Reserved for the Cat

Yes. That would work. But she needed another front to work on. If only she was back east of Germany! Then there would be people who knew she was the real Nina Tchereslavsky, and—

Wait—

Of course!

She sank down into her bath with a smile of satisfaction. There would be several cables to send today. She would have to be sure to send them from different offices to avoid drawing attention to herself or to her servants. This trap should come as a complete surprise.

And it should, ideally, ensure that all of her enemies would be so very busy that they would not see her real attack coming.

Because I don’t have any hands, nor voice, that’s why! the cat said with irritation to Nigel. If I could work most Earth Magic, don’t you think I would have done so to make sure my wife and child were taken care of? Maybe some of you can wield your power just by sitting down and thinking hard, but I can’t, and I never could. I needed physical implements and I needed the chants I was taught.

“If he can’t, he can’t, Jonathon,” Wolf said with a deep sigh. “I must say, I sympathize. I’m rather in the same pickle.” He fanned his wings. “No thumbs, don’cha know. Heaven knows I’ve tried, but when you can’t pick up both the wand and the cup at the same time . . .”

See? Even the bird understands.

Wolf gave the cat an evil yellow eye and made sound like a rude little boy.

“Curse it,” Jonathon said with passion. “I don’t know any Earth Masters.”

I was the only one in this part of the country, old lad, the cat said, wearily. I am afraid this is going to have to be done the hard way. The letter-tree.

Wolf groaned. Jonathon nodded reluctantly. “All right. I’ll do my lot. Wolf, you get Arthur to do yours; I expect he and Nigel know pretty much the same circle of magicians?”

“Identical,” Wolf replied, and sighed. “Bother. This could take a month.”

“Or more.” Jonathon’s mouth was set in a grim line. “Once we find an Earth Master, we will have to persuade him this truly is an urgent situation in order to get him inside a city. Only the Dark Walkers like what happens to the Earth inside a large city.”

“Truer words,” Wolf grumbled.

They were all sitting in Ninette’s dressing room, waiting for Ailse to escort her to the theater. It had been agreed that she was not to go anywhere alone from now on. Not that she had done so very much before, but it was even more imperative now. Jonathon had already set the Fire Wards around her flat; Nigel was setting the Air Wards now.

At that moment, the subject of their concern arrived, along with the little Scots maid. And Ailse had a very determined expression on her face that made Jonathon’s eyebrow rise. His curiosity was further aroused by the expression of excitement on Ninette’s face.

He wasn’t the only one to notice. “Do I sense a conspiracy?” Wolf exclaimed, standing up straighter on his perch on the back of a folding chair.

“Summat,” Ailse said shortly, and turned to Jonathon. “I’m thinkin’ sir, that ye’ll be havin’ more sense than Master Nigel and Master Arthur. You too, Master Wolf, Master Thomas.”

“Sense about what, exactly?” Jonathon asked warily.

“She wants to teach me to shoot!” Ninette burst out, her cheeks very pink now. “I think this would be a very good idea!”

“Shoot?” Jonathon exclaimed, startled. “You mean, a firearm?”

Ailse glared at him “No, a knittin’ needle, ye gurt booby!” she snapped, clearly having lost her temper. “Of course I mean a firearm!” She opened her purse and removed one of the biggest handguns that Jonathon had ever seen, wielding it with all the calm of an expert. “This lad, t’ be precise, or one like it. Me ald father taught me afore I left home,” she added with pride. “And me brother brought me this from America, aye. But ’twas me granny as told them t’teach me. ‘There’s nothin’ dark and fearsome can stand against Cold Iron, Silver or Blessed Lead,’ she said, and Father allowed she was right.” To Jonathon’s dumbfounded astonishment, she expertly broke the revolver and spilled six cartridges into her hand. “Two each,” she said with pride. “There be the Cold Iron.” She held up one with a business-end of a dull black. “Tricksy, those. I mun be sure they dinna rust i’ the revolver, an’ this near t’ sea, that isna an easy thing. Here be the Silver—” This time the bullets she held up were as shiny as a proud housewife’s best cutlery. “An’ those I mun be polishin’ every day too. An’ this is th’ Blessed Lead.” These looked ordinary enough at first. “Cast from the lead from the roof of our own kirk, with pastor’s own blessin’ on ’em, and look—” She turned the bullet to face Jonathon and he saw that the soft nose of it had been cut and cut again “—Saint Andrew’s own blessed cross on it, d’ye ken.”

Jonathon knew a little about firearms, as did most stage magicians, and he knew about the practice of cutting a cross into the nose of a bullet to make the soft lead spread more when it hit a target. He blinked. “Saint Andrew’s own blessed cross” was likely to be hell on earth for anything those bullets struck . . .

“She’s very good!” Ninette said, her eyes shining. “Really! I would feel ever so much safer if I knew how to shoot and had a gun!”

Jonathon considered this, carefully, and it wasn’t only supernatural entities that he was thinking about when he considered the dancer with a revolver in her hands. Earth Magic was also the magic of animal instincts. If he was an Earth Master, and he wanted to eliminate a pretty young dancer, one with many admirers . . .

“I am going to argue in your favor,” he said carefully, “if you both promise me one thing.” He turned first to Ailse. “I want you to make sure that she is deadly with this thing. She cannot afford to miss and she cannot afford to have it taken from her. Do you understand me?”

The Scots girl pursed her lips grimly. “Aye,” she replied. “An’ that I can do, if ’tis in her t’ be a shot.”

“And you—” He rounded on Ninette. “You must be ready to shoot to kill, without pause, without hesitation, if you ever have to take that thing out. There will be no time for second thoughts, no squeamishness. Whoever this is might well use someone—” He thought for a moment, then decided that being blunt was the only answer. “—might well use one of those men that throng your dressing room as an instrument. If that happens, there will be no question of guilt or innocence, no mercy. You will have to kill, or be killed. Or . . . worse,” he added with conviction. “The object might be to carry you off to much worse than simply death. And I do not mean mere rape.” Ailse went scarlet with embarrassment at the word, but he went ruthlessly on. “I mean dissolution. Terror. Horror, such as you cannot imagine. These magics that we use are primal forces and as such, they have all the raw power of the tempest, the volcano, the earthquake.”

He hoped—in fact, he prayed—that Ninette, child of Montmarte as she was, was near enough to the violence that could be in those streets that she would truly understand what he meant, and would be willing, able, to be just as violent to ensure her own safety.

Her eyes became very thoughtful, and a bit distant. He sensed she was looking deep into her memory. Her expression darkened, and he felt hope.

“I am no hothouse flower, M’sieur,” she said, quietly. “I am the—the cabbage grown on the windowsill of a garret, so that one might eat. There were Apache-gangs in my street. I have sometimes had to run home very fast to avoid the absinthe-drinkers, the hashish-smokers, the procurers with knives. I know how evil can wear a friendly, even a familiar face. Yes, M’sieur Jonathon. I can shoot to kill.”

The cat, silent until now, growled a little. A few of those limped home when I got done savaging their ankles, he added. I may not be a mastiff, but I can probably give her a moment or two more to aim.

“All right,” Jonathon said, with a slow nod. “I will make sure Nigel and Arthur have no objections. And I myself will go out and get you a revolver.” He eyed the monster in Ailse’s hands. “But not quite that big. You don’t have the wrists for it, Ninette. I won’t get you a ridiculous little lady’s gun, but I will get you something you can handle.”

“An’ the bullets!” Ailse said, instantly. “Cold Iron, Silver, and Blessed Lead.”

He raised his eyebrow again, and Ailse blushed. “I am an Elemental Master,” he reminded her. “I think I can manage. Even in so seemingly hardheaded and ordinary a city as Blackpool.”

It took relatively little effort to get the Silver and Cold Iron bullets. It was the Blessed Lead that proved to be the sticking point. There were not many churches, even in wicked Blackpool, that were willing to part with a bit of their lead roofing material when someone looking like Jonathon turned up and asked for it. Three times he tried, under various pretenses, and three times he was turned away with varying degrees of suspicion and hostility. And there was no helpful padre, well versed in the ways of Elemental mages, anywhere within the city limits.

He’d have used Ailse’s bullets, except that he had already determined that Ninette could not possibly shoot the monster pistol that Ailse wielded with such dexterity. Her attempts at dry-firing the gun would have put bullets into the sky or the ground at her feet, but never in an assailant. And besides, as the afternoon wore on, he became more determined that he would solve this difficulty. He had the gunsmith who would help them choose a weapon for Ninette and was willing to cast him bullets of the size needed in whatever material he chose to present. While not a mage himself, he knew mages, and ghost-hunters, and a variety of arcane folk; odd requests like this were routine for him. All he needed was the Blessed Lead.

Finally at wits end, he resorted to chicanery. He found a church with a roof badly in need of repair, hired an urchin to shinny up a drainpipe and steal him some, then salved his conscience with a generous donation in the “Repair Fund” box.

By then it was time to rush back to the theater for the evening performance, something which, in the light of what else was going on, had a distinct edge of unreality to it.

He found himself in the wings during Ninette’s turns, and not at all by accident. He watched her closely in the light of his new information, but he could find nothing whatsoever lacking in her skill. If anything, she was better now than she had been when she first started dancing here. That was, undoubtedly, partly practice. But there was something else, too. There was—a sense of joy in her dancing that had not been there before, a feeling that she was giving this performance to her audience, generously and unstintingly.

And the audience was giving back to her.

There was absolutely no doubt of this; if he could not actually see the energies, he could sense their effect on the energies of his own magics. It was not a parasitic relationship; it was a symbiotic one. The audience poured over her their pleasure, their appreciation, their support. She gave back to them happiness, exuberance, joy. It was, perhaps, the most remarkable thing he had ever seen on a stage.

There’s her magic, the cat said, from his feet, startling him. There’s dozens would give their souls for that sort of power.

“I can imagine,” he murmured. “If she chose . . . if she learns how to reach an entire hall, how to do this when she isn’t dancing—”

She could have the world at her feet. Or at least, London. She could fill a lecture hall on whatever subject she wanted, and get people to rush out and support it. She could probably even get elected to Parliament. It’s a dangerous power.

“Terrifying, when you think about it,” Jonathon said darkly.

But she’ll never use it that way, the cat countered firmly. I know my girl. None of that would make people happy.

Jonathon snorted. “Once she figures out that she can use this to get even better presents out of those fools that come backstage—”

She’s giving the presents back.

The cat’s words made him glance down incredulously. “Bosh!”

I’m telling you. Just you drop by and watch. She’s been giving the presents back, keeping only the flowers. See for yourself.

“But—why?” Jonathon managed.

’S’truth. I don’t care about her keeping the presents so long as she doesn’t end up in the bed of some blackguard—but she started handing ’em back about the same time as she discovered this magic of hers.

Jonathon shook his head. He wasn’t quite sure what to make of this bit of information. He turned and left the wings before she finished the dance, going back to his dressing room, shared with the patter-comic and the male half of the sentimental-ballad singers, and stared at his own reflection in the dressing-table mirror for a while.

Finally he shook himself out of his reverie and began carefully applying his makeup. Why should he care what she did or did not do with the presents those idiots pressed on her? Although he had to admit, given everything that was going on now, it was a wise decision on her part. He didn’t think, now that they were all on the alert, that anyone could slip anything magically dangerous past them and into Ninette’s hands, but you never knew. And gems and gold were the provenance of an Earth mage, too. If anyone could exploit such a thing, it would be an Earth mage.

Well if she had hit on that dangerous spot for a potential breech in their defenses, good for her.

He ignored the fact that he felt like gloating. Or rather, he ignored it until the moment that it was appropriate for his evil stage-self to gloat and smirk over his captive. He didn’t quite realize how much he was enjoying himself until she whispered, as she was being locked into the cabinet, “If you cackle, I swear I will not be able to keep from laughing at you.”

After a single glance of outrage, he slammed the door shut with a bit more force than was strictly necessary, and locked it up. He wasn’t that bad, was he?

Yes, it turned out, he was. Nigel intercepted him on his way back to the dressing room. “Just a word. A bit less of the villainy, would you? That’s all right for the pantos, but if you do that too often here, they’ll start laughing and shouting, ‘Look behind you!”’

Chagrined, he savagely wiped his makeup off and headed for the stage door. Or at least, that was his intention.

But his feet had a mind of their own, and took him to the door of Ninette’s dressing room. As usual, it was thronged with Lotharios. As he had seen before, they slipped little velvet boxes into her hand or onto the dressing table.

But this time, he caught the by-play with a sense of astonishment, as Ailse collected each box and discreetly gave it back to the giver with a whispered, “Mademoiselle cannot possibly accept this.”

Only once did she make an exception to this. The giver was a little girl, who solemnly presented her with a tinsel ring she must have gotten out of a cracker. With equal solemnity, Ninette accepted it, put it on, admired it, and directed the attention of everyone else in the room to it. Nor did she put it aside when the child had been taken off to an overdue bedtime.

Jonathon slipped away before she could notice him.

16

NINA had her fool, and an excellent choice he was, too.

Terrance Kendal had the acute misfortune of having ambitions that far, far outstripped his abilities, and an ego to match. He had been the only child of a deliberately “invalid” mother who doted on him, and a distant father who worked himself to death, leaving Terrance and said mother just enough money for pretensions of gentility, but none of the substance, like the protagonists in a satirical story by Saki. He had been given airs, but no graces. If he’d had wit, he might have found a place as a hanger-on in the circles to which he aspired, but sadly for him he had none.

Terrance was sent away to school, but alas, it was not Eton or Harrow, or even a second-tier school, a fact which was to cause him embarrassment for the rest of his life. He was encouraged by his mother to believe he was a budding genius, and it came as an embittering experience for him to discover that no one else had this impression. He was large enough and coordinated enough that he was not bullied, but he was no one’s friend, either. He was good enough at sports to survive, but not good enough to prosper. He thought too highly of himself, and made no effort to hide the fact that he felt himself to be the social superior of the entire school. To his face, he was mockingly called “Your Lordship” and behind his back rather less flattering names. He left school as alone as he had arrived.

University proved as great a disappointment. His credentials were lackluster, his antecedents plebian, his wealth nonexistent, his personality composed of nothing but affectation. He managed to get into a college that housed members of the classes he thought he belonged in, and he immediately set to work proving himself a nuisance. He hung about trying to get himself invited to parties, and when he could not, whenever the chance arose, he invited himself. He tried to drink, and he hadn’t the head for it; tried to gamble and hadn’t the wealth. He couldn’t afford a horse or a motorcar, and the only possibly route to the affections of those to whose ranks he longed to aspire, that is, the road of sport, was a closed book to him. He played neither cricket nor football well enough to make the teams, and he could not even pull a decent oar. The true wealthy and titled students were unimpressed with his scribblings and poetry; those who had the wit and learning recognized it for the pathetic dross it was, and the rest laughed to scorn the notion that a “real man” could find any interest in such nonsense when there were things to shoot and things to ride, things to play and things to cheer on, things to acquire and things to display.

Thus disappointed, Terrance returned to the maternal bosom in Blackpool to sulk on what he increasingly viewed as a “pittance.”

He had never felt affection for anyone, not even his adoring mother. His love-sonnets were as flat as uncorked champagne. So when Nina began her work on him, it was to persuade him not that he was violently in love with the dancer, but that she was violently in love with him.

Nina began her campaign with excellent box-seat tickets to the performance, and although under any other circumstance he would have scorned such entertainment as “too common,” this time he was persuaded. Partly because the tickets were sent, ostensibly, as a belated birthday gift from one of the few Cambridge men who had not utterly scorned him, and partly because of a rumor—entirely untrue—that the hall was going to be graced that night with the presence of the Crown Prince.

So he went, and seated in the next box, Nina went to work. She took care to work her magic in a very subtle manner. He was one of those sorts that could not go to a performance of any kind without nibbling and drinking throughout it, and before his (fashionably late) arrival, she had gotten into his private box and carefully laid out a little buffet in miniature for his pleasure, all of it bearing the magic she intended to become a part of him.

The magic she wove was compounded of half lust and half hallucination. It was easy enough to incite the lust; the hallucination was subtle. Terrance was made to believe that the dancer spent the greater part of her performances looking at him, winking at him, smiling at him, gazing coyly at him. By the time the evening was over, Terrance had more than half convinced himself that the dancer would be his in a moment, if he but raised his little finger and beckoned to her. He congratulated himself on his conquest, smugly. Not that he would have anything to do with so common a creature as a music-hall dancer of course but this was not a real music hall dancer, this was a ballerina, and a Russian to boot. So it was all right. Her devotion was acceptable; in fact, he considered that it was his due.

By the end of the performance he was basking in the imagined attention he was getting, and traveled home-wards in a taxi in a state of self-congratulatory satisfaction. Of course, he did not deign to join the crowd attempting access to the dancer’s dressing-room; not only was he above that sort of plebian behavior, he had every expectation that the lady would come to him, and not the other way around. Like Charles the Second, he would summon; like Nell Gwynne, she would answer, overawed with the honor he bestowed upon her. If he chose to summon, that is. He had to be sure she was worthy of his attention.

And so for several nights running, he made his observations. He took care never to take the same box twice, but always she somehow intuited where he was, and bestowed her flirtations on him. His mother complained mildly after the second week of this, of the expense of box seats every night, and could he at least share the box and the expense with some chums? He stared at her in fury; then the next day, in a rage, he went to the safe-deposit box at the bank, substituted her rather fine pearls for imitations, and sold the former. Thereafter there seemed to be no expense, so his mother’s nagging tongue was stilled. He told himself this was his right as the head of the household. Besides, they were to come to him eventually, and what need had she for pearls anyway? She hadn’t gone out in decades, except to funerals, and to those she properly wore jet, not pearls.

But that awoke him to a possible difficulty. He lived at home, with his mother; he could not bring a mistress there!

But a trifle of research on the part of the hall-boy eased his mind. The dancer had a flat of her own, with an entrance both private and discreet. So there would be no difficulty, and thankfully, no expense. The most he would need to provide would be a pretty trinket now and again, and the safe deposit box contained many tokens belonging to his mother than he imagined would be suitable.

With all these things settled in his mind, he decided the moment had come for the summons. He wrote it on a small card that he directed the hall-boy to convey to the dancer at the theater one afternoon. Then he took himself to the establishment he had chosen for the first assignation, a restaurant considered both smart and discreet; suitable for a man of wealth and taste to meet his mistress—or one who he was about to make his mistress.

He timed his arrival to a nicety. It would not do for her to appear at a table littered with the evidence of a long wait. He calculated how long it would take the boy to reach the theater, how long before he could deliver the note, and then, because she would, of course, fly out with the greatest speed to answer his invitation, how long it would take her to reach the establishment. He arrived there about five minutes before he reckoned she would.

But of course he made sure to ask the headwaiter if she had possibly preceded him. Having determined to his satisfaction that she had not, he had himself seated in the intimate and secluded corner he had reserved, ordered a brandy, and sat back to wait.

After some fifteen minutes, he was concerned. At half an hour, he was irritated. As the hands of his watch told him an hour had elapsed, he began to grow angry.

By the time he left the place, nothing in his stomach but overpriced brandy, he was in a towering rage.

Exactly as Nina had desired.

“What is that?” Ninette asked Ailse, who had answered the tap at the door of the dressing room and come away with a single card in an envelope with nothing written on it. “I hope it is not another invitation to teach some poor child how to totter about on her toes. Monsieur Ciccolini already has as many pupils as he cares to take.”

For some reason, the wealthy of Blackpool seemed to think that she had so much time on her hands that she would be overjoyed to teach their children to dance. Not with an eye to going on the stage, of course! No, the doting mothers in question had more of a vague notion of a dainty little tot in a fairy dress, flitting about on the lawn to the strains of Mendelssohn for the entertainment and admiration of garden-party guests. The normal sort of display that one trotted out on these occasions was a daughter singing or playing, or more rarely, the dramatic rendition of “The Lady of Shallot.” A dancing daughter, provided she was not yet nubile, would be a novelty. And it seemed that every good entertaining mama in Blackpool had conceived of this same novelty all at once. Ninette must come and teach the ball dance, or the ribbon dance, the hoop dance or the skirt dance.

Fortunately, Ninette had a stock answer for this. Ailse had written it up on cards, so it was ready-made and at hand, and needed only to have name and address added.

Dear (blank): I cannot tell you how honored I am by your invitation to teach your offspring. Alas, I fear your confidence in my ability is not matched by my competence as a teacher. I am, myself, still very much a pupil. However, I commend to your attention my own teacher, Monsieur Ciccolini, who has given me the skills you so admire. Sincerely, Nina Tchereslavsky.

Ciccolini now filled as many hours as he cared to, teaching these poor things the discipline of the ballet. Of course, it would do them a world of good. Knowing they would never get beyond flitting around a garden in a fairy dress, Monsieur Ciccolini did not put them into pointe shoes or stretch the little muscles to the aching point. Instead, he gave them exercises that would make them graceful, taught them the demi-pointe steps of the “white ballets” before toe-work became commonplace, and choreographed charming little diversions that would at least not cause garden-party guests to have to stifle yawns.

And he did so with great and abiding patience, patience that was justified by the very high fees he was charging. Nina found it all rather amusing. These women saw nothing wrong with expecting her to do the same thing for free, but Monsieur Ciccolini could command a handsome fee for his labor.

Then again, Monsieur Ciccolini did not stand to profit as highly as she did from the upcoming grand production, Escape from the Harem. There was no doubt in Nina’s mind that she was going to be worth every farthing, but the total still dazzled.

“’Tis not another one of those,” Ailse replied, her brow furrowed with puzzlement. “Canna make out what, exactly, this laddie wants . . . looks like he is inviting ye t’ tea, nobbut he writes like he’s invitin’ ye t’ Royal Audience.”

Ninette took it from her, read it through, and began to laugh. “Oh my!” she chuckled. “That is exactly what it is. Have you ever heard of this fellow?” she asked, handing the card back to Ailse.

The maid shook her head. “What with all the cards and flowers and all, a body would think ye knew every name that wasna already in the papers,” she said dubiously.

“Exactly.” Ninette chuckled. “This is nobody, but he thinks very highly of himself. I expect that this is not tea he is inviting me to. I think this is an audition to have the honor of being his mistress. And if I pass, he will permit me if you will—”

Ailse went scarlet, although Ninette could not tell if it was from outrage, amusement, embarrassment, or a combination of all three. Although she suspected the latter.

“Now,” Ninette continued thoughtfully, “it might barely be possible that this is someone of great importance masquerading behind an unknown name.”

“What?” Ailse gasped. “The Prince? Prince Edward? But—”

“But I think it highly unlikely.” Ninette serenely counted off the reasons on her fingers. “First, the royal yacht is nowhere to be seen, nor the royal car on the rails here. Second, Prince Edward was reported by the papers yesterday to be in Monte Carlo. Thirdly, should the prince seek to hide behind an unknown name it would be the name of one of his gentlemen, and he would not send a plain-jacketed manservant with dusty shoes to deliver the note. And what is more, anyone he sent would stay for an answer, because as royalty knows, the answer might be ‘no,’ and it would not do for a Prince to be loitering even in a private room of a common chophouse.”

Ailse breathed a sigh, half of relief, half of regret.

“And I do not intend to answer the invitation of someone who clearly regards himself as no less than royalty who is, in fact not royalty.” She turned to the dressing room mirror. “Particularly not when we have so much work to do. If this man had even the faintest idea of what my life is like, he would issue an invitation for a late supper, after the performance, not an afternoon tea. Toss it away, Ailse.”

“We are shooting today, Mademoiselle,” Ailse said firmly.

“I know. Nigel is sending his automobile in an hour. And in the meanwhile, I intend to practice the solo from Giselle.” Monsieur Ciccolini had the choreography from that ballet memorized so well that he probably could have taught it had he been blinded, and although Ninette was hardly performing the classical repertoire anymore, she intended to continue to learn it. One never knew. Perhaps, one day, if only to indulge her, Nigel would stage a real ballet. She felt faintly guilty about claiming to be a ballerina, and yet never actually doing real ballet.

With Ailse keeping careful track of time, she had just enough time to leave the studio garbed in a most peculiar costume and jump into the back of the auto before the driver became impatient.

“Hoy!” Jonathon said, looking at her in astonishment. “I thought I was taking Mademoiselle Ninette to shoot!”

“So you are,” Ninette replied, pushing back the boy’s cap on her head. “And this is a much more practical costume for shooting than any gown I own.”

She had put her hair up in the ballerina’s bun, and clapped a tweed cap, purchased from a shop that sold boy’s hats, over the top of it. She wore a shirt, rather than a blouse, of very severe cut; this had been purchased from a shop that sold the sort of things that ladies who typed wore to their offices. There were no lace cuffs or frou-frous to get in the way. On her legs, Ninette wore the contraption known as a “bloomer skirt”; admittedly, she could have gotten the sort of divided skirt some ladies wore to ride or play tennis in, but from what she understood, there was going to be a great deal of clambering over rocks, and she wanted her legs as free of encumbrance as she could manage. “I wish I could have gotten boy’s trousers or even knickers to fit me,” she said wistfully. “But on such short notice, it wasn’t possible.”

She was scarcely embarrassed, seeing as she had worn far, far less onstage for a very long time now. Jonathon’s lips quirked in a ghost of a smile.

“Allow me to congratulate you on your good sense, mademoiselle,” he said. “There are females who would have expected me to carry them to where we are going to go.”

Ninette sniffed scornfully. “Then you are accustomed to dealing with females who are fools,” she said. “Nigel said it would be a wild part of the coast; I took him at his word, and I dressed to suit. You and Ailse are doing me the favor of teaching me this. It would be sad if I were to play the fainting maiden now.”

Jonathon chuckled, then turned his attention to putting the automobile in motion and sending it down the street.

The auto trundled its way parallel to the ocean, passing the boardwalk, the beaches with their holiday families and bathing machines, all the little businesses that catered to the enterprise of sea-bathing and beach-picnicking. It was a rare day, without a cloud in the sky and without any prospect of rain. The famous electric lights that had made Blackpool a household name at the turn of the century were festooned everywhere. They passed the famous Tower, and Ninette made a private vow that when this was over, she was going to see all of these things she was missing. The Tower, the Winter Gardens, the boardwalk, the illuminations, the Opera House and all of the other theaters that Nigel competed with. The road narrowed and became more primitive, the ride a bit rougher as the macadam turned to gravel, and the beach on their left turned to rock flats.

Finally, at a place where the worn grass showed that other people had left vehicles, Jonathon turned the auto off the track and parked it, nose facing the sea. “Here we are,” he announced.

“So it seems. Why here?” Ninette asked.

“Chiefly because this is where a good many people already come to practice shooting,” Jonathon said. “The local folk know this, and stay well away to avoid the odd stray bullet by a beginning marksman. This is far enough away that the sound of gunshots will not excite any interest in the holiday makers, nor is there anything of interest here for the hiker or the sea-bather. We shall be quite alone.”

“Good!” Ninette applauded. “I should not like to be responsible for shooting someone’s ear off by accident.”

She hopped down out of the car without waiting for Jonathon’s aid, and walked as far as the edge of the grassy area. Looking down, she saw why the local folk came here to shoot. Nature had provided a kind of perfect target range; there was just enough of a drop-off down to a beach of pebbles and a mud-flat that it was unlikely stray shots would go anywhere other than into the earth or out to sea. The beach was not the sort to invite bathers, even though it was secluded. And the scramble down and back up again could only be attempted by the athletic.

Of course, all of them were athletic, and as she was completely unhindered by skirts, Ninette scampered down the crude path as nimbly as a monkey.

The end of the beach, most often used for targets, was a stack of flat-topped boulders, thoroughly pock-marked and decorated with splashes of lead. Glass shards and pottery fragments showed what figured most often as the targets, although three or four bullet-ridden, rusted tin cans showed that there were others who preferred targets that did not break when your bullets struck them.

Jonathon had come prepared with a sort of easel and some sturdy pasteboards with the crude outline of a man on them. These he proceeded to set up without a word, then came to join the two women at the opposite end of the “shooting gallery.”

He carefully explained the peculiarities of this pistol, then left it up to Ailse to get down to the particulars. Since there was no further call on his services, he turned his attention and his mind back to the question of just who Ninette’s enemy might be.

Thus far, they’d had a singular lack of success in finding an Earth Master. The few that he or Nigel had found were all too old to come live in a theater in Blackpool, and even if they were so inclined, they couldn’t have borne the psychic stench of the city for very long.

He expected Ninette to be fearful, and she certainly screwed up her face and jumped the first few times that Ailse fired the gun. But then she stepped bravely up, took the pistol in steady hands, and patiently let Ailse position her and show her how to squeeze off shots.

They went wide of the mark, of course. That was what he had expected. But what he had not expected was how quickly she began to sight in on the target. By the time they were halfway through the box of cartridges, she was hitting the target more often than not. By the time the box was empty, she was confidently firing and hitting almost every time.

Jonathon was honestly astonished. “You’re certain you’ve never done anything like this before—” he ventured.

Ninette looked at him with a twist of her lips. “I think that if I had, I would surely remember,” she said wryly. “But recall what I am. Dancers must have very good control of their bodies. Well, stand up—”

He did so, wondering what on earth she could be thinking. She stood quite close to him for a moment, measuring him with her eyes. It was a very calculating look, and he couldn’t imagine what she was going to do. That she was about to do something, he had no doubt. He had seen that look in her eyes before.

She settled her feet in their stout little walking shoes a moment, and then, like lightning, she made a tremendous jump and high kick, higher than he had ever seen her make before. The sole of her foot flashed within a hair of his nose, and hit the brim of his hat, knocking it cleanly off his head.

He stared at her. She shrugged. “A cabaret trick,” she said calmly. “The can-can dancers and washerwomen at the Moulin Rouge do it all the time. Usually when the gentleman is drunk; the gentleman gets a look up her skirts and she keeps his hat until he ransoms it back. But be sure, if I had wanted to kick your nose and not the brim of your hat, I could have.”

He looked at her soberly, without anger. “Better still?” he suggested, “Aim for the chin. You could break a man’s neck that way. At the worst, you would knock him flat.”

She blinked. “Mais oui? That is something to remember, then.”

He licked his lips, considering. “Practice it,” he suggested. “It’s better than the pistol. We can’t explain away a bullet, we can explain away an unfortunate fall.”

She nodded, and for a moment, the sun seemed to fade. Then they all shook off the mood, and scrambled back up the rocks to the auto.

This time, Ninette sat up front with him as he drove back to the theater. “I am thinking you like me a little better now,” she said, over the noise of the motor.

“I was disposed to be very angry with you when you told us how you had lied to us,” Jonathon replied, after a long moment of thought.

“But?” she persisted.

He answered honestly, but reluctantly. “Well. You are a good dancer, a very good dancer. There is no doubt that you are very popular with the audiences. And there is also no doubt that you work as hard as any of us. I don’t think anyone gives a hang whether you’re Russian or Red Indian, the point is you give them good entertainment. But still, you lied to us . . . I don’t like being lied to.”

“Mais ouis. But . . .” She looked out the windscreen, her mouth in a small pout of melancholy. “Would any of you have listened to me, let me audition for you, if I had not come with this story, this lie?”

Jonathon grimaced. “To be honest, no.”

“Then I should have starved. Or jumped into the river. Or gone into many men’s beds.” The matter of fact way she said it made him flush uncomfortably. “I did not want to do any of these things. And actually, I think I really did not know I wanted so badly to dance, either, until the people began to pay attention to me.”

“It’s a drug,” he said quietly. “That admiration. It’s a drug like any other, as bad as absinthe. You want it. You can’t do without it. And once you’ve had it, you’d rather die than give it up. At least—” he added honestly “—it’s that way for some.”

“It could be for me, I think,” she admitted. “I am taking care, I hope. You understand me? I am trying not to believe that I am so wonderful. But I feel something, out there—”

He debated a moment. “It’s magic. You have a touch of it,” he told her, deciding to make a clean breast of it. “You’re not like me, or even Arthur—you’re more like Wolf. You’ll never have more than that touch of it, never work spells, but this much is yours. When you dance, when you give yourself to the audience, when you forget about everything and try to please them, you feed them. You make them happy. Your magic makes them forget that the tinsel isn’t gold, that the props and scenery are only painted canvas and wood. And when you feed them, they feed you. Don’t you always feel stronger and better when you come off stage?”

“Oui!” she exclaimed. “And I could not understand it! I never used to feel this way when I danced! I was exhausted! And then, after a while, here, I began to feel so full of energy when I came off the stage! Sometimes I need to settle and quiet myself, for otherwise I could not sleep! And you say this is my magic?”

He nodded. “It’s you feeding them, feeding them something to take their minds out of themselves for a little while, and then they feed you. It wouldn’t be enough to keep you going for hours and hours,” he warned. “But I think that all the dancing that Nigel has planned for you in his big production will ultimately be no problem for you.”

But with that, she laughed. “Poo! You have not seen a great ballet, then! The prima is onstage for almost all of it! Swan Lake, sacre bleu, nearly every scene! It would have been no problem without this magic . . .”

But then she smiled. “Still!” she added cheerfully, “With it, things will be very good indeed.”

But as he wound his way through the streets to the theater, something occurred to him. What if this was what her unknown enemy wanted, this rare “performance” magic?

The attacks, then, would not be so much directed at her, as they would be to take what she had away.

Well, it looked as if he had some research ahead of him. It was going to be a long night. But, he hoped, a fruitful one.

17

NINA had wound up her first distraction and let him go. Now for the second.

They would be looking for Earth Mages; her use of the homunculus betrayed her origin. Very well. She would give them some. Or at least, she would give them something that looked like an Earth Mage.

She chose her decoy candidates very, very carefully, for they had to appear to be Earth Mages of the vilest sort, right up until their protections were exploded. The more plausible they were, the better. She could, of course, find mortals that ardently desired the powers of an Earth Mage, and who had just enough of the Gift in them to counterfeit Mastery without ever having anything more than what she granted them. But firstly, that would be wasteful, and secondly, she knew from past experience that such people were dangerous. They got ambitions, and they thought they could take what she would not give them. Such, in fact, had been her original summoner. When mortals got ambitious, things got . . . messy. And while she was not at all averse to mess, she knew that in this case, it could betray her. So she would set up the unknowing as her decoys, in a way that could not be traced back to her.

Her first choice was a natural one: a particularly nasty brothel-keeper of the lowest and most brutish sort. His customers were the same, and as for his “wares,” well, they were in no condition to think about much of anything. His girls were all addicted to the drugs he gave them, most were Chinese, and he kept them in nasty little cells lining the corridors of his building on the water-front, cells a mere six feet by eight, with nothing more than a pallet and a blanket, and a rag or two for clothing. They plied their trade, ate, slept, were drugged, and eventually died in these little “cribs,” as they were called. For pure misery, his establishment had to be high on the list of those creating negative energies, and Nina, surprised by the amount she was able to make use of, made a note to try this particular method at some time in the future. But for now—all she needed was her decoy.

She set herself up in a dingy room in the building next door, wearing the form of one of her vagrants in order to rent it and its noisome contents for a week. There was no lock for the door; she was forced to make do with a chair wedged beneath the knob. She worked swiftly, and without a protective circle, but within shields. A Circle where none should be would only attract attention, and besides, there was not much in the Earth realms that would dare take her on now.

She tapped into the energies boiling out of the brothel next door; siphoned off a cornucopia of rage, hate, shame, lust, and pure despair, and used it to create some of the most powerful Earth-shields she had ever built. Carefully she placed them around both the brothel and the building of flats she was in now. This would further serve to confuse the matter; it would not be clear whether the “Mage” was to be found in the flats or in the brothel. When she was done, she was satisfied; the shields were like stone walls; if they had been the walls of a fortress, not even the guns of a naval warship would be able to break them with a single shot. She added a “tap” to keep those shields supplied from the never-ending stream of soul-sickening darkness. Anyone who saw shields that strong would assume that the Mage inside them was stronger still. Unfortunately for them, this was hardly the case. She left the shields permeable to herself alone until she left the building. Then she closed them even to herself; the perfectly ordinary, non-magical people who belonged there would have no difficulty in crossing, but any creature of magic would be stopped dead in its tracks. This, of course, now included her.

Now what would happen when those shields were broken by a concerted, unrelenting attack? Nina wasn’t entirely certain. Perhaps nothing. Or, perhaps the power would backlash on those who were supplying it. In that case, it would backlash on the girls; in their weakened mental states, that might drive them mad, or it might kill them. If the latter—well, that would be delicious. It would mean the oh-so-noble fellows guarding the imposter would be personally responsible for the deaths of up to two dozen girls who, at least in the sense of harming them, were innocents.

She walked away from that place with a grin on her face that made people who saw it cross to the other side of the street. Nina liked this plan so much that she decided to repeat it.

A few hours’ worth of walking in similarly unsavory neighborhoods netted her more of what she was looking for; by nightfall, she had found two more establishments in which to do the same. The first was a gin palace, the second, an opium den. In both, she was able to rent rooms in which to do her work, undisturbed, once she had purchased, respectively, two full bottles of “blue ruin” and a pipe and sticky ball of black-tar opium.

She used the gin palace first, pouring the poisonous stuff out of the window, then getting to work. It was a trifle more difficult to set up a “tap” here, since the people who were systematically destroying their health, their lives, and their brains with the stuff didn’t actually live there. But she got the notion of putting the “energy sinks” into the benches that they sat on, and that worked admirably.

The next day, it was the turn of the opium den; she mashed the drug into a crack in the floor where it was indistinguishable from all the other muck collected there. What had served her well in the gin palace served her equally well here; this time she put the “sinks” into the bunks that those who could not afford a room stretched out on to fume their brains into drifting, benumbed pleasure. This was trickier than the brothel or the gin palace. Unlike alcohol, the opium did not admit the mind to anger. No, the emotion she siphoned here was bleak despair. Beneath the drug, there was the fear of not being able to raise the money for the next debauch, there was self-loathing, and more often than not, the wish that this time, the drug would end the struggle for existence. Then, of course, there were the addicts that appeared without money, suffering the agonies of withdrawal from the drug, so desperate for it and in such pain that they would do anything at all to get it.

Anything.

She walked away from the opium den with a feeling of smug cleverness.

In order to return to her new home without exciting comment, it was necessary to make a few stops and changes of clothing, going from the poverty-stricken vagrant, to a lower-class workingman, to a simple servant, to a lady’s maid, and finally, to herself. The last two changes of clothing she had concealed in order to effect the change, one in the backyard shed of a nearby house, the second in the tiny carriage-house of her own set of flats. She walked straight in from there, as casually as if she had merely gone for a stroll for the sake of the sea air. As it happened, there was no one there to note her coming in, as there had been no one to note her leaving, but she had learned over the years that remaining undetected and unmolested required the careful management of such details.

Her maid let her in, and she ordered several of her favorite foods at random and ate and drank hugely. She was surfeited on the dark energies of misery, but for the last four days her body had been subsisting on dubious sausages, doubtful cockles and oysters, and suspicious eel pies, and it craved wholesome, toothsome food.

With body and “self” satisfied, she flung herself down on a settee and watched the plump, red-faced throng parade under her windows. It amused her no end to think how little these holiday-makers that flocked to Blackpool in the season were aware that brothels, opium dens, and gin palaces existed mere streets away from where they were strolling. These, she could never feed on. There was simply too little there. One part ignorance, three parts complaisance, five parts smug self-congratulation, and a touch of anxiety that one day it might all go smash . . . thin stuff, and bitter, and flimsy as the paper they wrote their letters home on to save on the postage.

No, they had no idea that this pink pleasure-palace of a city had a dark and rotten heart. They only saw the façade. But of course, only the middle class and upwards could afford to take a holiday at all, much less one in another city. The middle class preferred to keep these sordid things at a considerable distance. The middle class did not want to know about what lay underneath the surface of anything. And it particularly did not want to know about the impoverished and desperate. It might be persuaded to part with the odd penny or two at Christmas to supply Christmas cheer for the “deserving poor,” but on the whole, these were things it was better not to think about too carefully. The middle class liked their impoverished class to be in the newspapers, not underfoot, and particularly not underfoot when the middle class was bent on enjoying itself. Opium dens had their place in sensational literature, and one could get a delicious thrill when a lecturer thundered sternly about the evils of white slavery, but when one went on holiday, one preferred to think of the city one visited as an endless panorama of delights and ignore the cockroaches that would appear if one took down a panel of the pretty scenery.

“Fools,” Nina muttered, and turned away from the window.

Having constructed three of these decoys, Nina knew that her labors were not at an end. Oh my, no. The hunters might not be lured by something so obvious. She turned her mind to more subtle decoys; something that would serve exactly the same purpose as her blatant works, but would not trumpet its existence for anyone with the eyes to see it.

Even if they took the first bait, she actually didn’t think her targets would be fooled twice, but you never knew, and the hollow shields were in any event the easiest and fastest to create. They bought her time. Let the enemies waste their time stalking the premises, trying to determine who among all the vile inhabitants was the Mage, and then destroying the shields. While they were distracted, she would be stalking the dancer, and when she finally struck, they would never see her.

She brooded about what to do for three days, then worked out something that would serve. The next set of decoys was going to be a deception within a deception. Instead of creating obvious shields, she used the same principle of using the energies of despair to fuel the magic, only this time, it was to hide, rather than protect.

Once again, she stalked the streets of Blackpool, a nondescript ruffian, looking for the best places to use for her loci. After two days of testing the energies, looking for sustainable concentrations of despair, she found what she was looking for. A workhouse provided the first source, an orphanage the second.

The workhouse was fairly ordinary as such things went. People only came there because they had been wrecked on the reef of debt and financial ruin, and yet had some small hope that they could, with hard work, get themselves and their families out of it all. They quickly found, of course, that they could not; that the workhouse offered the barest of living on starvation rations, but the only place you could go from the workhouse was into the street, where there would be no food, no roof, and nowhere to go. Families were separated, men from women, children from parents. Despair there was in plenty, but it was the dull despair of those who had been pounded on the rocks of life until there was little spirit left in them.

The orphanage, however, was actually very difficult for her to give over to her intended plan, as it was such a huge generator of senseless death. Infants were swaddled and stacked like cordwood on beds in cheerless rooms, to remain in their increasingly soiled wrappers until the scheduled time for feeding and changing. Never were they allowed to move freely, and the thin skimmed milk they were fed was not enough to sustain the majority of them. They were so starved and dull they failed even to cry—this was pointed out to visitors as an example of how “good” they were.

They were not “good,” of course. They were dying, most of them. Pneumonia and flu, chicken pox and measles, whooping cough and diphtheria . . . these childhood ailments would carry off battalions of them at a time. The infant wards could go from full to empty in a matter of days. The death rate was nearly ninety percent.

Children too old to be swaddled were left tied to bed-steads with no toys and little or no exercise, and fed equally inferior food of more skimmed milk, gruel and bread. As soon as it was possible to put them to work, they were rented out to mill owners. Not one in four lived.

It was delicious. All those little lives, cut short so soon . . . every life fraught with unrealized potential. She determined then and there that she was going to begin looking for an orphanage to patronize once all this was sorted out. It would be delightfully ironic to be seen as the Lady Bountiful to the little orphans in public, while in private she battened and prospered on their deaths.

All that took less than a week to set up. And meanwhile she was carefully watching the progress of her toy, Terrance Kendal.

He had come away from the failed assignation in a rage, but rage cooled too quickly, especially in a bloodless thing like him. He had, in all of his life, never sustained anything like passion for very long. Passion required commitment to something other than one’s own self, because it required being focused on the object of passion, rather than one’s own self. She needed to engender more than rage, she needed him to tip over the edge of sanity into obsession. If she had been forced to wait for it to happen naturally, she might have been waiting long. However, she had a number of resources she could use to manipulate his mind.

To begin with, dreams.

Dreams were very useful. They existed outside of logic, outside of normal behavior, and cut straight into emotion and instinct. Mortals did and experienced things in dreams that they would never think of doing, much less actually do, when awake.

Now to give a human dreams was not as easy as it might seem. The ordinary sort of human, without any magic to speak of, was singularly resistant to the any touch of the arcane. The sheer power of his disbelief was astonishing to someone who had never come up against it; the inability to See the creatures of other planes and other realms only reinforced that. This disbelief created a wall between a human mind and anything that might try to force it via magic. What a Mage had to do in order to infiltrate a human’s mind—rather than just cracking it open, which was rather damaging and not at all subtle—was to find out just what it was he did believe in.

Fortunately, in the case of Terrance . . . he believed in God and the Church. Not, of course, the kind of honest and open-hearted belief that would also have protected him . . . no, indeed. He believed in the comfortable, dozing-in-the-pew sort of orthodoxy that promised him Heaven in return for the weekly offering and an occasional high tea for the clergy. He liked his clergymen modern—that is, a fellow who would talk to him about hunting and dogs and fishing, and not about uncomfortable things like the state of the poor and the exploitation of the mill-worker, or abstract things like morals and conscience. He certainly was not comfortable with those who took too close an interest in the state of his soul, but preferred those who reassured him without actually saying anything that his soul was in good repair and a place waited for him in Heaven—a Heaven populated by Cambridge men who would see his worth at a glance and give him the respect and deference he was simply was not getting here on earth. That this Heaven would also include plebeians who would fawn over his every word and beg to serve him went without saying.

So Nina put on one of her male guises and went to visit him dressed in the clerical dog collar.

She appeared round about tea-time, knowing that if a clergyman presented himself at that hour, it was a given that he would be invited to share it by Terrance’s mother.

And so it was. Within two minutes of sending in a card, “Father Martin” was seated on the best horsehair sofa across from Mrs. Kendal and a rather bored-looking Terrance, nibbling on a watercress sandwich and drinking rather insipid tea. It was such a typical example of a stolid, middle-class sitting room that it could have been photographed and framed as a representative of its kind. The wallpaper was mauve, with great cabbage-roses climbing all over it. The woodwork was dark and shining with wax. The furniture was covered in mauve plush; there were small tables crowded with “curiosities” everywhere a table could be put, hand-embroidered firescreens, hand-embroidered cushions, hand-embroidered footstools—evidently Mrs. Kendal had a great deal of time on her hands and from the paucity of books in the room, did not care to pass it in reading. Mrs. Kendal was one of those blonde women who looked like roses in their youth, but faded rather quickly, like a printed chintz that has been washed too many times. She was thin—Nina rather suspected she lived on tea and toast and the occasional bowl of broth—her hair was now an indeterminate shade between silver and straw, her eyes were the pale blue of a sky with a thin haze of high cloud over it, and her voice was scarcely louder than a whisper.

Even her gown seemed a faded black, rather than the uncompromising color of full mourning. If there had been any less of her, she would have been a ghost herself.

Nina had long experience of reading mortals, and with the thoughts of those she absorbed, and it was easy to categorize this woman. Very pretty, by nature docile, she had been taught that was all she had to be in order to achieve the acme of all possible goals, a Good Marriage. She had been schooled and catechized within an inch of her life in the most rigid form of religion, and frightened by a nanny and teachers and clergymen into a petrified fear of ever “being naughty.” And because of this, she made a modest social success of herself. Her looks eclipsed her timidity, and her fear of practically everything was interpreted as shyness and an attractive modesty. She went where she was led, did what she was told, probably responded to her suitor’s proposal of marriage with “All right.” Once married, she was bullied by husband, parents, siblings, teachers, and son, and probably by her own servants.

She was as afraid of a social faux pas as she was of a sin, and to feel anything at all strongly, to break the surface serenity of the household, was the worst of all social faux pas. Every household book, every tome on proper wifely duties, preached this. This was at least partly where Terrance got his own cold-bloodedness; she had never had a passion in her life, or at least, she had never dared to allow herself to feel one. And life escaped her because she had never dared to grasp any of it; not youth, not joy, not love or romance. The only thing she had felt strongly enough about to try to hold it was her son, and she clung to him like a strangling vine, which made him all the more determined to shove her aside. This, of course, she refused to see. In her world of sentimental ballads and mottoes, the few tomes of what passed for fiction that she got from the lending library, this was how it was. Terrance was her “darling boy” who must, of course, be devoted to his invalid mother. He would never do anything to upset her. She had, after all, devoted her life to him, delicate as she was. She had no idea that every time she spoke those words, she increased his distaste for her company.

This was not helped by her pathetic conversation; the small gossip of the ladies of her charity-sewing group, timidly ventured opinions on the state of the world that she immediately discarded if Terrance frowned, complaints about all the “foreigners” in Blackpool, tales of woe about the servants.

As Nina listened to her nervous chatter, she thought to herself that there must be hundreds of women like her in Blackpool alone, and that they would be absurdly easy to exploit and devour. A little kindness, a bit of attention, and the right word at the right time would turn women like her into devoted slaves, who would passionately defend their chosen idol against anyone that criticized him or even failed to worship at his altar. It would have to be a man that attracted their devotion, of course. That sort of interest in another woman was “unhealthy” and highly suspicious, for no real woman could be so strong as to deserve the slavish devotion of others of her sex.

Like the orphanage, Nina filed that away in the back of her mind as another rich source of sustenance. The disadvantage would be that she would have to be a clergyman, of course.

But a few complaints about the indifference of Mrs. Kendal’s doctors made her revise that. A doctor . . . that had a number of advantages. A doctor with a new scheme for invalid women—something pleasant, rather than extreme, like vegetarianism, or cold water baths, or cereal flakes for every meal. Something involving a great deal of tea. And sweets. And perhaps opium-laced cordials . . .

But for right now, her attention was on Terrance. With patience and skill, she insinuated into Mrs. Kendal’s mind the idea that “the men” had important things to talk about, things that she was neither clever enough to understand, nor worldly enough to bear. Yet at the same time, Nina managed to insinuate that Father Martin did not feel these things, though her son might; Father Martin only feared that these matters were too weighty for a creature as delicate as she, and actually considered her to be the wisest and most gracious of women.

So, when it was clear that there would be no more afternoon visitors for tea, Mrs. Kendal pled her fragile health and left them alone. That was when Father Martin heaved a sigh, and leaned forward towards Terrance in a confidential manner, his expression turning earnest and grave.

“I would not for all the world have wanted your dear mother to hear this,” “he” said quietly, “But I must ask you something, man to man. What do you know of that dancing woman, the Russian? The one all the papers had stories about—the one in that shipwreck. You know of whom I am speaking, I know.”

“Nina Tchereslavsky,” Terrance said automatically, flushing. “Nothing much, I’ve seen her act at the music hall a few times. I read the stories in the papers. She’s accounted to be a handsome enough woman, I suppose, but certainly—really, Father Martin, she is a dancer in a music-hall who shows her limbs to anyone with tuppance, when it all comes down to it. Our paths are scarcely likely to cross, and if they did, I should hope she would know her place. Why?”

Father Martin heaved a great sigh. “Because, Mr. Kendal, the woman is a Jezebel, and I have reason to believe she is interested in you.”

Terrance’s eyes lit up, and his brow grew moist, but he probably thought he had schooled his features into indifference. He shrugged. “Me? I don’t believe I have been to the music-hall more than twice or thrice in my lifetime. Whatever do you mean?”

He did not ask what a less self-centered man would have asked, which was “How do you know that?” He did not ask what a cleverer man would have asked, which was “Why should someone like that be interested in a man who has never so much as sent his card backstage?” And he did not ask what practically anyone else would have asked, which was “What business is it of yours?” He did not ask these things because he was under the impression that the comings and goings and doings of Terrance Kendal were naturally the interest of all the world. He had a fine appreciation of himself, and took it for granted that everyone else should. If anything, he took this as the signal that the world was finally paying him the sort of attention that it should.

Father Martin made a tsking sound. “I make it my business to keep an eye on the creature, since she ruined a good young man of my parish. I have learned her sordid history on the Continent.”

Terrance made a kind of shrug that said, without words, “Well! The Continent! What would you expect?”

Father Martin nodded at the shrug. “You would think that someone as fairy-like as she would have a kind heart, a sweet nature, but no. She is steeped in black evil.”

Terrance laughed, a bit uncomfortably, and wiped his brow with his handkerchief. “Oh, come now, padre, I think that is coming a bit strong for what must be the paltry sins of a young lady no better than she should be.”

“Oh no. I use the phrase with full knowledge,” Father Martin assured him. “She makes it her business to find good young men of fine breeding, like yourself. She smiles at them from the stage, lures them into coming to her dressing-room, first in the crowd, and then alone. She makes them fall in love with her, she exploits them for every blessed penny they have, and when they have exhausted their resources and are one step away from the workhouse, she casts them off.”

“Oh surely not—” Terrance replied, looking guilty and sweating more heavily.

“I have the proof,” “Father Martin replied. “She has left a trail of tragedy behind her from Russia to Blackpool; madness, suicide, poverty. I attend her every performance now, and I noted her interest in you. I came to warn you. Shun her! She will devour any young man that comes into contact with her as the spider devours a fly.”

To Terrance’s fascinated ears, Nina poured out a wealth of tales of “the dancing Jezebel.” The more she told him, the more his anger grew, especially as she waxed eloquent on the material possessions the dancer had seduced out of her suitors. He said nothing, but she read him like a book. Now he knew why she had never answered his note! Somehow she had discovered that he was not the possessor of such wealth as she required, and had spurned his advances. She deemed him not worthy of her attention, the hussy! The brazen slut!

When Nina was certain that the fish had taken the bait and the hook was well and truly set, she took her leave. She had what she needed; the entrée into his mind.

Now for the dreams.

She left Terrance with his rage newly roused. He would go to bed tonight in a fever of indignation made stronger by the fact that he had no one to speak to about this. If he’d had a friend, they could have commiserated over brandy in the library, or even over a pint at the pub . . . but he had no one, and as a result, he would stew over this and fall asleep after tossing and turning for at least an hour.

Nina had come away with something from that house: Terrance’s handkerchief, which he had patted across his flushing brow and left on the table. Now she had the link to him she needed, as well as the way into his mind.

So she waited until well after midnight, and then set up her preparations; small ones, so as not to cause any great ripples in the currents of magic. Just the handkerchief, a mirror, and herself, full to repletion of power siphoned from another round of vagrants. As before, she worked without shields or containment circles, putting out no more ripples to the currents of power than some serving-maid trying inexpertly to create a love-charm. In fact, that was the genesis of this spell, an Earth-magic love-charm.

She stared into the mirror, holding the handkerchief, and sent a tendril of magic across the city from herself to Terrance. When she saw his image in the mirror, sleeping fitfully in his stuffy bedroom, she knew she had him.

With a smile of satisfaction, she began weaving her dreams, sending them into his sleeping mind. Image piled upon fevered image, all of them reaching deep into his mind, past all of the conventions, the manners, the morals and into the deepest, most primitive parts of his mind.

In them, the dancer featured, tantalizing, tempting, seductive. The dream-Nina did more than seem to smile at him from the stage; she beckoned, winked, quirked an eyebrow. This time, Terrance went backstage, where the dancer, no more than half clothed, whispered promises, and allowed him certain liberties.

She did not go too far into the realms of sex, because she was quite sure Terrance was still a virgin. But she certainly made the dream-Nina exercise all of her wiles on the dream-Terrance—in his dreams, he grew heated, restless, and aroused. Yet the dream-Nina never got beyond promises and poses, while the dream-Terrance sweated and lusted.

And then, the rejection. And worse, the laughter.

The rejection took place at a grand party. Dream-Terrance was treated with contempt and denied entrance to a gathering to which he had an invitation. The invitation said “fancy dress” and yet everyone else was in evening dress, further increasing his humiliation. To hide his discomfiture, he kept his domino-mask on. He pushed past the servants at the entrance, who turned up their noses at him, to find Nina in a ballroom, surrounded by attentive males. They were all laughing uproariously about something. As he neared them, all too conscious of his inappropriate garments, the stares of the other party-goers, he overheard something. His name, followed by a roar of laughter.

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

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

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

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

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

18

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bollocks! the Brownie exclaimed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He pondered what he should do to fill his time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And it was equally important for the good gentlemen to realize that their womenfolk had the potential to be even more dangerous than most of them imagined in their worst nightmares. They were all the more dangerous because they weren’t taken seriously.

“Hell hath no fury,” indeed.

He realized with a start that the song-and-dance turn was over, and the dumb-show comic was running through his paces. The man himself was affable enough, but Jonathon didn’t much care for that style of comedy. Shoving his hands into his trouser pockets, he went off to the stage door, thinking vaguely of some fresh air.

There was an odd sort of fellow, lurking there. Not the sort one found at a stage door; desperately middle-class and trying not to look it. Cambridge tie, but one of the more obscure new colleges; one of those that, the fellows at Trinity would say, looking down their long noses, “Oh, they’re open to anybody.” As if that were a sort of veiled insult. Egalitarian, they were not. Jonathon, who had, in fact, gone to Trinity, and could, if he chose, hold his own with the best and worst of the blue-bloods, found himself both exasperated and in agreement with the attitude.

Because often enough the “anybody” was someone like this chap, who had not gotten a good education because he hadn’t gone to Cambridge to get one. He’d gone to get affectations, and social connections, and to collect reflected glory because for whatever reason, he failed to produce any himself.

“Hoi,” he said, as the fellow mopped his face with a handkerchief, “anything I can help you with?”

The fellow started, and turned piggy eyes on him. “Ah, er, not really,” he said, turning the good and useful word into “rahlly” as he aped the upper-class drawl. “Just curious, don’cha know? Stage door, is this?”

Jonathon knew very well that no one outside the company would recognize him for the sinister magician of his act, so he slouched a bit and leaned up against the wall. “ ’Tis,” he said, hands deep into his pockets, as he felt for his matches. “This here’s a musical variety hall. Very posh, popular with the toffs.”

The stage-door porter, who guarded the door like a mastiff, looked as if he was going to laugh at Jonathon’s “act.”

“So,” Jonathon continued, guessing shrewdly what had brought the man here. “I ourta warn you, there’s no messin’ about with our star-ladies, if that’s what o-casioned you to be here. In-vee-tation only, that’s the word. We don’t allow no loiterin’ about in the halls, in ’opes of getting into the dressing room, neither. This is a respectable house. You go on down t’ Shipley’s, if that’s your game.”

The fellow perspired more. “No! No!” he stammered. “Just passing by! Just curious! No harm meant!”

And with that, he fled the scene.

The porter looked after him, mouth a little open in surprise. “Wot th’ hell was he on about?” the man finally gasped.

Jonathon shook his head. “Probably thinking he’d wait until one of the girl-acts came out, and see what he could get. I can’t think of any other reason for someone like him to turn up here. His sort generally don’t take holidays at Blackpool, and they don’t go wandering inquisitively down alleyways to see what’s at the back of the buildings. He knew what this was, and he had something planned when he got here.”

The porter turned red-face. “A masher!” he said wrathfully. “Bloody ’ell! If he cooms here agin, I’ll send ’im packin’, see if I don’t!”

Jonathon chuckled. “You might just have a word with the Reicher brothers instead,” he suggested, naming the “strong-man” act that used their two sisters as their “props.” It made for a very interesting and surprisingly graceful act, actually. The young ladies took beautiful poses, poised on tiptoe in the palm of one brother’s hand. Then they would collapse bonelessly into his arms to be tossed to the other like a ball. “You might let it be known that the fellow was asking after their sisters.”

The porter looked at him sideways, then broke out into an enormous grin.

Jonathon strolled away, whistling.

Nigel had not mentioned that the Water Master in question was one of the youngest Masters in the country. It usually took an Elemental Master decades to come into his full power; Alan Grainger had done so before his twenty-first birthday.

Now, partly that was because Alan had applied himself to the study of his Element and its magic with the devotion of any artist to the art that consumes him, whether that be music, painting, or the crafting of words. Part of that was because he came early into his power, calling and playing with Undines before he could actually talk, swimming before he could walk. And part of that was to his teachers’ credit; his parents were great Water Masters in their own right, and two of the best teachers Nigel had ever heard of.

Alan was the rarest sort of bird there was; raised by kind, clever people, he was kind and clever himself. Having seen that there were powers he would never command, he was modest. The pliant nature of water was his; flowing around obstacles whenever possible, but implacable in force when there was no other way.

He was also astonishingly good looking. Had he not been so modest, Nigel often thought, he could have made a fortune on the stage. But as self-effacing as he was, nothing would induce him to, as he would say, “make a guy of himself in public.”

It was a very good thing that he was clever, but not brilliantly so. He did modestly well in school, then at university. Then again, he didn’t need to be a brilliant scholar. His family owned a fine whiskey distillery in Scotland. He would, in due course, run it. He enjoyed the work, understood it, and would be happy in it, and his studies in history were something he had undertaken because he enjoyed history, not because he expected to have to make a living as a teacher or a scholar.

It was the “astonishingly good-looking” part that caused Nigel the most amusement. He expected that Ninette would find him attractive. He also expected that something would then occur with regards to Jonathon. Either he would take the same interest as any friend would—and if he had any sense, and the attraction was mutual, he would urge Ninette to pursue that attraction—or he would react with jealousy. In either case, this would be good for Jonathon. All this restless vacillation was distracting everyone at a time when they needed to be anything but distracted.

As for the little dancer, well, there was no telling what the girl would do—except that Nigel was fairly certain she wasn’t the sort to deliberately break a fellow’s heart and lead him on. Plus, she was French, and French women, in his experience—if they were the good-hearted sort—were honest in their affaires de couer. Mind, he didn’t think that she actually knew what she wanted yet. She had plenty of life experience in seeing amour as a business transaction, but was pretty heart-whole in that department herself.

Women tended to be fascinated by Jonathon, the wretched dog. It was the stage persona partially. Women were attracted to dangerous men, and even though Jonathon was no more dangerous than any other confirmed bachelor, and rather less dangerous than confirmed womanizers, he appeared dangerous. Partly it was the challenge; here was a personable man, well-educated, well-spoken, at the top of his trade, who could not possibly care less about women. Several of his assistants had, over the years, fallen into an infatuation with him. Always he revealed something to them that made them decide that there were better prospects elsewhere.

On the other hand, he’d been treating Ninette in a way he had never treated another woman before. He gave her more respect than any Nigel had seen with him before. Alan’s mere presence might wake him up to the fact that here was a rival that could compete with him on his own ground.

If there was a fault that this paragon had, it was that Alan was, well, mild. He never became passionate about much of anything. That might have been his youth, but Nigel suspected it was his nature. This was no bad thing in a Water Master, though Nigel sincerely hoped that one day he would find something he cared deeply about, be it a cause or another person. Nevertheless, this was what they needed right now. Alan would not get upset or agitated; he would simply apply his mind to the problem at hand and keep at it until they had solved it.

Furthermore, Alan had the luxury of being able to devote his entire mind to the problem. He did not have tricks to work out, choreography to create, dances and acts to practice, a theater to run, or an orchestra to keep under control.

Last of all, he had the advantage of coming to it with a fresh set of eyes and thoughts.

A tap at Nigel’s office door caused him to look up and smile broadly. “Alan, my boy, good to see you!” There was the young man himself: lean and fit, a good six feet tall. He had a chiseled face with handsome, angular features, frank blue eyes, and hair just a little untidy.

“Sir, if I may interrupt your work—” Alan began in that Scots burr tamed and softened by his terms at university.

“None of that,” Nigel interrupted. “There will be no ‘sirring’ here. You are our peer in power and it is high time you got used to thinking that way.”

The young man’s mild blue eyes lit a little, and he smiled. “Very well, Nigel. ’Tis true enough my people at home treat me in that way, but I never expect it outside our walls. My uncle said only that you had a rather nasty problem, and a dangerous one. What can I do to help you?”

“Close the door, then come sit down; this will take some explaining.”

As Nigel laid out the situation that faced them, he noted with approval that Alan was actually paying close attention; he interrupted from time to time, and asked Nigel to explain some things further.

Finally Alan sat back in his chair and absently swept his sandy brown hair off his forehead with his thumb, then rubbed his eyebrow a moment. “This is a puzzler,” he admitted. “You’re all right, though, a good place to start would be to hunt for places where our Elements are excluded, and I have just the tools for that particular task.”

“I was hoping you’d say that,” Nigel said with relief.

“Just one more question, and this one is personal, so you can tell me I’m an impertinent brat if you like and that I should keep my nose out of your business.” Alan paused a moment, but on getting no reaction from Nigel, went on. “Why are you spending all this time and effort to protect this girl? She’s nothing to you, and from what you’ve been telling me, she has scarcely enough magic to qualify as such. She lied to you from the beginning, so why are you repaying deception with trust and protection? I tell you now, my uncle would likely have turned her out the moment she revealed her falsehoods.”

“Good questions.” Nigel had been prepared for something of the sort. “For one thing, we like Mademoiselle Dupond. She might have begun with a lie, but other than her wild tale of how she arrived on these shores, she has been completely honest and above-board with us. She says that this was all the idea of the cat, the cat says the same, and I for one believe them. It’s not as if she were a Princess Caraboo, Alan. The imposture harms no one so far as I can tell, and she is a very fine dancer. You’ll see that for yourself. She’s thrown herself whole-heartedly into this company, and stepped into the breech when we lost a few acts earlier in the season. That’s one reason. For another reason, she is a legacy.”

Alan nodded at that. A “legacy” was the offspring or spouse of an Elemental Master, especially if they had been left without that magician for whatever reason. The other Masters—at least those in the circles that Nigel traveled in—regarded such people as the particular responsibility of all other Masters. This was doubly so if those left behind had no magic of their own. Granted, few Masters had any sort of feuds going that would extend to the next generation—yet such a thing had been known to happen.

“Point taken,” Alan agreed. But Nigel was not yet finished.

“Last of all, I will admit to you that I have not only liking for her, I have a very solid pecuniary interest in her. She has talent. She is probably not as good a dancer as the greatest of our time, but she is a fine performer, and she knows how to charm an audience. Well! Heaven knows Loie Fuller was no kind of dancer, either, and like Loie Fuller, our Ninette gives every bit of value with every atom of talent she has. And she works hard; performers are rather lazy dogs, in my experience—this girl is not. I expect to build many shows with her as the star turn, and I expect she will be grateful enough to remain here in Blackpool, take what I can give her and not what other, more wealthy impresarios will offer.” He nodded at Alan’s uplifted eyebrow. “Oh yes, I readily admit to you that I am prepared to exploit her as far as she will let me.”

Alan smiled crookedly. “You mean you will exploit her as far as your own good conscience and her good sense will allow. But I can understand a motive like that, I am a Scot, after all. Very well then, I am prepared to accept her as you have and give her the benefit of my abilities. Well! When can I meet the rest of our little group?”

There was a flutter of wings that made Alan start, and Wolf landed on the perch beside Nigel’s desk. “You can meet two of us now,” the parrot said, tilting his head over sideways. “So this is the Water Master. A child prodigy, I am told?”

“You should be familiar with that, Master Wolfgang,” Alan replied, recovering quickly. “Quite familiar, in fact.” The bird clicked his beak delightedly.

“So I am! Well, do not emulate me by dying too young. And here is Arthur, who hasn’t got the benefit of wings to whisk him through the backstage.”

Alan stood up and turned around as the conductor entered the room, and shook Arthur’s hand heartily. “A pleasure, and I wish this were under better circumstances,” Arthur said, taking a seat of his own.

Alan shook his head. “Our kind always seems to be meeting under unfortunate circumstances,” he said, sitting down again. “I met Nigel when he was assisting my uncle with a bad bit of business about five years ago.”

“In Scotland?” Arthur asked, and at Alan’s nod, continued, “Yes, he told me a bit about that. Very ugly doings. Someone should have done something about that old man long before he got to be a menace. It’s deuced easier to prevent a disaster than it is to clean up after one.”

“Well, we like our freedom and our privacy, north of the border, and we don’t care to meddle in a man’s business if he wants to make a hermit of himself,” Alan countered. “The worst that could be said of Auld Geordie was that he was a misanthropist and generally had a quarrel with anyone to cross his path, but up until that last, he had never done any soul any harm. We had rather leave our eccentrics alone; we’ve had more than enough of witch hunting in the bad old days. It’s only when the eccentric goes and calls up ancient evils because his neighbor’s a better fisherman than he that we feel we need to do something about him, d’ye ken?”

“Yes, but the general populace saw the damned thing, and might well have gotten eaten by the damned thing if the Masters hadn’t acted,” Arthur protested. “As it is, Loch Ness is going to have a notoriety I much doubt the natives will care for!”

Nigel snorted; having been up there, he was well acquainted with the hard-headed nature of the natives, as well as their sly sense of humor and the ability to wring a penny out of stones. “Being Scots, they’ll find a way to exploit it and make money off the Sassenach,” he said. “Without a doubt.”

Alan smiled crookedly. “I expect so,” he replied comfortably. “When a Scotsman butchers a pig, he uses everything but the squeal. When presented with a monster, he’ll find a way to make someone pay to strain his eyes looking for it. I’d be very much surprised if this didn’t make the papers, or at least, the pages of the annals of fantastic occurrences. Once that happens, every landlady and publican will be re-chalking the order boards with new prices for those who come to gawk.” Then he laughed. “And every man jack of them will be lamenting that the little castle by the Loch is too ruined to rent out, and crying pity that you can’t charge for taking or painting pictures of it.”

Nigel turned to his friend. “Did you manage to pry Jonathon and Ninette away from the new trick?”

Arthur rolled his eyes. “Pry is nearly the right word. Something or other got misaligned or malfunctioned or something, and Ninette was trapped in it for a bit.”

Nigel frowned. “That couldn’t be—”

“No, it was not caused by magical interference,” Wolf assured him. “Jonathon and Arthur both made sure of that. It was nothing more sinister than the usual business with one of Jonathon’s contraptions. Evidently when he tested it, he hadn’t allowed for the weight of someone inside.”

Nigel shook his head. “Poor Ninette.”

Arthur shouted with laughter. “Poor Ninette! Poor Jonathon, rather! He had every stagehand and half the acts clustered around him while he tried to get her out, all of them offering advice. We had to restrain Bob Anderson from hacking the thing open with a fire-ax. I swear to you, a vein was throbbing on Jonathon’s temple by the time he got her out.”

“Ninette wasn’t helping, either,” Wolf said merrily.

“Well, it is a very good thing that Ninette is not afraid of the small places,” said the lady in question, causing all the men to rise out of politeness. “It was not tres amusant, but at least I was not feeling that my breath was being stolen.” She shook hands gravely with Alan before taking a seat. The cat promptly curled up at her feet and watched the newcomer with unblinking eyes. “I am Mademoiselle Dupond, as you know, and this is the cat, Thomas.”

They had only just gotten settled when the last of the party showed up. Nigel immediately felt sorry for him. Poor Jonathon, indeed! The magician’s collar was half off and unfastened, his shirt sleeves rolled up, and the knuckles of his right hand were scraped and a little bloody. “Damn genius mechanics to perdition!” he swore bitterly. “Give me an honest craftsman who isn’t too concerned with being clever!” He offered his right hand to Alan. “Forgive my shabby appearance, but I have been wrestling with someone else’s Muse.”

The Muse almost won, the cat remarked. I was beginning to think Bob was going to have to use that fire-ax after all.

“If I hadn’t got the catch to turn, I would have been the one using the ax,” Jonathon replied.

“All is well as ends well, n’est ce pas?” Ninette said calmly. “You have discovered the trick of it, and I was able to abuse you most amusingly and you could not touch me!”

Jonathon shook his fist at her and scowled fiercely and she laughed. “You frighten me not at all, magician! Where else would you find an assistant of my sort? But we should not waste this good young man’s time with our silliness,” she added. “Pardon. Now, you are the Water Master, yes? And good Nigel has told you of the plague I have brought upon his house?”

“I am and he has,” Alan nodded, and Ninette smiled warmly on him. “And I have some ideas I would like to share with you all—because this will need you all before we are through.”

“Then say on,” said Wolf, bobbing his head rapidly. “You will never have a more attentive audience.”

19

NINA reflected slyly that one of the many, many advantages of being what she was, and not a human dancer, was that she never had to trouble herself with the tedious work of classes and rehearsal if she didn’t care to. Of course, when she was dancing with a ballet company, she had to attend the company rehearsals. It would have looked odd had she not. She had not gotten as far as she had by slipping up in so careless a manner. She faithfully attended all company rehearsals and all rehearsals with her partners, but her mornings, given by mortal girls to round after round of endless classes and exercises and the solitary practice of tricky parts in the ballets then being performed, were entirely free. Ostensibly, as the great prima, she was taking very private lessons and doing her exercises in her own comfortable studio, well lit, well ventilated, warmed by good stoves in the winter and catching cooling breezes through opened windows in the summer. And of course, she always took care to have such a studio, with a gramophone in place of a pianist. All very grand. But of course, she never used it.

And now, thanks to the fact that she was not a frail little mortal, she was able to devote all of her time to the battle with the imposter, when a human would have been forced to continue those classes and lessons in order to stay at the top of her form.

But all Nina had to do in order to restore muscle strength, tone, and flexibility was to assume the form she had stored in her memory, of the ballet dancer she had taken when the girl was at the peak of her abilities and in the best of health. In fact, once, on a lark, when the season had concluded and other dancers were taking concert venues and tours, she had decided to truly indulge herself. After all, she had been between benefactors, and she had never yet tried the so-called “sin” of gluttony. So during the glorious month of June, she had spent the time getting enormously fat, eating every good thing she ever cared to try. And of course, when the company gathered together again, she was back instantly to her slim, trim self, with never a hint that she had ever so indulged. Gluttony, she thought, was overrated. These things were pleasant to eat, but they gave nothing like the rush of feeling and power when she absorbed a victim.

So it was without the need to dance or to attend rehearsals that Nina assumed the schedule she preferred; sleeping until noon, rising late, and going out to pursue her various tasks and needs by night.

She had chosen her dwelling with an eye to being able to get in and out without any of the neighbors noticing, especially at night. In a way, this was turning out to be one of the most comfortable times of her life, in all truth. She was able to hunt and consume whenever she wanted—which was nightly—without worrying about a protector catching her away from the luxurious flat he was keeping her in. Or worse, catching her at her feast. She had no performances to concern herself with, so she could hunt from sundown to sunup if she chose. She had the wherewithal for the luxuries she had grown fond of, and the leisure to enjoy them without rehearsals taking up her time, or protectors hovering over her. This was, in many ways, a glorious life of freedom that she was actually enjoying. It occurred to her more than once that the girl had actually done her a favor, waking her up, shaking her out of herself, reminding her of what she truly was. It was so easy to get immersed in a human life, to think of it as the be-all and end-all, rather than the means to an end. Sometimes she too was very foolish.

And the truth was, if the imposter had not stolen her identity, she might well have had done with “Nina Tchereslavsky” in the not too distant future. Human life-spans were very short, and the practical life of a dancer shorter still. What injuries or illness did not cut short, simple old age generally did. She had already begun attracting a few comments, mostly spiteful and from those who wished to take her place in the limelight, about how well preserved she was. It was very likely that within the next two or three years, she would have been forced into counterfeiting her own death as she had so many times in the past, and assuming a new persona.

That was the awkward part of this; curse it. She did not age, naturally, but mortals did. The first and best way to be noticed in an unpleasant fashion was to seem not to age. She had always been able to find a way to transfer her accumulated wealth and goods to the new persona before but—

Well, this time it was going to be awkward. She was well known; if she died and left her possessions to someone no one had ever heard of, there would be questions. Worse, if she died and the bulk of what she had owned turned up missing, there would be even more questions. She had been looking into the fabrication of a distant relative—

But now she would not have to. No one knew her here in this country. For all they knew, she was no older than the twenty years she appeared to be, rather than the forty that Nina would have been if she were actually alive.

Furthermore, she had two strings to this bow. If she could manage to get the girl alone, for just long enough, she could simply assume her appearance and identity. That was the riskier of the two, because the Masters protecting her might be able to tell the difference before she killed them. Or, she could do what she had come here to do in the first place: expose the imposter for what she was, and use the notoriety to engineer herself a brand new career in England, where no one knew her history, and where she could go on dancing and attracting wealthy old men for at least twenty or thirty more years. By then, she could establish a “daughter,” and in due course the “daughter” would inherit her famous “mother’s” estate.

A shy, retiring daughter . . . plain, studious, the sort that attracted no male attention of her own. The sort that preferred to remain closeted up with her books and not be seen too often. Short-sighted, with enormous glasses. Calf-clumsy, and ill at ease in company. No one would wonder why she was so seldom seen.

There would have to be a husband, of course; that was easily arranged. And the husband’s tragic death soon after the “birth.”

How to arrange a baby . . . buy one, of course. A fat bribe to an orphanage, a false name, and it would be done. No need for messy things like a human birth. Then absorb it once the fiction had been established; no one of any consequence wanted to see babies or infants. They were messy, noisy, unregulated creatures best left to the attentions of wetnurses and nannies. That would hold things for at least three or four years, until the child would be presumed presentable for brief moments of time to adults. At intervals, then, she would get one of those workhouse children, trot it out for inspection, and absorb it when she no longer needed it. A teenager she could counterfeit herself—and easy enough to arrange rare appearances when her mother was supposed to be sleeping, or dressing, or otherwise not immediately available for company . . . in fact, the whole art would be to find a way to present herself that would not arouse sympathy, but would, at the same time, make it clear just why her putative child was never seen in polite society. Rabbity little red eyes, she decided. Big, thick glasses, and rabbity little red-rimmed eyes. She would say that the light bothered her always and gave her headaches. No, not say it. She would whine it.

For a few moments more, she found herself so immersed in the details of her next life that she forgot there were the details of this one to sort out before she could move onwards. It was only when the maid-creature brought in the morning mail, which included a large, flattish box postmarked from her flat that she gave herself a mental shake and attended to the present.

The contents of this package were going to provide her with the makings of the last distraction. And it would be one that they would never, ever anticipate.

She smiled as she cut the string and opened it up, to make sure that her servant-creatures had not left anything out.

Michael Peterson was not the sort of solicitor that was accustomed to seeing handsomely and expensively dressed women in his outer office, and he could not account for the one that was there now. His clients were more apt to be balding middle-class gentlemen with querulous dispositions and uncertain stomachs, apt to take offense and equally apt to fire off a slander or libel suit, or a breach-of-contract case when sufficiently roused by real or imagined slights.

Michael encouraged them in this; after all, he got paid whether or not the case had any merits. Such things could stretch on for some time, particularly when he and his opposition were in collusion to make them stretch on.

It was not, however, the most rewarding of law-practices. There were times, as now, when he would look across the road through the window of his chambers to the chop-house with longing, knowing that he would have to satisfy his hunger with the cheese sandwiches he had brought with him. And furthermore was the penance that tonight he would either have to boil an egg and make toast in his room, or manage to get through whatever glutinous stew-like creation his landlady had concocted: greasy, vegetables boiled to bits, and with only a nodding acquaintance with meat. His clients at the best of times would not bring in the sorts of fees that supported beefsteak dinners and tidy flats with a cook and a housekeeper. Now they were in a litigious lull, and that was not good for him.

So when the lovely woman dressed in garnet-colored silk responded to his invitation to enter his office sans appointment, he truly did not expect that she was going to offer him work—truth to tell he thought she was from some charity and looking to get a subscription from him. He would not be rude to her no matter how insane her charity, because some day she might be the cause of him getting more work. No, he would be polite, let his barren office speak mutely for him, and beg her forgiveness for not having brass to spare for her cause . . . and at least he would have had the pleasure of the company of a stunning woman for half an hour.

So it was with growing astonishment that he listened to her outlining, not the plight of abandoned orphans or sheepdogs, or African savages, but the whole of a fascinating and wildly unlikely tale.

She was so stunningly beautiful so he would have listened to her no matter what she said. She was small, dainty, with a mass of dark hair done up in some complicated braided style that looked like a crown and penetrating eyes that seemed to change in color as her mood changed. Her nose was just a trifle too long, but that made her face interesting rather than merely pretty.

If she was to be believed, and was not wildly insane, it was the most sensational case that he was likely to get his hands on!

For this woman claimed—and the papers she brought with her seemed to bear her story out—to be the real Nina Tchereslavsky, and the one currently performing at the Palais Royale was—an imposter! A fraud who had stolen this prima ballerina’s name and reputation, and was battening on both.

Who was the fraud really? This woman did not know. Michael vaguely recalled the stir when the girl was washed up after a shipwreck, speaking nothing but Russian and a bit of French, so it did seem that these two dancers were, in fact, both Russian. And that seemed too much for mere coincidence. This woman only asserted that her imposter was someone she did not know.

It seemed completely impossible, for first of all, how would an unknown Russian dancer come to Blackpool in the first place; why not go somewhere that there were proper ballet troupes, like London? Secondly, why should she claim she was someone of whom Blackpool knew nothing? The cachet of being a Russian ballerina was not that impressive, particularly not in a music hall. And in the third place, why enter music hall at all? Why not attempt to get a part with a ballet or opera company? There was an opera company, at least, in Blackpool; why hadn’t she gone there? And that brought them full circle again: why here, and why not London?

And yet, because it seemed so outrageous, so unlikely, it conversely became, to him, the more believable.

But by itself, it would hardly impress anyone, much less a judge. Michael turned over the documents that had been presented, one by one. It was a fairly thick portfolio. Together they formed a curious collection.

The first lot were press-clippings; interesting, but not particularly useful in and of themselves, since the photographs could have been of almost anyone, and the sketches were of someone who had no real distinguishing features to say the least. And how difficult would it be to assemble such a collection? One could subscribe to bureaus that collected these things for you.

The documents in the second set were more useful; personal letters from various men of wealth and rank. The problem was, though all of them began with “Nina” and ended with the gentleman’s name, they were all in foreign tongues. And where he was going to find someone in Blackpool who could reliably translate Russian, he did not know. There were plenty of Russian exiles, but whom could he trust to give him accurate translations, and not merely write down what they were told to say?

And again, how difficult a thing would these be to counterfeit? If they were love letters it would be one thing; it was unlikely that she would dare present such a thing and very likely they would be repudiated, but a simple letter of admiration for her skill in dancing? No man would really care. And no gentleman was likely to make the long trip to Blackpool England merely to verify that the letter was genuine.

So, while interesting, these were of no particular value.

The third set, however. . . .

It was the habit of people in these days to buy photographic portraits of particularly beautiful women to ornament their walls with. Now, many of these were of young women who had no particular thing to recommend them except their beauty; they were, in fact, known as “PBs” or “Professional Beauties,” and all they were required to be was lovely, amiable, with impeccable manners, and of at least moderate breeding, enough so that they could reasonably be invited to elite social gatherings to add sparkle, like a bouquet of exquisite flowers. That the Crown Prince generally at least made the effort to add them to his ever-growing collection of mistresses went without saying, though not all of them succumbed to him.

But others among the much-photographed were professionals of the stage; actresses mostly, but dancers were included, and even a few opera singers.

And the last set of these photographs were of the dancer Nina Tchereslavsky, in costume as, so far Michael could tell, various fairies, harem girls, spirits, and princesses. At least he guessed by the tiny crowns that they were princesses. For all he knew, they could have been aquatic waterfowl, or flowers. These photographs were plainly labeled, some in the queer letters the Russians used, but most in good lettering readable by civilized people. Mlle. Nina Tchereslavsky, Odette. Mlle. Nina Tchereslavsky, La Sylphide. Mlle. Nina Tchereslavsky, Raymonda.

Now these could be counterfeited, too, but it was less likely. Those costumes had to be fitted to each dancer, and it wasn’t likely that someone would have all these things sitting about in a wardrobe somewhere. So although the photographs were designed to show off the legs rather than the face, still, the face was clear.

So taken all-in-all, the entire portfolio argued powerfully that the owner was in fact the real dancer.

“I wouldn’t advise you to take this into a court of law, Mademoiselle,” he said, finally, closing the portfolio.

She looked startled, and a little angry. “But is that not what you do?” she snapped. “This—this creature has taken my name, my place! My reputation! I have been forced to cancel a contract because of this! I had to pay an enormous sum! Is this not a thing for the courts?

“I should have said, not yet, Mademoiselle,” he soothed. “We will eventually, of course. But our first strategy should be to take this to another court entirely, that of public opinion. We should make a sensation of this, so that when it does get into court, it will be noticed.”

“And this would be good?” she asked doubtfully.

“Oh very good, very good indeed,” he told her earnestly. “And I know just the newspaper too.”

And in truth, he did. He had used them before on other cases. But of course, there was no competition between a case featuring a balding old man and one featuring not just one beautiful dancer, but two.

“And this will help me?” she persisted.

“Better than a trial.” Her folded his hands atop the papers and peered earnestly at her. She stared at him for a moment, and for some reason, suddenly, her eyes seemed very cold, very alien. Despite the fact that her eyes should have seemed lovely.

But they weren’t lovely. They were cold.

Ah, but that did not matter, What mattered was in this portfolio. “We will take your story to a newspaper,” he continued. “They will place the truth before the public, and the public will see. This imposter will be routed. There may never need to be a trial, but if there is, many of the jurors will have seen these photographs and they will know the truth.”

“Very well,” she said finally. “You may call your newspapers.”

Nina was not nearly as reluctant as she had seemed. She was, in fact, not at all interested in going to court. A law-suit seemed to her to be an inordinate waste of time and effort, although the threat of one would take little effort on her part, yet would agitate her enemies no end.

But this, the idea of using sensation-craving newspapers to hound her foes—this was sheer brilliance. It was all she could do to keep from insisting the solicitor run straight out and bring in people from these newspapers on the spot.

Instead, she curbed her impulses and pretended reluctance. This was not unlike allowing a protector to “acquire” her. She would make them court her, coax her; she had ample practice in being the one sought after.

She allowed the solicitor to “persuade” her, and to arrange a meeting with a newspaper reporter for the next day. She “reluctantly” allowed him to keep her portfolio. There was only one thing that she was annoyed about; she had been certain she would be able to persuade one or more of her devoted adherents to make the journey to Blackpool to verify her identity, but they all sent regrets. It seemed that her hold over them was not strong enough at a distance to cause them to abandon good sense and speed to her rescue. It might not, in fact, hold them at all. She had never really had occasion to test it. It had always seemed to her that human mortals, the men in particular, were easily manipulated and entranced.

Well it was an annoyance, and something that could be worked around.

What she could do, easily enough, and in fact had, was to order her servants at home to bribe and browbeat one of the stagehands into coming to stand surety for her identity. It was difficult for a poor man, especially one who was no longer young, to look at more money than he could earn in twenty years and not turn it down. So this man, a common fellow named Jannos Durzek, was already on his way here by train and boat. She would have to find a translator, of course. She would have to find one anyway, for the Hungarian and Russian and Czech letters.

All this was running through her mind as she arrived at the solicitor’s office for her meeting with the newspaper man. She had put forth a great deal of effort to look her best, and at the same time, to look every inch the prima. There must be no doubt in this man’s mind that he was in the presence of a great dancer, even if he had never heard of her nor had any ideas about ballet.

The man in question was sitting in the solicitor’s office when she arrived. He took his time about getting to his feet, eyeing her with an insolence that made her seethe. If she had not needed him, she would have slapped that expression from his face, then ambushed him in the night and absorbed him. Perhaps she would anyway, when she no longer needed him. He was a very unprepossessing man, no longer young, yet holding himself as if he felt he were much younger than his actual years. His suit was slightly rumpled, and though hardly of the best quality, was definitely of the most modern cut. Most gentlemen would have considered it a touch too loud. He did not remove his hat, of the type known as a derby, in her presence, a fact that she resented. Perhaps he was ashamed to; his mousey brown hair looked rather thin, and needed a trim badly. His face wore what looked to be a perpetual smirk, as if he considered himself ever so much more intelligent than most of the people he encountered. His complexion was starting to show the effects of hard drinking, and his eyes, narrow and shrewd, were just a little bloodshot.

She allowed him, reluctantly, to shake her hand, then took a seat. Immediately he began going over the papers in her file, one by one, asking her pointed and detailed questions about all of them. Some of his questions were impertinent, and she felt her temper rising. He seemed to be amused by this, and the more amused he became, the more she was determined to give him the punishment he so richly deserved when she no longer needed him.

Finally he shoved her portfolio of papers aside. “I like this story,” he said, bluntly. “I’ll take it on.”

He would not be pinned down to how soon he intended to publish the story—or rather, what would probably be the first of several stories. “This will be a fight,” he warned. “They are not simply going to say, ‘Oh dear, you caught us, it’s a fair cop,’ and reveal the girl’s true name. They are going to demand proof. What you have here—” he tapped the portfolio “—is good, but hardly conclusive; it could all be fabricated and I expect them to point that out. But I’ll think of something you can do, I am sure.”

He was so arrogant! Assuming that she would not be able to think of anything for herself! And how on earth was he remaining proof against her magic-enhanced charm? That baffled her as much as his attitude infuriated her.

She would kill him. She would not merely absorb him as she did with most of her victims, taking them unaware and rendering them unconscious first; she would do it while he was aware and conscious and she would do it slowly.

Oh how she wished she did not need him!

She parted company with him and with the solicitor, once again leaving the portfolio, this time in the reporter’s possession. She was stiffly correct, and as she shook hands coldly with the man, he dared to grin at her. “You don’t care for me, miss,” he said baldly. “Well, I don’t care much for you. I expect you’re accustomed to men dancing attendance on you, and being your lap-dogs. You’re told what a tremendous artist you are, and all of that tommy-rot. Well, to me you’re the same as that girl that you say is using your name, and you’re both of you no better and no worse than the can-can dancer on the boardwalk. All three of you pull up your skirts and kick and show your legs—you and that girl just pretend it’s more refined, which, to my mind, makes the can-can dancer the more honest of the three of you. But I know a story when I see one, and this one is worth chasing after. You need me, and I need you, so you may glare all you like, and I’ll sneer all I like, but the story will still get printed, and we’ll see what kind of a dust-up we can start.”

Rigid with anger, she left, the solicitor at her elbow, apologizing for the reporter, babbling almost, about how his manner was rough, but he was the best in the city, how dogged he was in pursuing facts, and how fair he was in laying them out. The solicitor kept up this babble all the way to the street, where he hailed a taxi for her. As he handed her into it, Nina finally spoke.

“If this were Saint Petersburg,” she said wrathfully, “I would horsewhip him until he bled from a hundred cuts. He is an ignorant peasant. But he has a peasant’s cunning, and I believe you when you say he will write the stories to expose this imposter. But keep him from me. You deal with him. I would rather feed pigs with my own hands than speak with him again.”

Notions of increased fees doubtlessly dancing in his head, the solicitor hastily agreed, and she directed the taxi back to her flat.

The first thing she did when the door was shut and locked tightly behind her was to transform to her true form with a roar of rage. Her garments did not so much tear as burst asunder with the sound of shredding silk. Her servants already knew what to do; they had surely felt her anger for the last hour at least.

They performed exactly as she expected them to. They had clearly prepared for her, and now they fled before her, and opened the door to the cellar with cringing deference. She stood on the top step as they closed the door behind her, and listened to the whimpering of terror from below.

The Troll bared her teeth in a parody of a smile. Her servants had chosen well. Not one, but three victims cowered in the corners of the cellar, trying to somehow become one with the rough brick walls. Her eyes adjusted to the darkness, and she assessed the two slatternly women and the man awaiting her pleasure. By the tattered finery and the display of cleavage, by the too-loud, cheap suit and the air of a bully who finds himself in the power of someone unexpectedly stronger than he, she had a good notion of who her servants had plucked off the street for her. Two prostitutes, and she supposed the man was their procurer.

“Mistress,” one of the servants said through the door, “we brought the women here. The man followed; he broke in and threatened us, and demanded money.” She smiled. Good. She would take him first.

And she would make him last a long, long time. This was going to be no simple absorption. Tonight she was going to feed.

20

NINETTE was summoned in the middle of her exercises to Nigel’s office; puzzled, because she could not imagine what could have warranted such an interruption, she quickly toweled herself off and threw on her dress without bothering to tidy her hair or take off her rehearsal tights and demi-pointe shoes.

There she found Nigel, Arthur, Wolf, and Jonathon, all bent over something on Nigel’s desk, and the humans, at least, looking rather grim.

“What is amiss?” she asked, feeling uneasy, as they all turned to look at her.

“We have an unexpected problem,” Arthur replied, stabbing his finger down at what was now revealed to be a folded-back section of a newspaper. There were several more like it on the desk; Arthur picked this one up and handed it to her.

The first thing she saw was her own publicity photograph, taken in her costume of the Tudor Rose dance. Dancer Revealed A Fraud! shouted the headline.

Her heart in her mouth, she skimmed through the article as best she could, wrestling with the English. Quickly she got the gist of the matter. The real Nina Tchereslavsky had turned up—and how had that happened?—and the reporter was trumpeting the fact that Ninette was an imposter. He did not quite go so far as to claim her shipwreck story was the fabrication they all knew it was, but it would not take much for people to wonder about that, too.

At the bottom of the article was the photograph of the real Nina Tchereslavsky, in a costume of the Rose Fairy from Sleeping Beauty. Ninette stared at it, numbly.

“All right. What are we going to do?” Nigel demanded. “It is not exactly a front page matter at the moment, but if there is a day that has not got a lot of news in it, the story very well could soon be there. Should we—”

You are going to brazen it out, said Thomas the cat, strolling into the room in a leisurely manner, eyeing the top of the desk for a moment, before leaping up to it in a lithe bound. Take a look at those photographs. Do you think I chose that particular dancer at random for Ninette to impersonate?

Five heads bent over the newspapers, all of them analyzing the two pictures. As Ninette’s panic started to ebb, she looked over the two, side by side, and after a moment, she nodded. She looked up to see the same conclusion in the faces of the rest.

“All things considered, there is not a great deal of difference between the two of them,” Nigel admitted.

All ballerinas tend to look a great deal alike, the cat pointed out. That’s out of necessity. They have to be petite, light boned, thin. They tend to have very large eyes, and stage makeup exaggerates that. That newspaper man made a grave mistake in choosing to echo Ninette’s Rose costume with the other woman’s; the pictures could easily be of the same dancer in different costumes. So the obvious course here is to make the counter-claim that this woman is the imposter.

Nigel stared at the cat. “You’re not joking, are you?”

I never joke. I sometimes make witty remarks, often sarcastic ones, but I never joke, not where Ninette is concerned. No, I think you should brazen it out. Claim that this woman is the imposter.

“What possible motive could she have for impersonating Ninette? I mean Nina?” Arthur ran his hands through his hair. “This is very confusing. . . .”

The cat raised his chin. Ninette is very successful here. She is one of the main attractions to this theater, and when your new musical play is finally performed, that popularity will only increase. Now remember if you will that people are insular. It does not matter to a Londoner that a performer is popular in New York. He might go once to see the man, but unless all London decides he is good, the average Londoner will not go a second time.

“What are you saying?” Arthur asked, puzzled.

That we should forget entirely what anyone in Berlin or New York or even Paris thinks. That we should forget what a balletomane thinks. Ninette’s audience does not go to ballets, and does not care what the rich people that do would have to say about this. We need to concentrate on what Blackpool thinks.

“I see what you are saying,” Nigel replied slowly. “Blackpool thinks that what Blackpool says and does and has opinions about is of the first importance in the world.”

The cat nodded with satisfaction. Precisely. So when we go and speak to your friends in the newspapers here, we must be firm in saying that our Nina is the real one, and that this imposter’s attempt to take her place is motivated by the greed for the position Ninette has achieved here. What dancer would not wish to be in that position? That any sensible person from outside Blackpool or knowledgeable about ballet would find this laughable has no bearing. This will not even be a ripple in the London papers, but it might well move into greater importance here. Perhaps, as you yourself pointed out, even a front page story if there are no accidents, fires, murders, or notorious robberies. No, I think that the best thing we can do is respond with affronted dignity and a touch of scorn. The cat licked a paw thoughtfully. And one never knows with dancers. They often become hysterical over absolute nonsense. She might indeed decide for herself that what you are building for Ninette is of the primary importance to her.

“Hysterical over nonsense?” Ninette looked incensed—and then, flushed. “Ah, mais oui. The review in La Figaro—“

And who knows? Somehow the cat managed to shrug. We do not know how her reputation is faring on the Continent. It might be sinking. She cannot be young. It might be that to become the star of a music hall in Blackpool has become the height of desire for her. In any event, we very much need to make use of every chink in her armor. Including that. The cat looked up at them all. This does have the potential to do us a great deal of good, if we can keep our heads about us, and Ninette can be kind and gracious and say very little about what her life in Russia was like.

“I can do that,” Ninette said ruefully, “since I have no notion of what it could have been like!”

“You should describe what it was like in Paris, only don’t mention any real names,” Jonathon said firmly. “A dancer’s life is always the same no matter where she is from. Only in Moscow the winters are very long, there are heaps of snow, and it is always terribly cold. Make much of that.”

Ninette and the cat both nodded. Jonathon, that is an excellent suggestion. She could contrast our lovely weather with that of Moscow in the winter. Ninette, above all, you must make much of how happy you are, what a fine place Blackpool is, and how much you love the audiences here.

“That will be of no difficulty,” Ninette replied. “It is all true.” She looked about her at the men who had become such supporters and friends in such a short time, and unexpectedly, her eyes filled with tears. “One could not ask for better friends than you. I feel as if I have fallen into a fairy tale!”

“Yes, well, fairy tales have ogres,” Nigel grumbled. “We haven’t conquered ours yet. We don’t even know who it is!”

All the more reason not to allow this to distract us. Think of it as a diversion and not any sort of serious difficulty.

“They must have more evidence than just those photographs,” Jonathon pointed out.

They may. But they do not have me. The cat looked uncommonly smug. I will say no more.

Jonathon gave him a measuring look. “You are altogether too sly, Master Thomas,” he said severely.

I am a cat, was the self-satisfied reply.

“I do not know why I ever listened to you,” Wolf groaned from under Arthur’s coat.

Because I am cleverer than you, the cat replied. All three of the co-conspirators were in a pub opposite the building housing the flat of the fellow who had written the first article. They had discovered, by the simple expedient of buying a few drinks at the pub for his thirsty colleagues, that the man never kept anything he considered to be important at his desk in the newspaper offices. He was not well liked there; he never shared sources, and never put anyone else on to a good story, even if he never intended to follow it up himself. That meant that anything he had gotten from Nina in the way of files and proof would be in his flat.

They were waiting until he left for the evening. They had ensured that he would be gone long, and not in very good condition when he returned, simply by ensconcing Jonathon there in one of his many disguises, and with heavy pockets. By simple expedient of seeming to be a fellow who had won a great deal of money and standing rounds for the entire pub, Jonathon should keep him there, and drinking, for a good long time, without ever raising the man’s suspicions by being singled out.

“There he is,” muttered Arthur, as the fellow in question sauntered out into the fine spring evening, looking oddly both satisfied and irritated. But from all accounts he was a disagreeable man; perhaps this irritation was his natural state.

They watched as he strode down the street, heading right in the direction of his favorite watering-hole. They waited a good long time, just to make sure he wasn’t coming back, that he hadn’t forgotten anything, that he hadn’t changed his mind. As the dusk turned to darkness and the lamplighters came around—this part of the city hadn’t been electrified yet—Arthur and the cat took advantage of the shadows to slip across the street and into the narrow passage between the two houses-turned-flats. Wolf freed himself from Arthur’s coat and flew up to the third story to land on a ledge.

“He left it open, right enough,” Wolf said softly, and flew back down. “Give me the string,” he ordered Arthur in a peremptory tone. Wordlessly Arthur handed the bird a bit of fishing line. Wolf flew up to the ledge, disappeared inside, then emerged again as the string ran out from the coil Arthur held. When the bird was perched again on his shoulder, he took the string back.

“It’s around the leg of the desk,” Wolf said as soon as his beak was clear. “That ought to be enough to hold one small cat.”

It’s salmon line, it ought to hold two of me, Thomas replied. He waited while Arthur fastened the straps of a harness around him and Wolf flew up to the ledge a third time, vanishing inside. With the harness fastened to the fishing line, and gloves on Arthur’s hands to prevent it cutting into his fingers, the musician hauled the cat jerkily up the side of the building with all four legs dangling limply. They had all thought about having Thomas try and help, but then thought better of it. Only when the cat actually reached the ledge itself did he hook claws up onto it and haul himself up.

The line was easily bitten through by Wolf’s sharp beak. After a moment, the line came falling down and Arthur coiled it up and put it in his pocket. Then he waited.

He could hear, very faintly, sounds from up above. Thomas and Wolf had determined, via trials in Nigel’s office, that there was very little short of a safe that a cat and a parrot could not get into. What was more, they had decided that they would rifle the entire flat to make it look as if someone had been searching for valuables. Those were probably the sounds he was hearing.

After a very long time, or so it seemed in the darkened passageway, Arthur heard a whistle. And immediately afterwards, a piece of paper, startlingly white in the shadows, came drifting down from above.

Now he was very busy indeed, as a veritable shower of papers came down. They had determined that they were not going to steal only the information about Nina. They were going to take everything that looked to be of any importance. That way the man would not be aware that it was the ballerina’s papers that they were after. Arthur had brought a briefcase with him, and by the time the last of the papers was gathered up, it was stuffed quite full indeed.

Finally, after some more sounds of implied mayhem from above, including the tearing of cloth, came what he had been waiting for. Ready for me? came the question into his mind.

“As ready as I am likely to be,” he whispered back. “Mind your claws!” And he braced himself.

With an impact that made him stagger, the cat landed on his shoulder. He ended up against the wall, breath driven a little out of him.

It isn’t me that minds the claws, it is you, the cat replied, with the sense that he was laughing. I think that is the most fun I have ever had since I was a boy and stealing apples.

“He’s a hoodlum, that one,” Wolf said severely, flying down to land on Arthur’s other shoulder. “It will be most of a day before that fellow can clean up enough to figure out just what is missing.”

“What did you two do?” Arthur asked, easing his way out of the passageway, carefully making sure there was no one in the street to see him when he did so.

“We tilted over and knocked to the floor every book and ornament we could move. We spilled his inkwell. I knocked over the pitcher of water at his washstand. We pulled the covers off the bed. We scattered all the papers that were not in the files, and overturned a chair or two. I uncovered all the food that I could in the pantry and the mice are already at it. But that was not enough for Thomas, oh no. Thomas slashed every pillow and cushion in the flat, tore open the featherbed and the eiderdown, and then shook what he could lift like a terrier with a rat,” Wolf said. “And as if that was not enough, he asked me to flap as hard as I could.” The parrot could not smirk, but he barked a sound like a laugh. “It looks like a snowstorm struck in there. The man might find a way to clean it all up in a day or two, but it will take a small army of maids to do it.”

It took Nigel some patient work to sort Nina’s papers out of the rest, but when he was finished, he had a very tidy stack. All of them sat contemplating it.

This could be very useful, the cat pointed out.

Nigel frowned. “But if I use them, they’ll know we were the ones that took them.” He closed his eyes for a moment. “Let me think about this. If we use them, it has to appear that we had them before the real Nina appeared. Now how can I do this. . . .”

They all waited, Ninette holding her breath. Over the time that she had been here, she had seen Nigel say something about “thinking,” watched him close his eyes, then come up with something brilliant roughly three times. It had become apparent after the second time that he was not a successful impresario by accident, nor because he used his magic to make himself one. He was a shrewd businessman, with, when he needed to invoke it, the ability to see a way to do something that no one else would have thought of—or at least no one else would have thought of in as short a period of time.

The others all must have been used to this as well, since everyone, even Wolf, remained completely quiet. Traffic noise from the street below came in through the open windows, filtered slightly by the gold gauze curtains there that kept the insects out. A newsboy cried the latest edition from the corner, and that was when Nigel opened his eyes and smiled.

It was to Jonathon he turned.

“I need one of our smartest boys,” he said. “Two if you can manage it. They have to be clever, a bit manipulative and sly. Baker Street Irregulars, if you will.”

Jonathon grinned unexpectedly. “I know just the lads,” he said. “I use them myself as often as I can, and I thought—well, this is for later, but I thought we might put them in the act. I could do with a couple of apprentices.”

Nigel tilted his head to the side. “You’ve always said you didn’t need—”

“That was when I was going to be traveling about all the time,” Nigel interrupted, flushing. “I didn’t want to have to keep track of a damned boy on trains and boarding houses and strange theaters. But when this scheme of yours blossoms, we’ll be a repertory company. The whole theater will be keeping an eye on them. Never mind that now, you want Scott Merry and Stubbins. They’re thick as thieves, those two, and smart as they come. Scotty’s the older by about a year. What’s the plan for them?”

Nigel was already separating out the material into four piles. “I am going to want them to somehow sneak these into the files at the four major newspapers. I want it to look as if, when we first engaged Ninette, that I sent these publicity materials to the newspapers. By then, the whole brouhaha of her being found on the shore had died down, so this would have been by way of a reminder to them that she was a great dancer on the Continent.” He removed folders from a drawer of his desk and wrote Nina’s name, the name of the theater, the words Biographical Material, and a date on each of them, then filled each folder from one of his piles.

Jonathon shook his head in admiration, and Arthur beamed. “Brilliant!” the musician crowed. “And when we go to those papers to say that we have no idea where this imposter came from—”

“They will go to their files, find this, and be convinced we gave it to them long before this woman appeared.” Nigel beamed himself. It was an infernally clever idea. “Now, I’ll want the boys to put these in almost the right place, so that it’s logical to have been overlooked.”

“Let me get them,” Jonathon said, and took off. He returned with two boys somewhere between twelve and fourteen years old. One, taller, with black hair, was obviously “Scotty,” which meant the other, a smaller, darker boy with an innocent face until you saw the gleam of mischief in his eyes, must be “Stubbins.”

Nigel explained what he wanted, and, to Ninette’s astonishment, why he wanted it, although he didn’t reveal that Ninette was the imposter herself, nor that the materials were stolen.

“Now maybe this seems dishonest—” Nigel concluded, sounding doubtful.

Scotty snorted. “Bloody well it don’t,” he replied. “No reason t’hev given ’em this stuff before the big show, right, guv’nor? ’Cept now we gots this gel yappin’ ’bout how she’s the real Ma’mselle. An’ if we gives ’em the papers now, they says, ‘well, y’coulda just got all this anywhere! ’ an’ we’re still lookin’ bad. But if they gots the papers and thinks they gots ’em afore this gel shows up, then Bob’s yer uncle!”

“Ain’t dishonest,” Stubbins mumbled. “Jest puttin’ things roight.” He cast a sideling glance at Ninette. “Ma’mselle Nina’s one uv us, ain’t she? So we gotter take care uv ’er.”

“All right then!” Nigel said brightly. “Here’s the papers, and here’s a few shillings for you two—it will probably take all day, and you’ll need some luncheon, and money for the ’bus. Off you go! Report directly to me soon as you get back!”

Ninette smiled to herself, knowing that Nigel had given the boys at least twice as much as they needed, and had given them no deadline to meet. He had, in essence, awarded them with a bit of a holiday and the money to make it a rather jolly one at that. She felt terribly touched by Stubbins’ mumbled assertion that she was “one of them” too.

“Do you think they can manage it?” she asked Jonathon, who rolled his eyes and laughed.

“Those two? They mastered my cabinet in an hour, and they know more sleight-of-hand tricks than any boys their age should command. It is a good thing that they are fundamentally honest, because they could pick a man’s pocket while he stood there looking at them.”

“I expect the shillings will run out about dark,” Nigel said comfortably. “Expect them back then.”

Scotty scrupulously divided the coins between the two of them before they left by the stage door, and they both took a moment to gloat over the windfall. “Cor, Scotty!” Stubbins said with enthusiasm. “Think on it! There’s ices, an’ bullseyes, an’ Kendal Mint Cake, an’ catapults each, an’ we kin go to th’ Tower an’—”

“Job first,” Scotty said solemnly. “We gotter do this fast an’ smart. Like Sherlock Holmes’ boys!”

“Baker Street ’regulars,” supplied Stubbins, who read as much or more than Scotty did.

“Right. So t’ be smart, we shouldn’t oughta do the same thing twice. So how kin we do this four dif’rent ways?”

All the way to the first newspaper office, sitting up on the top of an omnibus, the two plotted and planned like the pair of old campaigners they were. Both had come to the theater off the street as crossing-sweepers; a place like a theater always had need of honest and reliable errand-runners, and the old fellow at the stage door had been directed to find a couple. Both took all their money home to share with enormous families; both were acutely aware of how lucky they were to be where they were. Master Nigel made sure everyone in the theater got fair wages, he didn’t demand a share of tips, and he regularly put things in the way of those that needed them. Whether or not he realized it, Master Nigel had engendered intense loyalty in his little fiefdom; there was not a man or woman in that theater who would not have stood between Master Nigel and a runaway elephant. Having been singled out for particular service made the two boys feel rather like a pair of King Arthur’s knights, right out of the panto.

This was made even more acute by the fact that the job was to be done for Ma’mselle Nina. Now, there were plenty of acts that had passed through the Imperial acting like they were royalty. Not Ma’mselle. She was, as Scotty put it, “a right’un.” Treated everyone fair, said “If you please,” and “Thank you,” never looked down her nose at anyone, and when she wanted something out of the ordinary, you knew there was going to be an extra penny in it for you. Everyone knew she was going to be the star turn when the Big Show got trotted out, but she never acted like she thought it was her due. Truth to tell, both Scotty and Stubbins were just a little bit in love with her. Who wouldn’t be? She looked like a little china doll, pretty as a fairy, and nice as nice . . .

So both of them were going to put a lot of effort into making sure things went right for her—and it made them feel even more knightly. Or maybe like Sherlock Holmes. Or a combination of Sherlock Holmes and Raffles.

The first office they came to was so busy it had been easy for two boys who looked like they knew what they were doing to mingle with the rest of the crowd. There were plenty of boys their age employed in such places, messages needing taken, things needing to be fetched. Careful listening led them to the desk of the fellow that wrote up reviews and other artistic stuff; the boys waited until he left his desk for something, then slipped their folder under a big pile of stuff that was already there.

They left that office no more than three quarters of an hour after they had arrived. One down, three to go.

At the second office, Scotty, who was older, engaged the little girl in charge of putting files away in a mild flirtation, while Stubbins slipped Nina’s file in among the rest of those she had waiting. Scotty broke off the conversation reluctantly when Stubbins was finished, and privately resolved to come back when he wasn’t on a mission.

Two down. They were halfway done and it wasn’t even luncheon yet.

Office number three presented a bit of a challenge. There was a man at the door and it was clear he was there to keep out interlopers. They both eyed the fellow from a distance, Scotty frowning furiously. “I dunno,” he said, finally. “This ’un—”

“Got it!” Stubbins crowed in triumph, looking at something or someone just past Scotty’s shoulder. He darted out before Scotty could say anything; Scotty turned to see a youngish man burdened with a huge pile of books and papers coming towards the guarded door. In a flash, Scotty knew what was going to happen—

And it did. Stubbins rushed past the young man, brushing up against him just closely enough to knock his burden out of his hands, but not so closely that he ran into the fellow. He kept going as the pile toppled to the floor, as if he was in such a hurry he couldn’t be bothered to look back.

Scotty ran out to lend the man a hand. They commiserated on the rudeness of some people, Scotty piled up his arms full of papers and files again, and they parted. Except, of course, the young man now had the third copy of Nina’s file in the stack he was so carefully balancing.

Number four was absurdly easy. They arrived just about luncheon-time, and everyone that could was running out for a bite. Scotty merely walked up to the wall of file cabinets, found the drawer for “T,” and inserted Nina’s file between “Titian” and “Toulouse.”

Their work done, they escaped into the sunshine outside, ambling away with their hands in their pockets as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Only when they were well away from the building did they look at one another and burst out laughing.

“Thenkee, Mr. Holmes,” Scotty said, doffing an imaginary hat.

“Thenkee, Mr. Raffles,” Stubbins replied with glee. “Now! About them ices!”

“Reckon we earned ’em, don’t you?” Scotty replied.

Stubbins nodded. “Reckon we did.”

21

“I suppose you’re wondering why I called you all here,” said Alan Grainger, looking distinctly uncomfortable.

Jonathon, who knew exactly why the young Water Master had called them all together—because the cat had told him—did his best to keep any tone of smugness out of his voice. “Didn’t find our Earth-Mage, eh?” he said instead, in as neutral a tone as possible. But he couldn’t help but gloat inside. So the young genius hadn’t had any more luck than his elders! Hard not to feel a bit sorry for him, especially when he looked at Ninette and flushed. Poor lad wanted to impress the lovely little dancer, and who could blame him?

“I’m afraid not,” Alan replied, crestfallen. “Whoever this is, he’s infernally clever, and I mean that almost literally. He set traps for us, and they weren’t the things intended to catch and perhaps harm us either. If we had been gulled by his deceptions, what we did would have hurt perfectly innocent people—well, not perfectly innocent, they were actually rather vile.” He flushed a deeper crimson. “But they were innocent of any wrongdoing towards us.”

“A good job you were being cautious, then,” Arthur said in an attempt to console him. “At least we won’t have that on our consciences.”

“Yes, but I didn’t find him, and Mademoiselle is still in danger.” He rubbed one temple. “I’m not used to failing.”

Jonathon snorted. “Then you aren’t trying things that are challenging enough.”

To his surprise and Alan’s obvious chagrin, Ninette nodded. “The more and harder things you attempt, the more you will fail. You are only guaranteed not to fail if you do not try. C’est las vie.”

“We have all failed at this one, Alan,” Nigel pointed out. “Whoever this is, he’s a step ahead of us.”

“He certainly was this time,” the young man said glumly, and began to outline just what it was he had discovered.

That was when Jonathon’s head literally came up like a dog catching a scent. “Damnation!” he swore. “This is not just a trap. He’s misdirecting us!”

“Like in one of your illusions?” Ninette asked, brows creased in a thoughtful frown.

“Exactly. He wants us to look for him using magic. He wants us to waste our time doing so. And meanwhile, he is doing something else! But what?” Jonathon grimaced. “What is it that he doesn’t want us to see?”

“Whatever it is,” Wolf observed, “it can’t be good.”

“He doesn’t want us to see him, or rather, to find him.” Nigel rose from his chair and began to pace. “The question is—”

And then he stopped, and a look of surprise mixed with annoyance spread over his face. “Good gad. We’ve been making a fundamental error here. All along we’ve been operating on the assumption that whoever this is first attacked Mademoiselle with a storm and sank her yacht.”

“Nom du nom!” Ninette exclaimed. “That was all a fabrication! It is the red fish!”

“Red herring,” Arthur corrected absently. “Exactly. So when we remove that from our puzzle, we need to know when the real attacks date from. And are they centered on Mademoiselle after all? It could just be coincidence, or it could be she was attacked just because she was vulnerable. We might not be looking for an enemy of Nina’s; we might just be looking for an enemy of Nigel’s.”

“I haven’t stirred up any trouble that I know of,” Nigel said slowly. “But then again, neither has Ninette any magically gifted enemies. But at least we know where to start looking for mine.”

“And what to look for.” Jonathon pursed his lips. “For that matter, the first attack that we definitely know of came after I had arrived. I might be the one that this magician seeks to ruin. And I must say I have made a considerable number of enemies over the years. I am not an easy man to get along with, and I do not suffer fools.”

“Surely not—” Nigel interjected, and then stopped. “No, you are correct, old friend.”

He began paging through a little book he kept, separate from the larger daybook in which he scheduled acts and noted things down about the day’s events in the theater. He had the daybook open too. He looked up.

“Do you suppose—when Harrigan broke his leg, do you think that could have been the first attack?”

All of them stared at him. It was Jonathon that spoke first. “Didn’t Mrs. Harrigan say that the street just opened up in front of him?”

Nigel nodded, his lips pressed into a thin line. “Well then, that was the first attack, and it not only came after you joined us, it came after I began letting information on our planned productions get out.”

“It does seem to point to the notion that this is an enemy of yours, Nigel,” Wolf put in thoughtfully. But then Jonathon saw Alan brighten.

“There is no reason to think that this enemy might have been covering his tracks quite so effectively that far back is there?” he asked eagerly.

“Perhaps. Perhaps not.” Nigel regarded the young man shrewdly. “I take it you have a notion?”

“If you know where that hole was, I can probably read what happened in the past,” Alan said with a look of determination. Jonathon whistled.

“I don’t know of more than one or two Masters that can do that.” He was impressed in spite of himself. But Alan only shrugged.

“It’s usually more in the line of a clairvoyant rather than a magician, but Water is uniquely suited to scrying,” he replied diffidently. “It’s more the aptness of the element rather than any virtue on my part.”

“Well I think you are very clever to have thought of it!” Ninette said, looking at the young man with admiration. Jonathon scowled a little.

“Will we have to go there?” the Fire Master demanded. “Because that could be deuced awkward even at night. When you start performing magic in the middle of a public thoroughfare, people tend to look at you askance.”

“It’s not that obvious,” Alan replied, “But I do need the exact spot—”

Jonathon rolled his eyes and growled a little, but agreed to take him to the spot. “I will come too!” Ninette insisted. “If need be I can make the distraction.”

“You are already a distraction,” Jonathon grumbled, but he knew better than to order her to stay behind. She wouldn’t obey him and it wasn’t as if he had the right to issue commands to her anyway. So the three of them went out into the afternoon—which threatened rain again—as Jonathon led them to the place where the so-called “sinkhole” had been a wonder and a nuisance.

It was filled in now, but that didn’t seem to matter to Alan, who looked around to make sure no one was near enough to notice what he was about to do, then pulled a watch out of his pocket along with a small flask, opened the watch so that the cover-plate was resting on his palm, then poured a tiny bit of water into the little dish that the cover made.

Ninette stationed herself in front of him. Looking up at him as if they were having a conversation. Seeing what she was doing, as Alan began to mutter to his little pool of water, Jonathon interposed himself between Alan and the street, his tall form making an effective screen. Anyone who saw them now would only think it was three friends having a peculiarly intense conversation.

Jonathon, of course, could not see what it was that Alan was doing, but he caught some words in a variant of Gaelic that sounded very old indeed.

Alan made a small sound of triumph and spilled the water out of his watch onto the ground. He watched it intensely for a moment, then nodded. “Feel up to a trek?” he asked the two of them, raising his eyes. “I can follow the disturbance in the Water-magic back to the source, I think.”

“Nothing ventured, nothing gained,” Jonathon observed. “But we should send Mademoiselle back to the theater.”

She opened her mouth to protest. He gave her one of those looks that she had learned meant she was going to get nowhere in arguing with him. Then, as he had learned to do around her, he told her why.

“Mademoiselle,” he said, in a quiet, firm voice, “we do not know what sorts of neighborhoods we may be going through. I am sure you can defend yourself against a single man, or even two, but we might be set upon by a gang. And someone has to tell Nigel that Alan has succeeded in wringing something from the stones, and is off on the hunt.”

Alan was casting entreating looks at her , but she did not look away from Jonathon’s eyes. “All right,” she replied. “Those are good reasons.”

She nodded agreement, but before she could turn to go, Thomas had his own say.

I will be staying with you, the cat put in. You might need another messenger. You might need for someone to get in at a second-story window.

“So that you can tear a room apart?” Jonathon snorted. “I think you were an anarchist in a previous life.”

Not likely. And I wouldn’t have done that if we hadn’t needed to cover what we’d stolen.

“I think there has been enough of arguing. Take Thomas, please, Jonathon.” Ninette said firmly.

He gave her a firm look. “And what if you should run into difficulties?”

She laughed. “Going back to the theater in broad daylight? Really, I am not so helpless as all that!”

He considered how far she had come with that pistol of hers, and nodded reluctantly. “Just take care.”

They parted at the corner, and Jonathon was relieved to see her summon a cab and step into it before he and Alan had moved from their spot. In fact, he let out his breath in a sigh of relief. He should have realized she would be sensible. After all, it was by no means clear that the enemy was actually after Nigel and not her.

He turned to see that Alan was watching him with a very odd expression, as if the young man had only now realized something—thought what that something could be, Jonathon had no idea.

“That is a remarkable lady,” Alan murmured.

“Remarkable in that she has more sense than most women,” Jonathon replied, wondering what had brought that remark on.

Yes, yes, yes indeed, Ninette is a fine creature. Now shall we get on with what we came out here to do? the cat asked in irritation.

“This is going to be aggravating for both of you,” Alan said sheepishly. “I have to follow the watercourses, so I will have to go afoot and will probably lead you on a very meandering course indeed—”

“As long as you actually lead us on something, I do not much care,” said Jonathon, then softened his tone. He hadn’t meant to sound so gruff. “Every Master works within the bounds of his own Element, and I would hardly expect you to conform to a Fire Master’s ways. Lead on.”

Alan nodded, and the odd little procession moved off.

Alan had not exaggerated. He did lead them on a course that was more akin to a cow wandering a pasture than anyone going directly towards something. From time to time he stopped, pulled out his watch, and allowed a little weight attached to the chain to dangle—Jonathon watched it, though, and watched Alan watching it, and knew within moments of the first pause what Alan was doing.

He was dowsing, that most ancient of means to find water. The pendulum would swing in the direction that they needed to go, and Alan would put the watch in his vest pocket and set off again.

Now normally one dowsed for water. Jonathon thought to himself that Alan was actually dowsing for the direction of the absence of water. Or rather, of Water Magic. And he was doing it, not in the present, but in the past. He had found the place in time when what was now a repaired sinkhole had been created. With that mark to guide him, he was following the path of that magic, by tracing where it had in essence shoved everything out of its way in passing.

This was a tour de force that Jonathon knew he would never have been able to duplicate.

He’s good, isn’t he? Jonathon sensed that the cat was “speaking” for his “ears” only.

Remarkably so, Jonathon thought back at the cat. I was skeptical—I’m not anymore. Even if— But he did not finish that thought, which would have been, “Even if Ninette does seem to enjoy his company more than I like.”

Well no one can be a young genius forever, the cat said with amusement. If nothing else, young geniuses become old geniuses, and a newer, younger genius is always coming up, nipping at his heels. Being in those shoes is somewhat less than comfortable.

Their journey took them long enough that Jonathon’s feet were beginning to hurt. He was by no means used to walking great distances; he was, after all, a city dweller, and men of his class took cabs. They would certainly need to take a cab back to the theater to be in time for the first performance. But just when he was about to ask Alan how much longer he thought this would be, Alan looked up and gave an exclamation of mingled triumph and disappointment. Jonathon looked in the direction he was gazing and saw—

A hotel.

“Oh curse it!” he said , annoyed, knowing exactly what Alan was thinking. “I don’t suppose—”

“With over a hundred people coming and going from there every day?” Alan shook his head. “There is not a chance I could sort through all of that. Besides, I much doubt that the magician confined his work to a single room. He more than likely expanded it to the whole hotel. I would have.”

Jonathon nodded. “All right then, we are not completely helpless. I can get a listing of all the people registered to that hotel on that day, as well as the servants and employees. That will narrow our search down from the entire city to at most two hundred people. I call that progress.”

Alan reluctantly agreed.

“Now, you may not need to hurry, but I have an act to perform,” Jonathon continued firmly. “So right at this moment, we need nothing more magical than the ability to get a cab in front of a fine hotel.”

Ninette stepped out of the cab in front of the theater and immediately had the sense that she was being watched.

Or to be precise, she had the sense that there were two sorts of watchers. The first sort were those who were watching her with admiration, varying degrees of recognition, and varying degrees of intent to find out if she could be enticed into a bed. There was a warmth to that which was friendly, even with those who dreamed of her being in their beds. Not even the ones who wanted her in that way had any intention of doing anything other than making her, and themselves, happy. And for the rest, she was something to be admired, like a sunset, or a lovely hat.

This she did not in the least mind. It was the same sort of thing she got when she performed. Even on stage, there were those who thought of her in their beds, and that only made sense, since her legs were clearly on display, though her bosom was not exactly as generous as those of the lady that sang “Champagne Charlie.” For the rest, again, she was like a fairy, a magical little creature that they watched flit about the stage so lightly they were sometimes afraid to breathe lest she break.

That was the good sort of being watched.

No, it was another sort of watcher, a single one, that startled her and sent a chill of fear down her back. How she knew this, she could not tell. Maybe Thomas could; maybe it was simply being around so much magic that it was rubbing off on her. But she knew, absolutely, that someone in front of the theater wished her only ill. That person, whoever and wherever it was, watched her with loathing.

Was this their enemy? Was this the magician who had sent all those terrible things to plague them? Had Jonathon and Alan gone in search of him only to have him come here?

And which person in the crowd at the theater entrance was it? Her eyes flitted over the crowd, lined up to buy tickets for the evening performances. They were all sold out these days, and even the standing-room sections in the backs of the galleries had plenty of occupants.

She simply could not tell who it was; no one looked angry, or affronted, or even more annoyed than one could be with standing in a line on a warm evening. There was nothing to give her so much as a clue, only that aura of hate, so with a shiver, she hurried towards the stage door. Nigel was in there, and so were Arthur and Wolf. They would know what to do. They would be able to tell if the person she sensed was the magician that they were all looking for. She tried to look as if she was hurrying only because she was a little late, and not because she knew he was there. If he knew that—there was no saying what he might do. Once inside that door she would be—

She had only a breath of warning before he was on her, the feeling of rage and triumph, the sound of a footstep in the alley behind her and the sense of presence looming behind her. But that warning was enough.

Not enough warning to fumble the revolver out of her purse—but she did have enough to react as a dancer would, sure of foot and aware as if her skin had eyes, knowing exactly where she was, and where he was, and where he was going. There was just enough time to side-step, turn quickly, and as the man sailed past her, arms outstretched, to kick him as hard as she could in the back of his trousers.

He had clearly expected to grab her, was off-balance to begin with, and the hard kick of a dancer, a well-fed, well-trained, and thoroughly healthy dancer, sent him crashing into the brick wall of the building opposite the theater. He managed to get his arms up in time to protect his head, but that was all. She didn’t hesitate for a second as he hit the bricks.

Screaming for help, she picked up her skirts over her knees and ran, her mind on fire with fear as the loathing and hate and rage washed over her, so thick it was a bitter taste in her mouth and a lash to her back, with terror putting wings on her feet.

She didn’t remember reaching the stage door, only that she found herself babbling to the doorman and a crowd of people who had run to the door at the sound of her screams. She thought she was saying something about a man attacking her, but her mind was so filled with fear that she scarcely could put two sensible words together. The doorman in his turn left her in the care of the wardrobe mistress and summoned four stagehands, leading them out in a wrath-filled group into the alley while the wardrobe mistress plied her with brandy and water and sent one of the boys for Nigel. The wardrobe mistress, under any other circumstances a crusty old dame with a formidable temper, put an arm around her shoulders as motherly as her own Maman could have been. “Here, sweetheart,” she soothed, “now drink this down. Did he hurt ye? Hit ye? Thank God it wasn’t dark out there—”

She shook her head and gulped down brandy that tasted salty from her own tears. “He wanted—he wanted—to kill me—” she babbled, as the terror slowly, slowly ebbed.

“I misdoubt it was killing he was after,” the woman murmured blackly, but at that point Nigel and Arthur came pounding up, with Wolf clinging like a limpet to Arthur’s shoulder. Without a word, Nigel scooped her up, as Arthur gave the wardrobe mistress orders that sent her scurrying determinedly away on some errand.

Things blurred for a moment, and she found herself on the couch in Nigel’s office, with Arthur peering into her eyes, Wolf still clinging to his shoulder and peering at her first with one eye, then the other. “Definitely psychic shock,” he pronounced, as she gazed up at him in bewilderment. “Honestly it is amazing she didn’t just freeze there in the alley and let him do—whatever it was he was going to do. Whoever he was.”

“He got away?” she gasped, panic rising in her again. “He got away?”

“Ninette!” Wolf barked, and flew down and bit her little finger, hard.

The physical pain snapped the panic, and the fear ran out of her like water from a cracked pot. She clasped her injured finger to her chest and stared at them all, unable to think, benumbed.

Arthur put his hands on her shoulders and shook her gently. “Ninette, it’s all right. At least it is for now. Whoever he is, he can’t get in here to harm you. Now tell us what happened.”

She gulped, reached for the glass of brandy that Nigel held out wordlessly to her and in halting tones, told what little she knew. “I cannot understand—” she faltered. “The horror—the fear—”

Nigel patted her hand, and Wolf rubbed his head apologetically along her wrist, but it was Arthur that answered. “Ninette, there is magic, and then there are the powers of the mind itself. It seems you have something of the latter.” He smiled encouragingly. “I do, too. I am about half magician and half mentalist. Tell me, have you been able to tell what the audience feels about you? As if you were feeling what they feel?”

She nodded slowly. “Mais oui. Since I came here to England, certainly. I am not sure about before—” But now that she thought about it, it did seem to her that she had always had a sense for who was friendly, who was not, and who might even be dangerous. She had just never thought about it very much.

Arthur nodded. “Probably talking with Thomas as you do has made all this stronger. And this man, whoever he is, has a similar ability. I don’t know why he hates you so much, but for you it was like someone with a megaphone shouting at you right into your ear. All you could feel was the hate and anger.”

“Oui,” she said slowly. “It felt like—like a blow.”

“It was a blow,” Arthur replied, and tapped her between her eyebrows on her forehead. “To your mind.”

“My head feels bruised inside,” she said, feeling dazed in a way that mere brandy could not account for.

“I am not surprised. Fortunately I have a remedy for that.” He smiled down at her. “You are going to take a refreshing little nap, and when you wake up, you will feel quite yourself again.” She felt his palm resting on her forehead, and suddenly her eyelids were too heavy to keep open. With a sigh, she surrendered to his will. After all, this was Arthur, and she had nothing to fear from him.

Nothing at all.

Nigel stared down at the sleeping dancer. “I never want to hear you denigrate your powers ever again, my friend,” he said soberly. “I certainly could not have done that, just now.”

Arthur shrugged. “Well, now we know what it is that she has that holds an audience,” he said pragmatically. “And it’s not a bad thing.”

“Not at all, you’ll just have to teach her control. And ethics.” Nigel turned away and paced towards the window.

“That’s hardly relevant at the moment. Who in bloody blazes attacked her?” Arthur picked up Wolf and replaced the bird on his shoulder. “Was it the Earth Master?”

Nigel shook his head. “No. The Sylphs are absolutely certain there is not a breath of Earth Magic, inimical or otherwise, around this building. Whoever it was has those mental powers, and nothing else, and for some reason he wants Ninette dead.” He turned away from the window, as a knock came at the office door. It was the chief of the stagehands, cap twisted between his hands, looking hangdog.

“Sorry, Mister Nigel, sir,” he said unhappily. “We lost him. He must’ve been faster as a ferret an’ twice as twisty.”

“That’s all right, Bob,” Nigel replied, though the man winced at the frustration in his voice. “It’s hardly your fault. Just tell the lads to be on the watch for him.”

“We will, sir,” the stagehand replied, and hastily made his escape. Nigel turned back to face Arthur, running his hand through his hair with agitation.

“First the Earth-Mage, then the other dancer, and now this,” he said with a touch of anger. “What next?”

Arthur could only shake his head.

22

NOT needing corsets, Nina never wore them if she could help it. So while the women all around her looked like marble monuments, she was able to undulate rather than walk, and lounge luxuriously rather than sit. This, apparently, was either very attractive to men, or made them acutely uncomfortable. Sometimes both.

The reporter had turned up at her flat—fortunately after she had awakened. Last night had been relatively good, despite the idiocy of her tool. She had decided that she would deal with him later, she had fed, though it was not what she would call a gourmet repast, and she was looking forward to unleashing another round of harassment via the newspapers in the next few days. She received her visitor leaning comfortably back in her velvet chaise, leaving him to take the uncomfortable chair with the itchy horsehair upholstery. She waved him languidly to it, and waited for him to tell her what the next barrage from him against the imposter would be.

But the reporter put paid to that idea.

“You lost it?” Nina said, incredulously, sitting bolt upright with shock. “You lost it?”

The reporter looked uncomfortable and indignant at the same time. “More like it was stolen,” he protested. “Along with a lot of my other papers, everything in my desk but my bills, things I was looking into for other stories. It took me this long to get my place cleaned up to figure out exactly what was taken. The thieves tore the whole flat apart looking for something, and it looks like in the end they settled for taking every scrap of paper that looked important.” He shrugged. “There are some stories I am pursuing that could cause scandal, perhaps even divorce. I expect that was what the thieves were looking for. They’ll most likely look through what they took and burn what they don’t want.”

“Why didn’t you keep these things locked away?” she snarled, her hands clenching and unclenching as she strove to control herself. “Are you so completely a fool? Why were they not in a safe?”

Now he looked angry. “Do I look like the sort of man that can afford a safe?” he snapped. “And even if I could, the landlord is so cheese-paring it would probably fall through the floor! Besides, what does it matter? You can send for more—probably better—bona-fides.” He gave her a superior look. “I told you that we needed those anyway. This time, get something I can actually use. Something a bit more convincing than photographs and impersonal letters.” His eyes glittered. “Letters from admirers would be the best. Especially things on letterhead with a crest. You can’t forge that.”

She glared at him. Give him letters from admirers now? And if she had been human, that would have been playing right into his hands. The opportunity for blackmail would be just too tempting—if, in fact, he wasn’t already planning on using what she gave him for blackmail.

She could easily send for things of a more personal nature, of course. But that would take time, and in that time, her enemies might come closer to unmasking her. One thing had already gone wrong with these far-off affairs. Her witness had vanished; he was supposed to be on the train now, but her servant had arrived in Paris without him. She assumed he had been shrewder and more crooked than she had suspected; he had taken her money and disappeared with it halfway between Prague and Paris. It was so maddening, having to rely on her servants so many miles away! They seemed to get more thickheaded with every month.

That was a setback, but, she had told herself, it was a minor one. This was only a skirmish, a feint, not the real battle. She could continue without a witness—and after all, it had always been an uncertain thing whether a working-class foreigner who had to speak through a translator would be believed.

Last night had been more serious. Her stupid tool had taken matters into his own hands and attacked the girl in broad daylight. Now the question was, would this be connected to her? She thought not, and the fool had gotten away, but—if they did, then her position became much more precarious. With the addition of a Water Master, the Elemental Masters had enough accumulated magic to effectively prevent her creatures from getting into their homes, and the theater, and if they tracked down an Earth Master strong enough to hunt her out—

Last night she had convinced herself these were only minor setbacks. There had been no sign that the magicians actually had linked the attack to her.

But now, to hear this—

Was it common thieves, after all? She listened, tight-lipped, to the description of how his flat had looked, and to him swearing he had locked the door securely before going out. It sounded as if it must have been common thieves—she didn’t think any of the theater people would have been likely to ransack the place so crudely. The stage magician could easily have picked the locks of course, and relocked them too, but she very much doubted that any of them would have torn open cushions and the mattress. No, that sounded like stupid, petty criminals. But still! Her pictures and other proofs of her identity were gone!

She realized at that moment, that despite her own self confidence, in short, things were not going at all well, and she needed to take it out on something, before her temper snapped altogether and she did something stupid and irrevocable in public.

And then she eyed the man before her, who had gone from being self-defensive to bullying. Every word he spoke, every line of his body, said the same thing. He was a man, she was a woman, he would therefore always know the right way to handle her story. She should be properly grateful for his advice. She should do as she was told, and keep that temper of hers to herself.

He was more and more infuriating by the moment. He had been injudicious enough, this reporter, and bald-faced enough, to come to her flat. He had been stupid enough to come alone.

And she had no further use for him.

She nodded once to her servant, who took the silent order, and left, closing and locking the door behind her. The man heard the click of the lock, and at first, it did not register with him. Then he turned to see that they were alone, turned back to her, smirking, anticipating, no doubt, that she had finally realized what a masterful man he was, and was going to yield to him in more ways than one.

She smiled sweetly at him. Then she shifted to her true and proper form. The smirk froze into a rictus of incredulity and fear when he saw what was facing him. His eyes bulged, and he made a little mewling sound.

“I have no further need of your services,” said the Troll, and slapped him to the floor with a single blow of her hand.

She made him last for a good long time, after first choking off his voice by the simple expedient of stuffing his mouth full of clay. He could still breathe through his nose. Her neighbors were awake and about, and it would be awkward to have to explain the screams. She absorbed him a little at a time, taking time out to actually, physically, feed on his flesh, just for the taste and the sensations it aroused in her and in him. She did not, of course, detach the limbs that she fed on. She wanted him to feel it, feel the horror as he watched her feed, and was helpless to do anything about it. Not a drop of blood was wasted; she absorbed it as it dripped from the ruined flesh, as she absorbed his energy, little by little. She savored all the complex flavors of his fear, spiced with despair and hopeless-ness. Finally, when she could wring nothing more from him, when he was semi-conscious at best, numbed, his mind hiding away from her, from the horror of what she was doing to him, she came to the point where it was time to end the game. She killed him and absorbed the rest of his body. When she was finished there was nothing left but a few bloody rags.

She reverted and signaled to her servants to return and clean up the mess. She was not sated, but her temper had been appeased. Now her mind was clear enough to think. She flung herself down on the chaise again, and allowed her servant to clean the blood out from under her fingernails before it dried there.

This was not going well. She had only one advantage at this point: that the Elemental Masters did not know that the real Nina Tchereslavsky and the Earth Master that was plaguing them were the same person. They did not yet know who she was nor what she was, and her location was still secure. But that could all change in a moment.

Briefly it occurred to her that the safest thing to do would be to abandon this project and go back. She had not yet ruined her reputation as a dancer with that single canceled contract. There were a thousand excuses she could plead; she could manufacture a plausible, even sympathetic reason for why she had not honored it. Or she could simply remain silent on the subject and allow people to gossip; humans being what they were, they would probably assume she was giving birth to a child out of wedlock.

And for a moment she toyed with that idea. She could even admit to it, and carry out the plan she’d been intending to execute here. She could purchase an infant virtually anywhere, call it hers, and bring it back to her home. It was not as perfect as the plan she had made for taking over this girl’s place. There would be no marriage, which meant there would be scandal of course, but that hardly mattered to her. It wasn’t as if she was hoping to make a good marriage! On the contrary, the more would-be lovers she had vying for her, the better.

Meanwhile she could carry out the rest of the plan. Display the brat at regular intervals. Absorb it when it was big enough that she could counterfeit it, and then play the dual role of mother and child. She would then be her own heir, and “Nina Tchereslavsky” could disappear in some manner.

It could work. It could easily work. All she had to do would be to pack her things and simply leave.

Then the thought of that wretched girl and her meddlesome friends enraged her all over again. She would not leave this battle! The wretched girl would have to pay for what she had done! Once again her hands clenched and unclenched, and the fingernails grew just a little longer, a little pointier, a little sharper.

Besides, now that the Masters knew that she was out there, she could not imagine that they would rest until they identified her. And when they did that—