The Fire Rose

CHAPTER SEVEN

So now we embark on the real undertaking. Cameron sent his Salamander down to Rose Hawkins with the night's set of books, and sat back in his chair. My hands are shaking. When was the last time that happened? He regarded the his trembling hands with bemusement. He had negotiated deals that could have broken his fortune if they had gone wrong, he had faced dreadful ordeals in the course of attaining his Mastery, he had endured trials of his strength and nerve that few other men could have survived, and none of that had left him feeling like this. He had been tempted to tell the girl that the evening's duties were canceled, but if she could sit there calmly and insist on carrying them out, he was not about to admit to weakness.

I feel as if I have run for miles, as if I have faced a ravenous tiger with nothing but my bare hands and my will, and convinced it to go eat something else.

The Salamander—which seemed very pleased with the evening's events—opened her door and brought the pile of books inside. She concentrated every bit of her attention on it, exactly as a bird of prey would concentrate on a rodent, as if she was still trying to spot some evidence of trickery. But when the books were on the table beside the speaking-tube, and the Salamander had transported itself to its customary position at his elbow, she stood up and walked slowly over to her accustomed seat.

"You will find these books a little more difficult than the ones I sent you in the past," he said, leaning forward so that his voice carried clearly down the tube. "They are mostly handwritten manuscripts, copies of books still older than they are."

"I am quite accustomed to reading medieval script, Mr. Cameron," she replied briskly, taking the top book without hesitation and opening it. "I see you have not marked a passage. Am I to read the entire book?"

"Precisely," he told her, with a touch of coolness. "You may begin now, in fact."

He really didn't need to hear all of that particular book—but she needed to read it. Although the author was not credited, it happened to be Doctor John Dee, the ancestor of the Dee whose work had precipitated tonight's crisis, and there was a certain symmetry in beginning her real education in Magick with this book, intended for the instruction of his Apprentices. It was a symmetry that John Dee himself probably would have approved of.

She read through it, unflinching, even when she encountered concepts as foreign to a well-bred young lady of this century as a fork was to an African Pigmy. Much of Dee's work was pure nonsense, of course; he often got results that were quite astonishing, and would correctly deduce the cause of some particular event—but he would arrive at that cause by some of the wildest twists of illogic! For instance—the admonition that to rid a village of Plague one must first rid it of rats was, of course, correct—but the reason was absolute bunk. Dee's assertion was that both Plague and rats came under the auspices of the Moon, and thus the rats carried the Moon's influence indoors, where it otherwise could not penetrate!

His notes on transformations were sound though, as far as they went. Dee had never actually attempted a transformation; he only related what he had learned from colleagues on the Continent. His tastes ran to the mystical, which certainly suited a Master of Air. The Sylphs were the least effectual of the Elements, and the most capricious. It didn't do to depend on them for much of anything, and they could not keep their attention on a task for more than an hour or two at most. They made tremendous messengers and information-gatherers, they could fetch something from anywhere in the world in the blink of an eye, but if their Master had an accident and sent them for help, chances were that without the Master's eye on them, they'd become distracted on the way and leave him to bleed to death.

Not that they were harmless, any more than a tornado was harmless, or a hurricane. No would-be Master of Air ever made that particular mistake twice. Very few ever made it once and lived to tell about it. Such was the case with each of the Elements and its Elementals. They had their strengths and weaknesses—and all were deadly and dangerous.

In the final section of his book, Dee described the first Ordeal an Apprentice underwent in the process of becoming a Master of Air, and Cameron felt it would be instructive for Rose to read it. It should serve as a cautionary tale, as well. He waited expectantly when she closed the volume and put it aside. She reached for the next book, but did not open it immediately. From the expression on her face, he deduced that she was making up her mind whether to say something or not.

She cleared her throat, self-consciously. "Clearly, some of that was flummery," she said.

"A great deal, actually, but anyone with a rudimentary scientific education would recognize what is nonsensical," he replied, quietly.

"But that final chapter—?" She let the sentence hang in the air, ending it on a note of query.

"The final chapter is accurate, insofar as it describes the correct First Ordeal for an Apprentice seeking to become a Master of Air," he told her, as matter-of-factly as if he were confirming that the sun rose in the east. "The Ordeals for other Elements differ, of course. Each is determined by the Nature of the Elementals; the one thing they all have in common is that there is a cost to the acquisition of power. Nothing comes without a price."

She did not answer that, but he had not expected her to. After a moment, she opened the second book, and began reading it aloud.

When she finished, it was well past four, and he called a halt. Even if she was able to absorb the stress of the past evening without any overt problem, he had not been.

As she finished reading, he cleared his throat. "That will be all for tonight, Miss Hawkins—"

"You called me Rose, earlier," she interrupted.

He recalled immediately, much to his chagrin, that she was right. "So I did. I apologize."

"Don't," she replied, surprising him. "The use of Christian names or even nicknames to another has more than one interpretation. It can be the sign that one is far superior to the other, but it can also be the sign that they are equal, if the liberty is equal."

He felt the corner of his mouth pull in an approximation of a smile at her cleverness. "Very well, then. I freely give you permission to call me Jason. I never had a nickname."

"I frankly can't imagine anyone daring to give you one," she countered, the blue eyes behind the thick lenses of her glasses sparkling with a hint of mischief. "I have no objection whatsoever to you calling me 'Rose,' however. I never particularly identified with my namesake."

"The character from Shakespeare?" he said, surprised. "But whyever not?"

"Because I wasn't named for the character from Shakespeare, but the naughty wife from Die Fledermaus," she admitted, blushing. "My father's taste ran to music rather than theater."

She startled him into a real laugh. "Now that I understand! We have done a good night's work, Rose; a great deal has been accomplished. Thank you, and good night."

"Good night, Jason," she answered, setting the book aside and standing up, brushing her skirt as she did so. "May I say that, strange as this has been, I fervently hope that I do not wake in the morning to discover this has been a dream brought on by too many medieval manuscripts and too much imagination? Life will be so much more interesting if all this is real."

"It is real enough, Rose," he told her image soberly, though too softly to be heard. "Real enough to be more nightmare than dream—which I pray you never discover."

In the morning, Rose woke quite certain that she had dreamed all of the events of the previous evening. It was too fantastic to be believed, too ridiculous. A railway magnate with a double life as a wizard, with magic at his command that truly worked? Absurd. She laughed at herself even as she stretched and made ready to rise—

Right up to the point where she drew aside the bedcurtains and groped for her glasses, only to find them floating mere inches from her face, with a blurry globe of brightness hovering in the center of the room.

She seized the spectacles and fumbled them on hastily, and the blurry form resolved itself into a Salamander. There was no mistake; it was exactly as she remembered, a lizard-like creature that glowed a brilliant, flame-colored yellow, with fiery blue eyes. She could not tell if it was the one from last night or not, since she didn't note any real differences.

Then it spoke, and the voice was significantly different from the other; higher, breathier, like a small, shy child's. "What would you care to wear today, lady?" it asked. Its tone was deferential.

She blinked at it, and said the first thing that came into her mind; the slight chill in the air reminded her that it was November, and she identified the first warm ensemble she recalled. "The brown wool plush suit and one of the ivory silk blouses," she told it. The Salamander began to spin, and the wardrobe doors opened.

The suit lifted out, jacket and skirt together, looking uncannily as if it was alive. "This?" said the Salamander, as the suit turned for her examination.

"Oh—yes," she replied, still feeling rather stunned.

A bureau drawer opened, and one of the blouses rose from it, unfolding itself before her eyes. Even as she watched it, dumbfounded, the creases it had acquired from lying folded in the drawer smoothed out.

"And this?" asked the Salamander politely. "Or another?"

It was silk, it was ivory—the details of ornamentation hardly mattered at that moment. "I—yes, that will do nicely." She stared in wonder as the suit draped itself over the back of a chair, the blouse followed, and the appropriate underskirts, petticoats, and underthings followed it. Without prompting, the Salamander extracted a pair of fine brown kid boots that matched the suit from the special rack holding shoes, and those skimmed across the floor to join the rest of the ensemble.

"Will you have a bath?" it asked breathily. "Your breakfast is here already, if you would care to eat while I prepare the bath."

"Please—" she said, still dazed. The Salamander, still spinning, floated off into the bath room.

She groped for the dressing-gown she had left at the foot of the bed, slid her legs out from beneath the covers, and put it on. She made her way into the sitting room in her bare feet; there were already fires burning in the fireplaces, warming the air.

Of course there are fires. This is a Salamander, a creature of fire. It would probably want a fire here.

The usual tray was indeed waiting for her. She sat down, bemused and a bit dazzled, but not too bemused to eat. Long before she was finished, the Salamander, no longer spinning, floated in through the door.

"Your bath is ready when you are, lady," it said. "Is there anything else?"

"Not—not at the moment," she told it, hesitantly.

"Only say what you need, and it will be here." The Salamander gave itself another spin, then vanished completely.

She put her fork down, still staring at the place where it had been. At least now I know what has been in and out of my rooms, and how things appeared so silently. It could be worse, much worse. It could have been du Mond. The very idea was enough to make her lose her appetite.

It also made her skin crawl, and the bath suddenly seemed very inviting.

There were distinct advantages to this new situation. The Salamander had laid all her clothing out, perfectly; had drawn the bath while she idled at breakfast. She discovered another, when the creature appeared as soon as she stepped out of the bathtub. It warmed her towels before she touched them, then brought her garments, one at a time, into the bathroom without her having to ask. She felt rather like a French queen with a hundred attendants before she finished dressing—and for once she didn't have to do up her corset herself as an approximation. The Salamander tightened it snugly for her—not fashionably constricting, but not so loose that it was uncomfortable and unsupportive. Not for the first time, she wished she did not have to wear the silly thing—but she was not the kind of wild and rebellious woman who would shed her skirts and corsets for a vest and bloomers, and stride off to march in a suffragette parade. Perhaps she was a rebel in her own way, but she preferred to keep her rebellion to paper and academia.

Sunshine outside beckoned, and she hurried down the stairs to see what her new change in status meant to the running of the household.

The change wasn't immediately obvious, but as she walked around the gardens, she did see the occasional spinning globe of light moving along a hedge or over a flower-bed. Where they passed, order appeared in their wake. And when she reached Sunset's paddock, the handsome stallion was enjoying the ministrations of three of the creatures; one giving him a thorough brushing, one cleaning his hooves, and a third slowly combing out his tail. Or rather—one hovered above his back while a brush passed over his flanks, one spun around the vicinity of his knee while a hoofpick cleaned his upturned hoof, and one spun above his tail while a comb ran carefully through the long hair. He seemed perfectly at ease with them, which surprised her, as she would have thought that such strange apparitions would have sent the stallion into a fit of fear.

But perhaps—if he came from a "friend" of Jason's, perhaps that friend is also a Firemaster. Perhaps Sunset has always been handled by supernatural as well as human grooms, and they seem ordinary to him. Even so, he was remarkably steady with them; the little she knew of horses was that they were often restive even with human grooms.

She took the remainder of her "stroll" at a very brisk pace, trying to cover as much ground as she could, to get the paths of the gardens firmly in her memory. Before long, she intended to have a mental map of every path on the grounds. A need to escape was still a possibility; Jason's cordiality last night had not changed her mind on that score. If anything, she regarded him as more dangerous, rather than less, no matter what she had told him. If she no longer needed to worry about interference from human servants in an escape, now she had to be concerned with the even more dangerous Salamanders. If she had to flee, she would have to get off the estate before they were sent to search for her, for she would never be able to escape them.

That set her to wondering just what Jason's accident had involved. Is he terribly burned, I wonder? That would make sense—the little I remember about Salamanders is that they were employed to smelt ores, fire up crucibles to incredible temperatures, and make fine steel by alchemists. Perhaps he had slipped, or somehow angered them, and they had burned him. But if that was true, would he still have such control over them now? I thought he said that his accident was because he attempted something foreign to his Magickal Nature. But I can't imagine that Sylphs or Gnomes could do much to him—and what kind of deformity could an Undine inflict?

The question kept part of her mind occupied as the sun slowly sank and she hiked her way through Jason Cameron's extensive complex of gardens.

For he had more than one. There was the Formal Garden, with its mathematically precise flower-beds and its carefully sculpted topiary trees in geometric shapes. This garden featured roses extensively, but also rhododendrons and other blooming shrubs. There was the requisite privet-hedge Maze, which she very quickly reasoned out to be a Fibonacci series and had solved the same afternoon she entered it. There was what she privately thought of as the Pleasure Garden, after the gardens mentioned in the poem "Kubla Khan" by Coleridge. This was a place of nooks and bowers, artificial grottoes and other places suitable for romantic tete-a-tetes, all planted around with bushes of fragrant leaves or flowering vines, all planned in such a way that each was invisible to the next or the one behind.

There was a Water Garden, a series of ponds graced with waterfalls and fountains, planted with lilies and other water-loving plants, and stocked with enormous, gracefully-moving fish of gold, white, and black.

A Kitchen Garden clearly supplied the estate with herbs and salads, and there was even a small orchard. But by far the largest part of the grounds had been sculpted into a clever imitation of a wild forest, complete with an artful "ruined tower," rustic swings, pretty little "forest huts" for shelter, and sculpted seats beneath the branches of some quite magnificent trees. A masterful hand had been at work here, keeping the best of the wilderness that had been here intact, leaving pockets of completely wild brush to preserve the illusion of absolute wild, while taming the rest so that it was inspiring rather than intimidating.

Cameron had walls around the gardens, but they were decorative rather than functional. At the extreme of his property, he had a single wire strung as a token fence. It was not even barbed wire—he had no near neighbors, and there were supposedly no dangerous animals about, so all that this "fence" did was to define his property-line. Once she got this far—if she had to flee—she could make her way down to the coastline and follow it to San Francisco, or follow the fence-line in the other direction to the rail-spur and follow it to the main line. It would be a long and grueling walk; it might well take two or even three days. But she had no doubt that she could make it, provided she could avoid pursuit.

Perhaps it was foolish to think about a need to escape from this place—

But it would have seemed ridiculous to think that Jason Cameron was a magician, two days ago, she reminded herself, as she made her way back to the mansion itself. I believe in the next day or so I will try to find where the rail-spur crosses the property line.

And if nothing else, this was certainly ensuring that she got her exercise!

"Do you try again this afternoon?" the Salamander asked, watching Cameron lay out the lines of a magickal diagram in specially enchanted chalk on the floor of his workroom. He had stuck the chalk itself through a potato so that he could manipulate it, for otherwise his paws did not have fine enough control to hold something the size of a stick of chalk.

"Yes," he replied in a grunt that betrayed his pain; his body was poorly suited to bending over, and the position was causing him more difficulty than usual. At the same time, he dared not take any narcotic for the pain; he could not afford to make a mistake in this diagram.

"Are you certain this is a good idea?" the Salamander continued. "You have not found out anything new in what the girl has read to you."

"Nevertheless—I think—I have—a new—insight," he grunted. Perusal of his notes this afternoon had given him a slightly different perspective into the spell—or rather, the counter-spell—that was supposed to have reversed his condition. He thought, perhaps, he might have deduced a piece that had been deliberately left out of the original manuscript. If he was right, he should be able to enact the altered spell and return to human form.

The main question in his mind now was if the spell would be effective on his hybrid form. It was possible that the only way to make the reversal would be to transform all the way to wolf first, then return to his human state. If that was true, his task was doubly difficult, for he would first have to find out what had gone wrong with the transformation to wolf, then make corresponding changes in the reversal-spell, then perform both.

I must have been insane. The medieval spell of the loup-garou appeared often in tales, but in only one real grimoire that he had ever discovered. That alone should have made him extremely cautious. He knew that most medieval Masters held things back from their written records, kept key points secret in order to maintain their power over their Apprentices. He should have assumed that this grimoire would have been no exception.

And he should never have trusted the grimoire of an Earth Master who created such a thing as a lycanthrope spell. What use was it, except to terrify or spy upon one's neighbors? If one wished to experience life as a wolf, there were many spells to place one as an observer within the mind of a real wolf. Earth Masters in general were the mildest of creatures, much taken up with the health and fertility of the regions in which they lived, with studying the flora and fauna, and tended to be very conservative in their Magicks. The Master who had written the grimoire must, therefore, have been something of a "maverick," unusual in his interests and in his approach to Earth Magick. Cameron knew now that he should have taken warning from this.

Instead, he had felt a cocky kinship with the long-dead Master, and confidence in his own ability to be as much of an innovator as the man who had penned the spells in this grimoire.

Stupid, foolish, over-confident... all those described Cameron, and well he knew it. After all, overconfidence was what had led him to accept Paul du Mond as an Apprentice, so certain he had been that he could make a silk purse out of that particular sow's ear. But up until now, he had never gotten himself into a difficulty he could not manage to get himself out of with a profit.

Up until now. Eventually the odds catch up with you, and pride goeth before a fall. He finished chalking the last of the sigils and straightened with a groan. His bones ached whether he remained still or moved, and he walked slowly to the table to deposit his chalk, listening to his joints pop and snap with each step he took. The muscles in his neck were so knotted and painful it was hard to hold his head up.

Fortunately, what he was about to attempt would either work, or not, within a half an hour.

"Guard me," he ordered the Salamander shortly. "If this is to be successful at all, it will be immediate, and whether it succeeds or not it will all be completed quickly."

"If it is over quickly, it will strain your resources." The Salamander sounded disapproving. "Your resources are thin enough, with very little to spare."

"If so, it is my decision to make." He turned to look at the creature with half-closed eyes. "You yourself know that your kind are no longer my servants, but my allies. I no longer need to guard myself against your rebellion, nor to use my Power to force you to obey me. I have not controlled you for years; you obey me because you wish to, not because I must coerce you. Unlike Simon."

"Unlike Simon," the Salamander agreed. "Still. You have limits, and you have enemies. There are other things you must guard yourself from, and Simon is one of them."

"So I will rely on you to accomplish some of that for me," he retorted. "Guard me now. This will require but a half an hour of both our time."

He stepped into the center of the diagram, being careful not to scuff any of the chalked marks.

Half an hour later, he stepped out again, unable to raise his feet enough to prevent scuffing the lines. But by then, of course, it didn't matter.

The modified spell had not worked, and as the Salamander had warned, it had left him in terrible pain and so exhausted that the mere act of breathing was an effort.

He ached in every joint and every muscle, and shivered, chilled to the bone, as if he was in the grip of a high fever. His mouth hung open, his parched tongue lolling out, dog-like, as he panted. His lungs burned, his stomach churned, there were shooting pains running down his spine and into both legs with every step be took. His head throbbed with agony. He got as far as his chair before collapsing, which was better than he had expected. He caught the arm of it as he fell, and turned enough so that his body slumped into the chair without further mishap. He wanted to close his eyes, but he knew that if he did, he would lose his grip on consciousness.

The Salamander was already beside him as he collapsed, and a goblet containing a mix of herbs and opium powder levitated into his hand before he could ask for it. He made the supreme effort it took to raise his hand, and lapped up the bitter mixture in thirsty gulps.

He lay back in his chair, as the goblet whisked away from his limp hand. Though bitter, the liquid did a great deal to ease the torment of his burning and dry throat and tongue. A second goblet followed the first into his hand, this one full of milk, one of the few liquids besides water he had any taste for in his altered body. As the initial exhaustion faded, he managed to bring it to his mouth as well; he lapped it up more slowly, and felt his stomach settling from the combined effect of some of the herbs and the warm, soothing milk.

The empty goblet lifted from his hand before he could put it down. He leaned back into the chair, and closed his burning eyes.

"Can you eat?" the Salamander asked. He raised his lids, and gazed at it. It had stopped spinning and now perched on the asbestos pad he'd placed on the desk for it to rest on.

"I shall have to soon—but not just yet." His voice sounded hoarser than usual to his own sharp ears. "Let the drugs take effect first."

"Yes." The Salamander cocked its head to one side, and regarded him closely. "You are not yet in danger from them."

"But I will be soon, if I am not careful." He filled in what the Salamander did not say. "And therein lies the dilemma, does it not? Do I take opiates for my pain, and risk addiction and muddle-headedness, or do I endure the pain and the attendant distractions and weakness? Both put me at risk, no matter which I choose."

"It is a difficulty," the Salamander agreed. It did not offer any further opinion, for which Cameron was grateful. He was not in a forgiving mood at the moment, and he did not want to hear any more criticism from what was essentially a creature under his command.

He slumped back in his chair and tried to relax into its cushions and support, consciously working to loosen those knotted muscles, to get them to release some of their tension. Gradually, the pain that was centered between his eyes began to ebb, the aches of his muscles and joints to subside, as the opium exerted its power. Finally, the pain receded altogether, and he opened his eyes, carefully assessing his physical state.

He was just a trifle light-headed, but no more than the equivalent of a single glass of wine. The Salamander was quite good at judging his need and the strength of the drugs he would require to deal with his difficulties.

And it was quite good at judging when those drugs would take effect. Within seconds, there was a plate of barely-seared chunks of beef on the desk, and another goblet of milk beside it. Obviously, his caretaker was going to see to it that he did eat.

The lamps had been trimmed, and the shades were thick, amber-colored glass, so that the light was clear, but not hard on his now-sensitive eyes. He was familiar with the physical effects of drugs; they were something a Master of any Element had to know, both on the rare occasions when he himself might have to resort to them or prescribe them, and in case an Apprentice resorted to drugs to make up for inferior ability. Cameron knew that the opiates had made his pupils widen, and that if he looked at himself in the mirror, he would see that there was nothing visible of the iris but a thin, brown ring around the dark, wide pupils. That would make him even more sensitive to light than usual, and his lupine eyes were very sensitive indeed.

He bolted the chunks of meat without chewing them, and washed down the salt-sweet taste of the blood left in his mouth with the milk. The Salamander said nothing during the whole time he ate, but whisked the plate and cup away the moment he had finished.

He yawned, and felt his jaw muscles stretching and his tongue extending, though he tried to prevent the latter. "I am just as glad that Paul was not here for this," he said.

The Salamander stirred restlessly. "Are you certain that you can trust him for a week alone in the city?"

It occurred to him that this Salamander was uncommonly intelligent and articulate, and growing more so all the time, as if continual exposure to its Master was making it into something akin to a highly intelligent human. Well, all to the good. I certainly need an intelligent aide, and if it is a Fire entity, why should that matter? He shrugged, or tried to. "I am reasonably certain that I cannot trust him, beyond trusting that he will follow my orders. But I have not yet detected the touch of Simon Beltaire on him, so whatever mischief he is getting into, it is probably nothing more serious than finding ways to cheat me. Or to cheat others," he added as an afterthought. "He has enough Magickal knowledge now to ensure that he wins at any number of games of chance. I am quite certain that whatever else he is doing, he is increasing his personal fortune illicitly, no matter how many times I warn him that such is a dangerous game to play."

"He would never believe he could be caught," the Salamander pointed out.

"And he might be correct," Cameron mused. "Who else would catch him but a Master or another Apprentice, and what others are there in the city that would stoop to cheating at games of chance for mere money when there are surer ways of obtaining a fortune for a trifle more work?"

He considered his own fortune, obtained by using his growing control and knowledge of Magick to be certain what commodity would be needed when and where. With that knowledge, and with the ability to see to it, through his Salamanders, that no one else beat his goods to the market, a relative pittance carefully invested doubled, redoubled, and doubled again. Within a year, he was well-off, within two, wealthy, and within five, in very near the position he held today. After that, he needed only to find competent underlings and he could settle back and concentrate his attentions on Magick, which was precisely what he had done.

It had been easier to accomplish all that out here in the West, where fortunes were made and lost overnight, where one's status depended, quite simply, on how much wealth one had, and no one questioned what a man did as long as he appeared to be a perfect gentleman in genteel company. In the East, he might have run into difficulties, not the least of which were the vastly greater number of Masters there. Here he had no one to contend with but Simon Beltaire, for the Masters of other Elements had no reason to interfere with him out here, where there was so little in the way of competition. The local Masters of Water invested in shipping concerns, knowing that they could ensure their ships arrived safely and ahead of all others. Those of Earth had made all of their fortunes in gold and silver; who better to know where the strikes would be? And those of Air invested in entertainment, and were paid back handsomely, for there was no place on the face of the earth as pleasure-loving as this West Coast, and no one better able to manipulate the emotions of others to induce pleasure than a Master of Air.

He closed his eyes, felt himself "floating" just a little with the effect of the drugs. It was the closest he came these days to a moment of pleasure himself—a moment when he allowed himself the luxury to be free from pain at the expense of mental alertness. He would not permit himself to fall asleep like this—his training made that much possible—but he could relax, just a little, and let his thoughts meander where they would.

He drifted further, and did not trouble to fight the drugs. The last time he had felt like this, it had been the effect of fever rather than drugs...

Typhoid. So medieval. Incredible that I survived. With opium between himself and the memories of what some might call a tragic childhood, it seemed as if they might belong to someone else entirely. He let the memories flow past him, surveying them with drug-induced detachment.

Not so tragic. Not as tragic as an early death, certainly. There are sadder stories than mine playing out in the streets of every large city every day.

How ironic that he and the Hawkins girl should have come from the same city. But a span of fifteen years separated her birth and his, and he doubted that she even thought a great deal about the event that had been so pivotal in his life and the lives of most other natives of Chicago born before 1871.

How incredibly ironic that he should have become a Master of Fire when Fire had been instrumental in obliterating his past and changing his future beyond all expectations. How even more ironic that this same Fire had been caused by two now-dead Firemasters.

He had only been four years old when the Great Fire in Chicago had taken his mother and destroyed his father's home and business. That was what he had been told, at any rate—during the few times his father had been drunk enough to talk, but not too drunk to be incoherent. He himself had no real memory of her or of the times before the Fire; vague feelings, even vaguer images, but no memories. And as for the Great Fire itself—

Even the opium could not cushion that memory, and as usual, he shied away from it.

He and his father had wandered for days before someone had taken them to a charity shelter run by some church or other, but when his father began to drink, they were turned out. His father had no real heart for anything after his mother's death; despite the generosity and charity of many, he never bothered to look for help outside of a bottle again.

Cameron could, if he chose, conjure up a Magickal vision of his father as the man had been, but all that remained in his memory was the drunk.

I can't even think of him with any positive feelings; he was never more than someone I had to obey—and sometimes take care of. The only time that Ronald Cameron was not drunk was when he was suffering from a hangover and trying to scrape together the cash for his next bottle of rotgut whiskey. He dragged himself from one odd job to the next, hauling his young son behind him like so much unwanted, half-forgotten baggage.

It was life on the edge, but children are flexible, and he had endured it because it was all he knew. Such a life could not last for long, but it had been long enough to ensure his father's complete descent into a state where nothing mattered to him but the next drink.

The two years Jason spent trailing about after his father should have been a century for all the misery they contained. Always cold, hungry, filthy—fighting with tramps who tried to steal the little he and his father had left, always sleeping with one eye open for trouble—small wonder he had gotten sick.

Small wonder father abandoned me as soon as became a real burden.

As so much of his memory was fragmented, he had only bits and pieces of memory from his illness, but the pieces he had were extraordinarily vivid. The first was of the hour before dawn, and his father literally tying him to the front gate of a brick house so that he would not try to follow, or wander away in his delirium. He recalled that he was cold, but as light-headed as he was now, and as he shivered, he could not make himself move so much as a finger. The second sequential piece was of an amazingly ugly man peering down at him, then glancing up at someone out of Jason's line of sight...

"Sick as a dog, sir." Then, in a tone of acidic irony, "Someone must've mistaken this place for a charity hospital. I'll call a policeman."

A second voice. "Wait a moment." A second face, thin and ascetic, peering at him through the lenses of a pince-nez. "No, bring him inside, clean him up, and send for the doctor. I can use this one. "

And that was his savior. Jason grimaced sardonically. Not surprising that "clean him up" was the order before "send for the doctor." Alan Ridgeway was not a cruel man, but he was not a compassionate man either. He could have stood as a model for anyone wishing to study the morals and manners of the pure intellectual. There was very little warmth in him, which was rather ironic considering that he was the most powerful Firemaster in Chicago.

He had not been in Chicago at the time of the Great Fire, or it might not have gotten as far as it had.

Might. He might have been able to separate the combatants before they burned down half of Chicago and thousands of acres around Peshtigo...

One Firemaster had lived in Peshtigo, a lumber town in the heart of the Wisconsin woodlands, and one on the South Side of Chicago. They had always been rivals, but one day in October, something happened to make them deadly enemies. And a few days later, the battle began that claimed twelve hundred lives in Wisconsin and an additional three hundred in Chicago.

The only other Masters in the city at the time of the Fire had been of Air and Earth, and precious little use in the face of an inferno. There were no Masters of any kind in the lumber-land of Wisconsin. And when it was over, both Firemasters were dead.

The Masters of Boston had been horrified by the carnage, and in an unprecedented burst of public-spiritedness, those of Fire decreed that one of their number must relocate to Chicago to see to it that there were no outbreaks of fires caused by Elementals set free by the deaths of their Masters. He had been told the Masters of Water of New York had sent a similar representative to counter any actions of Salamanders. The Firemasters had drawn lots to determine who should go, and Alan Ridgeway had lost.

A true Boston Brahmin, Ridgeway had changed his name when he achieved his Mastery and had vanished from the ken of his family, who would have expected certain duties from him that he was no longer able or willing to fulfill. Magick was his mistress and his wife, and no mere female could ever interest him enough to make him want to make even a token effort to satisfy her. That would not have Done in the circles he was born to, so he removed himself from those circles.

It hardly mattered that he was no longer even part-heir to the family fortune, since no Master was ever without money for long. He soon made a modest fortune of his own—a modest fortune was all he wanted—and when he was chosen by fate to go to Chicago, he went without too much complaint.

But the Fire that had claimed so many lives seemed to have claimed a disproportionate number of those with the Magickal Nature of Fire itself, for the one thing Alan Ridgeway had not been able to find in the year he had been in the City was an Apprentice. For some, this would have caused no great trouble, but for Alan, brought up to always strictly follow the rules, it was very disturbing. He was a Master and a Master needed an Apprentice. He had left his previous Apprentice with another Master, since the boy was not able to make the move with him. And Alan Ridgeway, unlike many Masters, loved to teach. Without a pupil, he felt truly incomplete.

So when a filthy, sick, penniless child, with the purest Magickal Nature of Fire Ridgeway had ever seen, had been abandoned at his front gate, it must have seemed like the hand of a beneficent Providence at work.

Not that Ridgeway believed in Providence. A true Cynic of the ancient Grecian school of philosophy of that name, he believed in nothing he could not see or experience himself. Perhaps that had been why Magick had claimed his soul with such strength—for although Magick was mystical in nature, it was also something he could see, measure, and control.

Dear old Ridgeway. Once I was clean and fit to come into his immaculate house, he did his best for me.

For a Firemaster, of course, the work of augmenting the doctor to ensure a cure was fairly simple. The reason for fever was to burn out a disease. In a child whose Magickal Nature contained even a hint of Fire, Fire could be used to complete the process before the child became too weak and debilitated to recover. In a child like Jason, Ridgeway could work a cure even the doctor pronounced as miraculous, though the illness be the deadly typhoid fever itself.

Jason had awakened in a place that, at the time, seemed compounded from fever-dreams—in an oak bed with clean, fresh sheets, in a fine room, with the ugly man sitting in a comfortable chair beside the bed, watching over him.

The ugly man was Ridgeway's trusted manservant, Barnes; beneath Barnes' gruff exterior beat a heart of solid granite. He was in that chair because he had been ordered to remain until Jason awoke, and not out of any humanitarian concern for a sick child.

Barnes never showed any sign of caring for anything or anyone; his acidic wit burned as wickedly as any Salamander, and he spared no one, not even himself. He treated Jason as an adult from the beginning, for he had no patience with children, and he reasoned that if Jason was treated like an adult, he would soon become one. If Jason did something childlike, he was scourged with the whip of Barnes' wit until he often thought that a physical beating would be preferable. But as long as I behaved like a responsible adult, I had nothing to complain about. Certainly there was nothing lacking in my physical and intellectual surroundings!

Ridgeway knew nothing about children or their needs, and left Jason's care up to Barnes. But as for Jason's education—there Ridgeway had an interest. He had his own theories about the way a child should be taught, and applied them with a vengeance.

It was a good thing I came out of that fever with all my intelligence intact. He had needed every scrap of it. Ridgeway's notion of a proper education was to rush the child through the tedium of learning to read, write, and figure, and then go straight into the real meat of learning, beginning with the classics of Grecian and Roman literature. Ridgeway had a sound background in history, and saw no reason why a modern child couldn't emulate an Elizabethan child like Lady Jane Grey, who could read and write in several languages competently enough to correspond with adults in them by her ninth birthday.

I would have been a severe disappointment to him if I'd been a dolt. Not likely, though. Not with such a strong Magickal Nature. Children of that sort were generally the brightest and best.

Ridgeway kept him at his books from dawn to dusk, with time out only for another passion of his, physical exercise of the classical Greek sort.

Cameron had actually enjoyed poor Ridgeway's attempts to replicate the exercises undertaken by the athletes of ancient Greece, with the addition of equitation, for Ridgeway loved riding and there was nothing he could not ride. Sound mind, sound body, and all that. They were the closest he came to being able to play. The time or two that he had feebly objected to the strenuous intellectual regimen, both Barnes and Ridgeway had pointed out that he had been taken from the gutter, and they had no obligation to him. If he wished to return to the gutter, he could do so at any time.

Memories of near-starvation were a potent goad to keep him from voicing any further objections.

Ridgeway was even kind in his own way. He never uttered a rebuke that was not justified, and while he did not demonstrate affection physically, he was certainly ready enough with warm praises as Jason rose to meet his high expectations. Before long, Jason never even thought of his former life.

Soon enough, Ridgeway treated Jason as the Apprentice he would be when his powers settled at about eighteen, rather than the child that he was. Such treatment included one-sided "discussions" of Ridgeway's observations.

"What do you think of people, boy?" The Master puffed on his pipe and regarded Jason speculatively.

"People, as in humanity, sir? Ordinary people, you mean?" At Ridgeways nod, the boy shrugged. "I don't think of them much at all, sir. I mean, we're so different from them. Why bother thinking about them?"

"People are sheep, boy." The Master made this pronouncement with the finality of a physical law. "But it's in our interest to protect the flock. If we don't, the wolves will eat them up, and there'll be nothing for us. Just because they're sheep, it doesn't follow that they have no value. Always remember that, boy. We aren't the wolves. We're the shepherds, and the sheep can be of great benefit to us."

Cameron had never seen anything in all his years to contradict that particular piece of wisdom. Ridgeway had used that analogy often during Cameron's education.

Once it had come up in an odd circumstance when a stained-glass window in a church had caught Ridgeway's eye. It depicted Jesus with a shepherd's crook and a lamb over his shoulders, and Ridgeway had begun to laugh.

Jason had been puzzled at the reaction to a church window, and Ridgeway had been in a good enough mood to explain it to him.

"I have to laugh whenever I see the sheep talking about Jesus as 'The Good Shepherd' without thinking about it. What does the shepherd do?" Ridgeway waited for the obvious reply, smiling a little.

"He protects the sheep," Jason had replied promptly.

"And why?" Ridgeway chuckled. "So he can take their wool twice a year, take their milk if he's so inclined, and butcher lamb and ewe alike when the flock is big enough that he can afford some meat out of it. Do you think that's the image those good people in there really have of their God?"

Even at ten Jason was far more aware of the illusions people cherished than most adults. "No," he had answered promptly. "They don't want to think of God that way."

"But it's a truer view than they know," Ridgeway had replied, sardonically. "A truer image than they want to contemplate." He chuckled again. "Barnes keeps asking me if the correct translation of that passage in the Bible feed my sheep,' shouldn't read 'fleece my sheep.' "

Jason's mouth twitched with amusement at the recollection. No doubt if anyone had overheard them, Ridgeway would have been publicly vilified, perhaps even attacked.

But Ridgeway was too clever to say any such things where he might be overheard. He had made a concerted effort to portray a perfect humanitarian and man of letters. He contributed generously to charity, in part because the "sheep" had to be fed, and in part because people who were starving tended to make trouble. In his capacity as a Firemaster, he helped to keep the common people of Chicago safe from a repetition of the Great Fire, though that was hardly public knowledge. He was considered a fine gentleman and a model citizen, and he saw to it that Jason was formed into the same pattern—but also that Jason knew why such a pose was necessary. When Jason passed his Ordeals and became a Master in his own right, Ridgeway was as proud of his accomplishment as he had any right to expect. If Ridgeway and Barnes had never attempted to become substitute parents, they also never pretended that they were trying to do so.

He had never found his father. He'd gone out, now and again, to look—but his quest was as fruitless as it was futile. What would he have done if he'd found the man, anyway? He could hardly have taken a drunk back to his Master; Ridgeway would rightly have refused to have anything to do with the situation, and might have thrown both of them out. Any money he had supplied would quickly have turned into little bottles of spirits.

At least Ridgeway and Barnes wanted him. Ridgeway wanted him because of his potential as a student, and Barnes because having him there pleased the Master and because Jason assumed some of Barnes' duties. It wasn't love, but why should that matter? It was tolerance and welcome, and that should be enough for anyone.

Well, it didn't matter, and there's an end to it. My own father didn't want me, so I'm lucky I found a place where I was needed.

But after he became a Master in his own right, things changed, as Ridgeway had known they would. It was uncomfortable to have two Masters of the same ardent Element as Fire in such close proximity to each other—the more so, since one was a former Apprentice of the other. There were bonds of respect and pride there that would not permit them to become enemies, so one of them had to go, and since Jason was the younger, he opted to leave. Besides, he had just discovered the amazing potential for wealth that the railroads represented, and it had seemed to him that it would be foolish to compete for a territory when so much of the great West remained unclaimed. Ridgeway provided him with the seed money for his own fortune and sent him off with blessings, and Cameron began his investments in the Chicago Commodities Exchange. It did not take him long to build up enough that be could be considered a serious investor in larger projects. That was when he left Illinois entirely, and became an entrepreneur in Steam and the Railroads as only a Firemaster could.

"Rose is in her room again," the Salamander said, interrupting his reverie. "She's just finishing her dinner. Are you fit enough for her to read tonight?"

With an effort, he raised his eyelids, and waved a clumsy-feeling paw at the obsidian mirror. Rose Hawkens' image appeared in it, laughing at something.

"She has just found out where her meals come from," the Salamander told him. "She asked her servant. She seems to find it very amusing."

She looked as if she was beginning to take all of the strangeness of her situation in stride, which was a definite relief to Cameron.

"Where was she today?" he asked the Salamander. "What was she doing?"

The Salamander could not shrug, but its indifference was clear. "Walking in the gardens."

That was harmless enough, and surely would have bored the Salamander. But the girl did more walking than any woman he'd ever met; not even the women who made a living on the streets covered as much actual distance in a day as she did!

"She must be used to walking," the Salamander continued. "She seemed to walk a great deal in Chicago."

There was that. Given the shabby state of her wardrobe, she probably had not even been able to afford street-car fare regularly.

He pulled the mouth of the speaking-tube over to his face, and spoke into it. "If you are ready, Miss Hawkins—"

"Rose," she interrupted. "We agreed to use Christian names, Jason."

"Indeed we did." He felt a flicker of amusement at her boldness. "Very well, Rose, we can begin where we left off last night."

He was not paying a great deal of attention to anything but the cadence of her reading once she began. He allowed the chair to take all of his weight, and stared into the obsidian mirror at her image as she slowly puzzled her way through the complicated German grammar of the first of the night's volumes. It was not an easy task to wade through this book, and Cameron was impressed by her fluency.

As she paused to decipher a particular word, she evidenced a flash of humor. "I beg your pardon for taking so long with this sentence," she said without looking up, "But I sincerely hope that this fellow's grasp of Fire Magick was better than his penmanship and skill at writing, or I fear he came to a warm end."

Cameron was surprised into a dry chuckle. "I believe you can be easy on that score," he replied. "I am given to understand that he died peacefully in his bed at an extreme old age."

She continued on for a bit further, then frowned, flipped ahead a few pages, then stopped altogether. "Excuse me, Jason, but I think the reason you wish me to read this next section is for my benefit, and not yours."

Once again she surprised him with her acuity. "Your point?" he asked.

"While I have no objection to the principle, this man's handwriting is wretched, his spelling worse, and his grammar, even for a German, worse still." She looked at the speaking-tube directly, as if she was looking straight at him. "I think you would do your ears and my eyes a great deal of good if you would give me your understanding of a person's Magickal Nature, since that seems to be the subject of this particular segment of the volume."

"She has a point," the Salamander chuckled. "You hated that book when Ridgeway wanted you to read it, and for the same reasons she dislikes it."

Only too true. He considered his own state for a moment. Was he personally fit to give anyone a coherent explanation of anything?

Possibly. Just possibly. "I will try, Rose," he acknowledged, "but you must bear in mind that my approach is modern, and tends to the rational and scientific, insofar as Magick can be either of those things. The solution I am searching for may be in more mystical realms and if your understanding is purely modern you may not translate later documents with the appropriate slant."

"Then I will set this aside to read later, in stronger light," she promised, and marked the book, placing it back on the table. Then she settled back in her chair, but rather than folding her hands in her lap, to his surprise she took a leather-covered notebook from the table and picked up a pencil, preparing to take notes!

He almost commented on that, and caught himself just in time. He could not let her know that he was able to watch her, or she might be offended. Worse, she might be angry, angry enough to demand to be released from this position.

I need her skills. There is no escaping the fact.

"Very well, if you are ready—" He cleared his throat, feeling a trifle self-conscious. Well, I cannot possibly bore her worse than those ancient professors she had to listen to. "According to the System of Magick which we all use, as calculated by Pythagoras, all Magickal Power is embodied in the creatures of the Four Elements. If a human—or any other earthly creature, I suppose, but at the moment we are only concerned with humans—wishes to work Magick, he must do so through the intermediary of creatures of the Element which he commands."

She nodded as she made notes. "Just as an aside, are there any other creatures that work Magick?" she asked.

"For certain, I am only aware that the whales and dolphins have a few Magick-workers among their kind," he said. "They work Water Magick, of course. There are rumors of other creatures, Man-Apes in both the Himalayas and the forests of the Northwest, for instance, but nothing I can confirm. If they do exist, these creatures are extremely secretive and are rarely even glimpsed. It is believed that they would do anything to avoid contact with humans."

"I suppose," she said, touching the end of the pencil to her lips as she thought, "That if they were working Magick, it would be to hide their presence from our own species, so you never would find out for certain, would you?"

He coughed. "A point, I grant you. Well, to get back to the subject, as described by Herr Alexander Metzeger, whose handwriting you so despise—"

She flushed very prettily.

"—every human has all four Elements commingled in his Magickal Nature. Most of them possess exactly equal amounts of all four, and thus, command no Magick for themselves. It is only when there is an imbalance that one can work Magick, for it is only when there is an imbalance that a human comes near enough to the Nature of the Elemental that he can communicate with and command them."

She scribbled fiercely in her little book, and he paused to allow her to catch up. "Would that be something like a blind man having acute hearing?" she hazarded.

"Good!" he applauded. "Yes, that is an excellent analogy. It may be that because the Magician has that lack in one Element, he becomes more perceptive in another, as the blind man does. There is a danger attendant in having an imbalance, which is that you are vulnerable in the area in which you are the most deficient, and most often, that is the Element that is the opposite of your own."

"How far can the imbalance go?" she asked. "How—how far can the sensitivity to one Element be taken?"

"To the point where only a Master would be able to find the traces of any elements other than the one that the Magician—or would-be Magician—in question commands," he told her. "That is why no one can command more than one Element. By simply having that surplus of one, you of necessity drop the rest below even that of a 'normal' man." He frowned, and thought of an analogy, since she seemed to favor analogies. "Think of a square table, with marbles rolling about on the surface. Tilt it towards any one corner, and only that corner will fill with marbles. That is the way Magickal Nature operates, and it is just as well."

"Why?" she asked.

He had been expecting that question. "Because the Elementals are jealous creatures. They would never tolerate sharing a Magician with creatures of any other Element. Even if a person somehow managed to get a surplus in two Elements rather than one, he would be much better advised to simply concentrate on the one he preferred. The Elementals of his two Elements would be constantly bickering with each other, wasting time and energy, and interfering with his plans."

"They sound like naughty children," she commented, with a smile she did not know he could see.

He snorted. "They are like naughty children," he told her. Actually, he had thought of another simile, but it was not a polite one. "Well, that, in essence, is what Herr Metzeger has written in the section of his book you wished to set aside for the moment."

She made a face. "He took forty pages to say that?" she responded incredulously.

"With more elaboration, which you can read if you choose. He goes on at some length about the characteristics of each Element, how you can tell if a child has that imbalance in his Magickal Nature that will make him suitable for an Apprentice, and how the characteristics of the Magickal Nature carry over into the personality." Cameron paused for a moment to let a wave of light-headedness pass. "You might find all that useful. If you pay close enough attention, you will be able to decipher a person's Magickal Nature without ever using anything but your wit and your five senses to do so."

"Is that what you do?" she asked boldly.

He barked a short laugh. "No," he told her truthfully. "I don't have to. I am a Firemaster, and I have my Salamanders do it for me. They can tell with a simple look what a person's Magickal Nature is."

She had that contemplative look again. She's thinking of something. This could be interesting. I wonder if she is going to ask me what her Magickal Nature is, and if she could be a Magician. But the question she asked was not the one he expected. "Could a Master of one Element teach an Apprentice of another?"

"Well, that is an interesting question." He thought it over for a moment. "In theory, I don't know why not—in fact, according to some of the old books you will be reading, the great Masters of the past did so. The discipline is the same, only the spells and Ordeals differ. The one drawback would be that if the Apprentice got himself into trouble the Master would not be able to command the Elementals of the Apprentice to return to their places."

"You stressed the word, command. Could he do something else to save his Apprentice from his own folly?"

Dear God, she was quick! "He might, if his command of his own Elementals was strong enough, be able to persuade his Apprentice's Elementals to leave the Apprentice alone." He shook his head, forgetting she could not see him. "I would not care to try such a tactic with any Elemental but the Sylphs, however. They are the most forgiving and tolerant, and the least likely to anger. Gnomes are slow to anger, but when enraged, they are implacable, and Undines I could not handle at all, obviously."

"Obviously." She picked the book back up. "Thank you, Jason. You have saved my eyes a terrible strain. On to the rest of Herr Metzeger's pearls of wisdom however atrociously written they are."

He settled back again as she resumed her reading, but his mind was still on the last question she had raised.

Her Nature was Air; the Salamander would not have bothered to mention that unless she was powerful enough in Air to command the Magick. Should he make the experiment she suggested, and try training her himself? It would certainly obviate the problem that most Masters and Apprentices had, that as soon as the Apprentice became a Master, one or the other had to seek a new home. A Master of Fire and one of Air could even dwell side-by-side in the same building with no ill effects....

Could I? Should I? Who would it hurt? I don't think she's stupid enough to do anything that would get her in real trouble; the only question would be if she could pass her Ordeals, and that would be out of my hands if she was an Apprentice in Fire rather than Air.

It was a question that continued to coil in the back of his mind through the rest of the evening, and even followed him into his dreams that very night.