The Wizard of London (20 page)

And
yet, this approach failed regularly with Elemental Masters, who seemed
impervious to her charms. David found that something of a puzzle.

Perhaps
it was only that she was a mere female. While men as a whole were susceptible
to womanly wiles, Elemental Masters took a longer view of things, and were
inclined never to make hasty decisions when it came to matters of Magic. So
although they might smile and nod and be charmed while Cordelia was with them,
they would commit to nothing without first taking time to think it over.
Without Cordelia
there
, her propositions often seemed less attractive,
and even reasonable suggestions coming from a woman appeared to be trivial
matters. Even a woman like Cordelia.

“The
most that I hope for is to be memorable in a positive sense to the P.M.,”
he told her. “Anything beyond that is less than likely, but the next time
I stand to speak, if the P.M. has some recollection that I appeared to be a
grave, sensible fellow, he is more likely to note my speech.”

Her
faint smile bestowed her approval on him. “I wish that all my
protégés could have been as wise as you,” she replied.
“Those of Air could never achieve a proper understanding of how a serious
approach to all things is of great benefit, and those of Fire never would
understand that the discipline of the opposite aspect of Fire allows one to
impose control on every aspect of Fire.”

He
did not allow her rare praise to go to his head; instead, he turned the subject
to commonplaces things; the invitations he had accepted or declined, whether he
intended to go to the country at all this summer, and some initial planning for
the first shooting party of the season. She no longer gave him daily
instruction in the control of his Element; only if he found himself at an
impasse did he ask for her help. And that, only rarely; she was more likely to
direct him to certain volumes in her esoteric library, or his own.

She
left at six precisely; they both had social obligations, which often, but by no
means always, overlapped.

Tonight,
he had nothing; a rare evening to stay at home. Not that it would be a
leisurely evening; he had reading to catch up on.

Yet,
when the house was silent, the servants all safely “below-stairs,”
and only the ever-present hum of London a steady backdrop to his thoughts, he
found himself paying very little attention to the book in his hand. Instead he
found his eyes straying to the greenery outside the window, and his thoughts
back to a time before he had ever met Cordelia…

Belle
.

The
memories of his first love? No, say “infatuation,” rather, since it
was obvious from the first how unsuitable the attachment had been, had he only
been sensible enough to acknowledge the fact. The details of her face had
become hazy over the years, but certainly Belle had never been the sort of
striking beauty that Cordelia was even to this day. Fine eyes, though, really
her best feature.

Odd,
he hadn’t thought of her in years.

Shame
he’d had to snub her the way he had, but Cordelia had been right. It was
the only way to effectively put the girl in her place and show her that her
foolish dreams were only that; dreams, and no more substantial than air.

Some
of the other girls in her set had initially come over a bit nasty to him
afterward. He’d been forced to make his indifference to their anger
clear, and after all, they were only schoolgirls, they couldn’t possibly
have understood that romance had no place in the alliances of their class and
their Calling. A word or two by Cordelia in certain parental ears had cleared
all that up. After all, if the Masters were to start indulging in the
foolishness of romantic attraction when it came to marriage, well! The next
thing you knew some duchess’ daughter would go running off with the
dustman or the chimney sweeper.

Still,
the hurt that had been in those eyes—

He
shook his head to rid it of the unwanted thought. It was not as if he had
plunged a dagger into her! It was nothing more than something she should have
expected from the beginning. It had been no worse a tragedy than a child denied
a sweet it ought not to have been promised nor craved in the first place.

It
was her own fault anyway. She had brought all the hurt on herself, with her
silly lending-library romances and the friends who had done her no favors by
allowing the country vicar’s daughter to think she was the social
equivalent of the rest of them.

It
had been on a night exactly like this one; a summer house party, the first of
the summer after the end of the Oxford term. Probably that was why his thoughts
had wandered in this unpleasant direction. A breath of breeze holding more than
usual of the scent of blossoms, perhaps, or a momentary lull in the sound of
the traffic that triggered memories best forgotten.

Memories
of startlingly intelligent conversation; of learning, with some fascination,
about the world of those whose Talents had nothing to do with Magic. Sometimes,
just listening to the stories of life in a small village, so different from his
own childhood.

He
shook his head again. What was wrong with him? This was ridiculous. Yes, the
girl had been vaguely attractive, had a certain intelligence, and a naïve
charm, but that was all! She certainly didn’t warrant more than a passing
thought!

Still…
he wondered what had become of her. She had vanished from the party, had not
come down to dinner, and the next day there had been some specious story about
being taken ill and going back to school—if the girl really
had
been ill she wouldn’t have made a journey all the way back to a school
that was nine-tenths empty over the summer recess. And after that, nothing,
except for a rumor she had gone to India.

Probably
chased down some poor officer and married him before anyone got a chance to
object
. The women that went out to India alone, or as someone’s
companion, were generally husband hunting. There were a great many unattached
officers in India, and very few unattached British women. Isabelle was probably
over there now, queen of a bungalow, having snared herself a captain.

His
mind began to complete that picture—except that the bungalow began to
shape itself into his drawing room, and the Hindu servant into his own parlor
maid, and that was when he resolutely, and with an unwarranted feeling of
anger, set his mind to reading that damned book.

***

It
was a small room, and austere, but exquisite in every detail. The floor, of the
finest white Carerra marble, was polished to a mirror gleam. The walls were
likewise of the same marble—which was a little unusual, and gave the room
the look of a cube made of snow. The ceiling was made of glass panels, but not
clear; they were opaque glass, swirled whites and pale, pale blues, leaded into
a pattern that teased at the mind, because it
almost
looked like a
great many things, but it was not possible to say precisely what it was. The
effect was slightly disturbing.

There
were no windows. Light came from four lamps of opaque white glass, standing on
four metal, marble-topped tables, one in each corner. There was something odd
about those lamps. The light they gave off was dim and blue, not the yellow of
an oil-fueled flame. It could have been gas, turned down until the flame was
blue, but there was no evident gas pipe, and at any rate, a flame like that
should have been too hot for a glass shade.

And
in an era when people crowded furniture into their rooms until there was
scarcely space to turn, this room had only the four small tables, and in the
center, a very strange chair and a fifth table. The chair, a single solid piece
of quartz crystal, looked like something carved out of ice. The table,
identical to the four in the corners of the room, held, at the moment, nothing.

The
chair, however, held Lady Cordelia.

Her
eyes rested on the empty surface of the table and there was a frown of
concentration on her face. And only when a puff of mist and a breath of cold
manifested on the tabletop did she stop frowning. “Speak,” she
said.

The
mist curled into the shape of a tiny, wingless dragon, that seemed to be made
of transparent crystal. This was an Ice Wurm, the Elemental opposite of the
Salamander yet, strangely, controlled by Fire.

“The
children are now further protected,” it hissed. “By Earth and Air,
by Fire and Water—as well as by Spirit. The woman has new allies.”

Cordelia
frowned again. “Powerful allies?” she asked, but the Ice Wurm did
not reply, as it would not if it did not know the answer. So, “Show me
the woman,” she demanded. She had viewed the face of her enemy in the
past, but only briefly, to assess and dismiss her. It seemed further
examination was in order.

The
Ice Wurm breathed on the tabletop, and a mirror of ice formed at its feet.
Cordelia leaned forward and stared into it, pondering the rather uncompromising
features of the woman shown there. As she stared, she tapped one perfectly
manicured fingernail on the tabletop. She ignored the simple gown, which was
perfectly in keeping with a schoolmistress of modest means. This woman was far
more than she seemed on the surface, and gowns were irrelevant—a mistake
in assessment that Cordelia had already made with her.

She
had begun to form the reluctant conclusion that this unprepossessing woman was
the same forgettable girl with whom David had formed an inappropriate
relationship years ago, just as she herself had come on the scene. She thought
the chit had been properly dealt with then, but—there was an echo of that
girl there. And how many female occultists in London had attained the levels to
which this woman had risen?

And
yet, it seemed the height of improbable coincidence that it should be she.
There was no reason for their paths to cross at this point, much less their
swords. The girl had vanished from polite society, as was only proper; no mere
vicar’s daughter should have been pushing herself into Elemental Master
circles, much less the social circles in which Cordelia was a leading light.
Cordelia had not even troubled herself to discover where she had gone; it was
fruitless to attempt to hunt down the fly one has swatted away so long as it
does not return. David had seen the error of his ways, and it was unlikely in
the extreme that he would ever encounter the girl again.

But—the
given name was the same, Isabelle. And—the child had formidable psychical
powers, even back then. She would not have been in the school she had been
attending, if she had not. The features were similar enough, at least insofar
as Cordelia’s vague memory of the girl went.

Cordelia’s
frown deepened. This was more than mere coincidence. The longer she stared, the
more convinced she became. This woman
was
the older version of that
child she had sent packing. How else would she have gotten Magicians of all
four Elements to protect her charges? Certainly not by recruiting from occult
circles, which contained, by and large, people with no Elemental Power worth
speaking of.

The
mere existence of those children could be detrimental to her plans for David
Alderscroft. There were just not that many genuine mediums around, and
certainly none of the power the younger of the two children possessed.
Elemental Magicians, of course, while they could certainly
see
spirits, were disinclined to do anything much about them. If there was a
particularly troubling Revenant, one might send it on its way, of course, but
for the most part, Elemental Mages considered the realm of the spirits to be
something in which they did not meddle. Renegade Earth Masters could and did
use them as weapons, but they were generally not terribly effective against
another Master in full possession of his or her powers. It was rather like
trying to use a swarm of bees to kill a horse. It could be done, of course, but
the horse would have to face a swarm of immense numbers, be unaware of the
attack until it was too late, and be unable to run once the attack began.

Cordelia—took
a different tack.

It
had begun much longer ago than she cared to think about, when the Honorable
Cordelia Westron had made the Grand Tour with a number of her schoolmates. They
had found themselves locked into one of the finer resorts in Switzerland by an
unseasonable spate of blizzards, and while the rest of her party amused
themselves with cards and dancing, flirting with the young men similarly
stranded, and complaining about the conditions, Cordelia had decided to take up
a guide’s offer to walk to a glacier. After all, she was an Air Master;
in her opinion, there was nothing that mere weather could do to harm her.

With
her own powers keeping her much more comfortable than the shivering guide, she
found the landscape utterly fascinating. There was something very attractive to
her in those vast stretches of pure white snow and ice and stark black rock; a
Spartan beauty that was very appealing, especially after being locked in an
overheated hotel, smelling of rich food and perfume, with a lot of chattering
magpies.

And
when she found the ice cave, despite the guide’s remonstrations, she
insisted on going in. The blue stillness drew her, the silence in which she and
the guide were the only living things, the purity of it, the hygienic
sterility—

And
then, suddenly, the guide became very quiet.

She
had turned, to find him as frozen in place as any statue; she had tried to
shake him, then slap him out of his stupor, but nothing broke the spell. She
had been about to invoke the Element of Air to wake him, when a flat sheet of
ice formed between her and him, the ice took on a mirror sheen, and she found
herself staring at herself—or rather, a reflection of herself.

Pretty
mortal child
, a voice in her head had crooned.
So strong in her Element
!