Phoenix and Ashes (17 page)

Probably
not that an Earth Master would come hunting him.

She
laid one hand on wall beside the thick oaken door, and allowed the stone to
speak to her. Her duster blended nicely with the gray of the stone, and even if
anyone came along here and saw her, she could claim to be looking for the tenant.
Not that anyone would. The spell of avoidance she had laid across the lane
would keep even cattle from wandering down this way.

Needless
to say, the German agent did not work his spells within the confines of the
cottage, the spells he had laid here were all of protection, a dome of mixed
shielding that melded with the walls of the cottage. His purpose here was
twofold: to gather information by means of his Air Elementals, and, whenever
possible, to disrupt the training of the Royal Flying Corps. Now, from the
little that Alison had learned about the RFC, it took very little to disrupt
that training. Fog, rain, contrary winds—things that were all easy to
direct and create would render it difficult and dangerous to go up, and they
were all things that occurred frequently and naturally. Impossible to say how
many casualties, if any, were due to his interference. Possibly none
whatsoever; the Flying Corps was quite efficient at killing off its young
recruits all by itself. One recruit a day died at each of the two training
fields, so Alison had been told, and there could be upwards of two dozen
crashes a day, and that was without any magical interference whatsoever.

Insane.
But no more insane, presumably, than the generals whose only strategy seemed to
be that of amassing men in trenches, then sending them in charges against
machine-gun nests across open land littered with shell-holes, razor-wire, and
bits of the
last
lot to make the charge.

Absolutely
insane. If Alison had been in charge of the war, the slaughter would certainly
have been as great, but it would have been to more purpose. There were other
ways of killing men than flinging them straight to their deaths. And she would
not have pursued a policy that spent so much to gain nothing.

She
didn’t know this man’s real name, and she didn’t care to
learn it. She didn’t want to know precisely what he was doing, outside of
what he was doing magically. She did not care to know who he was reporting to,
or how. The War Office, of course, did want to know these things.

The
War Office would have to go on wanting.

If
the War Office was interested discovering these things, the War Office could
send its own men.

Of
course… they had
tried
doing just that. They had sent
conventional agents against Elemental Masters before, but like the generals, it
seemed that they never learned what not to do. They had gotten less than
satisfactory results in their investigations of this man, for instance. Those
two agents that had been sent to find out what this man was up to, at least
according to what the Lodge had told Alison, had been found wandering around
the countryside, scorched and witless.

Lightning,
of course. Well known as the weapon of choice for Far Eastern Air Elementals,
especially the ones associated with Tibetan shamanism.

Alison
might have started life as an ignorant working-class girl, but knowledge was
power, and she intended to be as powerful as knowledge could make her. It was
astonishing, the amount of information that she had accumulated about
traditions other than her own. Thus far, the magic of choice for Germans seemed
equally split between Nordic and Tibetan; agents of the Irish in league with
the Germans stuck to their dark Celtic ways. The walls of this cottage spoke to
her of foreign creatures with multiple limbs and eyes, and boar-like tushes.
Definitely Tibetan.

So,
her quarry was out in a field somewhere, communing with his slant-eyed demons,
interfering with the lives of the young bucks at the two Schools of Military
Aeronautics, one at Reading, one at Oxford. And all without going more than a
half mile from this house.

So
why choose Stratford as a base? That Alison couldn’t guess, and
didn’t really care. Perhaps it was simply that there was nothing much of
military significance around her, and so there was less chance of his being
found out. It didn’t matter where an Air Master was in relation to what
he wanted to investigate. The only question was how long he was willing to wait
to find out the information, and how sure his control over his Elementals was.
He could operate at a distance of a couple hundred miles if he had firm control
of his creatures. It was certainly less than that from Stratford to Oxford or
Reading. He would have no difficulty at all in controlling weather from here,
and depending on how fast his Elementals flew, he could have his information
within an hour or two. Of all of the Elemental Masters, it was the Air Masters
who made the best spies, for precisely that reason. Earth and Water Masters
tended to have more control over their creatures, but needed to be in close
proximity to what they were investigating, because their Elementals could not
travel nearly so fast. And Fire Masters could work at a distance, but their
control tended to be problematical. If Fire Elementals did not
like
you, they didn’t have a great deal of difficulty in slipping their bonds.
And when they did, even the friendliest ones could prove deadly. So Fire
Masters, in general, were very poor intelligence agents.

Well,
the one thing that this Air Master had neglected to do was to leave one of his
little servants here to guard his dwelling in person.

That
had certainly been a mistake. Even an Elemental with no power could have run to
alert his Master that there was another Elemental Mage in his territory, and she
probably would not have been able to catch or stop it.

Well,
perhaps he had made the mistake that so many in the past had. He had looked for
a
male
Master, assuming that a female would be inconsequential. The
Germans seemed to have that habit of dismissing female Masters out of hand. Or,
like many Masters of a “superior” Element, he could have assumed
that an Earth Master was in control of an inferior power.

If
that was the case, he should have known better. There was a reason why opposite
pairings were considered inimical to each other. It might be a bit more
difficult for an Earth Master to get an Air Master in a position where he was
under her control, but when it happened—the results were unfortunate for
the Air Master.

Or
it might be because he had never seen an Earth Master who had dominion over the
hostile creatures of the Element. Earth Masters tended to be healing, nurturing
types. Alison curled her lip in contempt. If that was the case, if he
hadn’t bothered to do his research, he deserved what he was about to get.

She
placed both hands on the wall, and summoned her own creatures. They would
bypass the protections on this place—one great fault Air Masters often
had was that they forgot that things could come up from below as well as down
from above. Their protections tended to be domes rather than spheres. Water
Masters and Fire Masters rarely made that mistake.

Up
they came, slow and cold, investing the walls and the floor with their
presence, swimming through the stone as an undine would swim through water.
Kobolds and tommyknockers, mostly, those creatures that invested rock rather
than earth, and who hated mankind with an enduring passion as the invader and
despoiler of their secret underground fastnesses. They had the power to bring
down mines when angered, and the only reason that they weren’t more
dangerous than trolls and giants was that they were slow to work on their own,
and solitary, and found it difficult to work with one another.

She
bound them with spell and command, it wasn’t difficult, given what she
intended them to do. They hated mankind in general, and Air Magicians worst of
all. Ah, the benefit of working against a Master of the inimical Elemental; it
was seldom that she commanded any of her creatures under these circumstances that
was not pleased to do her will.

The
spell was set, the trap laid, and there was no point in remaining. The Air
Master would be returning soon. He would check his boundaries and find them
untouched, because her invaders had not forced, had not even crossed them. Only
when the clock crossed into the dark side of the night, at just past midnight,
would her minions—“strike” was not the correct word, for they
would approach by stealth. “Envelop” was more accurate. As he
slept, they would creep upon him, imprison him, paralyze him. And then, they
would slowly, so slowly, squeeze the breath out of him, sitting on his chest
while he struggled for air, until the lungs collapsed and the laboring heart
gave out. There would be no sign that he had died of anything other than
natural causes.

This
was far superior to invoking a were-creature and tearing her victim apart,
which is what she had been forced to do the last time. Stealth was always
preferable to direct conflict. Whenever she could avoid a mage-battle, she felt
that she had won two victories in one.

She
sauntered back to the waiting automobile, feeling altogether pleased with
herself. The amount of terror and pain that this particular murder would
produce would be remarkable, and that in turn, would enrich the power given up
at the death. The victim might well last most of the night. The kobolds would
absorb that power—retain some for themselves—but deliver the
lion’s share to her.

Which
would, in turn, give her more power for the conquest of Reginald Fenyx. She would
need extra power; Earth Elementals had already feasted on his fear and pain,
and would hunger for more. If she had meant to destroy him, that would have
been fine, but she would need all her magic and cunning to keep them restrained
and held in check.

She
drove back home in the sunset; the auto was constructed of enough of the
materials of Earth—though it was powered by Fire and Air—that it
did not dare misbehave under her hand. Which was more than could be said of
horses, or, for that matter, any other living beast that she hadn’t
specifically bred, altered, and trained. That was the drawback to being a Dark
Master; animals didn’t much care for you.

Well,
the antipathy was mutual.

She
brought it to a halt inside what had been the stable, and turned it off as the
last light of the day slowly faded. Through the garden door she came, walking
briskly up the path as light shown warmly through the kitchen windows.

Of
course, she did not have to go through the kitchen, for there were two doors
into the garden—the kitchen door and this one. It would never do for
her
to take a servant’s entrance, not even when there was no one there to
see; the passage from the garden led directly to the sitting and dining rooms.
However, the savory aroma coming from the kitchen told her that the girl had
concocted something tasty with the potted pheasant.

She
went upstairs to clean herself from the drive, and smiled at herself in the
mirror. It had been a most satisfactory day.

Orders
to use potted pheasant for dinner had made Eleanor seethe with repressed anger,
and this time, it was not only on her own behalf. Outside these walls, people
were getting by on a few ounces of meat in a day, stretching it by stewing,
putting it in soup, concocting pie—using parts of the cow, pig, sheep,
and chicken that no one would have dreamed of using before this. Here within
the walls of The Arrows, the announcement that there would be no ham or roast
had been met with an order to make a meal with a potted pheasant, as if this
was a great hardship. While the trio had been gone, Eleanor had learned a great
deal about life in the village in this third year of the war, and she knew that
the steady submarine attacks on convoys coming from the United States were
taking a significant toll on what was getting to the island. It wasn’t
only munitions. Far more than she had ever dreamed came into Britain from
across the oceans.

Taking
a greater toll on people’s everyday lives was the rationing and simple
scarcity, for there was no need to formally ration what simply was not
available. The greater share of meat, white flour, fat, dairy, and sugar was
simply taken to go to those who were fighting, or who, like the medical
services overseas, were serving those fighting. The result had an impact
everywhere. She wasn’t sure if people were actually hungry, but it
wouldn’t surprise her.

There
were no sweets in the village store for children, for instance, and when sugar
was available, everyone rushed to get what they could. The butcher, Michael
Kabon—to Eleanor’s initial shock, he was a black man, from
somewhere in Africa—made the most of every bit of meat and bone that fell
beneath his cleaver.

Mr.Kabon
was well-regarded in normally insular Broom, but then, when his personal
sacrifice was so visible in his own flesh, Broom would have found it difficult
to turn away from him, even had he not been as good-natured as he was. Whatever
had moved him to volunteer, she could not say, but he was never going to go
back to the lines again—not the way he fought for each breath after the
dose of mustard gas that had also scarred his face and body.

And
he had proved to be very useful for the village. Of course, here in the
country, no one ever complained about eating organ-meat, so he had no trouble
finding buyers for kidneys and livers, lungs and brains. But he knew of other
options. People were poor where he came from; he had some interesting
suggestions about how unlikely things could be cooked, and by this time, the
women of Broom were getting desperate enough to try them.

Chicken
feet, it turned out,
did
make a tasty soup when cooked long
enough… and cow hooves were not all that far from pig-trotters and could
be used to make more than jelly. So long as housewives disguised the origin of
their culinary adventures, no one seemed to mind where the taste of meat came
from. Any bone could be used to make a stock, and stock meant soup. It was
amazing how much meat could be gotten when you scraped bones, too.