The Wizard of London em-5

by Mercedes Lackey

  Cordelia entered the drawing room, followed immediately by the maid with the tea cart, and he advanced to greet her exactly as always, the comfort of well-rehearsed pathways making him feel settled. She extended a kid-glove-clad hand for him to shake, he took it, squeezed it once, and released it. She smiled faintly.

  “My dear David,” she said, taking her place in her favorite chair, and motioning to the maid to begin serving, “I am given to understand you have been exceptionally busy this afternoon. Following up on an invitation to meet with the Prime Minister, no less! I am impressed by your progress.”

  He no longer wondered how she knew these things; her sources of information were logical. They were in the same circle of friends, she would have been told of the invitation at some point during her morning calls, and it was beyond the realm of possibility that he would not have been putting great thought into the exact wording of his acceptance this afternoon. “It’s only a large dinner party,” he replied, hastily making it clear that although he had managed this himself, it was an inferior achievement to those things she could do for him. “I doubt very much that I will be able to get more than a word or two with him.”

  “But that will be several words more than you have gotten heretofore,” she countered, with no sign of disapproval. “Congratulations.”

  He felt a little glow at her praise, and indeed, he had worked hard to get this invitation. He suspected that he had ultimately gotten the invitation because he was an eligible bachelor, and the lady of the house had two unmarried daughters to dispose of. Not that he would even consider either of them.

  He had higher ambitions, and any wife he took would have to fit those ambitions. Neither of the two hapless daughters fit that mold, but of course, she would not know that. You manipulated people by knowing their weaknesses and exploiting them in such a manner that they did not actually feel exploited. Best of all was if you could exploit them in such a manner that they felt an obligation to accommodate you, or a desire to fulfill your desire.

  He had never met anyone quite as skilled at doing this as Cordelia. She could extract nearly anything she wanted from someone, and leave him (or her) with the feeling that it was Cordelia who had been conferring the favor.

  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 bungalo
w, 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!

  She had looked wildly about for the source of the internal voice, but had seen nothing.

  A pity such beauty is mortal, too, the voice continued, and as she watched in horror, the image before her aged, aged rapidly, until what stood before her was a hideously distorted reflection of an old, senile and withered crone wearing her clothing, which sagged and bagged on the shrunken, bent body. With a gasp, she had stepped forward and involuntarily touched the mirror.

  You do not like what you see? The voice had been sardonic. Oh, of course not. You silly mayfly mortals, who do not understand preservation, only consumption. You devour in moments what has taken long years to produce, then wonder why everything about you withers, including yourselves. Look at yourself! You who are the ver
y epitome of the eroding property of Air, instead of the slow preserving of Ice. You could remain ageless in your beauty, and instead, you fling yourself headlong into the Abyss to whirl yourself away to nothingness.

  That had caught her attention, but she was cautious enough not to grasp for what the voice had hinted at. Instead, she had stepped back. “You imply a great deal,” she had said boldly. “But Ice is only the other side of the element of Fire. I am a Master of Air, and even if I do not yet know how to control you, whoever you are, I have the means to destroy you.”

  A silent laugh had been her only answer. And the mirror dispersed into icy mist again, the guide woke from his frozen state without knowing he had ever been in it, and the two of them left the ice cave.

  But she had come back… oh, yes. She had come back again, this time alone.

  This time determined to have some answers.

  She had gotten them, too. Some of them, anyway, though she was still not entirely sure what the creature of the ice cave called itself. Possibly an Ice Dragon; it was more powerful than any Phoenix or Firebird she had ever encountered, and the only Elemental of the flame aspect of Fire that was more powerful was an avatar of a fire god, or a dragon. In return for subjugating her Power of Air to the Power of Ice, she would be granted a force far more effective than that of Air alone. It didn’t matter to Cordelia; she had gotten what she wanted, and near as she could tell, the only thing the entity wanted in return was for more control to be exerted in the world by Ice. Sometimes it was difficult to fathom the motives of Elementals; by definition they didn’t think like humans.

  But that was not pertinent to the moment; at this juncture, she faced an obstacle in her path, in the form of a child medium and the woman who guarded that child.