Elemental Magic: All-New Tales of the Elemental Masters

by Mercedes Lackey

  She didn’t know whether her talent for Water made her able to breathe within it, or whether the river-horse (or a sylph?) had created an air bubble around her. She knew only that when she couldn’t hold her breath a second longer, when her burning lungs forced her to gasp, she didn’t choke on water.

  She buried her face in the river-horse’s watery mane, and kept in her mind the vision of the mine the sylph had given her, sharing it with the river-horse.

  At some point they left the Taff, joined a canal; she wasn’t sure how. All she knew was that eventually she was deposited, half-frozen and shivering so hard she thought she’d come apart, on the bank near the entrance to the mine.

  There were a few men with lamps near the entrance to the main shaft. They didn’t notice as she crept close to them, intent as they were.

  “—can’t lower the cage, it just ends up in water—”

  “—must be a flood—”

  “—told them not to dig that canal so close to the mine—”

  “—that woman insisted—”

  Myfanwy dropped to her knees and pressed her hands against the ground. Although she had no rapport with Earth Elementals—indeed, they were the opposite of Air, not compatible with—she asked only for passage, for a route below.

  Perhaps because the ground was so sodden from rain, or perhaps because the gnomes were sympathetic to her plight, she found herself able to connect with and visualize the scene below.

  The men were right: The canal had been dug too close to the end of a tunnel, and while it hadn’t completely collapsed through, it had started to seep through, aided by the rain soaking the ground, and now bigger holes had appeared and the water ran faster, sluicing and slipping its way down the tunnel, rising, rising . . .

  Myfanwy could move water—in small quantities, and for short distances. She couldn’t shove all this water back the way it came, back through the holes, back against the wall of the canal.

  Although she tried, she couldn’t even shove it all the way back past the shaft where the cage hung, high above. She could get some of it past, but the pressure from the other end fought her. More water was flowing in, too strong for her to resist.

  If she didn’t hurry, it would fill the area where the men—where Glyn—were trapped.

  If she didn’t figure out a solution, they would drown.

  In her mind’s eye, she called up the plans for this mine. Siwan had insisted she study the plans for all the mines in Glamorgan, along with the existing canals, the railways, the rivers.

  Just before the shaft, there was another tunnel.

  The encroaching water had bypassed it, however, because it ran uphill.

  She might not be able to push the water back far, but if she could push it back to that junction, and then divert it . . .

  Myfanwy called to all the undines and naiads and nymphs, to the river-horses if they could come, and with humility and kindness, asked them for their help. Never commanded, never controlled. Simply requested, if they would be so kind.

  And they were. For her, they came.

  Their strength lent itself to hers. She imagined she pushed the water back with her hands, with a large scoop, pressing against the weight of it until she moved it, inch by excruciating inch. When she reached the juncture, she erected a barrier, leaving the water no place to go but up in the incline.

  Her back and arms and legs trembled from the effort, already weak from her precarious climb down the tower.

  “Tell him it’s safe,” she said to a sylph that hovered under a nearby overhang. “Tell him to come to the shaft and call for the cage.

  “Tell him to hurry. I can’t hold the water back for much longer.”

  She waited in the darkness, in the night, in the driving rain, all of which seemed to go on forever as she struggled to hold the water to its course. But then, through the hammering of the raindrops, she thought she heard a bell.

  Yes!

  And then the men atop were shouting and lowering the cage, and the cage was rising, and miners were coming out, and the cage was going down again, and she knew Glyn wouldn’t leave until the last miner was saved.

  He would be in the last trip of the cage.

  She had to hold on until then.

  But although she’d been trained, she hadn’t been tried, and there was still one more group of men—Glyn among them, she knew—to rise when her control faltered, and the water slipped and started to fill the main tunnel again.

  No! she thought. “No!” she screamed silently, and then something within her split open, something she didn’t understand, but it filled her with light and heat and brought her to tears, and she wept from the joy and the struggle and the pain and exhaustion.

  But tears were Water, tears were her Element, and they leached through the soil and into the mine, and like the Elemental creatures who aided her, they gave strength to her barrier against the water. They gave her one last surge of energy to bind the water back, divert its course, let the final cage descend, fill . . . and ascend, rise to the surface.

  Then, only then, did she collapse, releasing the water to flow where it may, releasing the Water Elementals from their task with the deepest gratitude she could muster.

  “Myfanwy? Myfanwy!”

  Glyn was there, cradling her. In the faint illumination of the lamps near the mine entrance, she saw that his beautiful face was streaked with soot and exhaustion. Saw that the press of the earth had weakened him—Air Magicians didn’t thrive well so far down below.

  But he was alive, and they were in each other’s arms, and that was all that mattered.

  Until a moment later when agony consumed her, and she screamed.

  “What is it?” Glyn’s voice barely penetrated the pain. She felt as if her scalp were aflame, searing and blistering. Even the chilling rain failed to put out the excruciating fire.

  Still, she clung to his voice. Dimly she was aware of the river-horse, rising from the canal nearby, and the Water Elementals, fragmented as they were in the raindrops that hammered around her. From them, she was able to choke out what was happening.

  “Your hair.”

  Glyn’s words made no sense. Her hair, short as it was now, was plastered to her head. It wasn’t on fire, searing her scalp.

  “Siwan must have discovered the rope you made. She kept your hair because she could use it to bind you to her. It was her last resort in case you broke free of her. She’s burning your hair, Myfanwy.”

  Her back arched as she writhed in pain. She didn’t know how to stop it, how to end it, how to—

  Then she felt the Elementals of Water surround her again, nymph and dryad and naiad and river-horse, before they dove into the water and sped toward Castell Coch, and somehow she knew that the sylphs and other Air Elementals did the same.

  It was the last thing she knew before she fell, blissfully, unconscious.

  * * *

  “Myfanwy.”

  She rose out of the depths of sleep, reaching toward the voice she knew.

  The voice of the man she’d realized, just before agony struck, that she loved.

  She opened her eyes. She didn’t recognize the room she was in—a hotel, she guessed, with soft white sheets and the scent of tea in the air.

  She reached a hand to her head. It ached, but didn’t burn. Her short hair was there, her scalp was unblistered.

  Seeking answers, she fell into Glyn’s blue eyes.

  Siwan’s body had been found in the banqueting hall of Castell Coch. She’d been burning something in the massive fireplace when, according to suggested reports, a surge of wind had blown down the chimney and the flames had escaped, consuming her.

  But even more odd was the fact that the flames had gone out, that they weren’t what had caused her death.

  That docto
rs had determined (and Glyn hinted that the doctors had been members of the Council) Siwan had actually died of drowning, her lungs filled with water.

  “Well,” Myfanwy said finally, “I suppose I have no home now.”

  “You can go wherever you wish,” Glyn said. “There are people in London who wish to meet you—and who can provide the rest of your training.”

  “What about Rhian?” She couldn’t abandon her maid, not when she’d been so protective and kind.

  “She’ll accompany you—after all, a lady needs her trusted servant.”

  “And what about you?” she asked.

  He smiled, and her heart thumped. “I think perhaps you’d need someone to show you around the city, if you’d have me.”

  Myfanwy smiled. “I would like that.”

  She would also, she thought, like to meet the river-horses who lived in the Thames.

  She would like to get on with her life.

  The Phoenix of Mulberry Street

  Michele Lang

  New York City

  November, 1885

  The little match girl stood on Mulberry Street between Houston and Bleecker Street, near the Central Office of the Police Headquarters of New York. The sight of her stopped young Fire Mage Jane Emerson in her tracks, on the threshold of the offices of the Daily Clarion.

  The day was fading, and a cold wind whipped down Broadway, chilling Jane to the marrow. The Central Office rose up behind the shadowed figure across the street, a whited sepulcher of brick and marble. The little girl reminded her of the Biblical plague of hail, the fire inside magically enclosed in ice, striking the land of Egypt and destroying it. She shuddered at the image that rose in her mind: New York City pummeled by an icy storm such as they had just experienced, then immolated by a hidden fire.

  The moment passed, and Jane stood on the threshold of the Clarion Building, trembling. She steeled herself against the sight of the girl—she saw the same or worse in the slums of the Tenth Ward every day of her working life. She could not do her work as a reporter for the Daily Clarion if she stopped in her path to help every orphan she encountered on the way.

  And yet, this little mite . . . something about the child both frightened and compelled her.

  Jane tore her gaze away from the girl and directed her steps to the doors of the Daily Clarion, where her employer and mentor waited for her report on the crisis at hand.

  For the news she had uncovered was indeed a crisis. It threatened all of New York. She barged into Daniel Tappen’s corner office without knocking, unafraid of baiting the lion in his very den.

  He raised a sardonic eyebrow when he saw who it was who had dared to invade his sanctum sanctorum. “Ah, Miss Emerson,” he said, his voice dry as vermouth. “I expect you have some news for me this afternoon?”

  Jane colored at the flash of his flat, blue eyes, at the amusement playing like a shadow over his thin, patrician’s lips. She reminded herself that as his protégée, their relationship was strictly one of mentor and apprentice.

  On the surface, in public, to the untrained eye. To the magical one, it was instantly clear that Mr. Tappen and Miss Emerson were linked together by the deepest, most magical ties.

  Daniel Tappen, scion of Old New York, had pledged to teach his ward, Jane Emerson, how the other half lived, in the hopes that conditions in the slums could be improved. More than this, as an Air Mage, he had promised his sister to mentor and perhaps even tame the untrained power of the girl’s Fire magic. Miss Emerson, latent Fire Master and wielder of a dangerous inferno of magic, was too much for his sister’s placid Earth magic to contain and guide.

  Their circle of Walden Pond mages had taught Miss Emerson in Boston as best as they could, but Jane’s spirited nature and immense promise could not fully flower under the tutelage of Mrs. Polly March, Mage of Earth. Daniel’s magic, of Air, had more affinity with Jane’s. But their magic was not the same.

  Still and all, he had taught her the basis of all magical arts, all that he knew of the lore of binding, shielding, spellcasting, and healing.

  But Jane wanted more, chafed under the strictures of her youth, her sex, and the limitations of her teachers. Mr. Tappen had told her that he knew a powerful Fire Master in London, Lord Alderscroft, and he hoped to send Jane across the sea to finish her education under his supervision.

  Until then, she had more to learn from the streets of New York than anywhere else.

  “I do have news,” Jane said. “I think I know who is behind the tenement fires.”

  Daniel’s eyes sparkled. “I trust you have corroborated your sources, Jane?”

  “I spoke with some of the ladies of the evening who know the Tenth Ward like the inside of their eyelids. And I spoke with some firemen who were so angry at the fires that they were tempted into . . . impertinence.”

  Daniel sighed. “You understand that it is you who are playing with fire.” They both knew he wasn’t speaking in metaphors.

  But Jane pressed on with her tale regardless. “Yes, they believe that it is arson. And it is my conclusion that these fires are the manifestation of Fire magic employed for foul ends.”

  “I fear that is the case as well. But proving the source is another matter.”

  “My ladies of the night told me that, despite the violence of the blaze at the shirtwaist factory last week, there were no strangers at the scene—nobody at all. Yet the fire was clearly arson, the firemen told me. And the orphanage, just last night . . .”

  Jane could no longer keep her voice from shaking in outrage. It was one thing to burn down a business—terrible to put working folk out of their jobs, and dangerous to other buildings standing nearby—but at least a rapacious motive made some earthly sense. But to deliberately set fire to a building filled with innocent children . . . the thought made her seethe with anger.

  “I take it the orphanage blaze was arson as well.”

  “Yes, that is what the firemen said, and they weren’t shy about telling me the modus operandi was the same in all of these fires. They could not pinpoint the accelerant, no matter how ardently they tried. But it was Fire magic, I am sure! A Fire Mage of some kind has deliberately set these fires, destroyed lives and property, for ends that I can only imagine. Furthermore, I believe our Fire Mage is a financial giant of some kind.”

  “Be careful now, Miss Emerson,” Tappen said. “You know as well as I do how many powerful interests vie for control of this city, even of the poorest precincts that provide political power. If you point your finger, in print, at one of these titans and cry murder, you realize that you are not merely twisting the tiger’s tail. The power of the press will not protect you in the end, or me.”

  “But unless these crimes are exposed to the scrutiny of decent people, what is the point of a free press, sir? We have enough evidence to publish. Please allow me to write up the story, at least.”

  Daniel sighed. “You don’t have enough to go to press, not enough for a paper that circulates among ordinary people. You may well have uncovered the crimes of a wielder of Fire magic. But unless you can prove with hard, mundane facts what you know only through magical means, we do not have enough to make a story.”

  Jane could have cracked a tooth in her jaw-clenching frustration. “I understand,” she finally said. “You are not putting the kibosh on the story, merely demanding that I further corroborate what we already know. But it is murder, Daniel!”

  Two orphans had died in the blaze, despite the children somehow having gotten advance warning before the fire roared through their dwelling. Jane could not bear the thought of standing by and not doing everything she could to stop the carnage before the arsonist struck again.

  “Do you even have the name of the arsonist?” Daniel asked, an edge creeping into his voice.

  Jane restrained a smile. If she was getting und
er the skin of her famously even-tempered mentor, she had achieved some kind of topsy-turvy victory, anyway. “I don’t have the name. But I have the profile and the motive, and a short list of suspects. This Fire Mage must have some financial interests that are in opposition to the places of business that have burned. And as for the tenements, the orphanage . . . the destruction of these poor people’s lives must also benefit the arsonist. In what way, I am not sure. But I propose to find out.”

  “How?”

  It was a simple but frustrating question. “Divination is not one of my gifts. But dear Mr. Tappen, you who move in every level of society from top to bottom, I am hoping that you may know of Sensitives who may divine more than I can with my shoe leather and obnoxious persistence in gathering facts on the ground.”

  “No, it won’t be that easy,” Tappen said. “You must prove the wrongdoer’s identity if you wish to write about him. And that means uncovering the ordinary evil first, and using that only to make your case. I am sure you understand the need for discretion where magic is concerned. You will have to take down the arsonist with facts, without revealing your own magic, or exposing the magical accelerant used in these attacks.”

  He returned to the papers littering the top of his enormous desk, and Jane realized with a start that their meeting was at an end.

  “I hope I don’t vex you to death, Daniel,” she said, surprising herself as she said the words. “I don’t mean to be a plague upon you. I just cannot stomach any more of these attacks!”

  “Nonsense, Miss Emerson. I admire your passion for justice and your ideals. I merely fear that life in this great city will prove a great disappointment to you if you cannot learn to live with the darkness as well as the light.”

  * * *

  Jane left Tappan’s office in a storm of frustration and doubt. She agreed with every word he had said, and yet she had hoped that somehow they could have found a way to publish the story. She quickened her pace as the shadows lengthened along the alleyways and gutters by the Mulberry bend. It would do no good to prowl such cruel streets after dark.