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.
It hardly mattered that he was no longer even part-heir to the family fortune, since no Master was ever without money for long. He soon made a modest fortune of his own-a modest fortune was all he wanted-and when he was chosen by fate to go to Chicago, he went without too much complaint.
But the Fire that had claimed so many lives seemed to have claimed a disproportionate number of those with the Magickal Nature of Fire itself, for the one thing Alan Ridgeway had not been able to find in the year he had been in the City was an Apprentice. For some, this would have caused no great trouble, but for Alan, brought up to always strictly follow the rules, it was very disturbing. He was a Master and a Master needed an Apprentice. He had left his previous Apprentice with another Master, since the boy was not able to make the move with him. And Alan Ridgeway, unlike many Masters, loved to teach. Without a pupil, he felt truly incomplete.
So when a filthy, sick, penniless child, with the purest Magickal Nature of Fire Ridgeway had ever seen, had been abandoned at his front gate, it must have seemed like the hand of a beneficent Providence at work.
Not that Ridgeway believed in Providence. A true Cynic of the ancient Grecian school of philosophy of that name, he believed in nothing he could not see or experience himself. Perhaps that had been why Magick had claimed his soul with such strength-for although Magick was mystical in nature, it was also something he could see, measure, and control.
Dear old Ridgeway. Once I was clean and fit to come into his immaculate house, he did his best for me.
For a Firemaster, of course, the work of augmenting the doctor to ensure a cure was fairly simple. The reason for fever was to burn out a disease. In a child whose Magickal Nature contained even a hint of Fire, Fire could be used to complete the process before the child became too weak and debilitated to recover. In a child like Jason, Ridgeway could work a cure even the doctor pronounced as miraculous, though the illness be the deadly typhoid fever itself.
Jason had awakened in a place that, at the time, seemed compounded from fever-dreams-in an oak bed with clean, fresh sheets, in a fine room, with the ugly man sitting in a comfortable chair beside the bed, watching over him.
The ugly man was Ridgeway's trusted manservant, Barnes; beneath Barnes' gruff exterior beat a heart of solid granite. He was in that chair because he had been ordered to remain until Jason awoke, and not out of any humanitarian concern for a sick child. Barnes never showed any sign of caring for anything or anyone; his acidic wit burned as wickedly as any Salamander, and he spared no one, not even himself. He treated Jason as an adult from the beginning, for he had no patience with children, and he reasoned that if Jason was treated like an adult, he would soon become one. If Jason did something childlike, he was scourged with the whip of Barnes' wit until he often thought that a physical beating would be preferable. But as long as I behaved like a responsible adult, I had nothing to complain about. Certainly there was nothing lacking in my physical and intellectual surroundings!
Ridgeway knew nothing about children or their needs, and left Jason's care up to Barnes. But as for Jason's education-there Ridgeway had an interest. He had his own theories about the way a child should be taught, and applied them with a vengeance.
It was a good thing I came out of that fever with all my intelligence intact. He had needed every scrap of it. Ridgeway's notion of a proper education was to rush the child through the tedium of learning to read, write, and figure, and then go straight into the real meat of learning, beginning with the classics of Grecian and Roman literature. Ridgeway had a sound background in history, and saw no reason why a modern child couldn't emulate an Elizabethan child like Lady Jane Grey, who could read and write in several languages competently enough to correspond with adults in them by her ninth birthday.
I would have been a severe disappointment to him if I'd been a dolt. Not likely, though. Not with such a strong Magickal Nature. Children of that sort were generally the brightest and best.
Ridgeway kept him at his books from dawn to dusk, with time out only for another passion of his, physical exercise of the classical Greek sort.
Cameron had actually enjoyed poor Ridgeway's attempts to replicate the exercises undertaken by the athletes of ancient Greece, with the addition of equitation, for Ridgeway loved riding and there was nothing he could not ride. Sound mind, sound body, and all that. They were the closest he came to being able to play. The time or two that he had feebly objected to the strenuous intellectual regimen, both Barnes and Ridgeway had pointed out that he had been taken from the gutter, and they had no obligation to him. If he wished to return to the gutter, he could do so at any time.
Memories of near-starvation were a potent goad to keep him from voicing any further objections.
Ridgeway was even kind in his own way. He never uttered a rebuke that was not justified, and while he did not demonstrate affection physically, he was certainly ready enough with warm praises as Jason rose to meet his high expectations. Before long, Jason never even thought of his former life.
Soon enough, Ridgeway treated Jason as the Apprentice he would be when his powers settled at about eighteen, rather than the child that he was. Such treatment included one-sided "discussions" of Ridgeway's observations.
"What do you think of people, boy?" The Master puffed on his pipe and regarded Jason speculatively. "People, as in humanity, sir? Ordinary people, you mean?" At Ridgeways nod, the boy shrugged. "I don't think of them much at all, sir. I mean, we're so different from them. Why bother thinking about them?"
"People are sheep, boy." The Master made this pronouncement with the finality of a physical law. "But it's in our interest to protect the flock. If we don't, the wolves will eat them up, and there'll be nothing for us. Just because they're sheep, it doesn't follow that they have no value. Always remember that, boy. We aren't the wolves. We're the shepherds, and the sheep can be of great benefit to us."
Cameron had never seen anything in all his years to contradict that particular piece of wisdom. Ridgeway had used that analogy often during Cameron's education.
Once it had come up in an odd circumstance when a stained-glass window in a church had caught Ridgeway's eye. It depicted Jesus with a shepherd's crook and a lamb over his shoulders, and Ridgeway had begun to laugh.
Jason had been puzzled at the reaction to a church window, and Ridgeway had been in a good enough mood to explain it to him.
"I have to laugh whenever I see the sheep talking about Jesus as 'The Good Shepherd' without thinking about it. What does the shepherd do?" Ridgeway waited for the obvious reply, smiling a little.
"He protects the sheep," Jason had replied promptly.
"And why?" Ridgeway chuckled. "So he can take their wool twice a year, take their milk if he's so inclined, and butcher lamb and ewe alike when the flock is big enough that he can afford some meat out of it. Do you think that's the image those good people in there really have of their God?"
Even at ten Jason was far more aware of the illusions people cherished than most adults. "No," he had answered promptly. "They don't want to think of God that way."
"But it's a truer view than they know," Ridgeway had replied, sardonically. "A truer image than they want to contemplate." He chuckled again. "Barnes keeps asking me if the correct translation of that passage in the Bible feed my sheep,' shouldn't read 'fleece my sheep.' "
Jason's mouth twitched with amusement at the recollection. No doubt if anyone had overheard them, Ridgeway would have been publicly vilified, perhaps even attacked.
But Ridgeway was too clever to say any su
ch things where he might be overheard. He had made a concerted effort to portray a perfect humanitarian and man of letters. He contributed generously to charity, in part because the "sheep" had to be fed, and in part because people who were starving tended to make trouble. In his capacity as a Firemaster, he helped to keep the common people of Chicago safe from a repetition of the Great Fire, though that was hardly public knowledge. He was considered a fine gentleman and a model citizen, and he saw to it that Jason was formed into the same pattern-but also that Jason knew why such a pose was necessary. When Jason passed his Ordeals and became a Master in his own right, Ridgeway was as proud of his accomplishment as he had any right to expect. If Ridgeway and Barnes had never attempted to become substitute parents, they also never pretended that they were trying to do so.
He had never found his father. He'd gone out, now and again, to look-but his quest was as fruitless as it was futile. What would he have done if he'd found the man, anyway? He could hardly have taken a drunk back to his Master; Ridgeway would rightly have refused to have anything to do with the situation, and might have thrown both of them out. Any money he had supplied would quickly have turned into little bottles of spirits.
At least Ridgeway and Barnes wanted him. Ridgeway wanted him because of his potential as a student, and Barnes because having him there pleased the Master and because Jason assumed some of Barnes' duties. It wasn't love, but why should that matter? It was tolerance and welcome, and that should be enough for anyone.
Well, it didn't matter, and there's an end to it. My own father didn't want me, so I'm lucky I found a place where I was needed.
But after he became a Master in his own right, things changed, as Ridgeway had known they would. It was uncomfortable to have two Masters of the same ardent Element as Fire in such close proximity to each other-the more so, since one was a former Apprentice of the other. There were bonds of respect and pride there that would not permit them to become enemies, so one of them had to go, and since Jason was the younger, he opted to leave. Besides, he had just discovered the amazing potential for wealth that the railroads represented, and it had seemed to him that it would be foolish to compete for a territory when so much of the great West remained unclaimed. Ridgeway provided him with the seed money for his own fortune and sent him off with blessings, and Cameron began his investments in the Chicago Commodities Exchange. It did not take him long to build up enough that be could be considered a serious investor in larger projects. That was when he left Illinois entirely, and became an entrepreneur in Steam and the Railroads as only a Firemaster could.
"Rose is in her room again," the Salamander said, interrupting his reverie. "She's just finishing her dinner. Are you fit enough for her to read tonight?"
With an effort, he raised his eyelids, and waved a clumsy-feeling paw at the obsidian mirror. Rose Hawkens' image appeared in it, laughing at something.
"She has just found out where her meals come from," the Salamander told him. "She asked her servant. She seems to find it very amusing."
She looked as if she was beginning to take all of the strangeness of her situation in stride, which was a definite relief to Cameron.
"Where was she today?" he asked the Salamander. "What was she doing?"
The Salamander could not shrug, but its indifference was clear. "Walking in the gardens."
That was harmless enough, and surely would have bored the Salamander. But the girl did more walking than any woman he'd ever met; not even the women who made a living on the streets covered as much actual distance in a day as she did!
"She must be used to walking," the Salamander continued. "She seemed to walk a great deal in Chicago."
There was that. Given the shabby state of her wardrobe, she probably had not even been able to afford street-car fare regularly.
He pulled the mouth of the speaking-tube over to his face, and spoke into it. "If you are ready, Miss Hawkins-"
"Rose," she interrupted. "We agreed to use Christian names, Jason."
"Indeed we did." He felt a flicker of amusement at her boldness. "Very well, Rose, we can begin where we left off last night."
He was not paying a great deal of attention to anything but the cadence of her reading once she began. He allowed the chair to take all of his weight, and stared into the obsidian mirror at her image as she slowly puzzled her way through the complicated German grammar of the first of the night's volumes. It was not an easy task to wade through this book, and Cameron was impressed by her fluency.
As she paused to decipher a particular word, she evidenced a flash of humor. "I beg your pardon for taking so long with this sentence," she said without looking up, "But I sincerely hope that this fellow's grasp of Fire Magick was better than his penmanship and skill at writing, or I fear he came to a warm end."
Cameron was surprised into a dry chuckle. "I believe you can be easy on that score," he replied. "I am given to understand that he died peacefully in his bed at an extreme old age."
She continued on for a bit further, then frowned, flipped ahead a few pages, then stopped altogether. "Excuse me, Jason, but I think the reason you wish me to read this next section is for my benefit, and not yours."
Once again she surprised him with her acuity. "Your point?" he asked.
"While I have no objection to the principle, this man's handwriting is wretched, his spelling worse, and his grammar, even for a German, worse still." She looked at the speaking-tube directly, as if she was looking straight at him. "I think you would do your ears and my eyes a great deal of good if you would give me your understanding of a person's Magickal Nature, since that seems to be the subject of this particular segment of the volume."
"She has a point," the Salamander chuckled. "You hated that book when Ridgeway wanted you to read it, and for the same reasons she dislikes it."
Only too true. He considered his own state for a moment. Was he personally fit to give anyone a coherent explanation of anything?
Possibly. Just possibly. "I will try, Rose," he acknowledged, "but you must bear in mind that my approach is modern, and tends to the rational and scientific, insofar as Magick can be either of those things. The solution I am searching for may be in more mystical realms and if your understanding is purely modern you may not translate later documents with the appropriate slant."
"Then I will set this aside to read later, in stronger light," she promised, and marked the book, placing it back on the table. Then she settled back in her chair, but rather than folding her hands in her lap, to his surprise she took a leather-covered notebook from the table and picked up a pencil, preparing to take notes!
He almost commented on that, and caught himself just in time. He could not let her know that he was able to watch her, or she might be offended. Worse, she might be angry, angry enough to demand to be released from this position.
I need her skills. There is no escaping the fact.
"Very well, if you are ready-" He cleared his throat, feeling a trifle self-conscious. Well, I cannot possibly bore her worse than those ancient professors she had to listen to. "According to the System of Magick which we all use, as calculated by Pythagoras, all Magickal Power is embodied in the creatures of the Four Elements. If a human-or any other earthly creature, I suppose, but at the moment we are only concerned with humans-wishes to work Magick, he must do so through the intermediary of creatures of the Element which he commands."
She nodded as she made notes. "Just as an aside, are there any other creatures that work Magick?" she asked.
"For certain, I am only aware that the whales and dolphins have a few Magick-workers among their kind," he said. "They work Water Magick, of course. There are rumors of other creatures, Man-Apes in both the Himalayas and the forests of the Northwest, for instance, but nothing I can confirm. If they do exist, these creatures are extremely secretive and are rarely even glimpsed. It is believed that they would do anything to avoid contact with humans."
"I suppose," she said, touching the end of the pencil t
o her lips as she thought, "That if they were working Magick, it would be to hide their presence from our own species, so you never would find out for certain, would you?"
He coughed. "A point, I grant you. Well, to get back to the subject, as described by Herr Alexander Metzeger, whose handwriting you so despise-"
She flushed very prettily.
"-every human has all four Elements commingled in his Magickal Nature. Most of them possess exactly equal amounts of all four, and thus, command no Magick for themselves. It is only when there is an imbalance that one can work Magick, for it is only when there is an imbalance that a human comes near enough to the Nature of the Elemental that he can communicate with and command them."
She scribbled fiercely in her little book, and he paused to allow her to catch up. "Would that be something like a blind man having acute hearing?" she hazarded.
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