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 his 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
