The attacks, then, would not be so much directed at her, as they would be to take what she had away.
Well, it looked as if he had some research ahead of him. It was going to be a long night. But, he hoped, a fruitful one.
17
NINA had wound up her first distraction and let him go. Now for the second.
They would be looking for Earth Mages; her use of the homunculus betrayed her origin. Very well. She would give them some. Or at least, she would give them something that looked like an Earth Mage.
She chose her decoy candidates very, very carefully, for they had to appear to be Earth Mages of the vilest sort, right up until their protections were exploded. The more plausible they were, the better. She could, of course, find mortals that ardently desired the powers of an Earth Mage, and who had just enough of the Gift in them to counterfeit Mastery without ever having anything more than what she granted them. But firstly, that would be wasteful, and secondly, she knew from past experience that such people were dangerous. They got ambitions, and they thought they could take what she would not give them. Such, in fact, had been her original summoner. When mortals got ambitious, things got . . . messy. And while she was not at all averse to mess, she knew that in this case, it could betray her. So she would set up the unknowing as her decoys, in a way that could not be traced back to her.
Her first choice was a natural one: a particularly nasty brothel-keeper of the lowest and most brutish sort. His customers were the same, and as for his “wares,” well, they were in no condition to think about much of anything. His girls were all addicted to the drugs he gave them, most were Chinese, and he kept them in nasty little cells lining the corridors of his building on the water-front, cells a mere six feet by eight, with nothing more than a pallet and a blanket, and a rag or two for clothing. They plied their trade, ate, slept, were drugged, and eventually died in these little “cribs,” as they were called. For pure misery, his establishment had to be high on the list of those creating negative energies, and Nina, surprised by the amount she was able to make use of, made a note to try this particular method at some time in the future. But for now—all she needed was her decoy.
She set herself up in a dingy room in the building next door, wearing the form of one of her vagrants in order to rent it and its noisome contents for a week. There was no lock for the door; she was forced to make do with a chair wedged beneath the knob. She worked swiftly, and without a protective circle, but within shields. A Circle where none should be would only attract attention, and besides, there was not much in the Earth realms that would dare take her on now.
She tapped into the energies boiling out of the brothel next door; siphoned off a cornucopia of rage, hate, shame, lust, and pure despair, and used it to create some of the most powerful Earth-shields she had ever built. Carefully she placed them around both the brothel and the building of flats she was in now. This would further serve to confuse the matter; it would not be clear whether the “Mage” was to be found in the flats or in the brothel. When she was done, she was satisfied; the shields were like stone walls; if they had been the walls of a fortress, not even the guns of a naval warship would be able to break them with a single shot. She added a “tap” to keep those shields supplied from the never-ending stream of soul-sickening darkness. Anyone who saw shields that strong would assume that the Mage inside them was stronger still. Unfortunately for them, this was hardly the case. She left the shields permeable to herself alone until she left the building. Then she closed them even to herself; the perfectly ordinary, non-magical people who belonged there would have no difficulty in crossing, but any creature of magic would be stopped dead in its tracks. This, of course, now included her.
Now what would happen when those shields were broken by a concerted, unrelenting attack? Nina wasn’t entirely certain. Perhaps nothing. Or, perhaps the power would backlash on those who were supplying it. In that case, it would backlash on the girls; in their weakened mental states, that might drive them mad, or it might kill them. If the latter—well, that would be delicious. It would mean the oh-so-noble fellows guarding the imposter would be personally responsible for the deaths of up to two dozen girls who, at least in the sense of harming them, were innocents.
She walked away from that place with a grin on her face that made people who saw it cross to the other side of the street. Nina liked this plan so much that she decided to repeat it.
A few hours’ worth of walking in similarly unsavory neighborhoods netted her more of what she was looking for; by nightfall, she had found two more establishments in which to do the same. The first was a gin palace, the second, an opium den. In both, she was able to rent rooms in which to do her work, undisturbed, once she had purchased, respectively, two full bottles of “blue ruin” and a pipe and sticky ball of black-tar opium.
She used the gin palace first, pouring the poisonous stuff out of the window, then getting to work. It was a trifle more difficult to set up a “tap” here, since the people who were systematically destroying their health, their lives, and their brains with the stuff didn’t actually live there. But she got the notion of putting the “energy sinks” into the benches that they sat on, and that worked admirably.
The next day, it was the turn of the opium den; she mashed the drug into a crack in the floor where it was indistinguishable from all the other muck collected there. What had served her well in the gin palace served her equally well here; this time she put the “sinks” into the bunks that those who could not afford a room stretched out on to fume their brains into drifting, benumbed pleasure. This was trickier than the brothel or the gin palace. Unlike alcohol, the opium did not admit the mind to anger. No, the emotion she siphoned here was bleak despair. Beneath the drug, there was the fear of not being able to raise the money for the next debauch, there was self-loathing, and more often than not, the wish that this time, the drug would end the struggle for existence. Then, of course, there were the addicts that appeared without money, suffering the agonies of withdrawal from the drug, so desperate for it and in such pain that they would do anything at all to get it.
Anything.
She walked away from the opium den with a feeling of smug cleverness.
In order to return to her new home without exciting comment, it was necessary to make a few stops and changes of clothing, going from the poverty-stricken vagrant, to a lower-class workingman, to a simple servant, to a lady’s maid, and finally, to herself. The last two changes of clothing she had concealed in order to effect the change, one in the backyard shed of a nearby house, the second in the tiny carriage-house of her own set of flats. She walked straight in from there, as casually as if she had merely gone for a stroll for the sake of the sea air. As it happened, there was no one there to note her coming in, as there had been no one to note her leaving, but she had learned over the years that remaining undetected and unmolested required the careful management of such details.
Her maid let her in, and she ordered several of her favorite foods at random and ate and drank hugely. She was surfeited on the dark energies of misery, but for the last four days her body had been subsisting on dubious sausages, doubtful cockles and oysters, and suspicious eel pies, and it craved wholesome, toothsome food.
With body and “self” satisfied, she flung herself down on a settee and watched the plump, red-faced throng parade under her windows. It amused her no end to think how little these holiday-makers that flocked to Blackpool in the season were aware that brothels, opium dens, and gin palaces existed mere streets away from where they were strolling. These, she could never feed on. There was simply too little there. One part ignorance, three parts complaisance, five parts smug self-congratulation, and a touch of anxiety that one day it might all go smash . . . thin stuff, and bitter, and flimsy as the paper they wrote their letters home on to save on the postage.