Reserved for the Cat

Well, take care that no one else ever hears you say that. Thomas the cat paced up and down her rug, restlessly. That Fire Master is altogether too sharp. Normally Fire Mages are the impulsive sort, ruled by their emotions. I suppose he must be the exception that proves the rule.

“He is very sharp,” she replied, sobering. “I will be careful around him. He frightens me.”

He should. Fire is the most powerful of the four Elements in the material world. It is also the most emotional. It takes tremendous control to become a Fire Master, and more still to regularly command the Elementals. They react poorly to coercion. I know of this man; he is very clever. Cleverer still to have come up with a way to make a living that enables him to work in plain sight and leave every ordinary person who sees him assuming he is working some sort of trickery.

“Will he use any of his real magic on stage?” she asked, watching the cat pace up and down the rug.

I expect so. Nothing powerful or important, just—fire-works, amusement for the audience. Pay attention, and you might figure out which thing he does is illusion, and which real magic.

Well, she would do that. It would be fun.

You should sleep now, the cat commanded.

She shivered with delicious anticipation, then rang for the maid to help her undress. The cat was right. Tomorrow she would be moving into her new apartment, all her own. She was going to need sleep.

8

ELEMENTAL Masters needed a very particular kind of servant. To be precise, they must either be Elemental magicians themselves, or have been aware that magic, real magic, was in the world, for most of their lives. Often enough, their servants came from a close-knit group of people who had been serving Elemental mages for centuries.

Or, as now, the servant came with a recommendation.

“So,” Nigel said, looking up from the letter the girl had presented to him. “Sean McLeod says here that you are a Sensitive.” She was a pretty little thing, was Ailse McKenzie: carrot-red hair, green eyes, and clearly as tough as she was tiny. She had good credentials though; she’d served as the ladies’ maid in the shooting season at Sean’s hunting lodge; his guests were all Elemental Masters and magicians and their offspring. She had wide ambitions though, and according to Sean was not content with doing general servants’ work when there were no ladies present. Neither he nor Nigel could blame her; the privileges and pay of a lady’s maid were considerably more elevated than that of a parlor maid.

“If that means I see the wee cratures you gents can call up when ye’ve a mind to, then aye.” The girl’s Scottish accent was not so heavy he couldn’t understand her. Though it might prove difficult for the other party in this equation. Nina might find it difficult to understand her and that could prove a great hindrance. Sadly that was a mark against hiring her.

On the other hand there were many more points in her favor. Nina needed a reliable maidservant, and maids who had experience with magic were not all that thick on the ground. While it was true that Nina herself did no magic, Nina had a talking cat. Eventually a maidservant would notice something odd about the mistress’s pet. If she actually overheard what the cat had to say and believed her “ears,” she would probably run screaming from the house. If she did not actually hear it speaking herself, sooner or later she would notice her mistress having one-sided conversations with her pet.

Then there was the matter of self-defense. This was something every Elemental Master needed to consider if he or she was wealthy enough to employ more than one or two servants. When enemies came calling, they generally did not offer advance warning, nor did they scruple to ask whether or not anyone in the vicinity was an innocent bystander. You could be killed just as dead by Elemental Magic that you could not see and probably would not believe in if you were told about it.

Miss McKenzie would be able to see it, and might have some defense against it. When it came down to cases, anything that had been sent after Nina probably already had her “scent.” If the storm that had wrecked her yacht had been sent after her. . . .

“Mademoiselle Tchereslavsky may be . . .” he paused delicately, “. . . hunted. We are not certain, but the storm that sank the yacht she was on might have been sent to harm her.”

Not entirely to his surprise, because the Scots were a tough race, Miss McKenzie raised her head on her slim neck and looked defiantly down her nose at him. “An’ ye think, a’cause I have never th’ magic of my own, I canna hold my own?” Her eyes blazed fiercely. “Aye, a horse-shoe and a right pair of hobnailed boots will send most of those cratures packing!”

“Miss Tchereslavsky does not speak much English, you know,” he said tentatively.

“Lor’ bless ye, sir, three years in a row now, I tended a lady what never chattered in anything but French, and we managed all right,” the girl said proudly. “I’ll find a way t’ understand her, make no mistake.”

One final thing. “She has a protector,” Nigel said. “It’s her cat.”

“Does it talk?” the girl wanted to know.

“After a fashion.”

“An’ will it talk to me?”

“That, I don’t know. He might.”

“Well!” Miss McKenzie said in triumph. “There you are, then.”

Nigel blinked. Somewhere the conversation had just taken an abrupt turn, and he had missed it. “I beg your pardon?” he ventured. “What exactly did you mean?”

“If it talks,” the girl explained, patiently, as if he was a very slow child, “then she can tell the cat what she needs, and the cat can tell me.”

“Ah.” That very practical application had not occurred to Nigel. “Very well then, your services will be required.” He swiftly negotiated her wages and privileges, and sent her on to the flat with instructions to have the landlord show her in and get everything in readiness for Nina. He then wrote a note to his man, instructing him to pack up Nina’s things and send them to the flat.

As usual, the dancer had gotten up at an hour that would have satisfied the harshest stage director and gone straight to the rehearsal hall. There she would work until noon, stop for a bite and a stroll in the sunshine, then return to the rehearsal hall until dinner-time.

However, he proposed to change that schedule today.

As the hour approached when she usually stopped for her midday meal, he went upstairs to catch her before she left. She was just going through some complicated faradiddle involving a lot of fast, intricate steps, and he paused in the doorway to watch. And not because her short rehearsal skirt showed her legs, either; he saw more than enough of his fill of legs backstage. No, this was the first time he had actually watched her doing anything other than exercises, and he indulged himself in a moment of self-congratulation. He was no judge of ballerinas, but he knew his audiences, and she was by far and away the best dancer that they would ever likely see.

She finished the sequence and came down flat-footed in that way that dancers had when they were practicing something and not actually in front of an audience. And only as she was turning around did she catch sight of him in the mirror.

She jumped, her hand going to her throat. “Blin!” she exclaimed. “You startle me!”

“Your pardon, Mademoiselle, I certainly didn’t mean to—” he began, but she waved her hand impatiently.

“It is good you are here,” she said in French. “There is something I wish you to see.”

She ran to the corner and got what looked to Nigel like a rod of some sort, and nodded to the pianist. “Spring song, s’il vous plais,” she said, and as the pianist began what Wolf would surely have snorted at as a “tinkly little melody,” she unfurled a long ribbon from the rod and began to dance with it.

Actually there was a great deal more twirling the ribbon in intricate patterns than there was dancing, but Nigel could easily see that this would be no great concern for his audiences. The eye was drawn to the streamer of silk, which was yards and yards long. It seemed almost alive as she made it draw circles and spirals, twine around her and create elaborate figures in the air. And he could just imagine it with some special stage lighting on it too. . . .

When the pianist ended with a flourish, and so did she, he applauded. She caught up the ribbon and began carefully folding it, looking both flushed and pleased.

“Bien?” she asked.

“Tres bien,” he assured her. “I don’t think our people have ever seen anything done like that before.”

“Oh, it is nothing but a little trick, and I could not do the throws and catches, the ceiling here is not high enough. But it looks grand from a distance,” she replied in French, putting the ribbon and stick up carefully. “There was a troupe of girls from Switzerland, I think, that performed these things. There is also a hoop, and a ball, and I think both will serve in your production.”

“Anything that looks good from the balcony will sell tickets, Mademoiselle,” he said with pleasure. “Now, I am going to ask you to please forgo your afternoon practice, if you will. I’d like to take you to luncheon, and then to your new flat. It’s all arranged, I’ve had your things sent over, and I just hired you a fine maid to take care of you. She’ll have set everything to rights by the time we get there.”

To his pleasure, she clapped her hands like a child given a sweet. “Monsieur, you are too good to me!” she exclaimed. He flushed, but smiled.

“Save the praises for when you see it all,” he cautioned. “After all, you might not like it!”

The little Scots maidservant answered the door, already looking as if she had been in this place since it was built, her crisp black and white uniform immaculate. “Sir,” she said, with a nod of respect to Nigel. “This would be m’lady then?”

Nigel nodded. “This is Mademoiselle Tchereslavsky. Mademoiselle, this is the young lady I hired for you, Miss McKenzie.”

Ninette elected not to imitate La Augustine this time; the dancer was horrible to her servants. Instead, she gave Miss McKenzie a friendly smile as she stepped for the first time into her own parlor, and made sure the door was not shut in Thomas’s face. Then she looked around, and felt a thrill of sheer delight.

In times of fanciful dreaming she had imagined living somewhere like this. When she daydreamed about being the pet of a rich old man, she had pictured herself in a place virtually identical in every way. Everything about it spoke comfort, not just that the furnishings looked comfortable, which they did, but unlike the boarding house (which was comfort attainable only so long as the money in her purse lasted), or the luxury of Nigel’s flat (which was his, not hers), this place whispered a little message to her. You will never be cold or hungry again.

“Beggin’ your pardon, sir, milady,” the maidservant said once the door was closed, “but there’s a Brownie in the pantry. Did ye wish me to do sommat about him?”

A—what? Was Ninette’s reaction. What was a Brownie? Some sort of mouse? Or worse still, a rat?

It’s quite all right, McKenzie, I invited him, said the cat.

“Oh well, it’s all right then. Your pardon for interrupting you,” she said, without turning a hair. “Your pardon, but I was preparing m’lady’s lunch. I shall be in the kitchen if you require me.”

“And I’ll show you about,” said Nigel, looking just a trifle smug.

But Ninette wasn’t ready to be shown her new flat just yet. “She heard you!” she said, in a tone of accusation.

Of course. Monsieur Nigel would not have hired an ordinary servant for you. That could have been a problem. Correct, Monsieur?

“Very much so,” Nigel replied, and turned to Ninette. “Miss McKenzie is not a magician, but she is able to see the same things that you are. We refer to her abilities as being a ‘Sensitive.’ You will not need to hide anything from her.”

Ninette nodded, with some relief. At least she was not going to have to explain the cat away! “But—how?” she asked in English.

“Our sort of folk need servants, servants we can trust, after all,” Nigel chuckled. “I simply let it be known I needed a maidservant for my famous dancer, and one was forthcoming.”

Somehow she doubted that it was quite that simple, but she was willing to let that pass. The tour of the flat took very little time, although the enjoyment she knew she would have in a more leisurely examination of its delights would occupy her for a while to come. When they were finished, Miss McKenzie had a really admirable luncheon laid out for them, which they sat down to enjoy.

“Excellent, McKenzie,” Nigel said, when she had cleared the last of it away.

“Och, well, that would be due to our landlord, sir,” McKenzie replied. “’Twas he that brought it all up; I just needed to keep it warm for you.”

“Ah, now that reminds me,” Nigel said, and began explaining the various meal arrangements she could make. “It’s all because this is theatrical lodgings, you see,” he concluded. “Players eat at odd times, they generally don’t know enough about the matter to keep a good cook, and they don’t stay long. Not as a rule, anyway.”

Ninette shook her head. It all seemed so irregular to her. “We change programme,” she said, finally. “Not theater.”

“A more sensible way, to be sure.” Nigel nodded. “At any rate, if you want company, you can go down and dine with the others. If you don’t, they’ll send it up, or McKenzie there can arrange something. The meals will be plain and simple, so if you’re longing for beefsteak, or pheasant, or anything of that sort, you’ll have to send out for it.”

She nodded; it was definitely a sensible arrangement, if a trifle peculiar. But it made sense.

“I’ll leave you to settle in,” Nigel said genially. “You can skip practice for one afternoon, I should think?”

She nodded, and McKenzie showed him out.

Now the work began in earnest.

Ninette spent all of one afternoon, on a day when the theater had no matinee, showing Nigel, Arthur, Jonathon, and Wolf all of her little “tricks.” These were, of course, the sort of things that dancers like La Augustine despised—dancing with the ribbon-wand, the ball, and the hoop, skirt dancing with yards and yards and yards of the lightest silk fabric to make ever-moving curtains that light could be played against. And she showed her other tricks, the showpieces that dancers like La Augustine did not despise, although they might pretend to; the solos from Swan Lake and Tales of Hoffman, from Bayadere and Giselle, from Don Quixote and Corsair.

All these things the men loved, and when she was done, exhausted and dripping with sweat, she looked out into the empty theater to see the four of them chattering away like so many rooks, planning what tricky bit should go where in their story.

Wolf was now supposed to write music—or at least adapt it—for all of this, but he seemed to be in a frenzy of delight, and no one ventured to trouble him or Arthur as they sat at the piano, Wolf dictating the music without a pause until they were both often found slumped over the keyboard, the parrot standing with one foot up and head hunched down, on the nape of Arthur’s neck.

Nor was Jonathon idle, concocting a tremendous stage-business for the Sultan’s burning palace, as well as adapting or reviving several more of his feats of illusion.

Nigel was busy filling in the spaces between Ninette’s performances and Jonathon’s with other acts. They had to be steady, reliable, and with a minimum of traits that might bring them into conflict with others. This would not be a case where in two weeks, each would go his separate ways. These people, like the theatrical and dance companies she knew, would stay together for months. Little irritations could escalate into harassment, into all-out feuds. It was Nigel’s job to see to it that the people he invited to this production were not the kind to escalate.

The plot was a simple one. In the Prologue, a ship would be caught in a storm; they had determined that only a segment of this ship would appear on stage, tossing on the artificial waves. There would be cries of “man overboard” and a dummy of her would be tossed down into the waves. This would not be the first nor the last appearance of the hapless dummy. . . .

She would do a skirt dance among the waves to make it appear that she was drowning, or at least, swimming for her life. She would clear the stage, and then the ship would sink.

In the first act, she would be lying on a “beach,” unconscious, and the Sultan’s men would find her. They would carry her off, and the curtain would rise on the Sultan’s palace. This gave the opportunity for several acts to come on stage to entertain the Sultan. Chief among them, of course, would be Jonathon. He would play the Sultan’s Vizier, who enforced the Sultan’s edicts with his magic. He would make some poor wretch turn into a chicken or some such thing—they hadn’t quite decided what animal they would use, perhaps even a dog—and then the new harem captives would be brought in. Nigel would have to hire dancers for this, but he had some experience with hiring actors and dancers for something called “the Panto,” so she expected he could manage that.

Then it would be her turn. Begging and pleading with the Sultan to send her back to her people, she would be refused, and ordered to dance. This is when she would do her hoop, ribbon, and ball dances.

There would be more entertainment for the Sultan, interspersed with a very clever idea on Nigel’s part. A scrim would drop down between the audience and the Sultan’s court, and everyone would freeze in place like a tableaux vivant. Then the lights would come down on the Sultan’s Court. Then two footlights would come up, one on a ballad singer, and one on her, apparently gazing out of a window. The ballad singer would perform a number about England or home, while she sighed in her captivity. Then the lights out front would come down, she and the singer would exit under cover of the darkness, and the lights would come back up on the Sultan’s Palace.

The Sultan would demand for her to dance again. This time it would be one of the ballet solos she knew so well. Then the Sultan would begin courting her.

“Now why,” Wolf had demanded, “is he going to court her when logic says he could simply take her?”

“Fairy tale logic, old bird,” Arthur had replied absently, “She’s a virtuous English girl and therefore the only thoughts that enter the Sultan’s head are those of honor and decency,” Then he had made that little exclamation that meant he had puzzled out what he was working on. “Try this out for your hoop-dance,” he had said, and began to play a melody. As she went through her planned choreography in her mind, everything else was forgotten.

After that, she would stand up to the evil Vizier, who would have a change of heart and agree to get her out. Nigel had the notion for her to do a “naturalistic” dance portraying Anger and Defiance at that point, in bare feet and legs and a little tunic, as Isadora Duncan did.

Next, she and the chorus dancers would do a nautch dance in the harem. She wasn’t at all sure about this, as she had never actually seen a nautch dance, but she supposed she could adopt one of Aspica’s solos from The Pharoah’s Daughter.

Then back to the Sultan’s court, where, growing weary of her refusal, the Sultan would attempt to force himself on her.

“Finally!” Wolf had exclaimed at that point, making them all laugh.

She would break away and perform a skirt dance with red and yellow lights on her for fire. The Sultan would be frightened, call her an Efrit, and demand that the Vizier do something about her. The Vizier would make her vanish from an open platform.

The last scene she would be in would be where she said farewell on a beach to the Vizier, who would send her away in the custody of a dozen British tars, who would, of course, do a dance with her in the middle of them.

But the last scene would be all the Vizier’s, where he would be dragged up in front of the Sultan for helping her to escape, and he would bring the entire palace down in a barrage of fire and vanish out of the midst of it. Jonathon was quite excited about this, for it meant not only a spectacular illusion, but an escape from chains as well.

In general, in fact, everyone was enthused about the production.

It was at that moment that she had realized there were two things she needed. A choreographer was one. A teacher was another. Try as she might, she was unable to put together sequences of steps that seemed at all interesting. She understood this instinctively; something in her compared, say, the Petipa choreography from one of the Sleeping Beauty variations, which were by no means his most inspired, to what she was doing, and she fell far, far short. And as for a teacher, she understood that she needed correction, and also understood that she was not going to get that correction working on her own.

Finally she broached the subject to Nigel, whose brow furrowed at her request. “I’m not sure I understand correctly,” he said, finally. “I thought it would be no problem for you to put together your little numbers. And aren’t you beyond taking lessons?”

“A dancer is never beyond taking lessons,” she replied solemnly. “There is always something new to learn. It is hard to practice and look for faults at the same time.”

Nigel nodded at that. “Come to think of it, I’m going to require someone to teach all those chorus dancers their parts, and handle them as Arthur handles the orchestra.” He pondered this for a moment. “Let me see if the booking agents have anyone of this sort.”

Not three days later, he turned up again at her rehearsal studio, and with him was a man she did not recognize. “Mademoiselle Tchereslavsky, this is Monsieur Ciccolini. He will be your teacher, he’ll be doing the choreography, and he’ll be keeping the chorus under as much control as possible.”

“That will not be the easiest proposition,” the gentleman said with a smile. He was a tall, lean man, hair once black, now going gray, but continuing to be handsome in that ageless way that only Italians could manage. This was not the “Roman-Italian” whose statues adorned theaters and government buildings everywhere; he definitely had a dancer’s build and a dancer’s way of moving, but she could tell that his knees pained him. “Young ladies being what they are, I can only promise that they will turn up to rehearsals and performances on time, and come up to my standard, or they will find themselves replaced.” He bowed a little. “Mademoiselle, if I may be so bold as to come back with you to your rehearsal hall? I can then get some idea of what lessons you may need.”

She was only too happy to take him there, and was very glad that she was already warmed up. He took over the room as if he had been there all his life, addressing the pianist, and taking charge of it all. He instructed her to warm up anyway, which she did, while he scrutinized her. Then, as he set the tempo of the pianist, he called out steps for her to perform.

This was something she had sorely missed. It was one thing to dance a sequence from one of the many ballets that you had memorized, or a sequence that you tried to make up in your head to try and stretch your abilities and all the while watch yourself in the mirror for any flaws. It was quite another to dance a sequence as it was called out by the teacher, and to rely on the teacher to watch for flaws while you concentrated on the dancing.

He ran her through several such sequences, at varied tempi, his long face growing more and more thoughtful. Finally he waved her to the barre. “Mademoiselle,” he said heavily, “I am only an old man from Milano, with two bad knees and some ability to teach little English chorus girls to stagger about on their toes and not disgrace themselves. You are better than anyone I have ever taught. You are better than anyone I have ever danced with. You may be better than anyone I have ever seen. There is nothing I can teach you.”

Ninette listened to this with growing astonishment. True, in the past several weeks she had completely forgotten about captivating rich old men and had concentrated on her dancing as never before. But surely that had not made that much of an improvement! Surely he was mistaken. Or flattering her. Or—

Perhaps testing her. She raised her head. “Monsieur, whether or not any of that is true, a dancer never stops learning. You have learned at one school, I at another. Another technique is always worth learning. And you choreograph, which is something I have never done. True?”

“True,” he admitted.

She smiled. “Well then, pray help me with this first of my dances for this production, for I confess I can think of nothing to make it particularly interesting.” She fetched the hoop from the corner. “It is to combine ballet with the hoop-exercises of the Swiss girls—”

“Ah yes!” he exclaimed with recognition. “I saw them. Well, then, let us begin.”

By the end of the afternoon, he had turned a rather lackluster little piece into something amusing and interesting. It was true that he was no Petipa, but he had a good eye and a sound instinct. Being able to make clear improvements in her dance raised his spirits as well; by the end of the afternoon, he was issuing orders and tapping out the tempo with his instruction wand, and using it too, to reposition a foot or a knee—

He was one of those teachers who used a long wand, nearly as tall as he was, to point out problems with the feet and legs. She had only had one such teacher, at the Paris Opera, and he had been prone to using it to thwack little ballerinas across the back of the calf when he did not like what they were doing. Perhaps Ciccolini was naturally more gentle than that, or perhaps he simply deemed her too old for such correction—or maybe he feared that in a temper she would snatch his wand and break it over his head! At any rate, he did no such thing to her.

It was a relief to think about something besides magic, to concentrate entirely on her dance. It was very odd to think that a few weeks ago, she would have been perfectly happy to find herself not dancing! This was real, solid, something she had known all her life, something she understood. Magic, she did not understand. How could a cat talk? How could there be little creatures like the Brownie living right under everyone’s noses?

Dancing was better. But—there was something lacking even with her dancing.

But she needed something more. She needed—

“Mademoiselle,” the instructor began, breaking her out of her reverie. “This looks very fine in this room. But to judge whether or not it will serve on the stage, you must take it on the stage. And to judge whether or not it pleases an audience, you must take it before an audience.”

She thought about that for a moment, and realized what it was that she had been feeling the lack of.

An audience. She had not, until that moment, realized just how much she had missed that aspect of dancing. The audience! Not just potential suitors, but all of them, from the little girls at their first ballet to the old balletomanes. She wanted to hear applause, feel their presence, drink in their attention.

It was very strange . . . when she had danced the Sylphide, she had not even considered the audience, and yet now, that applause had been like a drug. And she wanted more of it.

“I quite agree with you, Monsieur,” she said with a nod. “I will speak with the director. There is no reason why I should not start performing. Same time tomorrow, then?”

He nodded. “I fear my mornings will be filled with teaching people who have perfect figures and an imperfect sense of where to put their feet or how to execute a few steps. In other words, I will be instructing the chorus.”

“Very good, Monsieur,” she replied—the old man bowed to her, and took his leave. The pianist began packing her music away, and Ninette retired to the little changing room just off the rehearsal room. She changed into her street clothing, and went straight to Nigel’s office.

He looked up as she tapped on the doorframe, for the door itself was open. “Mademoiselle?” he said, looking worried. “That Italian chap not to your liking? I’ll find you another teacher if you must—”

“No,” she said swiftly. “No, he is excellent!” She took a deep breath. “However, I grow uneasy that you support me and I do nothing.”

Nigel laughed. “You are in rehearsal. You are earning your salary—”

She shook her head. “I have never performed before an English audience. I need to see what they are like. Now is the time to try some of my dances, to see if they respond to me. Sir, I would like to perform in your show. Not the one we are creating. This ‘music hall’ that you are presenting.”

The look of surprise on his face made her smile.

“If you’re certain,” he said, finally, “I’m sure we can fit a dance or two in.”

“I am certain,” she said, firmly. “And Monsieur Ciccolini believes this is a good idea too.”

“In that case, I would be the last person to argue,” Nigel replied, giving in with good grace. “We’ll start you next week, on the new playbill.”

She smiled and thanked him. The conviction that this was exactly what she needed remained with her all the way back to her flat.

9

NINA Tchereslavsky regarded the dead old man in her bed with a remote regret. Regret, because he had, after all, offered so little sustenance, and now she would have to find another admirer with a great deal of money, but it was tempered with the knowledge that she really did look very chic in black. It was a great pity, but he had to be devoured. He had been getting restless, eyes beginning to rove—which was how she had gotten him in the first place. But Nina left nothing for any other female creature, human or otherwise, when she was finished with a man. That little pale-haired girl in the back of the chorus would just have to go hunting elsewhere.

So farewell to Herr Klaus Obervelten, the farm-tractor tycoon.

But it would not do for him to be found here.

With a twist of her mind, she summoned a herd of the kobolds that were as much slaves to the power she granted them as they were her allies. Being very much part of the material world, they came scampering through her open bedroom window rather than manifesting in any other way.

“Take that to its home,” she said, pointing a languid finger at the corpse and wrapping her silk-velvet robe more tightly around herself. “Put it in its bed.” With another twist of her mind, she showed them where her benefactor’s home was, and where his bedroom was in that house. Without a word, the little mob of kobolds had hoisted the body onto their backs, and a moment later, were scampering out the window with it. They would go over the rooftops, of course; it was night, and the sun wouldn’t hurt their eyes. It certainly would not do for a policeman to see a dead, rather naked body being carried through the streets by things invisible to his eyes.

That would be unfortunate.

Nina closed the window and stretched. That was that, sadly. No more presents, and the heirs would likely very soon cut off the monthly rental payments for this very expensive flat.

No matter. She had enough to live on for a while until she found another so-called “protector.” It would not take long. The magic and energy she took from her old men was sufficient to allow her to keep this form as it was when she had devoured it and moved into the girl’s life. She looked not quite twenty, in that ageless way of ballerinas everywhere.

She had chosen her victims very carefully, not at all at random. The original Nina had been well on the way to becoming a great dancer, and had attracted a great many followers at the point where the creature that became her had taken her, but few of them had been the sort that would have done her any good. She was forever attracting starving poets, who would write wonderful things about her, but did not pay the rent on a nice flat. She had been very wild, and rather wanton, and threw herself away on these beautiful, but impecunious fellows. Evidently she had not taken the lesson of La Boheme to heart; she had doted on La Dame Aux Camellias instead. Her talent for dancing and her fine body had been wasted on her silly little soul.

The creature had swiftly changed all that. It had been easy. She simply assumed the form of one of her own victims, who had been an exceedingly beautiful young man, and Nina had happily let the creature seduce her. Once in her bed, it was only a moment until Nina was absorbed and the creature became Nina.

She had spent all the rest of that night getting used to the dancer’s body and memories. In class the next day, she had been clumsy at first, occasioning some giggles from the other girls, but she joked and laughed herself about “a little too much champagne” and they all put it off to a hangover. But the creature had a great deal of practice in mastering forms, and by mid-afternoon she was actually dancing better than the original. This was not as hard as it might seem. For one thing, she was able to concentrate as Nina had not been. For another, her body did not tire or hurt as Nina’s had. The beautiful movements of ballet, the creature now knew, were performed more or less in pain. Well, the creature did not generally experience that sort of pain; as long as she could drain others to heal or sustain herself, she would not ever suffer, either.

By the evening’s performance, in which Nina was a soloist, the creature was ready. Backstage, all the beautiful but impecunious boys found themselves relegated to the back of the crowd, as Nina concentrated on the old and rich and not at all beautiful. By morning, Nina was wearing a fur coat, a diamond bracelet, and was about to be installed in a fine little flat complete with maid. Her benefactor had been an aging count, well used to keeping pretty little ballerinas, and if he had a taste for cruelty, well, he did not last long enough to indulge himself in it too much. The next man, a highly successful wine merchant, was easier to deal with, and just as generous.

For some reason, dancers attracted old men. Some much older than the ones that pursued opera divas. This was exactly as the creature that had taken the dancer’s form and place liked it. Old men were prone to dying from a thousand and one causes, and Nina’s benefactors were all very old men, and she was discreet. Most of the time, unless the old gentleman himself wished to flaunt her, as Herr Klaus had, no one knew there was a liaison. As for the ones who paraded her like a trophy, no one thought twice about it when Nina lost a few lovers in such a fashion, since not a single death was directly connected with her. Herr Klaus would be found in his own bed, with no indication that he had been with her last night. Nina’s servants, who were rendered blind and deaf when she chose, could not have told anyone otherwise even if they wanted to.

Perhaps she should go to the Bohemian quarter and find herself a starving artist or tortured poet. Or two. Or three. And it was a very good thing that she was leaving to dance elsewhere; she could take another old man or two there without the rumors of the previous ones following her. She would choose ones who needed to be discreet; that way no one would be the wiser when she consumed them.

The creature had taken the forms and shapes of many beings over the years; an elemental creature of earth, it had first been conjured and inexpertly bound some three hundred years ago by an Earth Master who relied on instinct rather than learning, and whose self-confidence was nothing short of hubris. He was the first human that the creature had devoured; up until then, it had confined itself to lesser Elemental beings and animals. But once she had absorbed the magician . . . that was when things began to change.

Her talent, which had caused the magician to try to bind her in the first place, was that not only could she kill anything by absorbing its essence, she could then imitate it flawlessly afterwards. So once she discovered that, having absorbed her erstwhile captor, she was able to stay on the Material Plane, there was no turning back for her. She had taken on the form of that foolish Elemental magician for quite some time before his life bored her, and when she was ready to move on, it hadn’t taken a lot of effort to find someone else to be.

The creature—the first mage had called her a “Troll”—went back to bed. When the body was found, which it would be soon since the sky to the east was getting brighter, “Nina” needed to be in her bed, alone. She might not be sans peur et sans reproche, at least in the eyes of the world, but having him die in her bed might excite the suspicions of the wretched police. There were Elemental Mages everywhere They could, and would, banish her back to her previous existence. Or worse . . .

She wrapped the silk sheets around herself and settled into the lovely, soft bed. It had been a good day when Nina Tchereslavsky decided she was going to use magic to get the attention of a certain beautiful young poet who was not interested in her. The current Nina judged that this was a very foolish thing to do; not only would most love spells not have worked on someone who was devoted to someone else, there had been a dozen equally beautiful young men clamoring for her. As for the dancer, she had been prepared to throw her entire life away on a succession of these beautiful young men, none of whom would have done her a particle of good, had any money, or ever likely would have any money.

Whereas the creature that had taken her place had made her great. A much, much better use of the gifts that had been given her.

With these thoughts in mind, Nina drifted back off to sleep, fully expecting to be awakened by the maid bewailing the death of the old man.

Instead, she was awakened by the maid bewailing nothing, only bringing her the morning pastry and chocolate, and an envelope, a letter from the impresario of the theater in Salzburg at which she was expected to perform. She frowned at it before opening it. She really hoped he was not canceling her engagement. She needed to move away from Hungary altogether; too many men had died around her, and this last one might start some talk. Germany, that was far enough. She would be discreet. It wasn’t hard to be discreet when you knew what to look for.

Provided this impresario wasn’t having second thoughts.

But instead, what fell out was a note and a newspaper clipping.

I trust this note will reach you where you should be, the note read, because you cannot perform in my theater and one in England at the same time.

Swiftly she caught up the little cut-out bit of paper. It wasn’t much, only a note that Nina Tchereslavsky was performing at some music hall in Blackpool and that she was to be the star of an upcoming and very ambitious project by the owner of that theater.

At first, Nina did not grasp what this meant.

Then she flew into a rage.

When at last her initial anger was expended, the bedroom was virtually destroyed. The furniture was in splinters, the bedclothes and curtains in rags. The servants knew better than to approach her in this mood; she likely would have killed them.

Not that this would have mattered to the world in general. Her servants were not human.

She stood in the middle of the wreckage, trying to think.

This . . . girl . . . was impersonating her. It did not matter that she was off in some provincial little city in England, where no one would see her but farmers in smocks and thick boots. What mattered was that this girl was stealing the reputation that Nina had built. Stealing her identity.

She had stolen from Nina. No one stole from Nina.

Her skin flushed with rage again, just thinking about it.

She would go to England. She would find this girl and kill her. It could not possibly take any time, and it should be pathetically easy. She would do what she had done with the original Nina, she would take on the form of a beautiful young man . . . or if that did not work, a very rich, old one. She would seduce the girl, and then kill her, and leave it to look as if she had been murdered by her lover. And of course, that lover would no longer exist. Nina could change to another form, and leave the country, all in time to make her debut at Salzburg.

She finally felt her anger cooling, and even managed to smile. Amid the chaos, she found the pull for the bell, and rang for her maid. The servant opened the door a crack, timidly.

It was so frustrating that she was fettered to this solid form! If she had not been, she could have been in England within a day, moving in the secret ways of the Earth Elementals, swimming through the very crust of the earth itself. She could change her form, she could work Earth Magic herself, but she was still as bound to the laws of the mortal world as if she was mortal herself.

“Clean up this mess,” she ordered. “Then have the others pack my trunks. Tell Yuri to order my car and get tickets to England.” How fortunate that the ballet season was over! “And you, cancel all my engagements and send for some new furniture; have this room repaired and re-furnished while I am gone. There is nothing here I need to deal with that cannot wait.”

“Hold very still,” ordered Jonathon, as he closed Ninette into the cabinet. “And don’t be afraid. Nothing you see is going to harm you.”

“But—” she began, as he closed the door. He didn’t open it again, and she stood there, in the dark, in what felt very like a coffin, wondering what it was she was going to see that might—

And then the entire box was engulfed in flames.

Terror overwhelmed her; she shrieked at the top of her lungs. She tried to bring up her arms to beat on the door of the box, but it was too narrow, and she couldn’t move. There was no fastening on the inside of the box; she tried to get up her foot to kick and couldn’t even do that. The flames were everywhere, and—

Suddenly she realized, in mid-scream, that she wasn’t even warm, that her clothing was not on fire, that she didn’t smell smoke, that the inside of the box was not even warm to the touch.

Whatever Jonathon was doing, this was not real fire! And she was quite ready to kill him at that moment. He might have said!

That was when the trap door beneath her that she had been told about opened, and she dropped down onto a pair of soft mattresses. Her knees automatically flexed as soon as she was falling, so she landed lightly. But fuming.

She stormed across the space beneath the stage and up the stairs to the backstage; her face must have looked like thunder, because even the stagehands scuttled out of her way. With hands balled into fists, she stalked across the stage to where Jonathon had just opened the cabinet with a flourish to show it was empty. At the sound of her feet thumping across the stage—for a ballerina can walk very heavily if she chooses—he turned.

“Now that is the kind of scream I—ow!”

She had kicked him in the shin before he could finish the sentence. He looked at her in astonishment. She kicked the other shin.

“Ow!”

“You might have said!” she shouted. “Merzavets! Lopni tvoya selezenka I ospleni tvoy glaz, nechistaya sila!” The Russian simply poured from her lips without thinking, and she would have been surprised if she had not been so furious. “You frightened me to death!”

“I am a magician! You know it couldn’t have been real!”

Oh yes, and she very much doubted that this was any illusion or stage trick. Those flames had to have come from his powers as an Elemental Mage. But she could not say that, not in public, so instead, she kicked his shin again.

“I would have known if you had warned me, but you did not!” she retorted. “You close me in a coffin, and then, fire! How was I to know it was not some terrible accident?”

“You would have heard someone shouting Fire!” Jonathon barked, heatedly.

“I would have heard nothing!” she shouted back. “I was screaming!”

Silence descended on the stage. Finally Arthur chuckled from his position in the orchestra pit. “Admit it, Jonathon. You wanted her to scream. You gave yourself away when you said that was the kind of scream you wanted.”

Jonathon flushed and looked away.

“Oh!” she spluttered, and kicked his shin again before stomping off the stage.

Behind her, with some satisfaction, she could hear him swearing.

The cat was waiting in the wings, and walked back with her to her dressing room, where she slammed the door closed, sat down, and looked at him.

That was very bad of him, the cat observed. It’s a naughty schoolboy trick.

“He is quite old enough not to play such things,” she said severely. “I am doing my best to be a good assistant to him, and he should not play such things on me. Stage fire is not funny.”

Especially not when you are trapped in a box. The cat sighed. He hasn’t changed. He drove off more young ladies with his pranks than you could imagine.

She looked at the cat oddly. “You know him?”

His assistants, the cat said hastily. The stagehands talked about it.

Ninette turned back to the mirror of her dressing table, but considered, and not for the first time, that the cat sounded as if he knew, or had known, the Fire Master in the past.

But it could be when my father lived here, she thought. There was no reason why the cat should not have been with her father before he came to Paris. Though why the cat should want to conceal this fact, she could not imagine. Thomas was full of mysteries. How had he known to come here, to Blackpool, for instance? How did he know that there was a theater owner here, moreover, one who was looking for someone very like her? But she was not going to pose these questions to him. If he had not told her these things before, there was no reason to think he would do so now, and she was not in a position to force him.

Are you going to rejoin the rehearsal? Thomas asked.

“When I think I have been away long enough to have made my feelings clear,” she said firmly. “That was not funny, and I do not intend to put up with any more such pranks. I am not an assistant that has no choice but to endure that sort of thing.”

Well put. And about time someone taught him that schoolboy tricks are very unwelcome when played by an adult man.

She waited a few moments more, then came out of her dressing room and returned to the stage, where Jonathon was fussing with his apparatus. She cleared her throat and he jumped.

“You aren’t going to kick me again, are you?” he asked, turning to her with a grimace.

“I shall, if you do any such thing again,” she said stiffly. “I am not your hired assistant, who must endure cruelty in order to collect her pay, and if you play more tricks on me, I shall kick you somewhat higher than your shin.”

His eyes widened. “You’d do it too, wouldn’t you?” he said with grudging admiration.

“Yes, I would.” She looked up at him defiantly. “Now, I believe we have an illusion to rehearse. I take it you wish me to scream in a terrifying fashion when I see the flames?”

He nodded speechlessly. She returned to her “spot” and knelt, arms behind her back as if tied there, then nodded to Arthur, who took that as the cue it was, and lifted his baton.

This time the illusion proceeded in a professional manner. Jonathon locked her in the cabinet, when she saw the flames, she shrieked, and if she let out a bit more anger with her screams, well, no one was the wiser. The trap-door released, she dropped onto the mattresses, then made her way back up to the wings.

They ran through the trick three or four more times before Jonathon pronounced himself satisfied. “You are a capital screamer, though,” he said, apologetically. “I should have told you what was coming, since I can clearly see you would have done just right if I had warned you.”

She raised her chin. “I am a professional,” she said.

“I can see that.” He looked uneasy. “I am sorry I frightened you.”

She sensed that was the closest she was going to get to a real apology, and nodded. She was not going to apologize for kicking him, even though she was fairly certain that he now had four round little bruises on his shins.

“I think that the illusion is ready to use tonight,” he continued.

“I think so too. I will have just enough time to change after my ribbon dance.” She couldn’t help but smile at that. The ribbon, hoop, and ball dances had, with some more adjustment by Monsieur Ciccolini, been quite popular with the audiences.

“That’s a nice bit of business, that ribbon dance,” Jonathon said awkwardly, then paused. “You know, I have an illusion that makes a handkerchief fly about the stage. You might do a dance where you chase it. Or dance with it.”

“I would prefer a combination of the two,” she said after a moment. “I begin by chasing, then stop and dance to see if it can be lured, and lure it into dancing with me.”

He laughed. “That is a good notion. Let’s go talk to Nigel and Arthur about it.”

She nodded, and the two of them headed up to Nigel’s office.

Arthur was with him, as they both expected, going over some last-minute changes to the bill—just a little rearranging of the acts, since it was proving awkward to get the performing dogs off the stage in time for the ragtime dancers to enter, since they had to come in from both wings. The acrobats were going in after the dogs instead, since they could enter from one side while the dogs left on the other.

Jonathon explained the idea for the new illusion, Nigel approved it, and Arthur made several suggestions for music until they finally settled on a piece. Only then did Ninette ask the question that had been in her mind since her shock. “What were those flames?” she asked. “They were not even warm, but they looked so real!”

Jonathon chuckled. “Pure illusion, not stage magic, but one that ordinary folks can see. As a Fire Master I know everything there is to know about Fire and its creatures, and as a consequence, I can call up real fires, or summon up what is nothing more than the illusion of fire. That’s how I intend to burn down the Sultan’s Palace at the end of our production, except the fires will be partly my illusion and partly stage-craft.”

He held out his hand, and a moment later, there was a flame dancing on the palm. “Don’t touch that one, that’s real,” he said cautiously. He held out the other, and a second flame sprang up, but with the two side-by-side, she could see that there were differences. The illusory one was paler, and rather than flickering and moving randomly, this flame kept the same side-to-side motion, as if it was some sort of clockwork pendulum.

“That’s the problem with illusions,” Jonathon continued, turning both hands into fists to banish both flames. “Unless you concentrate all you have on it, you always wind up with a second-rate imitation of the real thing. Still, it wouldn’t do for me to burn down the stage, or my apprentice either.”

She smiled slightly. As witticisms went, it was rather feeble, but she was determined to hold the high ground and not show any further displeasure with him.

“By the way, Mademoiselle.” Arthur said thoughtfully, “How did you know about Jonathon’s regrettable tendency to make his assistants so angry at him that they leave his employ? He must go through two or three in a year.”

Jonathon flushed, and Ninette restrained a smile. She guessed that Arthur was also tired of Jonathon’s pranks, and was using that question as a means to show the magician that his behavior had not gone unremarked.

“The stage hands,” she said, after thinking quickly about what the cat had said. “When he did not arrive with one, they talked about it. Frankly, they did not seem surprised, only anxious that one of them not be dragooned to serve as his victim in the illusions.”

Jonathon flushed with embarrassment, which well he should, given the circumstances. Whether the cat had known about it from some previous acquaintance and had lied, or it really had been the stagehands, it was rather unpardonable behavior.

“I well, I suppose I am notorious,” he said, with an artificial laugh. “Do you think we can get a spot of something to eat before the performance?”

She almost said something, then changed her mind. “I’ll send one of the boys out for something,” Nigel replied. “I wanted to talk with you both about whether or not you’d—noticed anything, or anyone, that seemed too interested in Mademoiselle Nina.”

They exchanged a glance. “I am not certain I would,” she said, finally, and shrugged. “You should ask Thomas.”

“I did. He looked inscrutable. By which I think he means that he has sensed something, but that it is nowhere near. Certainly not in Blackpool, probably not in the county, Possibly not in England. But I suspect that whatever it is, it will be here soon. So I suggest we plan for its arrival.”

Ninette could only look baffled. She could not imagine who among the circles of Elemental Masters good and bad, could be holding a grudge against her.

“All right. I suggest that you and I, Nigel, have our creatures watching for any other new Master that enters the city,” Jonathon said with a nod. “Now, the Master might be able to conceal himself to a greater or lesser extent, but Elementals gossip, and that’s something no Master has ever been able to break them of.” He grinned. “Even if he has Wardings on him, he’ll still cause a ripple in his element just by existing, and the other Elementals will sense that.”

Nigel nodded.

“Then what?” Arthur asked.

“Then we wait for him, or her, to do something,” Nigel replied. “We cannot act against him, there are rules about that, and I don’t want to face someone like the Old Lion for breaking the rules. Besides, unlikely as it seems, we might get another Master in here just as a visitor to Blackpool, and it would be very unwise to launch an attack of some sort on some hapless stranger.”

Jonathon shuddered. “The Old Lion would fry us for that.”

“Besides, if you are clever, he will not know that you are there, or that you know what I am supposed to be,” Ninette said, after a moment of silence. “I think it would be wise to wait. No?”

Yes.

All eyes turned to the window, where the cat sat on the sill, although he had not been there a moment before.

Our enemy does not know about me, either, Thomas pointed out. “Laying low,” as our American cousins would say, is the wise choice here. But be prepared, because it is possible an attack will not come from magic, at least not at first.

Ninette stared at him.

“Perhaps I should round up a solicitor then,” Nigel replied, half in jest.

That might be wise, replied the cat, not at all in jest.

10

NINETTE stopped in astonishment at the door of her dressing room. It was full of flowers.

She had been dancing in the performances for two weeks now, and had been acting as Jonathon’s dancer and assistant for one. Last night she had added a fourth dance to her routines, a skirt dance with special colored lights playing on it, a la Loie Fuller. Sure that had not been the occasion for all of this!

There were bouquets of every size and color, from a little nosegay of violets on her dressing table to an enormous creation that practically required a table of its own. Her maid, Ailse McKenzie, had collected the cards and arranged them on her dressing-table. She opened each one, to see messages of admiration . . . and five different names. Well! It seemed she had a suite of admirers!

For a moment, she felt a warm glow, and a smile passed over her lips. This was wonderful! This was exactly the sort of adulation that the etoiles enjoyed, and it was a harbinger of more substantial offerings to come. From flowers, the tributes usually rose to flowers and fruit, then flowers and chocolates, then flowers and jewelry . . . or they did, if several men were vying to become one’s benefactor. Of course, there was no telling how rich any of these men were. It was nearly summer, and flowers were not as dear now as they were in winter. She didn’t know enough to tell which were in season in England, and thus inexpensive, and which were not and thus expensive, but these extravagant floral tributes could represent the limits of extravagance of any or all of them. A starving poet could and would spend his last farthing on a bouquet for one whose looks excited his imagination. Poets and other artists were hardly the most practical of creatures. Still! It would be wonderful to have the men that had given her all these flowers crowding her dressing room after the performances, and even nicer if one of them took her out for dinner afterwards. . . .

“I’ll be accepting visitors after the show, Ailse,” she said, slowly and carefully, for Ailse did not always understand her heavily accented English.

“Gemmun visitors too, ma’amselle?” the girl asked.

She nodded. The girl nodded, though Ninette thought her face showed a trace of disapproval. That was only to be expected. She had never served theater people before, and likely had no idea that the dressing room of a principle served as a kind of drawing room for the etoile. Or perhaps she did not think that Ninette should be encouraging so many men.

Well, she would have to get used to it. Ninette reckoned that if the maid could get so accustomed to a Brownie living in the pantry that she put out a daily bowl of milk and plate of bread for it, she could get used to Ninette’s admirers, and perhaps, a benefactor. Eventually.

Not that Ninette expected to find the sort of benefactor that La Augustine enjoyed here in this city. That was highly unlikely. It did not seem to run to rich men, or nobles with both titles and money. Nor did she expect to see such men in this sort of theater; she had never yet seen the kind of men she hoped to attract, the sort that became the protectors of etoiles.

Or at least, they would not come here until Nigel’s real show began, if there even were such in this city.

Then . . . well to be realistic, the ones who came would probably not be the nobles with both titles and money, nor the ones whose great-grandfathers had been both wealthy and genteel. Rich men, newly rich, with fast motorcars, who like jazz and ragtime . . . yes, perhaps. That sort had come to the opera now and again, but they tended to favor the dancers at the Moulin Rouge, and then, they did not keep any one woman for very long. Why should they? Dancers at the Moulin Rouge were not devotees of art and culture, they had simple tastes and seldom took thought for the future. A ballet dancer, an opera singer—they knew that their days were numbered on the stage, and they took thought for the future. They looked for men who would give them presents that would support them when they could no longer dance or sing—things like not just a flat, but the entire building the flat was in, or presents of money without asking where that money was going.

The great courtesans understood this, as did their benefactors. Ninette had actually been present one day when some fanatic street preacher had accosted one of those great ladies outside the theater and chided her for her “irregular life.” “My good man,” the lady had said with a laugh, “My life is a great deal more regular than that of your wife.” And everyone had known that was true. The street preacher’s wife could never be sure of what her household allowance would be, nor when it would come. The courtesan, however, had arranged for all such things to be negotiated ahead of time by her factor—often an older female relative. She had a dress allowance, her foodstuffs were charged, her rent was paid, she had an allowance for when she entertained her own friends or went out to the theater alone, she knew that she would be taken once a year to Monte Carlo or some other holiday spot, so many times to the races, so many times to the theater, and so forth. All negotiated very carefully, nothing left to chance. The sort of men that Ninette wanted understood all this.

The Moulin Rouge dancers—and she was far closer in position to them right now than to La Augustine—never thought of the future if they could help it; when they got presents of money, they spent it, and they would not know what to do with a building of flats except to allow all their friends to move in and stay for nothing. They were happy with the flashy jewels and champagne suppers of the bold, rich men who drove big, fast motorcars. This was the way that such men liked things. And those men were not old. Nor were they often very kind. In fact, from what little of those sorts of men Ninette had seen, she judged them to be very demanding, very arrogant, and often difficult to deal with. They wanted and what they wanted, they generally got. They also had very little regard for wants or needs not their own; they expected to be the ones being pleased, and not the ones giving pleasure. When they gave a gift, it was with the expectation that it would be displayed so that everyone would know what a fine gift they could give. They seldom took their kept women to the theater, to the opera, to places where the “respectable” might go. The lives of their women were very irregular indeed.

She considered these things as she carefully and expertly applied her stage makeup, and as Ailse helped her into her costume. All things considered, she decided, if these were that sort of young man, she would not give any of them particular encouragement. She would accept their flowers and other gifts, but give them nothing other than the opportunity to display to each other how important they were, and to vie for her undivided attention.

And it was always possible that these were merely romantic young men for whom sending several bouquets of flowers to a dancer was the acme of extravagance. And since she had far more in common with Manon than with Mimi, she did not propose to live on love in a garret. So she would enjoy their attention and their flattery, but give them nothing to hope for beyond that she would allow them to give her attention and flattery.

Besides, the audience gave her that . . .

And with that in mind, she hurried off to the wings to give them every reason to grant it to her.

The house was full, the holiday-makers’ season in full bloom, and it was an audience that expected to be pleased, was prepared to be pleased, and was happy to show that it was pleased. Her dances with the props, the huge skirt, and the colored lights brought oohs and ahs from the audience. Then she changed from the skirt costume to the simple long Grecian-style dress she wore for the first of Jonathon’s turns, the trick with Jonathon where she chased his dancing handkerchief. It was never quite the same twice in a row; she played the part of a young girl that Jonathon was trying to make smile. He would pull the handkerchief out of the air, make a little puppet of it and make the puppet dance. She would chase it, and it would elude her, popping in and out of a bottle to keep her from capturing it. Then she would decide to trick it, go off to the other side of the stage, and dance wonderfully intricate ballet passages cribbed from the solos from Les Sylphides, the Chopin ballet that had no plot, as opposed to the La Sylphide, which had been her triumph and downfall. The handkerchief would become curious, come closer and closer, and finally end up dancing with her. That brought delighted laughter.

Then she ran offstage and quickly changed into her “captive slave” costume, for the trick where she appeared to be burned alive; as ever, even through her own screams, she heard the gasps of horror. It was a particularly good evening. It almost seemed to her that she could feel the audience’s pleasure, as well as hear it. She had actually shivered in the cabinet at their gasps of horror, feeling some of that horror herself.

And when she returned to a dressing room full of more flowers, she found it also full of both passionate and impoverished young men and brash and demanding wealthier middle-aged men. And as she had expected, the older men were all the nouveau riche, motorcar-driving, ragtime-loving sort. Not the sort from which one would get proper support.

For one moment, she almost fled, despite her earlier thoughts. She was not the great dancer she pretended to be. She was only a little creature from Paris Opera Ballet, not an etoile, a bare step up from coryphée.

But then she steeled herself, cast her mind back to La Augustine, and sailed into the dressing room with a smile and a tinkling laugh. This, too was a performance, and she would give it her best.

Nigel came by, looked surprised and then pleased by all the attention she was getting, then went on his way. Well, he was surely counting his receipts with great pleasure tonight. Arthur waved, and Wolf flapped his wings at her from the door, but they were clearly on their way somewhere else—home, perhaps.

Then Jonathon appeared, and when he saw the crush, he looked absolutely black. But he did not stay either; he looked daggers at the men, then stalked off. She wondered what reason he thought he had to look so evilly at her visitors. Surely none of these men, not the shallow, showy ones with money, nor the young and romantic ones with nothing, should give him any cause to be concerned. The idea that any of these could be a magician with murderous intent was too laughable even to entertain for a moment.

In the end, of course, she sent them all away with laughter and flattering words that sounded like promises but were not, and once she was sure they were gone, she changed to her street clothes, and set out with Ailse on foot for her flat. Through the rain. Again. Did it never stop raining here? At least the street lights were electrical, and remained on during the rain. Blackpool was allegedly famous for them.

Dinner had been left to stay warm in the oven for her; she smelled it as soon as she opened the door. The Brownie, of course, could be counted upon to keep it from burning or drying out. It was a lovely beef dinner; the English seemed to eat a great deal of beef. She and Ailse shared it, she savoring every single bite, slowly and with infinite pleasure, thinking how like paradise this was. Only a few weeks ago she was eating the last of her cabbage soup and stale bread. Now she feasted on roast beef, new potatoes, the first of the spring asparagus, and a splendid chocolate cake to follow. She would sleep in a bed with sheets and warm blankets, and awake to tea and toast and wonderful currant jelly served to her in that same bed. Then she would stop downstairs for another breakfast of eggs and broiled tomatoes and a little sausage before going to the theater. Someone would surely take her out to luncheon, or Ailse would bring her something from the nearby theater pub. She never went without a meal now, and a good one—just as well, because she was rehearsing morning and afternoon, and performing every night. Master Ciccolini was proving a better instructor than he thought he was, for his eye was very good and caught all the little places where her balance could be improved, a turn could be made more beautiful, a line more graceful—and what was more, he knew how to position her to get those things. They were working on the choreography for the big production of Escape from the Harem in this way, bar by bar, trial and error. What she could not lift wholesale from other ballets, that is. It was hard work and she needed the good food. She had never felt better, healthier, happier in her life.

Ailse glanced once or twice at her with curiosity, but was too good a servant to ask anything. “Food,” Ninette said into the silence, “is a kind of art. Like all arts, it can be simple, or it can be complex, but one always knows when the artist who created it is great. And great art deserves respect and attention.” She smiled. “It goes without saying that our hostess is an artist in her own kitchen. Everything she makes is as perfect as it can be.”

“ ’Tis uncommon good, aye, m’amselle,” Ailse ventured, winning another smile from Ninette. And there was another thing. Although she had a heavy accent, and her conversation was unexpectedly sprinkled with Russian phrases, her English mysteriously improved each night. Was that the cat’s doing? It must be. She could not imagine any other way in which it could be happening so quickly.

In short, life was wonderful, even without a rich old man to shower gifts and fine living on her. She was beginning to wonder if she really needed such a man after all. . . .

But as Ninette went to bed, she wondered something else; what about the crowd in her dressing room had made Jonathon Hightower look so annoyed?

Nigel’s Air Sprites fled from his office without warning, so he was not entirely surprised to see Jonathon come in wearing an expression like a thunderstorm. Nigel went on counting the receipts. “Good house tonight,” he remarked.

“Full of idiots,” Jonathon growled. “But I suppose that is just as well. Easier to deceive idiots.”

“They seemed to appreciate your act.”

Jonathon frowned. “I wish she would show a little less leg.”

It seemed a non-sequitur, but Nigel was tolerably familiar with the way that Jonathon thought. Aha. That is the way the wind blows, is it? Nigel coughed. “If I recall correctly, your last female assistant wore tights and a Merry Widow—and not much more—”

“My last assistant was a trollop,” Jonathon all but spat. “This dancer of yours needs to be more careful. Some people seem to think that showing your legs on the stage means they’ll get to see more of those legs up close if they just bring enough flowers.”

Ah Jonathon—the magician, so far as Nigel was aware, had been notoriously indifferent to his assistants, although it was quietly understood that being his assistant on stage meant sharing living quarters for the tour offstage. And if they objected to that, they were replaced. To Nigel’s knowledge only one or two ever had been, at least in mid-tour, and not for that reason. Jonathon’s relentless drive and his acid wit, however, had driven more than one of them to quit at the end of a season. He was rather a hard taskmaster, and his sense of humor, as Nina had discovered, was just a trifle cruel. Nigel was actually proud that she had stood up to him over that one incident. Jonathon didn’t care for shrinking violets. He respected her now.

Respects her enough to not care for a dressing room full of potential rivals . . .

“She’s a ballet dancer. They spend most of their lives half-naked. I doubt she thinks anything of it, no more than you think of spending half your life with false hair plastered on your face.” He decided to obliquely change the subject. “Has anything turned up looking to harm her?”

Jonathon frowned at that. “That’s the other thing I wanted to talk to you about. My sentries are uneasy. There is definitely something in the wind, but whatever it is, they haven’t been able to exactly find it. You know they have some limited ability to see into the future?”

Nigel nodded. Fire Spirits and Water Spirits were particularly good at that, Air Spirits could, but tended to be so flighty they had trouble concentrating, and Earth Spirits were . . . well . . . very dense when it came to the future, keeping all their attention solidly in the present.

“There is threat to her. And the origin of that threat is here, in this country. That is all they can say.” Jonathon’s frown deepened. “Do you suppose that whatever or whoever it is knows that she is being guarded?”

“Wouldn’t you?” Nigel countered. “We daren’t underestimate this foe. Her father was powerful enough to create Thomas, and yet he lost out to this person—or persons. For all we know, there could be more than one enemy. And if there is, and they have separated, that could also cause confusion for your spirits.”

“Curse it, you’re right,” Jonathon growled. “And curse them, too.”

“Indeed,” Nigel replied dryly. “How dare villainous cads be as clever as the heroes?”

Jonathon looked at him in shock for a moment... and then they both laughed.

Once her rage cooled—and the journey to this “Blackpool” place was accomplished, not by uncomfortable train, but by luxurious steam yacht, giving her plenty of time for her temper to cool—Nina, the real Nina, had gone from livid to calculating. And she realized that there was a very good reason, an excellent reason why the imposter had chosen her identity to steal. In the girl’s place, she might have done the same.

Eastern Europe, and the Russian Empire, were a very, very long way from England. The English knew only what came to them, visiting their shores from out of those remote climes—Pavlova, Nijinsky, Diaghilev, Stravinsky—and did not care to learn anything more. No one there had seen Nina dance. A few balletomanes would have heard of her name, that she was a great prima with the Imperial Ballet, but aside from a few sketches or blurred photographs, which could have been of virtually any ballerina, there was nothing to tell the imposter from the real thing. “Nina Tchereslavsky” was the perfect person to impersonate.

And aside from those few balletomanes, no one would know who, or even what, she was. The imposter was already on the metaphorical high ground, having established herself as “Nina Tchereslavsky.” Any challenger would have an uphill fight against someone who had fans, adherents, and the backing of an impresario. Claimants to a throne already being held usually did not fare well.

Perhaps an oblique approach, at least at first.

So, rather than sail that very expensive steam yacht directly into the harbor at Blackpool and excite all manner of interest among those who might wonder who was aboard, Nina ordered it put in to the harbor at Southport, then hired a motorcar and spent a leisurely and very private journey up the Liverpool Road to Preston, eating at the best establishments, sleeping at the best hotels, crossing a river known (she thought rather hilariously) as the “Ribble”, and from thence to Blackpool itself. She took lodgings in a fine little hotel under the name of “Anna Vronsky,” another joke, since she rather doubted any of the insular and culturally illiterate English would ever recognize the names of Tolstoy’s famous hero and heroine of the great master-work, Anna Karenina.

Nor did they. And generous payment in advance practically guaranteed discreet silence about the mysterious Russian lady, though according to her servants, rumors flew about the dining room that she was a duchess, even a grand duchess, or at least a countess.

Having established a headquarters, she went about obscuring her magical existence, for a very brief foray into the Elemental realms told her that the imposter was somehow involved with both a Fire Master and an Air Master. Discretion was definitely in order, and caution, and a great deal of covering her tracks. She had plenty of practice in that. There was not an Elemental Master on the planet that would be happy about one of the Elementals achieving what she had done in escaping her bonds. They would be even less happy if they knew how she was sustaining herself outside the Earth Realm. Dangerous. Very dangerous.

That took several days. One more thing was needed; knowledge. This was not her land, nor her language, nor were any of those she had absorbed familiar with England, much less this particular city. She sent out her maid one night to find and bring back someone who would not be missed.

It took only a moment to absorb the ragged street urchin, who gave her a street-urchin’s command of the English language, and a street-urchin’s knowledge of the city. Only then was she prepared to go and have a look at her imposter.

And she did not do that as “Anna Vronsky,” either.

It was a very good thing to have servants that were not human—and were totally under her control. There was no curiosity to contend with when she sent out her maid to buy a second-hand men’s suit, nor when she assumed the face and figure of one of the poets she had consumed. Carrying a stack of empty boxes, as if she had just made a delivery, Nina left the hotel by the service entrance without anyone looking at her twice.

Then it was a simple matter to dispose of the boxes and make her way to the theater where her imposter was dancing. She bought a cheap balcony seat, and sat, un-smiling and unmoving, through the entire performance.

Grudgingly, she had to admit that the little trollop was good. Quite good. And it was clear that she was an audience favorite. Of course, the mobs of holiday goers in the theater were quite prepared to be pleased with just about anything they were given, provided it was novel and amusing enough. And it was quite clear just who and what the girl had purloined her dances from, even if most, if not all, of the audience had never seen Loie Fuller or Isadora Duncan. Nor had they even heard of the dancers except as the subject of articles in newspapers.

After the performance, Nina went back to the stage door, and loitered, listening to the gossip among the stagehands. Here her knowledge of the language was perfect; she fit right in. And her knowledge of backstage life allowed her, eventually, to slip around to the theater pub, pay for two bottles of cheap champagne, and get in backstage by pretending she was a delivery person. One bottle was destined to be delivered to a woman who sang popular songs, and the other to a comedian, both with notes of congratulation and an unreadable signature attached. But having them gave her all the excuse she needed to linger backstage—

She learned that the imposter was very popular with the backstage workers. That was awkward, because by her nature, she had a great many limitations as to what she could and could not do. She could easily influence someone whose mind was already tending in a direction she wanted it to go, but it was the next thing to impossible to influence them in the opposite direction. There were also disadvantages to being tied up in very mortal form; she could not manifest in the girl’s flat and simply absorb her. She would have to somehow get within embracing range of her, and remain private with her for as long as it took to absorb her. There would be no finding allies back here, and the girl was too well-guarded to think of a direct approach.

She also learned that the imposter had so thoroughly ingratiated herself with the theater management that an enormous production was being planned solely around her. So there would be no hope in disenchanting the management with her, either. . . .

Nina would have to think of an entirely different plan of attack.

With that in mind, she left the bottles of champagne with their surprised and gratified recipients, and returned to her hotel. Once there, she got the boxes from where she had hidden them, then applied at the service entrance for admission to her own suite. The room was rung for permission, the maid gave it, and Nina took herself back up to her quarters and assumed her rightful form.

Once there, she paced like a caged lion, restlessly, trying to think of a way to undermine the girl. She could not do so on the basis of talent, that much was clear. The girl had made far too many friends in that theater to do so there, too. Why could she not have been a scheming, vituperative shrew? Why hadn’t she been arrogant, cold, heartless? Why had she spent time and money distributing little favors to the stagehands? Why hadn’t she had furious arguments with the orchestra?

Furthermore, there were not even rival lovers to set against each other, nor was there a hint of scandal to excite the interest of the press and outrage the public! Why hadn’t the girl had the decency to take up with a married man as his lover? That sort of thing was shrugged at on the Continent, even expected, but it could have brought her down completely in so-proper England!

Well there was no use in lamenting what had not happened. Nina needed to think of something that could.

Well . . . there was the possibility of creating a scandal out of nothing. She could find someone utterly unsuitable who wanted to be the girl’s lover, make him think that the girl reciprocated his feelings, then inform the wife . . . that would take time, however. And a great deal of effort.

Well it would certainly do to at least start that project. She could begin by finding such a man. One of the imposter’s many admirers, who crowded her dressing room, no doubt, was of the proper stuff to turn into a man obsessed.

But in the meantime . . .

She shook her head. She was famished, and not for mortal food. She had not drained anyone since that street urchin, and he had been relatively unsatisfactory. There had not been a great deal of life in him; it had gotten beaten and starved out of him by the streets. There were two kinds of people that provided her with a satisfactory repast. First and foremost were those rich old men, who were fat with abundant living and experiences. All those memories, all the things they had accomplished—it was like a multi-course meal created by the finest of chefs.

And then there were the young men, full of passion, dreams, hopes, and desires. Everything about them was sharp, new, flavored with high emotion. She could not have said which were her favorites. . . .

But tonight, on such short notice, it would be much, much easier to find a young man.

She summoned her manservant. Tonight she would be taking another long walk.

11

THE show was coming together. In fact, it had progressed far enough that the entire score was complete, and Arthur was rehearsing the orchestra in their parts, Maestro Ciccolini and Ninette had finished their choreography and Ninette was rehearsing her numbers, as well as dancing in the evening. At first, Ninette had been worried that her act would get stale—music hall audiences were used to seeing a different bill every week, after all. But Nigel assured her that Blackpool, at least in holiday season, was very different. The audience changed every week, so to them, the revue was entirely new. And he was right.

Ninette’s admirers had gone from a handful to a young army. None of them were what she was looking for, but then, she was no longer looking very hard. It seemed that the more she danced, and the more audience acclaim she had, the more she craved the applause. It was no longer thinkable that if she ever did find a protector, she would give up dancing. She might have felt alarm at this, except that she came off the stage every night feeling invigorated rather than drained.

Not that any of the gentlemen who filled her dressing room with flowers were the sort to offer the kind of arrangement that suited her. Still, some pleasant things came from all these admirers. Not just flowers, which were delightful and kept her flat scented sweetly—there were some more permanent presents. Nothing spectacular, nothing so enormously expensive that accepting it would have implied certain expectations that would have to be fulfilled . . . no, these were pretty, but more modest tokens. A pair of garnet and tortoiseshell combs, a handsome set of enameled gold necklace, bracelet and earrings in the Egyptian style, any number of less remarkable pieces of jewelry, pairs of gloves, fans, lace handkerchiefs—all tokens of esteem, mute pleas for preference, but not demands for attention. The one time a rather remarkable sapphire bracelet had appeared on her dressing table, it had been very firmly given back to the one who had proffered it.

There were also many pleasant suppers, and a few parties—all of them in the company of other members of the company, of course. Usually Nigel came along, in fact. And if she was not the first to leave these affairs, she was certainly never the last.

Certain members of the circle of admirers remained, men who lived and worked in Blackpool. Others appeared, only to vanish: those who were not residents. The two sorts were easy to tell apart, and Ninette and Ailse had a little game between them, of how long it would take for these birds-of-passage to understand that money could not necessarily purchase everything their hearts desired. She wasn’t worried; the one and only time a “gentleman” had gotten a little too demanding, she’d broken his instep for him. Ballet dancers might look fragile, but dancing built muscles.

He had been the exception though, and she had felt so little threatened at the time that she did not even bother to tell Nigel and have him barred from the theater. In the first place, his broken foot was going to keep him safely confined to his hotel until it was time for him to depart back to whatever grim industrial town had spawned him. For another, he had learned his lesson rather sharply. No need to get Nigel involved.

But Thomas the cat was not happy. And neither was the magician, Jonathon Hightower, but Thomas was someone she could actually talk to. The magician would only look annoyed, sullen, or angry, and tell her to leave the magical business in his hands.

“What on earth is wrong?” she finally asked the cat, after his prowling and peering out of windows on what should have been a quiet evening finally got on her nerves. “We had a delightful supper, the house was almost full, tomorrow the theater is dark and we have that dinner party—and I have not seen a sign of this inimical, invisible enemy you think I have.”

She didn’t add an enemy that you made up in the first place, because Ailse was in the room, but her brief glare at Thomas said it for her.

But the cat had other ideas. There is something out there, and it is no friend to you. I just cannot figure out who or what it is, nor what it wants.

She blinked a little in surprise. So this wasn’t part of his elaborate ruse?

“I can’t imagine why—” she began.

That’s the problem. Neither can I. He sighed gustily. I suppose I will have to investigate this. Jonathon—

She frowned. “I would not take anything Master Hightower says to be an indication of anything at all other than his overactive imagination. He sees a bit of rope and sees a serpent, a shadow and thinks it is a spirit.”

He has reasons to. Sometimes a rope is a serpent in disguise.

She flung up her hands. “Have it your own way then! Is there any reason why this mysterious something you both sense must be planning on me as its victim? What about Nigel? Arthur? Wolf? You? Even Jonathon? All of you are far more likely to have collected magical enemies than I!”

The cat hesitated. I suppose that is possible . . .

“I would say it was far more likely.” She sniffed. “The only enemy I am likely to have would be the sort that would put ground glass in the toes of my shoes, or cut the shoulder-straps of my costumes.” She surprised herself with a yawn. “I am going to bed. You may stay up and watch all night if you please.”

Hmm, was all Thomas would say.

After a great deal of thought, and a great many discarded plans, Nina decided to attack obliquely by attacking not the girl herself, but the theater. If the physical building was gone, she would have no place to perform. If she had no place to perform, she would be cast out on her own, without a salary, and be easier to get at. At this point Nina had decided that she would absorb the girl. Not just out of revenge, but because it could be useful to have a second identity ready and waiting to step into which provided such fruitful rewards for her kind.

So that was her plan. Attack the theater, destroy it, and flush the quarry.

As for how that was to be done . . . although fire obviously was not Nina’s Element, fire was the easiest, and that was what she would try first.

Jonathon Hightower watched the Salamander twine around the fingers of his left hand, and frowned. Strictly speaking, Elementals could not see the future, not as a human clairvoyant could, at any rate. But they could sense when something was going to happen a short time before it actually did, and they reacted to that.

This one was agitated. Very agitated. Enough to make it come to Jonathon without being invoked, which was something Fire Elementals rarely did. All he could discern from it was the sense of danger, danger and destruction, coming soon.

Wait— No, he sensed something more. The danger had to do with fire.

Fire was always a theatrical nightmare. Everything about a theater was a fire hazard. The scenery, made of canvas painted with oils, the curtains, the dry wood . . . it was worse in the days of limelight and gaslight of course. There were terrible stories of performers getting too close to the lights and going up in flames. That was why there were buckets of sand, and sometimes water, tucked unobtrusively away everywhere in the wings.

Finally, the Salamander grew frantic, and he decided he was going to take a walk.

His present lodgings were, in fact, the guest bedroom that the dancer had just vacated. Nigel saw no reason for him to take his own lodgings, and every reason why he should not. Here, among Nigel’s trained servants, accustomed to mages and magic, he could do whatever he chose to do and not so much as a raised eyebrow would occur. Outside of these walls, however, was a land of nosy landladies, curious fellow tenants, and a wealth of horror stories about what had happened when an ordinary person stumbled into someone working magic. And truth to tell, for all his apparent misanthropy, Jonathon liked the company of others well enough if his companions were intelligent.

One certainly couldn’t fault Nigel, Arthur, or even Wolf on that score. Besides, this saved him money. Power as a mage did not translate into wealth, and not every, or even most, Elemental Masters were independently wealthy. Nigel had made his fortune honestly, by gauging the public’s tastes and meeting them, but he was no more the norm among Elemental Masters than he was among ordinary folk. Jonathon had chosen a path that would probably never make him rich, although if he was careful, he could retire comfortably one day. So living off Nigel did not bother him one whit, since it meant that much more of his salary could be tucked away towards that end.

Staying here had other advantages—one of which was that he could stroll out of the flat at two in the morning without making an excuse to anyone, and know that no one would be poking a nose out to find out where he was going. More to the point, he could return when he pleased and not have to answer to anyone, nor face being locked out.

So off he went, after choosing an inconspicuous coat and old cloth cap to wear in order to blend in with the locals.

The Salamander vanished, leaving a sense of relief in its wake as it did so. Whatever he was doing must have been right.

The streets were dark and quiet, even here in the theater district. They were, however, very well lit—it was bad for business if your customers fell and broke a limb on the way to the theater, and worse for them to be the victim of a cutpurse or felon. For once, there was no rain. At this time of night, one of the most important things to do was to walk briskly and with purpose, so that any policeman that spotted him would be certain that he was a man with a duty and a destination, and would not hinder him. He passed by two such on his way to the theater, and only when he reached it did he pause, slow down, and drop into the shadows.

And chided himself for such a melodramatic action.

Still . . .

He slipped around the side of the theater and paused, still staying concealed in the shadows, as he stood with his back against the wall, considering what could and could not be seen, trying to become invisible. Once he had regulated his breathing again, he listened. . . .

And that was when he heard it. The unmistakable sound of someone striking a match in the darkness of the alley.

Carefully, slowly, with his hand shielded by his arm and the breast of his coat, he called up a tiny flame in the palm of his hand. “Show me what you see,” he breathed, the simple words calling up a spell of as much intricacy as a piece of fine lace. He stared into the flame, willing it to show what that fire struck in the alley was surrounded by.

As if reflected in a mirror, he saw a shabby boy, cap pulled down over his forehead. He was striking a match. The flame that Jonathon was looking through was some little distance away, a tiny fire of the spent sticks of the matches piled there.

The boy set fire to something. Something like—a tail?

That was it. He was lighting a bundle of straw and lint that was tied to—

A rat’s tail.

As the rat squealed in fear, he opened the door to the cage, and it dashed out and into the ally.

Jonathon in his turn, leaped around the corner, only to see the bobbing ball of fire that was just out of reach duck down a grating into the sewer.

“You!” he shouted. “You there!”

The wrong thing, of course, though it had been a calculated risk—would the boy freeze in place, or try to run?

He ran. And he knew these streets better than Jonathon. Within moments, he was gone, and Jonathon was left staring into the darkness that had swallowed him up.

Dammit.

Had that been the only rat the urchin had turned loose? He dared not take that chance.

He dashed back to where he had seen the boy crouched, and to his dismay, found a dozen empty wooden live-traps—it had been a live-trap that he had mistaken for a cage. In a moment of rage, he kicked them, scattering them across the alley, splintering several.

But temper was not going to fix what had been done. He was going to have to work quickly. There were an unknown number of rats scrambling about this area, trailing fire behind them. Rats that could get into anywhere ... but most especially, between walls and under floorboards.

Quickly, he summoned a circle of protection about himself; it glowed on the slimy cobblestones of the alley with the deep red-orange of coals in the heart of the fire. Once there, he had his own little mantra for summoning—where Nigel used music, he drew.

With a wand of fire pulled out of the element itself, he drew in the air around himself, sigils and symbols in what would look to an outsider like a hopeless jumble, but which were, in fact, precisely placed. They glowed, yellow-hot, hanging in midair around him. The boy had turned loose a dozen rats, not less, possibly more. For good measure he scribed the desire for two dozen Salamanders on the wall of air around him.

With a push of his power, he set the final sigil. Then he sent his wand back to where it had come from, opened his arms, and Called.

The symbols around him flared, blurred, pulsed with the power he gave them, and then vanished in a blinding flash.

And Jonathon swarmed with Salamanders. They danced all over him, wreathing around his arms, threading in and out of his jacket, as he explained to them what they needed to do.

“A boy was here,” he told them, and showed them with his thoughts. “He set rats loose with fire tied to their tails. I don’t know where they all went; you have to find them.”

He got their answer more in impressions than words. Agreement. Fire? That was what they were. Of course they could find the rats.

“All of them.”

Of course. That went without saying. And then what?

“You must follow and eat every bit of fire they leave behind them. Then when you find them, you must eat the fire tied to their tails.”

Glee. They were not often permitted to devour real-world fire. This would be like candy to them. But . . . he did not expect them to eat the rats, did he?

“No, that is not necessary. But go! Those rats could be setting anything on fire!”

Agreement.

And then they were gone.

They flashed in a dozen different directions at once, leaving him standing alone in the alley, lit only by the light from his circle of protection. Wearily, he dismissed it. The Salamanders had been alert and focused; there were times when he had trouble with them, but this, evidently, was not going to be one of those times.

They did naturally what he would have had to do magically and at greater physical expense; they were tracking the rats by the “scent” of fire, and their “noses” were better than a bloodhound’s. He knew he could leave them here to do their work. When they were done, they would simply go back to the Elemental Plane of Fire, sated and happy. They had been “paid” twice: once in the magical energy he had given them, and once in the feeding they would have.

He wanted to lean against the wall in fatigue, but it was cold and damp and very dark here, and none of those conditions agreed well with a Fire Master. Instead, he trudged back to Nigel’s flat. He knew the others were sound asleep by now, and with the crisis averted, he reckoned that morning would be soon enough for them to hear what had almost happened.

Nina tore the vagrant she had found in the gutter limb from limb in her rage, then sent the pieces off with her goblins, to be dropped into the sewers all over the city. And then, she went back to her hotel, climbed up the wall and in through the open window, and shed her blood-stained clothing. She set the maid to cleaning up the mess while she flung herself down into her bed and brooded.

What wretched luck that there was a Fire Master associated with the theater! She wondered what had brought him there tonight? Was it only restlessness and an urge to walk, or had he somehow been warned of what she was doing?

She was just glad she had been trying something without the taint of magic to it. This trick had come out of the annals of ancient sieges—sending animals into a city or an armory to set it afire. Rats were the favored vehicle for this—small and agile, they could carry the fire into the heart of the building. And she had paid the rat-catcher who served the building specifically for these rats and no others. Terrified, in pain, they would run to the place they thought of as home, dash through their secret ways in a futile effort to lose the thing that was hurting them, the fire tied to their tails.

It had been a good plan. Too bad the Fire Master had shown up to ruin it.

But she, at least, had gotten away. And he had no idea she was anything other than a mad little street urchin with a penchant for setting fires.

One good thing had come out of this. Now she knew the face of the possible opposition, or part of it, anyway. She would have to be cunning, careful.

She settled herself in her bed, and began to think.

“He what?” Nigel spluttered.

“He was tying bundles to the rats’ tails, setting them on fire, and—” Jonathon paused. “—and turning them loose.”

“That is an ancient siege trick,” Wolf said unexpectedly.

Jonathon did not ask the bird how he knew that. Wolf was always coming up with unexpected bits of information.

“Well what are you waiting for?” Nigel asked, regarding him angrily. “Is it Nina? Is this someone attempting to attack her? Is this what we should be looking for?”

And now Jonathon had to hesitate. “I don’t know,” he said, finally. “There wasn’t anything at all magical about what was going on. It was just a street-boy, and it wasn’t as if he was actually trying to start fires that I could make out—more that he was just tormenting the rats for the fun of it.”

“But?” Arthur asked, watching him closely.

“But I don’t like it. If Nina’s enemy is clever, he could have paid the boy to do this. There would be no telling that it was the work of a mage.” He got up, all his interest in breakfast gone. “I just don’t know. It seems almost diabolically clever. But the storm—that is the work of someone who just doesn’t think. And yet—”

“All right, Jonathon,” Arthur said, finally. “What we can do is to be on our guard. The fact that your Salamander came to you before we had a burning theater means that they seem to have rapport with you we can probably count on.”

He nodded. That was reasonable.

“In that case, we should assume it was the work of Nina’s enemy, and that she’s been discovered,” he replied. “Whoever this is, he’s very subtle. So we should assume spies, attempts to lure her out somewhere alone, and indirect attempts, like on the theater.”

“Humph.” Nigel put his fork down and frowned. “I wonder, if it is Nina’s enemy, what he’ll come up with next.”

“Clearly we have to think in terms of things that are not magical,” Jonathon pointed out. “Whoever this may be knows very well that there are Masters here, and he is not going to make it easy for us to find him, or stop him.”

All three of the others, Wolf included, nodded. “We must think like a saboteur, or an assassin,” Arthur murmured.

“And not just that,” Jonathon replied grimly. “We must think like a clever one.”

Nina still thought that burning down the theater was the best plan. The question was, how to do so without showing her magical nature. Her second attempt was more straightforward in execution but devious in planning.

Taking on the look of one of the ruffians she had absorbed, she went in search of the sort of pub where unsavory deals could be made. Then, once she found such a pub, she let it be known that her employer had a building she wanted removed from the property it was on.

It was not long before she was sharing drinks with someone who thought that might be arranged. He was a little surprised to discover the building in question, but it was just a brief flash, and then he was all business. Nina was relieved to discover that he did not want to know why the theater needed to be burned. She did not offer said explanation. She merely paid him what he asked, and settled back in her suite to await the results.

But the results were disappointing. There was no fire on the stipulated date, and the next day the sensation of the morning paper was that a known arsonist had been caught red-handed, and he was expected to be spending the rest of his life in prison.

Credit for the discovery was given to a young police constable, but Nina cursed, knowing in her heart it must have been that wretched Fire Master.

She made one more attempt, but her heart wasn’t in it; like the first try, she used an animal to try and carry fire into the building. This time it was the starlings that nested in the top. She gave them matches and twists of oiled paper which they carried up to the roof and tucked into their nests; she intended to do just a tiny bit of magic to ignite the matches themselves. That failed as the first had; one of the wretched birds dropped its burden on a passer-by, and the next thing Nina knew, the building was being scoured and the poor starlings lost all the nests they had started.

She also looked for ways to lure the imposter out away from anyone else; if she ever managed that, the result would be that the imposter would be absorbed, and Nina would change into her clothing and take her place. At least for a little bit—just long enough to have a great row with the theater owner and flounce out.

But the girl wouldn’t accept invitations of that sort. No “I have something that might be to your advantage,” no supper invitations from handsome young men, no—nothing.

In fact, the girl led a life so cloistered that it gave Nina pause. Not the work—Nina herself did the work of a dancer, and a good one too—but the sacrifice, that was unprecedented. No little téte-a-téte dinner parties with select gentlemen. No afternoons off for a picnic. No afternoons off shopping! That was what truly astonished Nina; every other dancer she had ever known was an inveterate shopper!

It was a pity too, since shopping would have been the ideal way to take her. Become a helpful shop girl, suggest there were better things in a back room. Take her there—and become her. No one the wiser.

There would be a complication of course, because it was possible that she might just decide to stay here. That impresario in Germany . . . she could cancel the appearances . . . but then she would have to eliminate him, too, or return his money. If she didn’t he would probably sue for breach of contract.

All right. It was time to play to her strong suit. Use her own Element.

Ninette limbered herself backstage at afternoon rehearsal. She had taken the ball, hoop, and ribbon dances out, and had put in two pure ballet solos. Both, had she been asked, were blatant copies of two of Anna Pavlova’s dances—“Waterlily” was a copy of her “California Poppy,” complete with bringing the petals of her skirt up around her at the finale when the stage went dark, and “Fairy,” which was a copy of Pavlova’s “Dragonfly.” But Anna Pavlova was far away and unlikely to ever get to Blackpool, and people were actually coming to Blackpool for their holidays to see her!

Of course most of that was due to her miraculous “rescue” that spring. But still. . . .

“Those dances are rather good,” Jonathon said from behind her.

She shrugged, and bent over to touch her forehead to her knees and hold the position for a moment. “I copied them from Pavlova,” she said frankly.

“I know,” came the surprising reply. “I saw ‘California Poppy’ and ‘Dragonfly’ in Monte Carlo.”

She straightened so fast she almost hurt herself. “What? And you said nothing to Nigel?”

It was his turn to shrug. “He wouldn’t care. I know I don’t. A dance isn’t like a magic trick. I don’t think you can ever say ‘that’s mine’ once you’ve done it in public.”

“I suppose so,” she said, dubiously. She hesitated, but anything she was going to tell him was lost as the trained dog act suddenly saw Thomas, and idiotically forgot all of their tricks. Thomas headed straight for the dressing room with the pack in full cry behind him and the frantic trainer right behind them. Ninette let them all run—she knew very well that Thomas was more than a match for a hundred dogs—but Jonathon swore and raced after them all. Perhaps he was concerned for the dogs.

But that was the moment when things began to thaw between them.

12

NINETTE was keeping her muscles warm in the wings when the female half of the dog-training act dashed up to her, face white. “Have you seen Nigel?” she asked, breathlessly. Ninette stared at her, perplexed and alarmed, all at once, and pointed to stage left, where Nigel’s sleeve was just barely visible behind a piece of scenery.

The dog trainer—Ninette strained to remember her name since the act went by the name of “Harrigan’s Amazing Hounds”—rushed across the stage in a blatant violation of all the rules of performance. Thou shalt not cross the stage during someone else’s act in rehearsal—dress rehearsal, of course, not band-call.

The act she ran through was, thank heavens, that of the character-comic, who was a good-natured old fellow, even if he did partake of the bottle a bit more than he should have. He kept right on, like a trouper, even as the female trainer seized Nigel—literally!—and began an urgent speech that started off quietly but very, very rapidly ascended into the hysterical.

She spoke too rapidly for Ninette to understand her, given that for Ninette, English was still very hard to comprehend unless people spoke in a leisurely manner. She got a few words here and there—accident and broken legs.

She rushed back across the stage again, her agitation visible, her eyes seeing nothing but the way out. Ninette kept warming up. No matter what, the show went on. It always went on. Only the death of a monarch would close down a show.

But in just exactly the time it took for someone to cross from stage left to stage right through the backstage area, Nigel appeared at her elbow. “Harrigan somehow fell into a hole in the street and broke both legs,” he said grimly. “I hate to ask you to—”

“I will put back the ball, ribbon, and ring dances,” she said instantly. It was not as if they were great effort to perform. Not like the Black Swan pas-de-deux. Not like Giselle’s Mad Scene. Not like the Corsair solos. They were, in fact, full of little pauses, rests, where she could catch her breath before going on to the next difficult passage. And they were done on demi-pointe rather than full pointe. She would have to change her shoes, but that was no great difficulty, and if worst came to worst and the ribbons wouldn’t unknot, she could cut them off and Ailse could put new ribbons on while she danced en pointe.

Nigel nodded with relief and gratitude. “I’ll be in my office; I should have a replacement act by tomorrow.”

She shrugged. “So long as the audience is not bored with me, I can dance the extra solos for as long as you need me to.”

He just said something that sounded like “You’re a brick,” and dashed off to his office. She was left shaking her head. It was going to be a long and strenuous night.

She went looking for her ball, ring, and ribbon music. At least the band knew it. And at least the hole she would be filling was in the middle of the bill. She’d be well rested by the time her skirt dance came up.

By band call the third day after Harrigan broke his legs, if Nigel had been any other impresario, he would have been tearing his hair out. Because by that time, it was beginning to look as if the Fates had targeted him for disaster.

This was a very desirable venue for most performers; a six-week engagement at minimum meant it was possible to relax, unpack, mend things, take in the local sights. It was, after all, the audience that changed during the season in Blackpool; virtually a new audience twice a week. Nigel usually had far more acts auditioning than he had slots for them.

But now . . . first Harrigan, who had fallen into a hole that his wife swore literally “opened up in front of them” and broken both his legs. It was a good thing for both of them that Nigel knew a doctor who was also an Elemental magician, though not a master. He did not care to think of what a butcher’s job an ordinary doctor would make of such a patient. So Harrigan was now splinted and resting comfortably surrounded by wife and dogs, a stone’s throw from the doctor’s office. Nigel was keeping him on wages, partly because it seemed the right thing to do, and partly because he wanted the Hounds for the big show, and when Harrigan was well again, he would certainly feel a debt of gratitude to Nigel.

But the next day brought another unpleasant surprise.

Three of the acts just . . . quit, with four more weeks to run on their contracts. They wouldn’t tell him why, nor would their agents, but he suspected that a rumored Australian impresario with a supposed “golden tour” was to blame. On the one hand, he viciously wished all of them to perdition. On the other... he knew how most of these things turned out—with performers stranded in the middle of nowhere with no money and no prospects of getting any, sick with heat and tropical disease and bitterly regretting the decision that had brought them to that pass. He had already made up his mind that he was not going to ask these acts to stick for the big show, but still, he needed them now. He was not going to ask Nina to put in another turn, and anyway, she could hardly make up for half the show missing.

As it happened, though, Nigel was the rare sort who always assumed some disaster was going to overtake his shows, his theater, or the season, and planned accordingly.

He regularly made forays into the countryside and as far as Liverpool, looking for people with talent who had not yet “caught on.” Two fast trips in his motorcar yielded him a perky little singer with a genuine gift for comic timing and a “novelty” juggler and his partner, a fellow who impersonated a drunken “toff” with an impertinent maid who kept piling things into his arms when he came home after a night on the tiles. He rushed them to the theater in time for a quick rehearsal; to fill the last slot, Jonathon put in an act he seldom performed anymore, a Hindoo fire-eater. It was all real magic, of course, and as such it was something of a risk. If there was an untrained Elemental mage in the audience, Jonathon’s performance might “wake him up.” And there were those who hunted Masters as well, though usually feuds were of a personal nature.

Jonathon, however, swore that there were precautions he could take, shields he could set up. Nigel was disposed to believe him, but he wanted the act safely tucked away as soon as possible. He simply did not want to take any chances when there might be someone hunting for Nina—why give a hunter an opening for an attack?

So a morning on the phone and running back and forth from the telegraph office to London netted him a brother and sister “minstrel” act from America; the idea of a woman in blackface playing a banjo and tap dancing seemed to have put some booking agents off. But on the basis of an enthusiastic report from one of his scouts, which he trusted, he pursued the lead. He learned they were starving in London; he engaged them on the spot and arranged for the agent to advance them money so that they could buy train tickets to Blackpool.

All three of the new acts were enthusiastic and terribly grateful for the opportunity to play in one of the “big” halls. All of the acts were solid, if not brilliant. By the weekend, the programme was full again, and Jonathon and Nina were able to drop their extra turns, and not a moment too soon. It was clear that the extra work had just begun to wear on them.

Nigel watched the two of them from the wings as they ran smoothly through the “evil magician” turn, feeling unspeakably grateful that they had both come through without a murmur of complaint. No matter what else could be said about this Russian girl, there was no doubt in his mind that she was willing to work, and work hard. She was an imitator rather than an original, but no one on holiday in Blackpool and spending time in a music hall was likely to have seen the originals, and the girl gave you a good show for your money. Who did it harm, that she borrowed Loie Fuller’s serpentine skirt dance without a blush of shame? How did it matter than she turned Pavlova’s “California Poppy” into her own “Water-lily”? Was Pavlova losing money by it? Had Pavlova ever even heard of Blackpool? Would Fuller ever set foot in this city? Since the answer to all of these questions was “no,” Nigel didn’t see that anyone could have any quarrel with the girl. In fact, he thought she ought to be commended. She was probably the first ballet dancer most of these people had ever seen. And having seen, the holiday-makers might choose to have a look-in on a real ballet corps. Who could tell? They might even become regulars at the theater.

It wasn’t as if she was claiming to be Pavlova, after all. In the theater, nothing was new, and the only people that ever successfully kept the secrets of how they did things were magicians.

He watched her with the eye of a critic rather than a showman as she went through her paces in Jonathon’s act. She was certainly graceful, but that went with being a dancer. She wasn’t much of an actress, but then, she wouldn’t have studied acting. Nigel didn’t know much about ballet, but he had the vague notion that the dancers were far too busy keeping track of their steps to do much acting. She didn’t have to be much of an actress anyway; the audience for Music Halls was not one for subtle nuances. They liked showy tricks, melodrama; they wanted to be thrilled and amazed; they wanted to laugh and be dazzled. The Divine Sarah and Eleanor Duse had no place in the music hall. Little Tich, however, dancing in boots that were as long as he was tall . . . that was what they wanted.

He continued to watch. She was good. The audience liked her. Part of that was her youth, part her apparent fragility, part the romance of her rescue these several weeks ago. She connected with the audience too, she had an instinct for that. Performers had been a success on that alone.

One thing he didn’t get from her was that . . . spark, that something special, that he felt from people that really were geniuses. He was hardly an ignoramus; he made a point of going to London when he could, to see what the world considered great. And there was a magic, a special something, in those for whom the stage was a kind of home, that the rest of theatrical humanity just did not possess. Ellen Terry, Henry Irving, they had it, and the audience reveled in seeing it displayed. He’d gone to ballets as well as the theater; he had seen Nijinsky, Pavlova, and Isadora Duncan too. They had it, they had it and made the stage sing beneath their feet. Eleanor Duse. The Divine Sarah, dear God, she had it, she could make you believe she was anything she chose to be, and you would completely forget that she was not fourteen years old as she spoke tremulously from her balcony to Romeo, that she was not the courtesan Marguerite Gautier and dying of consumption, that she was not even a woman, as she donned the breeches of Hamlet.

Nina Tchereslavsky did not have that gift. She had another, a gift for evoking emotion, and for giving it back, and she was good. She would never be immortal.

On the other hand, the people who had that spark often didn’t do well in life. It was almost as if having been granted this enormous gift, the Fates decided that you had to make up for it in other ways. Those who had it seldom prospered in love; those who had it often drank to excess, or dosed themselves with morphia or hashish or some other drug. Those that had it knew that their gift was a jealous mistress and would tolerate no others.

Besides the people that came to music halls didn’t want to see genius. Genius wasn’t comfortable, it didn’t actually care about what an audience wanted. Genius didn’t set out to entertain you; if you were entertained by genius, that was incidental. Genius burned, and if you weren’t careful, you burned with it. Genius didn’t want you to forget your troubles, make you laugh, make you gasp. Genius wanted to take your troubles and make art out of them, which was all very well, but made it cursed uncomfortable to live around genius.

No, for his purposes, he didn’t want genius, he didn’t want art, and he certainly didn’t want artists. He wanted entertainers. He wanted people who lived for the sound of applause and would turn themselves inside out to get it. People like that tended to be troupers, and when something bad happened, they pulled together to make sure the show went on. Genius regarded an audience as a sometimes-inconvenient thing that insisted it should be the judge of what it was shown. Genius only wanted to show the audience something that would make it go away and try very hard to think. Of course, people who lived for audience approval could be trouble too, craving that approval to the exclusion of everything else, making a dreadful pother about themselves offstage and hogging the limelight when on. In fact, there didn’t ever really seem to be an offstage for them. They played to the people around them as if they were always in front of an audience. In their own way, they were going to always be lonely, for there was no room in that place for anyone who was not audience.

But after all this time, Nigel was fairly good at recognizing that sort, and he generally did not extend their contracts unless there was absolutely no helping it. He knew Jonathon; Jonathon craved that applause but was far too cynical about it to recognize it for anything other than what it was—the momentary pleasure and approval of people who were prepared to like you, so long as you weren’t appallingly bad. Jonathon enjoyed tricking them—in the sense that he was, at least once in his act, performing real magic right in front of their noses.

And Nina seemed to be level headed about it as well. He was happy to see how much she desired that short-lived accolade, though, because it meant he wasn’t going to lose her to one of those fellows who thronged her dressing room after the show.

That was always a worry with a pretty young girl, a solo act. After a while, they got tired of moving from town to town, never staying longer than six weeks in any one place. They wanted to settle, and he didn’t blame them. And if one of those fellows with their motorcars and champagne and jewelry offered to take her off the boards and set her up in a neat little nest with all the modern conveniences and all . . . well, you couldn’t blame a girl for taking them up on it.

That was what the brilliant thing was, from a player’s point of view, about this scheme of his. It was going to be exactly like one of those ballet or opera companies. The players would stay. It would be the production that changed. Everyone would get to have a home, rather than lodgings. People could stop living out of a suitcase, could acquire things like furniture and dishes, could sleep in a bed they could truly say was their own at night.

And then there was Jonathon.

Nigel smiled a little, watching the magician once again flawlessly execute the finale of his act, the part other magicians called “the Prestige.” Jonathon did have that spark, but it was not for stage magic.

Sometimes Nigel wondered if he knew his friend better than Jonathon knew himself. Perhaps he did.

Jonathon Hightower, unlike Nina Tchereslavsky, did not live to hear the audience applaud. For him, in a way, the audience was irrelevant. He didn’t want to amaze them; he often remarked sarcastically how very easy it was to amaze them. He was thoroughly devoted to seeing that they did not leave unsatisfied at the end of his act, but after that, he really didn’t much care.

He said he was more interested in astonishing his fellow magicians, but that was not it either. Nigel had been watching him for many years now, and the conclusion he had come to was one that would probably shock Jonathon.

Jonathon was not a showman. Jonathon performed stage magic only so that he could make a living at a profession that permitted him to be what he was without having to answer too many questions. If he could have done the same thing by being a farrier or an automobile mechanic, he would have done so, provided he’d had the aptitude for either of those things. He needed the sort of profession and living space where odd things could happen without anyone taking notice. Granted most people could not see the Elementals—but they could certainly see the effects of the Elementals. Rains of fish and frogs, crops flattened in patterns, weird lights in the sky—too many of these occurrences and people started to talk. Accidents happened, but when you were supposed to be an ordinary fellow, a clerk or a carpenter, fingers were much more likely to be pointed in your direction than if you were rich, if you lived in the sort of place where everybody knew everybody else’s business.

No, stage magic was for Jonathon only the means to an end. What Jonathon really was—was an Elemental Master.

Nigel had seen it, when Jonathon talked about Elemental magic, about things he had learned about the creatures of Fire, of the things he had seen. The spark had been there, and no doubt about it. Other stage magicians that Nigel had known over the years had been passionate about the tricks they invented, but not Jonathon. He was careful and craftsman-like about mastering the tricks he had purchased, and he clearly enjoyed the acting part of his turn, but it was only when he spoke of how he was integrating Fire magic into things in a way that made it appear to be more stage effects that he really lit up with enthusiasm.

He had been born to wield the power, to study the power, to learn more about it. But Nigel very much doubted that his friend had figured this out for himself yet.

Then again, he hadn’t had the leisure or the space to do any proper work with his power. The designation of “Mage” or “Master” had to do with the amount of innate power and control you had, not how well you had learned how to wield it. In many ways, Arthur, who was “only” a Mage, had more mastery over his Element than Jonathon had. Arthur had other things too, for he was a Sensitive as well as a Mage, and the need to control the one had brought discipline to the other.

But Jonathon had been itinerant for almost as long as Nigel had known him. They had first met when Nigel had been the proprietor of a much smaller “music hall,” a place that was mostly intended for drinking with a nod to entertainment, and a Water Master out in Lancashire County had suggested he give the young stage magician a trial. It was very hard setting up proper spellcasting when you were in lodgings, and you could be interrupted at any moment by a landlord who wanted to know what all the funny sounds and lights were about. And that was just for the magics that you could be taught or learn on your own—researching new Elemental spells took a deal more time, space, and effort, and a traveling showman rarely had a lot of any of those.

Of course, once the big show was on, and Jonathon realized he had settled in a place, would he realize that it was possible for him to start in serious study of his powers and abilities? Right now, in this building, Nigel had a flat that covered all of the first floor, and Arthur had one of the two that took up the second floor. As he watched Jonathon work, and thought about the kind of house guest he had been, it occurred to Nigel that he would not be at all averse to having Jonathon as a neighbor. That would mean the first and second floors were all taken up by Elemental mages, all in the business of entertainment. No one would make any inquiries about strange lights, odd sounds, or unexpected smells. In fact, no one would think twice about it. “Oh, it’s the music hall people,” would be the general consensus, and the neighbors would go about their own business.

As for Nina . . .

Star performers had been made of lesser stuff than she was. Now, Nigel did not know a great deal about ballet, but there was one thing he could tell. Nina connected with her audience. She made them want to like her. That was a rare gift; ninety-nine performers out of a hundred couldn’t do it. In fact, Nigel had come to suspect that those who were able to enchant an audience in that way might just have some talent of a psychical nature about them. Now, once they got this business of who was after her settled—and he was sure that they would—then there was just one thing to worry about with Miss Nina.

How to make it worth it to her to stay with the company instead of finding a rich man to care for her.

He would have to think about that. There was this much; the girl had a talking cat, and she had witnessed magic, real magic. No one who understood that magic actually existed could ever look at the world in the same way again. She needed to be around people who had seen the sorts of things that she had seen, knew the sorts of things she knew. That just might be enough to hold her.

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.

13

NINA 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.

There was something going on that no one was talking to her about. Ninette could tell by the way that Arthur, Nigel and Jonathon would look at her when they thought she wouldn’t notice. And it wasn’t the “we are suspicious of you” look, it was the “we are really worried for you” look. That made her uneasy, and it made her even more uneasy to think that whatever was going on probably had a great deal to do with magic.

She really didn’t want to think about magic. Despite that there was a very helpful brownie living in her flat. Despite that Jonathon was producing all manner of magical—the real sort, not legerdemain—effects on stage. Despite the fact that she was half friend and half slave to a talking cat. She just would rather not think about magic at all. Rather than growing easier about it over time, knowing about it, knowing it was real, actually had the effect of unnerving her further. It was as if the solid and understandable world she knew was just a thin shell over something impossible and deadly, something she could not see nor guard against. All her childhood fears of night-hags coming through the windows and demons up through the floor could be real. And what was more, she had no way to protect herself against these creatures.

It was horrible, every moment of it, and so she thought about it as little as possible.

Ailse astonished her. The little Scots maid was as practical and level-headed as any Parisian landlady, and yet, she not only accepted all of this, she seemed to have no particular difficulty in doing so. She put out a little food and drink for the Brownie every night, and pretended to ignore the shy little creature whenever it happened to get caught in the open. Although she said she could not hear Thomas unless he spoke to her directly, she spoke to him at all times as if to a human being. And Wolf, whom she certainly did hear, she flirted with in a sort of dry, ironic manner. The practical and level-headed nature would seem to preclude any belief in magic. And yet . . .

All this glancing and looking worried had begun about a week ago. Ninette finally got fed up with it. It was making her more nervous than thinking about magic. So she decided to accost the one person of everyone in the group that was likeliest to give her the truth.

“Ailse,” she said that night, as the maid was combing out her hair, “why is everyone so on edge this past week? And why do they keep looking at me?”

The maid was silent for a good long time. Her hands kept moving automatically, but looking in the mirror, Ninette could see a very thoughtful expression on her face. “Well, ma’amselle,” the girl said thoughtfully, “They wouldna like my tellin’ ye, but I’ve been thinkin’ ’tis a sin and a shame to be keepin’ ye in the dark.”

“I knew it!” Ninette said fiercely. “I knew there was something amiss!”

“Well, it’s that summon tried to burn down the theater, d’ye ken? And they be thinkin’ it has sommat t’ do with you,” Ailse said reluctantly.

“Me?” Ninette’s mouth fell open with surprise, and she turned and took the brush from the maid’s unresisting hands. “How could that have anything to do with me?”

“Because, ma’amselle, they’re thinkin’ it’s all of a piece, that you have a strong enemy, a magician—well, not you, but your Papa that’s gone.” The girl nodded. “They’re thinking that the wreck of your friend’s wee boat, the laddie that tried to set fire to the theater, and the accidents are all at the hand of this magician, d’ye ken. Because they’re unnatural for certain sure. There’s thousands as wouldna believe that tale yon Harrigan told, of the hole in the street opening up under his feet, but I do, and more’s the point, so do Master Nigel and Master Jonathon.”

Ninette listened to this with astonishment, not the least because Nigel and Jonathon were hanging their theory on a slender thread indeed. That their entire “chain of events” began with a shipwreck that never really happened—

She bit her lip and was about to turn away from the maid, feeling a terrible load of guilt, when suddenly from the direction of the kitchen a commotion erupted that sounded like a cross between a cat-fight and a drunken brawl, punctuated by the crash of crockery.

Both young women hesitated a moment, then Ninette leapt up from her seat and ran for the door. She stopped long enough to grab a poker from the fireplace tools, and flung open the door of her bedroom.

It was easy to see the cause of the noise. Thomas and the brownie tumbled together on the floor, tangled up with something else, both of them fighting, both of them screeching. The brownie was shouting something incomprehensible, while Thomas sounded like a perfectly ordinary cat in a towering rage.

The thing they were fighting, strangely, made no noise at all.

Ailse went straight for the kitchen, as Ninette stood by looking for an opening in which she could bash the thing with her poker. She couldn’t tell what it was; it was a sickly, muddy-earth color, and had four limbs and a head, and that was all she could tell for sure. But as she set eyes on it, she felt a creeping horror, absolute revulsion, and her hands shook as she clutched the poker.

Ailse came back with a big iron pot and a lid. Before Ninette could ask what that was for, she shouted, “Stand aside! Cold iron!” and in a flash, both the cat and the brownie freed themselves.

Ninette, who had been waiting for just that, took the opportunity to bash it with her poker. Incredibly, she connected with it. Even more incredibly, she stunned it. And while it was stunned, Ailse clapped the pot down on top of it, then slid the lid underneath, and flipped pot and creature back over. Ninette slid her poker through the pot’s two handles, locking the lid down tight.

And a good thing she did so, too, for a moment later the creature recovered, and the pot began gyrating as it tried to batter its way out. Ninette, went quickly to the fireplace, then put one of the fire-dogs on top of it just to be sure; this stopped the pot from bounding, but a furious hammering came from inside as the creature beat on the lid and sides.

The brownie stood there, panting, staring at the pot. “Damme! Wha’ be that?” he asked, the first time that Ninette had ever heard him speak.

That, Thomas replied grimly, is an homunculus, and it means us no good, I promise you. Don’t, on your lives, let it out. I am going to get Nigel and Jonathon.

Limping slightly, the cat leaped out of the window, leaving the two young women and the brownie staring at one another.

“Well,” Ninette said, finally. “Do you think we ought to put more heavy things on top of the pot?”

“I’m thinkin’ it wouldna hurt,” Ailse said, and went in search of something heavier than a fire-dog.

An hour later, Ninette sat on the bed in her room, seething. It was quite bad enough that Nigel, Arthur, Jonathon and Wolf had all come rushing up the stairs to her flat, acting as if she and Ailse didn’t have the sense the Lord gave a goose, but it was worse that they all but shoved her maid and herself into this room and barred the door with a chair to keep them in!

Ailse sat primly in the chair staring a hole in the door. When she glanced over at Ninette and saw that the dancer was looking at her, she grimaced.

“You are thinking,” Ninette said, and marveled a little at how firm her own grasp of English had become. Then she shivered. That was magic again. Creeping into her life, little by little. Making such tiny, helpful changes—until the moment when some shapeless thing, some awful monster that was terrible all out of proportion to its size, got into your own flat and—

And what? Why was it here? Preying on the Brownie? She didn’t think so. Something told her it had come for her. Thomas had said it meant them no good, and she could well believe it. Had it come on its own? Had it been sent? If it had been sent, who had sent it?

Was this somehow tied to the person who had tried to set fire to the theater?

“I am thinkin’ ma’amselle, but ’tisna my place t’say—” Ailse said with great reluctance.

She grimaced. “Oh please do speak your mind. I think it will be the twin of my own thoughts.”

Ailse looked at the door again. “Men,” she said, slowly, and with great deliberation. “Now an’ then, they be as a’mighty as they think. But ’tisna often.”

Ninette was surprised into a giggle, and some of her nervousness ebbed. “What do you suppose they are doing out there?”

Ailse shrugged. “Some mess of magic, do ye ken. And we shouldna see it on account of we have no magic of our own, and we’re puir weak women besides. We shouldna fash oursel’es. Let the braw laddies handle it.”

Ninette nodded, flushing. “Forgetting who it was caught it in the first place.”

“Aye.” Ailse looked back at the door. “But nivver mind. I’d be guessin’ we’ll find oot soon enoo—”

And at that moment . . . something indescribable happened.

If you could have a soundless explosion, that was the closest that Ninette could come to the experience. She felt the concussive impact of something out in her sitting room, even though not even her handkerchief fluttered. She felt as if she should have been driven back against the counterpane. She was left feeling slightly disoriented, exactly as if she had been struck by something, and from the look of her, Ailse felt the same.

Out in the sitting room, Jonathon began to curse.

Ninette was feeling too dazed to react, but Ailse shook off her shock and jumped up out of the chair she had been sitting on. She stalked straight to the door and pounded on it. “Ye might as well let us oot!” she said fiercely.

“Yes, yes, all right,” Arthur said, sounding distracted—or maybe just as dizzy as Ninette felt. “I’m coming!”

There was a scraping sound as the chair was pulled away from the door; Ailse opened it, and held it open for her mistress. Ninette got up, slowly, afraid to find her pleasant little sitting room in ruins.

But in fact, the sitting room was fundamentally intact, except for the few things the Brownie and Thomas had broken in their struggles with the homunculus.

But there was a very nasty stench in the air, and the iron pot was empty.

“I would be rid of that, if I were you,” Jonathon said, seeing that her eyes were resting on the container. “It won’t be fit to use for anything for a long time, perhaps never.”

“Why—” Ninette began.

“Because this thing was a pestilence-bringer,” Nigel replied wearily. “Anything you cook in that pot for a while will make people sick.”

Ailse peered closely at him, as if to ascertain whether he was joking or not. “’Twill still work as a trap for the uncanny, noo?” Ailse persisted.

“I suppose it will,” Nigel began.

“Good. Then we’re keepin’ it,” Ailse said in triumph. “I’ll be puttin’ it somewhere safe. But it’s no bad thing, havin’ a trap for uncanny evil wee things. What was it here for?”

“Not what,” Jonathon corrected. “Who. It was here for Nina. And I would very much like to know how she managed to attract the attention of so practiced an Elemental mage.”

Her father— the cat began.

“Bosh. Humbug,” Jonathon interrupted. “This was a very personal enmity, as you very well know, cat. You felt it. We all did. That thing was pestilence and hate, and whoever created it did so for the purpose of being rid of Mademoiselle Tchereslavsky.”

“Who sent it?” Ninette whispered, a feeling of terrible dread coming over her.

“Well, that would be the problem,” Arthur put in, scratching his head with one hand, while with the other he scratched Wolf’s. “It fair disintegrated when we tried to find out. Violently.”

“So that is why we would like to know, Mademoiselle, just how you managed to make a personal enemy of so powerful a mage,” Jonathon went on. “Particularly as you have no magic yourself, and profess that you do not much care for it . . .”

Helplessly, Nina looked at the cat. The cat shook his head, as if to say, Be quiet! Say nothing!

But Ninette was tired of the subterfuge—and she greatly feared that if it went on for much longer, it would get in the way of—well—everything.

“I have been deceiving you,” she said with a sigh as the cat looked frantic. “And I am very sorry. But I do not know why a powerful mage would want me dead, because until a few weeks ago I knew nothing of mages and Masters and Elementals. That is because I am not Nina Tchereslavsky, prima ballerina with the Imperial Ballet. I am Ninette Dupond, coryphée of the Paris Opera Ballet.”

There. It was out in the open. And all of them but the cat stared at her with their jaws dropping.

The cat only groaned and dropped down to the floor to cover his face with his paws.

14

JONATHON took a slow, deep breath, his brow like thunder. But before he could say anything, the cat spoke up.

Don’t shout at her, magician. It was all my idea. And I took advantage of the fact that she was light-headed from hunger to persuade her, too. The cat stalked up to Jonathon and looked up at him, tail lashing back and forth defiantly. I stole money and tickets to get her here from Paris. I told her what to do. I concocted the shipwreck story. It was all my doing.

Ninette looked into their eyes. Arthur licked his lips. “She’s still a first-rate dancer,” he said hesitantly. “It’s not as if she cheated us that way.”

Wolf made a tsking sound. “People create fantastical stories about performers all the time to puff them up,” the parrot said thoughtfully. “They always have, I expect. You should have heard some of the ones about me.”

Jonathon still looked wrathful. Ninette stared down at her hands. “My mother was abandoned by her husband when I was a baby,” she said, softly, and began the tedious recitation of her misfortunes in a flat voice. She only looked up once when Nigel laughed, on hearing La Augustine’s reaction to her grave error in smiling at the prima’s patron. “It was not funny,” she said flatly. “I knew at that instant that it was the worst possible thing that could have happened. It was not that La Augustine was jealous—she did not care a sous for whether the old man really loved her or not. It was that in that moment, I threatened her . . . livelihood. I threatened to take away his interest, and thus the flat, the luxuries, the jewels and furs and beautiful gowns. Of course she was in a rage. She was not ready to give him up yet. In fact, I am not sure she was ready to give him up at all. He was an ideal patron, old, unmarried, and no relations closer than a cousin. If he died, he could leave her very comfortable, and a dancer does not have a long life on the stage.”

Nigel sobered immediately. She continued with her story, of being cast out of the Opera Ballet, of trying to find a position elsewhere, of determining finally that she was going to go to the Moulin Rouge . . . to find someone who would give her money. She did not say for what purpose. She did not need to. She looked up again, to see that all three men had looks of embarrassment and chagrin on their faces.

She thought many things, and with them came a flare of anger. Men never had to face these choices. A man could always find work if he looked hard enough. A man had so many more choices than any woman. Oh, you do not think of this when you take girls into your beds, or into a room at a not-too-careful hotel. You do not think of them as real persons, who are doing this not because they want to be in your bed, but because they must go there or starve. You give them money and they go away and you never think of them again. They are the amusement of an hour. Maybe, maybe, you ask for them, look for them again. But not too often, for then they might start to make demands of you. But they think of you. They look at the money you give them, and they wish that all the men would be kind, would not beat them or try to cheat them. They count the money and wonder how long it will last them . . . or they count the money and cry because they must give it all to their procurer, and then give themselves to another stranger, who might not be kind. You do not think of these things . . . yet in your hearts, you know them, in your hearts, but your minds shove them away so they will not be disturbed.

The cat took this moment to jump into the conversation, which was just as well, seeing as she was on verge of saying these things out loud.

When she was all alone, hungry, and facing being put on the street, I knew I must intervene. That was when I stepped in, and I took advantage of her. He then took up the narrative, describing exactly how and from whom he had stolen purses and tickets. Telling how he had herded her onto the Metro, then the boat-train to Calais, onto the ferry, then to the train to Blackpool. How he had found her the boarding house, and how he had devised the little charade of the shipwreck.

When he paused, she spread her hands wide. “And there you have it, for everything else, you know what happened, except that I am Ninette, not Nina.”

Ninette, the cat interjected, who convinced your new ballet-master that she could not benefit from lessons given by him. And you know his credentials are impeccable. Ninette who has been dancing every night, sometimes taking two turns more than anyone else, to increasing acclaim. Ninette, who convinced all of you by her talent to base an entire show around her. Ninette, whose dressing room is thronged every evening by fans and well-wishers, and full of flowers. Who charms the gentlemen of the press and the little girls who give her sticky nosegays of violets.

Out of the corner of her eye, Ninette noticed Jonathon frown a bit at that. But the magician said nothing.

Nigel ran his hand over his hair. “You have me there,” he said. “It isn’t Nina Tchereslavsky that our audiences are coming to see. They come to see the dancer they’ve all heard about, from other people who’ve seen her. Good heavens, I doubt if one in a thousand has ever seen a real ballet-dancer before, much less an entire ballet, and they don’t give a farthing about some ‘Rooskie wench’ who danced in front of people they openly make fun of, like the French and the Germans and the Russians. It might be different if we were the Royal Opera Company—”

“But we aren’t,” Arthur said firmly. “We don’t have a Royal Circle, we don’t have titles and famous writers and famous painters in our audiences. We’re nothing but entertainment for the masses. We have Bertie and Mary from Worcester, we have Sally and Tommy from Liverpool, on holiday, looking for a good time and getting it. They see the dancer up there and they know someone who’s good, even if they don’t know a jette from a plie. And if we throw Mademoiselle Ninette out on her ear, they’d be tearing the curtains down to hang us with them.” He looked from Nigel to Jonathon and back again. “I don’t see we have a choice. And I don’t see where anyone is being harmed by this. I say let the charade go on. Ninette isn’t taking a shilling out of Miss Tchereslavsky’s pay-packet, and no one east of London is ever going to know there’s two of them.”

Nigel grinned. “I’m glad to hear you say that, old lad, because I was going to propose the same thing. But tell me,” he continued, turning to Ninette, “How did you learn to speak Russian? For that matter, how did a poor little ballet girl from the Bohemian parts of Paris learn how to speak English?”

Oh, that was my doing, Thomas the cat said smugly. I just found a bannik in the bathhouse of one Alexei Balonovich that had come over with his master. He and I struck a bargain, and I got him to whisper Russian in her mind while she slept. You might be amazed at all the Russians who live here. Russia is not an hospitable place if you aren’t a friend of the Tsar. And as for the English, there are plenty of brownies in England to teach her English the same way.

Jonathon looked at the cat sharply. “That isn’t supposed to work unless you’ve got some magery in you.”

Well, she has. Her father was an Earth Master; that part is true enough. And she has a touch of it, enough for her to hear me, enough for her to learn languages. . . . The cat looked slyly at all of them. And enough to enchant an audience. And don’t tell me you haven’t seen her do it. Charm. Charisma. It’s magic, right enough, opens up a connection between her and them. It’s all there, what they used to call “the glamourie.” And that’s all of the magic there is in her.

“Huh,” said Arthur, and Wolf chortled. Nigel just shook his head.

“This still doesn’t tell us why there’s an Earth Master trying to kill her,” Jonathon said sharply. “We’re no closer to unraveling that particular riddle than we were before.”

But at least you won’t go barking up any Russian trees, the cat replied. Nor, I advise you, any Parisian ones either. La Augustine may be a witch, but she’s not the sort with magic, and so far as I know, there’s not a soul Ninette ever came across that has a jot of magic in him—or her—other than me. I won’t say that she never made an enemy, though I don’t know of any, but I do know that there was no one around her that I ever sensed that had magic enough to light a candle.

The men exchanged looks of resignation. Finally Nigel shook his head. “I’m curious about one thing, cat,” Nigel said slowly. “Why Blackpool? Why not—Bath, or Birmingham, or Plymouth? I can understand not wanting to try your trick in London, where someone might have seen the real Nina Tchereslavsky, and there are a lot of people there who know about the famous ballet dancers in the rest of the world, but why come all the way up into the North?”

You, Thomas said instantly. How many impresarios are there that are also Elemental Masters? I had to find someone who could hear me, didn’t I? That was the only way to make the trick work.

“Impeccable logic,” Wolf said, and chortled again. “Keep on like this, and I might even start to like you, cat.”

Jonathon scowled. “Shall we have done with this love-fest?” he asked. “We need to find out who is behind these attacks, and put a stop to them, before someone—probably our star dancer—is murdered.”

Ninette shivered at this timely—and unwelcome—reminder. She kept shivering though, feeling very cold, and rather empty inside. The secret was out, and now . . . now she did not really know what she should do. And there was still someone, some terrible magician out there, who wanted her dead. Ailse got up and fetched a shawl and put it around her shoulders. “There noo, ma’amselle,” the maid said in her no-nonsense tone. “Ye’ve got t’dance tomorrow, an’ there’s naught going to happen more tonight.” Ailse looked at Nigel, Arthur, and Jonathon sternly. “You lads, be off with ye. Worrit yer heads about it all ye like, but not here. Ma’amselle Ninette needs to sleep.”

“Gad.” Nigel shook his head. “You’re right as rain, Ailse. Curse it all though . . . if only we could concentrate on either the magic or the theater, one or the other, and not have to deal with both at the same time.”

“If wishes were horses, beggars would ride,” Ailse quoted primly. “Go along with you.”

Ninette stopped shivering, but immediately felt as if she could not keep her eyes open anymore. Perhaps it was the unreality of the situation; despite how she had felt when she first clapped eyes on the horrid little monster, she could not seem to think of it as menacing, much less life-threatening, now. There had been a strange little—thing—in her sitting room. It hadn’t even been as big as the cat. Ailse had clapped a cooking put over it—how absurd was that? So absurd no one would even write a ballet about it. She yawned, stifling it behind her hand, and Ailse pounced on her.

“That will be enough of that,” the maid said firmly. “To bed wi’ ye. And oot with yon gents!”

A word with you, Jonathon, Ninette vaguely heard the cat say, as Ailse hustled her back into the bedroom. I’ll walk you home.

For a moment she was moved to protest—she needed Thomas here! Who else would protect her if another of those things put in an appearance? But then she realized that if Thomas wasn’t worried, then there probably was no need to worry at all. She followed Ailse meekly into the bedroom, quite as if it was Ailse who was the mistress here, and she the obedient maid.

The cat had had mixed feelings, watching the Fire Master’s expressions change over the course of Ninette’s confession. At first, Jonathon had been angry at Ninette’s deception, that much was clear. Thomas could only assume he was angry because he had been tricked, and not for any “moral outrage.” Ninette had only been doing what Jonathon did every night on the stage—tricking people into thinking that what was in front of them was something other than what it was.

Then had come grudging acceptance, as first Arthur, and then Nigel had voiced their own opinions on the subject.

Then, interestingly, when the mention of Ninette’s many admirers came up, the cat had seen acute annoyance flash across Jonathon’s face. In fact, it was akin to the annoyance that Thomas himself felt.

Fascinating . . .

Of course, if Jonathon was attracted to the dancer, he would do his best not to show it. Not because he had any ridiculous ideas about the moral inferiority of his fellow entertainers, but because he would know how often disastrous flirtations within a theatrical company could be. And Jonathon, from all that Thomas knew about him—which was a great deal more than Jonathon was aware!—thought of himself as a confirmed bachelor.

Nor did Thomas himself particularly want Jonathon attracted to Ninette.

On the other hand, if the choice was Jonathon—or one of those fellows that filled her dressing room—well, then the cat would fervently welcome Jonathon.

All of them made their way to the ground floor, and out the private entrance, without encountering anyone else. It appeared that despite the row that had gone on in Ninette’s sitting room, the other tenants had remained blissfully unaware of any unpleasantness. That was good, because otherwise the ruckus would have been very difficult to explain.

When they stepped out into the cool, damp, dark summer night, with the scent of wet brick and growing things on the air, Thomas took the opportunity to glare up at Nigel, Arthur, and that wretched bird. And then he coughed, politely.

Arthur and Nigel took the hint, and swiftly outdistanced the two of them, rapidly moving through the patches of light where the streetlamps stood, until they turned a corner and moved out of sight. Thomas could feel Jonathon’s eyes on him, and sensed the frown.

“Well, get on with it,” the Fire Master said impatiently. “What is it you wanted to tell me that you couldn’t say in front of the others?” Without waiting for an answer, the Fire Master strode out in the footsteps of his friends.

Largely—my motives, said Thomas, reluctantly. Let us start with the question, “Why Blackpool?” The reason is simple, really. I know Blackpool. I am a native of this area. That was how I knew that an Air Master was the impresario of this particular music hall. Since I came from this part of England, I made it my business to keep track of the Elemental Masters here.

“You—what?” The cat felt a certain smug satisfaction. He had managed to surprise the magician. Well, there were more surprises to come for Jonathon Hightower. The magician wasn’t the only one who was good at keeping things up his metaphorical sleeve.

I said, I know the city because I lived here, about twenty years ago, more or less.

“What a surprise, you hardly look a day over ten,” came Jonathon’s sarcastic reply. “You are a remarkably well preserved cat.”

The cat bristled, the hair on his tail poofing out a little. Like uncle, like nephew. Were all the Hightower men born with acid wit, or did they learn it from one another? Do not mock me, Jemmie Hightower, he snapped. And keep a civil tongue in your head. I knew your uncle, and I knew you when you were still in nappies.

The magician stopped dead in his tracks and swiveled to look down at the cat. His voice shook a little. “No one—has called me ‘Jemmie’—since—”

Precisely why I used that name with you. You surely don’t think I am an ordinary cat.

“Well of course not! You’re a magical—” Jonathon stopped, and a dumbfounded look came over his face. “No magical construction could be half as clever as you. Most of them could never even think for themselves, much less some up with the wild plans you have. What are you?”

I am a cat, replied Thomas, primly.

“You are as much a cat as I am a Bartholomew Faire conjurer. I say again, what are you?” The cat looked up and saw Jonathon’s eyes narrow. “Or is the right question not what, but who?”

Thomas sat down on his haunches, and wrapped his tail tightly around his legs. You must swear never to tell Ninette. If you do, I swear I will scratch your eyes out, and pee in all your stage props.

Warily Jonathon nodded. “All right.”

The cat sighed. He hated letting these secrets go. He had hoped to carry them to the grave. I was as human as you are, and no, I am not reincarnated in cat form, as Wolf claims to have been. I was an Earth Master, and this is a permanent transformation. I lost a magician’s duel, and my opponent froze me in the last shape I took. Not surprising, really; she was a truly vindictive and jealous wench, and she never forgave me for running away from her—and even less was she inclined to forgive me when she tracked me down and discovered I had married someone else. He still remembered the look on Helen’s face when he told her. The fury—it had been enough to make him take a step back at the time. And if he had thought for a moment that he might be able to run away from her again, that expression had utterly disabused him of the notion. They say hell hath no fury like a woman scorned . . . I am inclined to think they are right. Kipling also says that the female is more deadly than the male. I am in a position to corroborate that.

He could almost see the thoughts running through Jonathon’s head as the Fire Master ran through all of the Earth Masters in the last forty or so years he had ever heard of that came from hereabouts—sorted out all the ones that had gone missing or that could not possibly have known his uncle or clapped eyes on himself as a baby—then eliminated all those too young to be the one in question—

Thomas recognized the moment when Jonathon put all the clues together. His jaw dropped.

“Thomas Dupond?” the mage gasped incredulously.

The cat sighed. The same.

“But—” another clue floated to the surface, and Jonathon almost reeled. “But—you must be Ninette’s missing father!”

Now you know why I did what I did. The cat’s tail lashed angrily. I did not abandon my wife and child! I was ambushed, and they were threatened. Helen Waring tracked me to Paris, sent a private detective to find me, and confronted me literally no more than a block from my home. She threatened to make life unendurable for Marie and Ninette, and you know very well that she could have, and would have, and she would never have had to use a bit of magic to do so. The only way I could distract her was to call her out in a magician’s duel. Which, as you must have deduced, I lost.

“But now we know who the magician that is trying to kill Ninette is!” Jonathon crowed. Thomas sighed.

You are leaping to far too many conclusions, the cat told him. No, in this case, you are quite wrong. Helen Waring is not the Earth Master we are looking for.

“Why do you say that?” Jonathon demanded.

Because she is dead, Thomas said flatly.

Silence for a moment. “How can you be sure?” Jonathon asked, after a pause.

Because I killed her.

More silence. Then Jonathon cleared his throat awkwardly. “Ah . . . how did that come about?”

She intended to go through with her threat to torment my wife and child. I expect she had some idea of capturing me as well, but I got over the shock of finding myself permanently a cat a great deal faster than she had thought I would. I crept into the hotel where she had rented a room that same night, Thomas told him, reining in the anger and hatred that still lashed him whenever he thought of that cruel, cruel woman. How he despised her still! Had she been a man, her evil nature would have been uncovered and dealt with long before it had come to this pass by her fellow Elemental Masters, but since she was a woman . . . they had laughed at what they called her “folly,” and had never taken her seriously. Perhaps that was why she had obsessed over Thomas; he had taken her seriously. He had known she was, or at least one day would be, a menace. He had realized that she was dangerous to him, when he had begun finding her creatures spying on him. And she had money, a very great deal of it, being the only child of a shipping magnate who had left her his entire fortune, while he was as poor as a church-mouse. She had assumed she could buy him, as she had bought everything else she wanted, including the best of tutors in her magic. It must have come as a tremendous shock to her when she discovered he had fled. I waited for her at the top of the stairs, he continued, reliving that night. And when she stepped out of her room, and was not looking, I ran between her ankles and tripped her. It was a new hotel, in the latest fashion they called Art Nouveau. There were terrible stairs in that place; very steep, beautiful marble with sinuously curving iron railings, and treacherous. She broke her damned neck exactly as I intended she should. I was glad I did it and I would do it again.

Another long pause. “But . . . you lost the chance to have the transformation reversed—”

Which she swore that she would never do, Thomas said bitterly. In fact, her last words to me as she sealed the spell were “I hope you enjoy mice, for you will be living on them from now on.” At a stroke she doomed my poor Marie and Ninette to starvation or worse, and me to a miserable existence either running from her, or as her captive. My only regret is that she did not suffer as poor Marie and Ninette suffered. I did what I could for them, but I was limited by . . . well, real life. I stole purses and left them where Marie would find them, but I had to be careful, and I had to make sure it was nothing too generous nor too often. Marie herself would have started to question where they came from, and if she started looking too prosperous, the gendarmes would start to ask questions to which she would have no answers. How well he remembered his horror when Marie decided that Ninette would have to become a courtesan! And to see his lovely wife trading her favors among the artists for the sake of a few sausages . . .

It made him angry, ashamed, and vengeful, all at the same time. It still did.

“I—see,” Jonathon said, slowly. “I mean, I do see. I’d have felt the same in your place . . .”

I hated it. And Marie—trained Ninette to think that she must find a rich protector. I hate that even worse, if that were possible. Thomas paused to get a grip on himself. But Ninette is a good dancer, and I was sure she would be able to make her way without needing to find a—protector. In fact, I had planned to help her rise in the ranks as soon as there was an opportunity. Figaro praised her! That is no small matter in Paris! And when she found herself ejected from the Opera Ballet . . . I did not want her to find a rich protector elsewhere. I still do not. His mental voice turned fierce. I want her to never need any such thing. So I waited until she was desperate and dizzy enough with hunger that she would accept such a thing as a talking cat, and set my plan in motion. And you must never, ever tell her who and what I am.

“I gave you my word,” pledged Jonathon. “And I give it again.”

Good. Now, I think we must part. I am going to serve as nightwatch. And you must go and try to discover who it is that wants my child dead.

And with that, Thomas stood up, flicked his tail twice, and leapt off into the shadows.

Jonathon Hightower had had a fair number of unpleasant surprises in his life, but this evening certainly should be posted near the top of the list. First, there was the arrival of the cat and his frantic call for help. Then the discovery of just what the young ladies had caught. Then Ninette’s confession—

Ninette. He had to admit the name suited her much better than Nina . . .

And now this. It was as implausible a tale as anything in a shilling novel about rags-to-riches newsboys, or American cowboys and savage rustlers. Yesterday he would have called such a story sheer lunacy.

But that was before; now, well . . .

It was the spare, unembroidered way in which Thomas had told his tale that made it the more plausible. He had to admit that his blood had run a little cold when the cat had described so matter-of-factly how he had murdered his tormentor. But then again . . . she deserved it. He remembered stories his uncle and some of the other Elemental Masters in that circle shared over beer or brandies. Helen Waring was not remembered with anything other than distaste—and curses, and the general opinion that it was to be hoped that “she got what was coming to her.” Not that anyone suspected she had been murdered . . . she had just gone to the continent, and rumors had returned that she had died. But no one ever was quite sure about Helen Waring, and for all anyone knew, she could appear again without warning. It would be a profound relief to some people in magical circles to learn that she really had gone on to whatever “reward” she had earned.

And he certainly didn’t blame Thomas for doing his best to keep his child from prostituting herself. In Thomas’s shoes—or fur—he’d have done the same. From the tone of the cat’s mental voice, it had been agony to watch Marie training the girl for such a position, knowing he could do nothing about it.

But then, there was the deception. He hated being lied to above all things.

He walked back to the flat in a sort of smoldering temper, which was rather the worse for the fact that he could not really fault her very much for doing so. It was not as if she had somehow cheated them; she had worked damned hard for them all, in fact. It was not as if she didn’t have talent, for she certainly did. In fact, he had no real reason to be angry with her . . .

Are you angry with her because she lied about her identity, or because you just learned she has been raised to be a courtesan, and she is unlikely to give up that plan?

He gritted his teeth. Well, at least he had an ally in hating that idea. The cat Thomas was entirely of the same mind about that . . .

And neither of you will have anything left to fret about if you don’t put your mind to discovering who it is that wants to be rid of her and why! the logical part of his mind protested. Really, you had better set your priorities . . .

He stopped, then; looked up and blinked in shock. No wonder the pavement had felt somehow familiar—

He had gotten from where he left Thomas all the way to the building that contained Nigel’s flat without having any memory of the intervening space.

15

“WELL,” said Nigel, over breakfast. “What are we going to do about this situation?”

No one had to ask “What situation?” since none of them had slept particularly well last night. After many attempts to trace the homunculus back to its source, both Nigel and Arthur had to admit defeat. Jonathon had not even tried; “Fire,” he had said distinctly, “is not an element conducive to bloodhound work.” Nigel had hoped that the Air Elementals might have a memory of the creature’s passage, but evidently it had not come out into the open until it reached the building that housed Ninette’s flat.

“Guards, for one thing,” Jonathon said, slowly chewing a mouthful of toast. “Wards, for another, since I am not sure we can rely on Air Elementals to remember they are supposed to guard her.”

Nigel groaned. “Wards. Do you know how much that is going to attract attention to her? We might as well set a beacon on the top of her building! Better yet, why don’t we simply just send invitations to every dark mage we know of, and let them all appear at once?”

“Oh come now, Nigel, it isn’t that bad,” Wolf said, leaning down over Arthur’s shoulder and helping himself to a generous bite of Arthur’s scone. “After all, I wrote an entire opera that revealed I was an Elemental Master, and look how long it took the dark ones to puzzle it out!” He held the bite in one claw and ate neatly, as Arthur gazed ruefully at the place where all the jam had been until Wolf took it. “Poor Salieri. He went quite mad after that. Convinced himself that he was the one that killed me.”

“Wolf—it was a disease homunculus that did you in, wasn’t it?” Nigel cast the parrot a sharp glance. “I don’t suppose it would be the same mage—”

“After all this time?” Wolf made a sound like a snort. “I think not. Besides, the creature was clearly after our dancer, not me.”

Nigel sighed, and went back to contemplating his kipper. “Well, nothing is simple, is it?”

“We could set a trap . . .” Wolf continued, wiping his jam-sticky beak on Arthur’s dressing-gown, much to the latter’s exasperation. “Not anything that would actually catch the next creature that attacks her, but something that would allow us to trace it back?”

Jonathon shook his head. “If we were the same power, yes, but for an unlike and an antagonist power? It would take us years to work out how.”

“I would rather know why,” Nigel said thoughtfully. “The girl seems so inoffensive. It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Then it has to tie back to her father somehow.” Jonathon pursed his lips. “I believe I will send some messages out via Elemental to the other Fire Masters that might remember Helen Waring and Dupond. Nigel, you do the same. Perhaps if we can unravel the mystery from that end, we’ll be in a position to do something for Ninette.”

“It might turn out to be someone that Miss Waring scorned,” Wolf said, with relish. “Someone who blamed Dupond for it. That could be very useful actually. So long as he isn’t utterly mad, we might be able to show him that rather than being jilted, he had a narrow escape!”

Nigel rolled his eyes. “Trust you to think of that. It sounds like a plot for one of your operas.”

“Speaking of which,” the parrot said brightly, “I have the plot for Nina’s next vehicle! It’s very Ruritanian, and if we can manage it, I think we can even get a swordfight into it! It’s about a princess who is engaged to marry a prince she’s never seen, and only wants to be a dancer instead, so she disguises herself as a maid and runs away to London, where she becomes a sensation.”

“And I suppose that the prince she was supposed to marry only wants to become a stage magician,” Jonathon drawled sarcastically.

“Not at all. The prince has been going to university here, sees her on the stage, and not knowing who she is, falls instantly for her and begins wooing her. She doesn’t know who he is, she only knows he’s a very rich student and is probably noble, and doesn’t take him very seriously at first.” Wolf looked triumphant. “Then we can have an evil cousin who has plans to usurp the throne, and kidnaps the princess to use her as bait for the prince. We can have a grand melee sword fight and end with a triumphant wedding scene when they all realize who they all are.”

“I think you have been reading too many sensational novels,” said Jonathon dryly.

“Bosh. Let’s just make the kidnapping an attempted kidnapping so we don’t have to change the scene.” Nigel looked up, a light that Jonathon very well recognized in his eyes. Jonathon sighed.

“Shall we concentrate on protecting our leading lady and get her first show on the stage before we think about her next one?” he asked, exasperated.

Nigel shook his head as if to clear it. “You’re right. So. Wards?”

Nina woke from her death-like sleep with a groan. Destroying her homunculus before those cursed Masters could trace it back here to her had been destroying a part of herself. Doing so had left her prostrated on the floor, too weak to move, and she’d just held onto consciousness long enough to get her servants to pick her up and carry her to her bed.

She had saved herself, at the cost of a great deal of power.

At least now she knew what all her enemies looked like, as seen through the eyes of the homunculus. There were two, not one, Masters: an Air Master and the Fire Master she already knew about. There was an additional Air magician, the wretched dancer who had only the power of glamorie, and a girl that was Sighted.

She did not have to ring for her servants as a human would; they knew when she was aware and needed them again. And they knew just what it was that she needed, too. Two of the men each brought a struggling street urchin in, both children so ragged and filthy it was impossible to say whether they were male or female. Not that it really mattered to Nina. She fell on them like a starving dog on a steak. When she was like this, there was no finesse involved, only the hunger and the need to replenish herself.

Literally, in this case. She had lost substance as well as energy, and when she was done there was nothing left of the children but their rags. Feeling sated and reinvigorated, she stretched and yawned. The servants took that as their signal to remove the rags and send her maid in.

“Draw me a bath,” she said. “I need to think.”

What she meant was that she needed to draw on the memories of all those she had absorbed, on their collective intellects. Her old men might have been addled by her spells and her beauty, but most of them were intelligent men who had not inherited their wealth. They had earned it, every penny of it, and gotten it as ruthlessly as anyone could imagine. They had been shrewd, calculating, and scheming. All that was hers to call upon now.

As she sank into her hot bath, with her hair piled high on her head and the scent of musk surrounding her from the perfume oils and special herbs she always put in the water, the first thing that came into her mind was this.

They know you are here, now, and they know what you are.

They might not know who, but they would know what, or at least, they would know that an Earth Master walking the dark path was hunting their precious dancer.

It is only a matter of time before they find another Earth Master to hunt you.

It was true that Earth Mastery tended to come to those who were reluctant to venture into cities, and for good reason. What human beings did to the Earth in their cities left it fouled and poisoned, and Earth Masters felt that acutely. Still, given that there was an urgent need, one could be persuaded in time. It all depended on how organized the Elemental Masters were, hereabouts. If they were highly organized, as they were in, say, Germany, it would not take long at all. If, however, they were as chaotic and anarchistic as they were in Russia . . . it might take a year.

So assume that you have between two weeks and six months. Unless . . . you find something else to distract them with.

Thus came the advice of those shrewd old men from their decades of chicanery, backstabbing, Machiavellian schemes. Find something else to distract them with. They will have a hard time fighting a battle on two, or even three fronts.

She frowned, pursing her lips. This could be a problem. If she were back on her home ground, she could have had a dozen distractions for them already. And she had already tried making one of the dozens of admirers around the dancer besotted . . .

Wait . . .

She nodded to herself. Yes, that was one thing she had not tried. She had been working with men who were already attracted to the girl. What she had not tried was creating a crazed and infatuated admirer.