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 fruitful.
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.”