Reserved for the Cat (26 page)

Add to that, a nice flat of her very own, the accoutrements of a star performer . . . even if she was only the star of one music hall in Blackpool. For some, that might be enough, and Nina did not strike him as being greedy.

He needed to put his mind to it. He knew what Jonathon needed, and soon enough Jonathon himself would come to realize this too. Now he had to figure out just what it was that Nina needed.

Watching these two work together, he could see that he could set any number of shows based around them . . . they didn’t have to be fairy tales either, or at least not ones with working magic in them. Already an idea was forming in his mind . . . there were all those popular operettas based around minor royalty from tiny little European monarchies that no one had ever heard of running away to pretend to be peasants and falling in love . . . The person in question was generally a prince, but what if it was a princess? A princess who just wants to dance on the stage? Who runs away because she’s about to be married off to some other minor prince she has never even met, gets a job with a musical theater, falls in love with the stage magician . . . Yes, and when her parents come to collect her, the stage magician reveals himself as the prince she was supposed to marry, who
also
ran away because he couldn’t bear to be shackled to some girl he had never met . . .

Yes, that would be an excellent plot for their second production. It wouldn’t do to get too bound to fairy tales. Variety, that was the way to go.

Now he just needed to deduce what would keep Nina happy and contented.

The genuine Nina knew the signs. People were starting to eye the mysterious Russian with a bit less awe and a bit more suspicion. This was taking longer than she had thought it would.

Sabotaging the theater had not worked. It was impossible to get at the girl directly. None of the men that flocked to her dressing room came up to the mark for causing scandal.

Well, she needed to find a place to live, a place where there would be room enough to work some real magic, and where no one would be looking askance at the comings and goings into the night.

A few moments with the concierge elicited regrets that she was leaving and the name of a reliable agent. Within half a day, the agent had found and taken her to view three suitable flats. She rented the first one, which came furnished. More importantly, it was on the ground floor, and had a separate servants’ entrance which was
not
overlooked by any of the other flats in the building. She could come and go whenever she liked without being seen. It also included the cellar, which meant her Elemental slaves could come and go without needing recourse to any outside entrances.

She wrote the impresario in Germany, canceling her appearances, and sent payment to him for the cancellations without a qualm. This was war, now, and she was
not
going to lose.

N
INA had made a major mistake when she first arrived in Blackpool, and now she knew it.

She had assumed that her imposter was just an ordinary, greedy little human being. Now she knew better. The girl had a protector, an Elemental Master, a Fire-Master to be precise. She still didn’t know which of the men around the girl was the magician. Humans were infernally good at hiding their powers, if one was bent on hiding them, and most of the clever ones would never come out in the open if they could help it. If a mage was of her own element, she would certainly sense him in the powers when he actually worked magic, but if he was not of her element, he could be conjuring away at removing mountains and she would never know it if he was shielded.

And if he was shielded all the time, she’d not be able to tell him from an ordinary sort of human.

She had made a grave mistake, choosing to attack the building as she had. She had used creatures of her own element—the rats were of earth, of course—to be the carriers of disaster, but it had been
his
element, fire, which would have been the actual cause. Some of these blasted humans were on good terms with their Elemental creatures, good enough terms that the benighted things acted as watchdogs, and that must have been the case here. There was absolutely no doubt what had put out the fires. Salamanders, dozens of them. And that could
only
mark the work of a Master.

All right. This meant that she couldn’t go after the girl directly. She would have to be very careful how she did it indirectly. That meant working entirely in her own Element.

It was unlikely there was another Earth mage anywhere in this city; Earth mages felt acutely uncomfortable in places where the ground was paved over, where there were filthy slums and tenements, and where the air and ground were poisoned by the smokes and effluvia of humans living in such crowded conditions. These conditions did not trouble Nina in the least; on the contrary, these were the sorts of things that Trolls thrived in.

So it was unlikely that there would be a mage of her own Element to sense when she was working. And it was very unlikely that the Fire Master would sense it either. He couldn’t know who or what she was, or he would have tracked her down by now. So long as she stayed within her own element . . . it was safe to use magic.

So . . . what to do?

Well, the obvious thing was to try to get at her with one of the most powerful weapons in Nina’s arsenal.

Illness.

There were all manner of things that Nina could strike her with. And now that she had an establishment of her own from which to operate, she could investigate which might make the best weapon.

The vehicle would be another question entirely. Nina was not going to trust this to one of her dim-witted underlings, oh no. Nor to any old rat or mouse that she might trap.

Nina was going to make a homunculus, a bit of magic for which the Earth magicians were unusually apt.

And she moreso than a human magician. She needed no implements, no herbs, in fact nothing but a shielding circle—and herself.

She called in her maid. “Is the cellar prepared?” she asked, with an edge to her voice. She had told the creature to have the cellar made ready as soon as she took possession of the house—but had her servant done so? They could be astonishingly thick. It was the problem with the creatures of Earth; they often moved slowly, and they were not very clever. Nina had been an exception even among the Trolls who were the cleverest of the sorts of Elementals that wise magicians did not call up. But that was probably because of the number of humans she had absorbed over the years; it was not just their forms that stayed with her, it seemed that some of their intelligence remained as well.

But fortunately the maid nodded, and Nina felt a moment of satisfaction. They were learning, it seemed. Good. It was about time.

Waving the maid away, she descended into the cellar alone.

She did not need a lantern, nor indeed any light; Trolls could see in the dark as well as any cat. The steep wooden stairs were no trouble to navigate once she rid herself of her clumsy and encumbering human garments and continued on in her shift. What foolishness it was to wear such things! Humans were so stupid sometimes.

She felt the cool and the damp on her skin with a sense of great relief. It was at times like these that she almost regretted giving up her existence in the underground world of the darker Earth elementals. And yet, the life she had now was so rich, so varied, so . . . luxurious . . . she could not even contemplate giving it up. When she thought about how simple-minded and dull her own servants were . . . no. She was never, ever giving up this life.

The cellar was paved with stone, which, fortunately, was all native to the area. That made it ideal in every possible way. The preparations that Nina required were simple; a protective double circle had been deeply inscribed into the stone, with words in the ancient language of the Earth Masters etched between the inner and outer circles. Nina inspected these carefully, until she was satisfied that they had been written perfectly, that there were no flaws in the words, nor breaks in the circles. It was not that she was in any danger of course. These circles were not to keep anything out. Her human body with its Trollish powers was more than enough to take care of anything that might come at her across these circles.

No, this was to keep her power in, to keep from betraying her presence to that accursed Fire Master, and any other meddlesome human mages that might be alerted. The Fire Master
shouldn’t
be able to sense Earth power, but . . . she preferred not to take any chances. And anyway all the Elementals gossiped, especially the Bright Powers. Let a Faun or Dryad get a scent of her presence, and the next thing you knew a Sylph would find out about it, and from there it was a short step to the ears of those Salamanders that danced attendance on him.

She had not gotten as far as she had by being careless.

She crossed the lines of the circle, knelt in the center, and with a touch, called Earth magic into the carvings. Slowly, gradually, they began to glow a smoky and sullen ochre.

With a whispered word, she raised the power into a dome, arching above her head. Invisible to mortal eyes, though visible to hers, the corresponding half of the dome penetrated deep into the stone and earth of the cellar floor. Now she was walled, shielded, protected from every prying sense. She was invisible in here; even her own servants would not be able to sense her.

She cupped her hands over her belly, feeling the power rise in her now; she concentrated with all her might, for what she was about to do was the closest her kind ever came to giving birth.

And it was just as much work, although the time of “labor” was considerably shorter.

She pulled her own substance out of herself and into her waiting hands, panting and sweating as she robbed herself of her own flesh, and gave it shape and life. She groaned, not with pain, but with effort. And when she was done, there it was in her hands, about the size of a newborn human baby, a faceless, smooth little thing like a dough-man or a wax doll, waiting patiently for her to give it purpose. It was the same color as the earth hereabouts, and it was cool to the touch, with a faint dusting of grit over the surface of it.

She would have liked to lie down at that point, for the effort had been greater than she remembered. But she did not have that leisure. If she did not give this thing its purpose, it would start to merge with her again, and this would all have been for nothing.

So she called up more power with another whispered word, invoked the particular form of pestilence she wished to visit upon the girl, and gave the creature her “scent.” With every layer of magic, the homunculus glowed a little more, a dark and angry glow like cooling lava. Finally, when she was done, she set it down on the floor in front of her, feeling weary to death, as she never felt after mere physical exertion like dancing.

The homunculus stood there on its own, nearly vibrating with the need to be off about its purpose.

She dismissed the magic in the protective circles, and the homunculus did not waste a single moment. It sank into the floor of the cellar as easily as if the stone had been water, and in a moment, it was gone. Not even another Earth mage was likely to be able to detect it. Only another Elemental could. That was the beauty of this: since it had once been part of her, it became its own little independent creature. Not quite a Troll, but close enough it should raise no alarms among the other Elemental creatures hereabouts.

Finally, after a long, long rest on the stones, slowly drawing in Earth energy to replace what she had lost, she got to her feet and pulled herself up the stairs.

If all went well, within the week, her imposter would be dead. And she would then be free to decide whether or not to take her place.