Yes, that would be an excellent plot for their second production. It wouldn’t do to get too bound to fairy tales. Variety, that was the way to go.
Now he just needed to deduce what would keep Nina happy and contented.
The genuine Nina knew the signs. People were starting to eye the mysterious Russian with a bit less awe and a bit more suspicion. This was taking longer than she had thought it would.
Sabotaging the theater had not worked. It was impossible to get at the girl directly. None of the men that flocked to her dressing room came up to the mark for causing scandal.
Well, she needed to find a place to live, a place where there would be room enough to work some real magic, and where no one would be looking askance at the comings and goings into the night.
A few moments with the concierge elicited regrets that she was leaving and the name of a reliable agent. Within half a day, the agent had found and taken her to view three suitable flats. She rented the first one, which came furnished. More importantly, it was on the ground floor, and had a separate servants’ entrance which was not overlooked by any of the other flats in the building. She could come and go whenever she liked without being seen. It also included the cellar, which meant her Elemental slaves could come and go without needing recourse to any outside entrances.
She wrote the impresario in Germany, canceling her appearances, and sent payment to him for the cancellations without a qualm. This was war, now, and she was not going to lose.
13
NINA had made a major mistake when she first arrived in Blackpool, and now she knew it.
She had assumed that her imposter was just an ordinary, greedy little human being. Now she knew better. The girl had a protector, an Elemental Master, a Fire-Master to be precise. She still didn’t know which of the men around the girl was the magician. Humans were infernally good at hiding their powers, if one was bent on hiding them, and most of the clever ones would never come out in the open if they could help it. If a mage was of her own element, she would certainly sense him in the powers when he actually worked magic, but if he was not of her element, he could be conjuring away at removing mountains and she would never know it if he was shielded.
And if he was shielded all the time, she’d not be able to tell him from an ordinary sort of human.
She had made a grave mistake, choosing to attack the building as she had. She had used creatures of her own element—the rats were of earth, of course—to be the carriers of disaster, but it had been his element, fire, which would have been the actual cause. Some of these blasted humans were on good terms with their Elemental creatures, good enough terms that the benighted things acted as watchdogs, and that must have been the case here. There was absolutely no doubt what had put out the fires. Salamanders, dozens of them. And that could only mark the work of a Master.
All right. This meant that she couldn’t go after the girl directly. She would have to be very careful how she did it indirectly. That meant working entirely in her own Element.
It was unlikely there was another Earth mage anywhere in this city; Earth mages felt acutely uncomfortable in places where the ground was paved over, where there were filthy slums and tenements, and where the air and ground were poisoned by the smokes and effluvia of humans living in such crowded conditions. These conditions did not trouble Nina in the least; on the contrary, these were the sorts of things that Trolls thrived in.
So it was unlikely that there would be a mage of her own Element to sense when she was working. And it was very unlikely that the Fire Master would sense it either. He couldn’t know who or what she was, or he would have tracked her down by now. So long as she stayed within her own element . . . it was safe to use magic.
So . . . what to do?
Well, the obvious thing was to try to get at her with one of the most powerful weapons in Nina’s arsenal.
Illness.
There were all manner of things that Nina could strike her with. And now that she had an establishment of her own from which to operate, she could investigate which might make the best weapon.
The vehicle would be another question entirely. Nina was not going to trust this to one of her dim-witted underlings, oh no. Nor to any old rat or mouse that she might trap.
Nina was going to make a homunculus, a bit of magic for which the Earth magicians were unusually apt.
And she moreso than a human magician. She needed no implements, no herbs, in fact nothing but a shielding circle—and herself.
She called in her maid. “Is the cellar prepared?” she asked, with an edge to her voice. She had told the creature to have the cellar made ready as soon as she took possession of the house—but had her servant done so? They could be astonishingly thick. It was the problem with the creatures of Earth; they often moved slowly, and they were not very clever. Nina had been an exception even among the Trolls who were the cleverest of the sorts of Elementals that wise magicians did not call up. But that was probably because of the number of humans she had absorbed over the years; it was not just their forms that stayed with her, it seemed that some of their intelligence remained as well.
But fortunately the maid nodded, and Nina felt a moment of satisfaction. They were learning, it seemed. Good. It was about time.
Waving the maid away, she descended into the cellar alone.
She did not need a lantern, nor indeed any light; Trolls could see in the dark as well as any cat. The steep wooden stairs were no trouble to navigate once she rid herself of her clumsy and encumbering human garments and continued on in her shift. What foolishness it was to wear such things! Humans were so stupid sometimes.
She felt the cool and the damp on her skin with a sense of great relief. It was at times like these that she almost regretted giving up her existence in the underground world of the darker Earth elementals. And yet, the life she had now was so rich, so varied, so . . . luxurious . . . she could not even contemplate giving it up. When she thought about how simple-minded and dull her own servants were . . . no. She was never, ever giving up this life.
The cellar was paved with stone, which, fortunately, was all native to the area. That made it ideal in every possible way. The preparations that Nina required were simple; a protective double circle had been deeply inscribed into the stone, with words in the ancient language of the Earth Masters etched between the inner and outer circles. Nina inspected these carefully, until she was satisfied that they had been written perfectly, that there were no flaws in the words, nor breaks in the circles. It was not that she was in any danger of course. These circles were not to keep anything out. Her human body with its Trollish powers was more than enough to take care of anything that might come at her across these circles.
No, this was to keep her power in, to keep from betraying her presence to that accursed Fire Master, and any other meddlesome human mages that might be alerted. The Fire Master shouldn’t be able to sense Earth power, but . . . she preferred not to take any chances. And anyway all the Elementals gossiped, especially the Bright Powers. Let a Faun or Dryad get a scent of her presence, and the next thing you knew a Sylph would find out about it, and from there it was a short step to the ears of those Salamanders that danced attendance on him.