The Fire Rose em-1

by Mercedes Lackey

  The main question in his mind now was if the spell would be effective on his hybrid form. It was possible that the only way to make the reversal would be to transform all the way to wolf first, then return to his human state. If that was true, his task was doubly difficult, for he would first have to find out what had gone wrong with the transformation to wolf, then make corresponding changes in the reversal-spell, then perform both.

  I must have been insane. The medieval spell of the loup-garou appeared often in tales, but in only one real grimoire that he had ever discovered. That alone should have made him extremely cautious. He knew that most medieval Masters held things back from their written records, kept key points secret in order to maintain their power over their Apprentices. He should have assumed that this grimoire would have been no exception.

  And he should never have trusted the grimoire of an Earth Master who created such a thing as a lycanthrope spell. What use was it, except to terrify or spy upon one's neighbors? If one wished to experience life as a wolf, there were many spells to place one as an observer within the mind of a real wolf. Earth Masters in general were the mildest of creatures, much taken up with the health and fertility of the regions in which they lived, with studying the flora and fauna, and tended to be very conservative in their Magicks. The Master who had written the grimoire must, therefore, have been something of a "maverick," unusual in his interests and in his approach to Earth Magick. Cameron knew now that he should have taken warning from this.

  Instead, he had felt a cocky kinship with the long-dead Master, and confidence in his own ability to be as much of an innovator as the man who had penned the spells in this grimoire.

  Stupid, foolish, over-confident ... all those described Cameron, and well he knew it. After all, overconfidence was what had led him to accept Paul du Mond as an Apprentice, so certain he had been that he could make a silk purse out of that particular sow's ear. But up until now, he had never gotten himself into a difficulty he could not manage to get himself out of with a profit.

  Up until now. Eventually the odds catch up with you, and pride goeth before a fall. He finished chalking the last of the sigils and straightened with a groan. His bones ached whether he remained still or moved, and he walked slowly to the table to deposit his chalk, listening to his joints pop and snap with each step he took. The muscles in his neck were so knotted and painful it was hard to hold his head up.

  Fortunately, what he was about to attempt would either work, or not, within a half an hour.

  "Guard me," he ordered the Salamander shortly. "If this is to be successful at all, it will be immediate, and whether it succeeds or not it will all be completed quickly."

  "If it is over quickly, it will strain your resources." The Salamander sounded disapproving. "Your resources are thin enough, with very little to spare." "If so, it is my decision to make." He turned to look at the creature with half-closed eyes. "You yourself know that your kind are no longer my servants, but my allies. I no longer need to guard myself against your rebellion, nor to use my Power to force you to obey me. I have not controlled you for years; you obey me because you wish to, not because I must coerce you. Unlike Simon."

  "Unlike Simon," the Salamander agreed. "Still. You have limits, and you have enemies. There are other things you must guard yourself from, and Simon is one of them."

  "So I will rely on you to accomplish some of that for me," he retorted. "Guard me now. This will require but a half an hour of both our time."

  He stepped into the center of the diagram, being careful not to scuff any of the chalked marks.

  Half an hour later, he stepped out again, unable to raise his feet enough to prevent scuffing the lines. But by then, of course, it didn't matter.

  The modified spell had not worked, and as the Salamander had warned, it had left him in terrible pain and so exhausted that the mere act of breathing was an effort.

  He ached in every joint and every muscle, and shivered, chilled to the bone, as if he was in the grip of a high fever. His mouth hung open, his parched tongue lolling out, doglike, as he panted. His lungs burned, his stomach churned, there were shooting pains running down his spine and into both legs with every step be took. His head throbbed with agony. He got as far as his chair before collapsing, which was better than he had expected. He caught the arm of it as he fell, and turned enough so that his body slumped into the chair without further mishap. He wanted to close his eyes, but he knew that if he did, he would lose his grip on consciousness.

  The Salamander was already beside him as he collapsed, and a goblet containing a mix of herbs and opium powder levitated into his hand before he could ask for it. He made the supreme effort it took to raise his hand, and lapped up the bitter mixture in thirsty gulps.

  He lay back in his chair, as the goblet whisked away from his limp hand. Though bitter, the liquid did a great deal to ease the torment of his burning and dry throat and tongue. A second goblet followed the first into his hand, this one full of milk, one of the few liquids besides water he had any taste for in his altered body. As the initial exhaustion faded, he managed to bring it to his mouth as well; he lapped it up more slowly, and felt his stomach settling from the combined effect of some of the herbs and the warm, soothing milk.

  The empty goblet lifted from his hand before he could put it down. He leaned back into the chair, and closed his burning eyes.

  "Can you eat?" the Salamander asked. He raised his lids, and gazed at it. It had stopped spinning and now perched on the asbestos pad he'd placed on the desk for it to rest on.

  "I shall have to soon-but not just yet." His voice sounded hoarser than usual to his own sharp ears. "Let the drugs take effect first." "Yes." The Salamander cocked its head to one side, and regarded him closely. "You are not yet in danger from them."

  "But I will be soon, if I am not careful." He filled in what the Salamander did not say. "And therein lies the dilemma, does it not? Do I take opiates for my pain, and risk addiction and muddle-headedness, or do I endure the pain and the attendant distractions and weakness? Both put me at risk, no matter which I choose."

  "It is a difficulty," the Salamander agreed. It did not offer any further opinion, for which Cameron was grateful. He was not in a forgiving mood at the moment, and he did not want to hear any more criticism from what was essentially a creature under his command.

  He slumped back in his chair and tried to relax into its cushions and support, consciously working to loosen those knotted muscles, to get them to release some of their tension. Gradually, the pain that was centered between his eyes began to ebb, the aches of his muscles and joints to subside, as the opium exerted its power. Finally, the pain receded altogether, and he opened his eyes, carefully assessing his physical state.

  He was just a trifle light-headed, but no more than the equivalent of a single glass of wine. The Salamander was quite good at judging his need and the strength of the drugs he would require to deal with his difficulties.

  And it was quite good at judging when those drugs would take effect. Within seconds, there was a plate of barely-seared chunks of beef on the desk, and another goblet of milk beside it. Obviously, his caretaker was going to see to it that he did eat.

  The lamps had been trimmed, and the shades were thick, amber-colored glass, so that the light was clear, but not hard on his now-sensitive eyes. He was familiar with the physical effects of drugs; they were something a Master of any Element had to know, both on the rare occasions when he himself might have to resort to them or prescribe them, and in case an Apprentice resorted to drugs to make up for inferior ability. Cameron knew that the opiates had made his pupils widen, and that if he looked at himself in the mirror, he would see that there was nothing visible of the iris but a thin, brown ring around the dark, wide pupils. That would make him even more sensitive to light than usual, and his lupine eyes were very sensitive indeed.

  He bolted the chunks of meat without chewing them, and washed down the salt-sweet taste of the blood left in hi
s mouth with the milk. The Salamander said nothing during the whole time he ate, but whisked the plate and cup away the moment he had finished.

  He yawned, and felt his jaw muscles stretching and his tongue extending, though he tried to prevent the latter. "I am just as glad that Paul was not here for this," he said.

  The Salamander stirred restlessly. "Are you certain that you can trust him for a week alone in the city?"

  It occurred to him that this Salamander was uncommonly intelligent and articulate, and growing more so all the time, as if continual exposure to its Master was making it into something akin to a highly intelligent human. Well, all to the good. I certainly need an intelligent aide, and if it is a Fire entity, why should that matter? He shrugged, or tried to. "I am reasonably certain that I cannot trust him, beyond trusting that he will follow my orders. But I have not yet detected the touch of Simon Beltaire on him, so whatever mischief he is getting into, it is probably nothing more serious than finding ways to cheat me. Or to cheat others," he added as an afterthought. "He has enough Magickal knowledge now to ensure that he wins at any number of games of chance. I am quite certain that whatever else he is doing, he is increasing his personal fortune illicitly, no matter how many times I warn him that such is a dangerous game to play."

  "He would never believe he could be caught," the Salamander pointed out.

  "And he might be correct," Cameron mused. "Who else would catch him but a Master or another Apprentice, and what others are there in the city that would stoop to cheating at games of chance for mere money when there are surer ways of obtaining a fortune for a trifle more work?"

  He considered his own fortune, obtained by using his growing control and knowledge of Magick to be certain what commodity would be needed when and where. With that knowledge, and with the ability to see to it, through his Salamanders, that no one else beat his goods to the market, a relative pittance carefully invested doubled, redoubled, and doubled again. Within a year, he was well-off, within two, wealthy, and within five, in very near the position he held today. After that, he needed only to find competent underlings and he could settle back and concentrate his attentions on Magick, which was precisely what he had done.

  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 lumberland 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.