Reserved for the Cat (36 page)

“And so I told him ‘fancy dress!’ ” she crowed. “And look! There he is, the pathetic fool! What a guy it is!”

Then dream-Nina turned, and looked at him fearlessly. “You are useless to me, little dog,” she said mockingly. “You are of less use to me than a pet monkey. The monkey, at least, is amusing. You have no money, though you pretend to it. You have no breeding, though you would like us all to think you are loftier than the Prince of Persia. You are stupid, and never did more than middling well in any of your schools. Your head is stuffed with commonplaces. You don’t know music, you don’t know anything about art, and you don’t understand more than half of what is going on around you. You are
a bore,
with your middle-class ways and middle-class morals! Shoo! Find someone else to put to sleep! You cease to amuse.”

And with that, she turned away, leaving him the center of a circle of people pointing at him and howling with laughter.

In the mirror, he woke up in a cold sweat. And Nina smiled. She was rather fond of that dream, and he would continue to have it once a night from this moment on.

If that didn’t tilt him over the edge, nothing would.

N
INETTE sat sidesaddle on a chair and hooked her chin over the back of it, her hands resting just underneath her chin. She watched Jonathon as he sat on the hearth-rug of her bedroom, carefully crafted a working circle and summoned the shields, all without using anything other than a candle and his index finger. And she could not see a thing.

Well, perhaps a little. A kind of vague heat-shimmer in the air. Maybe. Assuming that wasn’t her eyes being very tired after a long morning rehearsal, a short after-lunch revision of choreography, and a matinee and two evening performances.

These “Bank-Holiday” things were
terrible.
Everyone got a holiday, it seemed, except the poor performers and entertainers.

“Are there supposed to be flames?” she asked, doubtfully.

“Not really, no,” Jonathon replied absently. “It is more the abstraction of Fire, the energy that
is
the Plane of Fire, represented here—” He looked up at her, and smiled suddenly. “I am boring you to sleep, aren’t I?”

“No, I am only dreadfully tired,” she replied, and eyed Jonathon’s work with longing. “Please tell me you will be done soon?”

“Very soon,” he promised. “But good shields take time, and I have learned a trick or two over the years. I don’t think a creature of any Element will be able to pass these if it’s one of the nasty sort.”

I hope you’re right, lad, because none of us have gotten much sleep lately,
the cat said, from his perch on Ninette’s bed.

And if he’s not the nasty sort?
The Brownie suddenly appeared in the door, arms folded, looking daggers at Jonathon.
Oh, it’s like you lot, forever casting us out of our homes and—

“No one is casting anyone out of his home,” Jonathon snapped. “Have done, will you? This is tricky enough without a lot of critics standing about.”

The Brownie snorted, but the cat just curled his forepaws under his chest and half closed his eyes, waiting.

He did not have long to wait. No more than five minutes later, Jonathon grunted in satisfaction, and then made a complicated gesture with his fingers.

For a moment—so short a moment that Ninette was not entirely certain she had actually seen anything—the walls of faint heat-shimmer flared a hot yellow-red, like the heart of a burning log. Then she felt something rush through her, taking her breath away for a moment.

The Brownie’s eyes were as big and dark as the bottom of a bottle of ink for a moment. He took a deep breath in a gasp, and in that moment, Ninette found she was holding her breath and did the same.

Bollocks!
the Brownie exclaimed.

“I told you it would be strong, and I told you that you would be all right,” Jonathon said with a smug look of self-satisfaction about him. “Maybe you’ll believe me next time.”

The Brownie snorted, and vanished into the kitchen. Jonathon stood up, brushed off his trousers, then picked up the candle and blew it out. “There,” he said. “That should take care of any magical intruders. You may take your rest, Mademoiselle.” He bowed a little from the waist, and she giggled a little tiredly.

“And if they are not magical?” she asked, in all seriousness.

“Then you may summon a policeman by screaming out a window,” the magician said carelessly.

“And if they are magical and still pass your boundaries?” she demanded.

“That,” he replied, already on his way out the door, “is why you have the pistol.”

It had been a very good day. Jonathon had gotten a very tricky piece of stage magic equipment that he had bought from an old and retiring performer to work properly at last. Of course, he’d been forced to replace every spring in the wretched thing, and then work out what tension they
should
be set at, but it had been worth it, in the end. The panels popped closed so fast that even if you were looking for it, you wouldn’t see it happen, and the noise was easily covered by the band playing a crescendo. People weren’t used to seeing mechanical things accomplish anything fast, and in the uncertain stage-light he would have for this business and a burst of a flash-pot, they’d never realize what had happened even though they looked straight at it. Which they wouldn’t, of course. He’d have his distraction going. Though he had cursed himself many times for buying the wretched thing in the first place in the end, it was worth it. The audience would see a young lady vanish before their eyes, and reappear across the stage, and all without use of a trap-door in the stage. He hated trap-doors anyway. Unreliable things, they were always sticking, and you had to depend on stage hands to be sure the mattresses were in place under them, and even then it was possible to fall wrong and break an ankle. During his apprenticeship to a fine old stage magician, the fellow’s young nephew had done just that, and had gone on and walked his way through the rest of the act on an ankle that was months in healing. And of course, you weren’t just depending on the trap door to work, you had to hope the lift at the other end was also working . . .

Not to mention what a disaster it would be for Ninette to break an ankle.

No, this was better, and now it was working. He could hardly wait to try it out. Magicians’ assistants were always on the small and lean side. But Ninette was exceptionally small and lean even by those standards.
And
agile. He was so excited by the whole prospect it was all he could do to set the trick aside and not demand she cut short her morning lesson with Maestro Ciccolini to try it out.

He pondered what he should do to fill his time.

For a moment, he toyed with the idea of calling up a few Elementals and sending them out on a search for the person that had sent the homunculus after Ninette. But—he’d done that several times already, and they had been unable to find a trace of the magician. They still hadn’t found an Earth-Master, who
could
do that sort of thing—where the blazes were they all, anyway? Was there some sort of official Earth Master holiday going on? He had woken up this morning in a particularly frustrated state of mind for just that reason.

But Nigel had had an idea over breakfast. As the maid dished them up eggs and sausages and broiled tomatoes, he had looked rather smug.

“Much longer and you’ll be licking the cream off your whiskers,” Arthur had said, finally. “What is it that has set your brains afire, old chap? Is it another idea for the musical production? No? A new act you’ve hired? Not that either? Well, what, then?”

“I have a nephew of an old chum who’s a Water-Master who’s going to join us,” he’d said. “And I’m Air and Jonathon, you’re Fire.”

“Go on,” Jonathon had urged. “You’re stating the obvious and being obtuse, old man. Don’t torture us any more, I beg you, or we’ll be forced to fling buns at your delicate cranium.”

“Well look, with three of the four Elements all inside one Work, what we can do, is we can pool our resources and look for places our magic is excluded from. That’s where we’ll find Earth-based power operating.” He looked at them all in triumph. “It will probably be shields that we see, but that’s fine. We’ll know where he is, then.”

Jonathon had sat there blinking for a moment, and Nigel had gotten worried. “What is it?” the impresario finally asked. “What is it that I am missing?”

“Only that I thought
I
was supposed to be the clever one,” he’d said, full of admiration. It was a beautiful plan, and had all the virtues of simplicity. If they hadn’t been needed for band-call, they probably would have still been at the table turning ideas over and over to see what the undersides looked like.

So, as soon as this Water-Master arrived, they’d be trying to ferret out where this renegade Earth Master was, and deal with him.

Jonathon went to take a turn around backstage, where he watched the brother-and-sister dance act without really seeing it. It would be a great relief all the way around to get this thing dealt with, hopefully incarcerated somehow. Mind, all this only fed the fire of a long-held conviction on his part, that the Elemental Masters who were not actually gone to the bad
ought
to be organized enough to know each other from one end of the country to the other and be able to work together on a regular basis. They
certainly
should be able to call upon one another for help at a moment’s notice! Good heavens, there was a Minister for practically everything else in the government, there damned well ought to be a Minister of Magic! Even if it meant revealing to the Government that magic was real, and that terrible things could be done with it.

But of course, trying to get the notoriously reclusive and fiercely independent Elemental Mages to agree to anything of the sort was rather like trying to, in the immortal words of John Donne, “get with child a mandrake root.”

Well, as it happened that little poetic image Donne used wasn’t
impossible,
not for an Earth Master with the right set of skills . . . at least, that was what some of the grimoires he’d been reading over the years suggested. So maybe it wasn’t impossible for the Elemental Masters to get organized. Maybe if something threw a big enough alarm into them they finally
would
organize.

The right place to start might be with the London crowd. Oh, yes, they were all peers of the realm, or most of them anyway, and as a consequence they all chummed around together, had hunting parties and concert parties and balls and all that Social Register folde-rol together anyway. And they had the other sort of Hunting Party when they thought it was needed, like the old medieval lords, banding together to go slay a dragon or depose a king. It was more or less in their blood . . . maybe he could get them to step up and take charge of all of the Elemental Masters in the British Empire, not just their own “set.” He could appeal to
noblesse oblige.
He could suggest they reach out to the Masters in London first, just as an experiment, then go further if the experiment proved fruitful.

But that would be later, when all this was sorted out. And in the meantime, he could start writing to people, and asking for addresses of their friends, for the one thing he could do would be to make certain that the story of Ninette’s father got spread far and wide. Not that he’d been turned into a cat, of course. That was a secret, and he wouldn’t betray it. But all the rest of it—that much was important for other mages to know about. They needed to realize that it didn’t take invoking a Greater Demon on Salisbury Plain to make another Elemental Mage dangerous. All it took was being ruthless, bad, and willing to do anything to have your way, because once you started having your way, what you wanted gradually became larger and larger, and affected more and more people. This little campaign would take time, but moving slowly in this case was a great deal better than running about waving one’s proverbial arms and shouting about a danger no one else could see. Better to just tell the story, and let people figure it all out for themselves, so that not only would his fellow mages begin to see how dangerous it was to keep on the solitary paths they had been, but also how dangerous it was to disregard the power of one overlooked person when it became obvious that she was going to use that power wrongly.