It had been easier to accomplish all that out here in the West, where fortunes were made and lost overnight, where one's status depended, quite simply, on how much wealth one had, and no one questioned what a man did as long as he appeared to be a perfect gentleman in genteel company. In the East, he might have run into difficulties, not the least of which were the vastly greater number of Masters there. Here he had no one to contend with but Simon Beltaire, for the Masters of other Elements had no reason to interfere with him out here, where there was so little in the way of competition. The local Masters of Water invested in shipping concerns, knowing that they could ensure their ships arrived safely and ahead of all others. Those of Earth had made all of their fortunes in gold and silver; who better to know where the strikes would be? And those of Air invested in entertainment, and were paid back handsomely, for there was no place on the face of the earth as pleasure-loving as this West Coast, and no one better able to manipulate the emotions of others to induce pleasure than a Master of Air.
He closed his eyes, felt himself "floating" just a little with the effect of the drugs. It was the closest he came these days to a moment of pleasure himself—a moment when he allowed himself the luxury to be free from pain at the expense of mental alertness. He would not permit himself to fall asleep like this—his training made that much possible—but he could relax, just a little, and let his thoughts meander where they would.
He drifted further, and did not trouble to fight the drugs. The last time he had felt like this, it had been the effect of fever rather than drugs...
Typhoid. So medieval. Incredible that I survived. With opium between himself and the memories of what some might call a tragic childhood, it seemed as if they might belong to someone else entirely. He let the memories flow past him, surveying them with drug-induced detachment.
Not so tragic. Not as tragic as an early death, certainly. There are sadder stories than mine playing out in the streets of every large city every day.
How ironic that he and the Hawkins girl should have come from the same city. But a span of fifteen years separated her birth and his, and he doubted that she even thought a great deal about the event that had been so pivotal in his life and the lives of most other natives of Chicago born before 1871.
How incredibly ironic that he should have become a Master of Fire when Fire had been instrumental in obliterating his past and changing his future beyond all expectations. How even more ironic that this same Fire had been caused by two now-dead Firemasters.
He had only been four years old when the Great Fire in Chicago had taken his mother and destroyed his father's home and business. That was what he had been told, at any rate—during the few times his father had been drunk enough to talk, but not too drunk to be incoherent. He himself had no real memory of her or of the times before the Fire; vague feelings, even vaguer images, but no memories. And as for the Great Fire itself—
Even the opium could not cushion that memory, and as usual, he shied away from it.
He and his father had wandered for days before someone had taken them to a charity shelter run by some church or other, but when his father began to drink, they were turned out. His father had no real heart for anything after his mother's death; despite the generosity and charity of many, he never bothered to look for help outside of a bottle again.
Cameron could, if he chose, conjure up a Magickal vision of his father as the man had been, but all that remained in his memory was the drunk.
I can't even think of him with any positive feelings; he was never more than someone I had to obey—and sometimes take care of. The only time that Ronald Cameron was not drunk was when he was suffering from a hangover and trying to scrape together the cash for his next bottle of rotgut whiskey. He dragged himself from one odd job to the next, hauling his young son behind him like so much unwanted, half-forgotten baggage.
It was life on the edge, but children are flexible, and he had endured it because it was all he knew. Such a life could not last for long, but it had been long enough to ensure his father's complete descent into a state where nothing mattered to him but the next drink.
The two years Jason spent trailing about after his father should have been a century for all the misery they contained. Always cold, hungry, filthy—fighting with tramps who tried to steal the little he and his father had left, always sleeping with one eye open for trouble—small wonder he had gotten sick.
Small wonder father abandoned me as soon as became a real burden.
As so much of his memory was fragmented, he had only bits and pieces of memory from his illness, but the pieces he had were extraordinarily vivid. The first was of the hour before dawn, and his father literally tying him to the front gate of a brick house so that he would not try to follow, or wander away in his delirium. He recalled that he was cold, but as light-headed as he was now, and as he shivered, he could not make himself move so much as a finger. The second sequential piece was of an amazingly ugly man peering down at him, then glancing up at someone out of Jason's line of sight...
"Sick as a dog, sir." Then, in a tone of acidic irony, "Someone must've mistaken this place for a charity hospital. I'll call a policeman."
A second voice. "Wait a moment." A second face, thin and ascetic, peering at him through the lenses of a pince-nez. "No, bring him inside, clean him up, and send for the doctor. I can use this one. "
And that was his savior. Jason grimaced sardonically. Not surprising that "clean him up" was the order before "send for the doctor." Alan Ridgeway was not a cruel man, but he was not a compassionate man either. He could have stood as a model for anyone wishing to study the morals and manners of the pure intellectual. There was very little warmth in him, which was rather ironic considering that he was the most powerful Firemaster in Chicago.
He had not been in Chicago at the time of the Great Fire, or it might not have gotten as far as it had.
Might. He might have been able to separate the combatants before they burned down half of Chicago and thousands of acres around Peshtigo...
One Firemaster had lived in Peshtigo, a lumber town in the heart of the Wisconsin woodlands, and one on the South Side of Chicago. They had always been rivals, but one day in October, something happened to make them deadly enemies. And a few days later, the battle began that claimed twelve hundred lives in Wisconsin and an additional three hundred in Chicago.
The only other Masters in the city at the time of the Fire had been of Air and Earth, and precious little use in the face of an inferno. There were no Masters of any kind in the lumber-land of Wisconsin. And when it was over, both Firemasters were dead.
The Masters of Boston had been horrified by the carnage, and in an unprecedented burst of public-spiritedness, those of Fire decreed that one of their number must relocate to Chicago to see to it that there were no outbreaks of fires caused by Elementals set free by the deaths of their Masters. He had been told the Masters of Water of New York had sent a similar representative to counter any actions of Salamanders. The Firemasters had drawn lots to determine who should go, and Alan Ridgeway had lost.
A true Boston Brahmin, Ridgeway had changed his name when he achieved his Mastery and had vanished from the ken of his family, who would have expected certain duties from him that he was no longer able or willing to fulfill. Magick was his mistress and his wife, and no mere female could ever interest him enough to make him want to make even a token effort to satisfy her. That would not have Done in the circles he was born to, so he removed himself from those circles.