably should be a letter, Lord Alderscroft,” she was saying, with a
melting smile. “Or better still, two—one to Lady Devlin directly
and one I can hand-carry. Say that—oh, I am too diffident to push myself
on her, but would she please look me up as I’m too terribly alone down
there in the village?”

Maya
gritted her teeth.
Oh, please rescue me from these wretched peasants, she
means
. And she knew that Alderscroft’s subconscious would recognize
her tone and the cadence of her speech as well as her words and respond to it
in
spite
of the fact that he knew she was as common as a dustbin. That was
because she
had
the proper accent, and the proper manner, and
everything in his upbringing and training was screaming out to his subconscious
that here was gentry. For one moment she hated Alderscroft, his automatic
response to the proper turn of phrase, his automatic assumption that anyone
born to the strawberry leaves was “one of us” and deserving of
special treatment and protection.

For
one moment, she hated them all, and felt a powerful sympathy for the socialists
and the Bolsheviks, and it was very tempting to think about throwing a bomb or
two into the Royal Enclosure at Ascot, just to shake them up a bit. Certainly
you could fire a cannon off through there and never hit anyone who would be
missed by society—

But
then good sense overcame her, and she sighed, and acknowledged that there were
aristocrats who were good stewards, and useful. And as for the rest, she
forgave Alderscroft and his set for being idiots, and went back to paying
attention to the conversation.

Well,
there was one thing that being born a half-caste in India was good for, and
that was in knowing what
wouldn’t
work with the British
aristocracy. Though she might very much
like
to point out to the old
lion that the Robinson woman had played him like salmon on her line, it would
do no good at all.

No,
she would simply tell Alderscroft that the woman was heavily shielded and
couldn’t be read—that she certainly had ulterior motives for
wanting that introduction and remind him of the two daughters looking for
husbands—and that Fenyx’s own grandmother would do a
much
better job of keeping an eye on him than any stranger ever could.

And
then she would go confide her
real
feelings to her husband
Peter—who would certainly, at that point, take them to his
“Twin.” And there was no one that Peter Almsley did not know among
the Elemental Mages inside the peerage. Almsley’s grandmother, who was
herself a powerful Elemental Master, almost certainly knew Reggie’s aunt,
who was another. And when
those
two heard what she had to say…

Now
Maya smiled for the first time since she began listening to the conversation,
struck by the mental image of a herd of water-buffalo surrounding an injured
calf to protect it from a tigress.

The
tigress had no notion of what she was about to face.

Alison
was pleased with herself. Despite some setbacks, this trip to London had been
unexpectedly productive. She sat down at the little desk in the sitting room of
their suite to catch up on her correspondence, while the girls unpacked the
day’s purchases.

“Mama,”
said Carolyn, idly tracing the line of the fringe on the new shawl she had
purchased that morning, “What do you know about the Americans getting
into the war?”

Alison
looked up from the letter she was writing to Warrick Locke. “The
Americans have no intention of entering the war, child. President Wilson is a
pacifist. If the sinking of the
Lusitania
did not accomplish it,
nothing will. Why?”

“Well,”
Carolyn persisted, with a small, sly smile playing about her lips,
“It’s just that—you had rather they didn’t,
wouldn’t you?”

“It
would interfere greatly with my plans, yes,” she said sharply. “And
it would probably interfere with our income as well. Why do you ask?”

“She
asks because she’s been meeting with that American boy, from the embassy
in the tea room,” Lauralee interrupted, frowning with jealousy at her
sister. “And she doesn’t want to get in trouble over it, so she
wants to make you think she’s been doing it for—”

“Lauralee—”
Alison held up a warning hand. “First, do
not
frown. Frowns do
not improve your looks, and cause wrinkles. Secondly, let your sister answer
for herself. Carolyn?”

“He
is
the ambassador’s son,” Carolyn protested, pouting
prettily, in a way that Alison approved. “And you
know
Mama has
been busy, and you
know
we’ve been hearing rumors in the hotel!
I thought I ought to find out at first hand!”

“And
it has nothing to do with the fact that he’s tall, and blue-eyed, and
looks like—” Lauralee muttered, sullenly.

“And
don’t allow jealousy to show, Lauralee,” Alison reproved absently.
“It gives one jowls. What did the young man tell you, Carolyn?”

“That
the President will
certainly
enter the war next month!” Carolyn
said in triumph. “He’s going home to enlist! So are most of the
young men on the embassy staff!”

Alison’s
lips tightened. This was no part of her plans. At the moment, the war was at a
stalemate—both sides were worn out and weary, and the conflict might well
drag on for years, which was very good news for the Earth Elementals that
she
favored, and for her plans concerning Reggie Fenyx. For the latter, she planned
more fear—her Elemental creatures making his life a never-ending round of
attacks of terror—until the one girl who could drive them away appeared
in his life. At which point, he would probably marry her on the spot. Or at
least be willing to.

But
to complete the plan, she would need time. Time for the boy to heal physically
enough to be sent home on recovery leave. Time for Lord Alderscroft’s
introduction to bear fruit. Time for her spells to work, time for
Carolyn—or Lauralee—to be the answer to his prayers, time for him
to propose and for a proper society wedding. And then more time, for she did
not intend for him to survive the war, and he would have to recover from his
shellshock and go back to the Air Corps, and if the Yanks entered the
War—

America
was full of brash young men who were perfectly willing to fling themselves into
combat. America was wealthy; within months she could turn her factories from
making frying pans into making cannon and machine-guns. And America had
immense, untapped resources on her own soil; she did
not
depend on
ships to bring those resources to the factories. If America entered the war, it
could be over within a year.

Unless—

She
couldn’t
stop
them. But she could add a new enemy to the
equation… one that should add to the attrition in the trenches, and slow
the number of troops coming over.

“Carolyn,
dear, I believe that we ought to hold a little farewell dinner for all those
fine young men at the embassy,” she said, in a tone that made
Carolyn’s eyes narrow. “We ought to thank them for being
so
willing to serve. Invite them to a little supper tomorrow night.”

Lauralee
also caught the scent of something in the air. “Mama—” she
began, then shook her head. “Come along, Carolyn. Let’s go write
invitations. I think there are six or seven of them, including the
ambassador’s son, Mama.”

“When
you are finished writing the invitations, make the supper arrangements with the
Savoy chef,” Alison replied, already unpacking what she needed from her
trunk. “You should know what to do already.”

“Yes,
Mama,” her daughters chorused, and Alison smiled with content.
Well-trained and obedient, everything a mother could ask for.

By
the time that all the arrangements were complete, and the invitations sent to
the embassy by messenger, Alison was ready. Her implements—deceptively
simple ones—were set out on the thick silk cloth that she used as her
portable Working table. It already had the runes and circles of containment embroidered
into it, dyed with blood—hers, and others. She spread it out over the
table they used when they dined en-suite, summoned the girls, doused the
electric lights, and lit the candles she had unpacked.

“This
may be one of the most underrated incantations in our arsenal, girls,”
she said, as the two of them moved closer to stand on either side of her.
“And yet, it requires surprisingly little power, especially here, in the
city. We are going to call an Earth Elemental. The trick to this is that you have
to remember to be
very
specific about what you want from this entity.
You already know that one of the great Gifts of the Earth Mage is to
heal—but the converse is also true. Watch.”

With
the precision of a surgeon, Alison placed a deceptively plain bowl (made of
clay dug from a graveyard and fired in the same fire as a cremation) in the
center of her Working cloth. Into it she dropped a tiny bit of rotting meat
(she always kept some sealed in a small jar with her when she traveled), and
several more equally distasteful ingredients, burying them all beneath a layer
of dirt dug from the piles of tin-waste near a mine. Then she closed her eyes,
held her hands over the bowl, and let the power flow from her, into it,
chanting her specific invocation under her breath and concentrating with all of
her might, and the sullen ocher-colored energies flowed out of her fingertips
and into the bowl, pooling there in the candlelight.

Carolyn
gasped, and at that sign, she opened her eyes.

The
Earth Elemental standing in the now-empty bowl might not look like
much—it was a squat little putty-colored nothing, with the barest
suggestions of limbs and a head, the sort of crude and primitive object that
might be found in an ancient ruin. It looked utterly harmless—but
properly used, it was one of the most powerful of all of the inimical Earth
Elementals, because it was one of the most insidious.

It
was called a
maledero
, and it brought, and spread, disease.

“I
need an illness,” she told it. “One that spreads in the air. It
should
seem
harmless, but kill. I don’t want it to fell
everything that catches it, no more than one in four, but no less than one in
ten. It should bring death quickly when it does kill, it should lay out those
it does not kill, and it should be hardest not on the very young nor the very
old, but those in the prime of life. It should spread rapidly, and be
impossible to stop, because by the time victims are dying, it should have
passed on to others.”

The
putty-colored thing smiled, showing a mouth full of jagged and rotting teeth,
while above the mouth, a pair of bottomless black eyes looked at her.
“How if it spreads through a sneeze?” it suggested. “If it be
spread by any other means, this might be countered.”

She
nodded. “Ideal. There will be six young men here tomorrow night for
dinner before they journey homewards. You will infect them, and
only
them, and you will lie dormant within them until they have ended their journey
in a place where there will be thousands of young men like them. Then you will
release yourself, and be free to spread as far as you please, across the whole
world, if you like—
except
to myself and my daughters.”