Well, there were many fire brigades that had been faced with catastrophic, unexplained fires that would, had they known Elemental Magicians existed, have discovered a somewhat grisly answer to their many questions. “Spontaneous human combustion” was what they called it. Temperance lecturers ascribed the phenomenon to drinking too much, although they never had an explanation for why it also happened to teetotalers.
He shook himself out of his dark thoughts as a trio of drunk sailors lurched past in the street, singing. Disaster averted, he told himself, and felt relief. Suzie would take care of the girl, get her settled in safe lodgings, see to what she needed. Reliable little Suzie! If only she’d been a mage . . .
Well, she wasn’t, but with her good heart she was a treasure he would sorely miss, the more so since she’d been with him longer than any other assistant that was a mage.
He and Jack turned down a little lane connecting two larger streets. Both sides of the lane were lined with two-story dwellings, wedged-in and dwarfed by the three- and four-story townhouses of the two streets themselves. Those towering townhouses were owned by very well-to-do families of what might be called the “upper” middle class who could afford a second home for summer, and didn’t care for either the country or conventional watering spots like Bath. This was where the wife and kiddies came for the summer, both for a bit of fun and to avoid the perilous climes of London, and where the good, hardworking husband came for his holiday. All except for this lane, whose occupants, with the exception of Lionel, were white-haired and elderly.
This lane was where his house was—outright bought and owned, like the townhouses, rather than rented. There were only half a dozen of these little places, three to each side of the street, and all were at least two hundred years old. Their proportions were a bit broader than the townhouses, although the ceilings were a bit low. He often wondered how they had survived the conversion of Brighton into a holiday resort, when the little houses like them had been knocked down and replaced with the grander townhouses. Perhaps the explanation was simply that the owners had refused to sell at any price, so here they were, hemmed off and overshadowed.
For someone like Lionel, being hemmed off and overshadowed was anything but a handicap. After all, he was gone most of the day, so why would a lack of sunlight bother him? And the relative darkness in the morning, when he was sleeping long past the hour when most were awake, was just what he needed.
The little scrap of a back garden that belonged to his house had been left to go wild, and whatever could flourish nurtured only by the rain and the little sun that got down there did so, and what didn’t, died. The fact that it had ended up becoming a tiny wilderness pocket of shade-loving plants was a happy accident. Birds loved it, and he even had a resident squirrel.
He’d completely renovated the inside when he’d bought the place, so he had all the conveniences of the most modern of flats, including laid-on gas, a boiler for hot water, gas fires instead of coal, sound indoor plumbing, and floors that did not tilt in every possible direction. He didn’t care that he had no view, it didn’t matter that the inside needed artificial lighting even at midday. The fact that those tall buildings on either hand also muffled the noise of the city was something he had counted on, and more than made up for the shadowy interior.
The house was the middle of the three, with a door right on the street, so poor Jack hadn’t any stairs to climb. The modern gaslight at the door had been left lit by Lionel’s housekeeper; by its clear beams he unlocked his door and waved Jack inside.
There were no smells of cooking, other than the lingering aroma of fresh bread. The housekeeper was very old-fashioned in her cookery habits, and saw no reason why they should buy bread when she could make it.
That lack of cooking-scent meant that the supper laid out for him in the dining room under the hygienic metal domes he insisted on would be cold. Probably Sunday’s ham, which was quite fine with him, and which Jack would enjoy.
The two of them moved to the back of the house and the little dining room attached directly to the kitchen, where the domes gleamed in the center of the table. With a faint sigh, Jack sat down immediately; Lionel whisked off the domes to reveal what lay beneath. As he had suspected: ham, some cold sliced tongue, some rather lovely cheese, onions, pickles of various sorts, radishes, some lettuces, and a fresh, round loaf of bread.
“That looks heavenly,” said Jack with approval. Knowing what his friend and fellow magician liked, Lionel was already making him up a sort of plowman’s lunch without being asked, even as Jack passed him plates and cutlery from the stack waiting on his side of the table.
There was beer as well, but that was in a little barrel on the sidebar. Lionel pulled them each a pint before he sat down himself.
“All right then,” Lionel said firmly, before taking his first bite. “Time for you to be talking, my lad.”
“Not much to say,” Jack replied, picking up a piece of Gloucestershire, eyeing it for a moment, then eating it. “The girl turned up with one of your sylphs flitting about her, so at first I thought she might be Air, but then one of my salamanders flashed out and attached himself to her, so I knew she was Fire. Unawakened, of course, but if a salamander’s taken to her, the power is there. She had a scrap of paper with your advertisement on it and asked if the job was still open. I told her yes, gave her a ticket to the show so she’d stop here, and told her to come back when it was over. Then I went to let you know.”
He paused and dabbed some mustard on the ham, folded it in bread, and ate that while Lionel pondered. Lionel remembered the sylph making off with a similar scrap of advertisement; had she been responsible for the girl turning up?
More than likely—probably. Unlike a Master, an Elemental Magician couldn’t actually command Elementals to do something, and half the time, when he requested something of them, they ignored the request. But Lionel had always gotten along well with his sylphs, and knowing he was truly in desperate need of a proper assistant, it looked as if they had finally decided to assist him.
“She’s Traveler, or Gypsy, or I’ll eat my hat,” Jack continued, the lamplight making gold out of the few silver threads in his hair. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Plenty of magic in Traveler blood, and no sylph or salamander would take to her like they have if she was bad.” He ate a hard-boiled egg while he thought. “Did she seem . . . nervy to you, though?”
Lionel knew that as an Air mage he was not as sensitive to emotions as Fire or Earth would have been. “I couldn’t tell,” he said truthfully. He thought a little more. “It did seem . . . I got the impulse to act rather like her old dad, just to keep her soothed, if that makes any sense.”
Jack nodded, and ran his finger around the inside of his collar, loosening it a little. “I’ve never known nor heard of a Traveler or a Gypsy to leave the caravans of their kin unless they were running from something. And this is a girl, alone. It does point to her running away.”
“She’s not just any girl—” Lionel pointed out, then took a pull of his pint, and tapped the wood of the table to emphasize his words. “This is a trained acrobat, a trained dancer—trained enough she likely had a good job somewhere. In fact, I know it; that rehearsal dress of hers looked like a costume, it was used, and used often and hard. Could it be that she’s running from?”
“Circus, maybe,” Jack mulled. “Circus uses dancers around the horses—around the elephant, if they’ve got one—and in the parade and chorus numbers. Dancers always double as something else. And she does acrobat tricks.” He turned his beer glass in little circles on the tabletop. “A girl like her, maybe alone in the world . . . a hard man would find it easy to take advantage of her, and most circus men I’ve met with are hard men.”
It disgusted him, but Lionel had been in show business more than long enough to know Jack had probably hit the answer. After all, the kinds of girls he’d been getting,
answering his advertisements, had not been . . . the nicest of young ladies. His sylphs hadn’t much cared for them, and neither had Jack’s Fire Elementals. So how was it that suddenly, the perfect assistant came calling out of the blue? Because she isn’t all that perfect. She comes with a past. “I think you’ve got it.” Lionel nodded. “Some circus owners can be brutes. Could be she ran off and broke her contract.” He ate the last of his ham, and followed it with a pickled carrot. “I’ll operate on that assumption until she tells me different. We’re going to have to break it to her that real magic exists, and train her.”
Jack barked a laugh, and drained his pint. “That went without saying. I knew that the moment I realized what she was. There are no coincidences when it comes to magicians, Lionel. I think your sylph brought her here. You know how things are; if the sylph brought her here, so far as they are concerned, she’s our responsibility and we’d better see to it that she gets sorted out.”
The elephant in the room finally having been acknowledged between them, they were able to dispense with it for the moment, and go on to homelier matters. When Lionel finally let his friend out the door, things were pretty much settled between them. They would wait and see how the girl managed, and only force the issue on her if it appeared she was being obstinately blind to the genuine magic going on around her.
He locked his door and made his way back to his bedroom, turning out the lamps as he did so. I’m glad that at least I don’t have to deal with this alone. Jack might not be a Master, but he is a damned fine Fire Mage. He can be the one to really train her. I just need to be the one to be ready to jump in if he gets in over his head with this.
And Jack would be the one to try and coax the tale of her past out of her. Having Lionel, her employer, demand it of her might only frighten her. But Jack was an equal, and was friends to everyone in the theater. She should see that almost immediately, and with luck would come to trust him.
It was as good a plan as they could come up with, at any rate.
4
THE magician seemed pleased with Katie’s costume, which fitted better than she thought, and was as easy to move in as any of her circus costumes. If this was an example of the Wardrobe Mistress’s work, she had no fear now that the new costume would be a hazard.
“Excellent!” he exclaimed on seeing the two girls in the wings. “Now, I have a plan for the two of you, to slowly break young Katie in on the act. What I want from you, my dear young lady, is to caper about while you watch, carefully, what Suzie does. That is what you will do in the first few shows as well.”
Katie looked at him thoughtfully, trying to think in her mind what her character should be. She had learned about character from one of the clowns, who had pointed out just how different each of the clowns was, and how each of them represented a distinct personality. After that, except when she worked with Dick, she had tried to do the same. So . . . it was clear from watching Lionel’s act that the magician liked telling a sort of story. How could she fit herself into that story? “I can caper, right enough—but am I on your side, or hers?”
Either of those would do, really. Just so she had a side to be on. There would be a lot more enthusiastic capering if she were on the magician’s side, though.
His eyes gleamed. “Excellent question. Which would you prefer?”
It occurred to her in that moment that she was rather tired of performing as a frail little flower. Being a bit of a devil would be a relief. “Your side, sir,” she answered, and thought a bit more. And then, another idea occurred to her. “Be good if I could wear a domino, or some other devilish mask . . .” The mere thought of being able to don a mask almost made her knees weak with a sudden sense of relief and liberation. If she wore a mask, even if Dick or Andy came looking for her, they’d never recognize her. All she had to do was keep her head down when she was outside the theater, and they would never find her!
“Capital idea!” the magician applauded. “The more devilish you look, the better. That way, when you take Suzie’s place, no one will recognize you. All right then, Davey, let’s have a full run-through. Ladies, with me.”
He led them off into the wings, then nodded to the pianist, who banged out the opening chords of the magician’s music with a will. She already knew this tune from last night; quite a lively piece that would be easy to dance to. On impulse, Katie ran out ahead of Lionel, who was pulling the “reluctant” Suzie along by ropes looped around her wrists. She did a series of leaps and tumbles across the stage, cartwheeled back, and ended up at Lionel’s side as he pulled Suzie to the table on which the “magic carpet” was lying. As Katie mimed evil laughter, the magician mesmerized his victim with a few passes of his hands, and laid her down on the carpet. And Katie rolled over to stage front, keeping on the floor, but starting a series of slow contortions as she watched the proceedings. Her job, after all, was to distract, so that no one noticed whatever trickery the magician was doing to perform the illusion.
From out front last night, the carpet had appeared to levitate itself. But that had been when the backdrop curtain had been in place. Now, it was painfully clear that Suzie was lying on a board, over which the carpet had been draped. From the other side of where the curtain would be tonight, a burly stagehand inserted an iron bar under the board and with a clever mechanism and a lot of main strength, made Suzie “float.” And when the magician had passed a ring around her to prove that she wasn’t being hung on wires? Simple manipulation of the hoop in such a way that it seemed as if the hoop was passing over her twice, when in fact, the magician was manipulating the hoop to avoid the bar. Now that she was up in the air, Katie capered about as she watched this, like a devilish little monkey, clapping her hands and somersaulting, and pausing now and again to turn herself into another knot.
The “flying carpet” didn’t look very comfortable for Suzie; it wasn’t nearly as long as she was tall, and her head and legs draped over either end. Well, it more or less had to be that way, Katie supposed, otherwise the hoop couldn’t make the passes around that bar.
Suzie came down again, the stagehand pulled out the bar, and the whole apparatus was wheeled away to the side as the magician woke his victim back up again. Katie darted in, tugging at Suzie’s gauzy pantaloons, pretending to pinch her, and generally making a nuisance of herself to cover the sound of the apparatus being taken away backstage.
The magician now brought out a lamp, and conjured up a “genie” out of it—a square of scarlet silk, knotted so that it vaguely resembled a figure, that danced about in the air, while Suzie wheeled in the next apparatus, the sword-basket. Since Katie already knew how this worked, she now imitated a cat chasing after the dancing silk, and eventually Suzie joined chasing it, with more graceful, dancing movements. For the life of her Katie couldn’t see how the magician was doing what he was doing, but that didn’t matter. She understood that her job was to provide enough distraction to the audience that if Lionel slipped, they wouldn’t notice his manipulation.
The “genie” whisked back into the lamp, and the magician turned his attention to Suzie again. With threatening gestures, he forced her into the basket while Katie leapt and tumbled about with glee. With every thrust of a sword, Katie shouted, jumped and clapped her hands. And when Suzie emerged unscathed, she pounded her fists on the stage in rage.
The magician seized her, bound her with ropes, and forced her into a cabinet. He closed the cabinet doors, whirled it around four times, and opened them again, and she was gone! He closed them again, whirled the cabinet four more times and opened them, and there she was! Katie still couldn’t see how this one was done, but she rejoiced at her “master’s” triumph in a spiral of cartwheels.
And now came the finale. Lionel threw a rope up into the air, which remained, stiff as a pole, hanging in midair. From here, Katie could see that a stagehand had caught the rope and somehow fastened the end of it to a stout hook in the overhead scaffol
ding. With threats, the magician forced Suzie to climb the rope, but when she got to the top, she began making rude gestures at him.
As the magician raged at her below, and Katie imitated him, there was a blinding flash and a puff of smoke and Suzie vanished as the rope dropped to the ground.
Except, of course, two very strong stagehands had actually pulled her quickly up into the scaffolding with them and let the rope drop.
The magician ran off stage, raging, as Katie followed, imitating him, and the piano player finished with a few crashing chords.
“Well done, by Jove!” the magician exclaimed, and the piano player stopped playing to applaud. “Just repeat that tonight and we’ll be fine!”
“Too bad you can’t keep both of them,” the pianist said with enthusiasm.
“Not a chance, you cheeky monkey!” Suzie called down, on her way down out of the scaffold. “I told my Harry we can set the date, we’ve already had the banns read, and that is that!”
The piano player struck his chest with one closed fist. “Crushed! Again!” he cried. Katie was surprised into a giggle.
“Now, lads, let’s wheel the cabinet out so Katie can see how that one is done,” Lionel ordered, and the stagehands brought the box back out again. And of course, once Katie was inside it, she saw how shallow it was compared to the outside dimensions. Of course, since it was painted black inside, it was impossible to tell that. She understood immediately what he was doing as she braced herself inside the cabinet. There were two sections to it, one with her in it, and one empty. When Lionel opened the cabinet door on her side, she stepped out again.
“Now, let’s run through the tricks with you doing them, while Suzie coaches you,” the magician ordered. “You’ll be fine bouncing about as you did just now in the shows, but making the illusions appear flawless takes some work.”
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