Reserved for the Cat em-6 Read online

  “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 fruitfu
l.

  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, t
he 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.