man. Too many of these herb-sellers were inclined to lace their potions with powerful doses of opium, and such a treatment would render Rose useless for her duties.
The mirror showed her as he had expected; she was reading as the railway-carriage swayed with the rhythm imposed by the rails. She was lost in whatever it was she had chosen, immersed, completely oblivious to her surroundings. It was too dark to tell just where she was, but he did not think that she would be back soon.
Suddenly he was seized with the restless impulse to try his spell anyway, and hang the consequences. After all, it was only a variation on one he had tried many times before. Though the optimal time had passed, perhaps the optimal time did not matter. He had tried it before in bright daylight with no success; perhaps time of day was not a factor.
But the stars were a factor, and they were still in their proper configuration. He lurched to his feet abruptly, his mind made up. Very well then, he would make the attempt, and have it done with by the time Rose returned home. It was, at the bottom, a very simple spell, so what could possibly go wrong?
Rose left her luggage behind her on the platform, secure in the knowledge that all of it would be wafted up to her quarters the moment she issued orders to that effect to the 'empty' air. It was well after ten at night when the train pulled up alongside the platform below the house; they had been forced to wait on a siding while a 'special' went by, an order not even Cameron could or would countermand. Regular rail traffic must not be interfered with; that was the cardinal rule every rail-man lived by, and Cameron was too much a rail-man ever to violate it.
She took the elevator up to the house; she knew how to run it for herself now. Her heels clicked confidently across the floor and up the stairs; when she opened the door to her rooms, her luggage, books, boxes and all, was waiting for her beside the sofa.
But something else was waiting there, too.
A Salamander hovered in midair, throwing off sparks in its agitation. She thought she recognized it by the particular combination of its colors; this was not 'her' Salamander, which was a pale bright yellow, but was the gold and orange one that seemed to be particularly intelligent and outspoken, the one that spent most of its time serving Cameron personally.
'Rose Hawkins!' it said urgently. 'You must come with me! The Master is ill, and needs your help!'
Her first reaction was not one of alarm, but of incredulity. Cameron? Sick? But-how would an inhuman creature like a Salamander know if a human is ill? If Cameron happened to be drunk, perhaps the Salamander might mistake it for illness ... if that was the case, he would hardly welcome her intrusion! Perhaps she ought to check first; despite the agitated dancing of the Salamander, she went to the speaking-tube and called Cameron's name several times. This is surely a mistake. He was perfectly fine when I left him. The Salamander must be mistaken. How could he have fallen ill in less than three days?
She was answered by silence-then, as she shouted more urgently, by a hollow groan in the distance, a sound she had to strain to hear that made the hair stand up on her arms and sent a shiver down her spine. It did not sound like a man who was drunk. It sounded like an animal, a dying animal.
She whirled, without a second thought, and picked up her skirts in both hands so that she could run. Dear God, what could have happened? He was in perfect health! Could he have hurt himself? No, the Salamander said he was 'Ill,' not 'hurt. ' What illness comes on so quickly? With her skirts hiked up above her knee, she burst through the door, ran down the hall, and took the steps of the staircase down two at a time. Could this have something to do with his accident? Where in God's Name is du Mond? Why isn't he here and why didn't he know about this illness?
The inevitable, guilty thought flashed through her mind as she clattered down the stairs. Has he been ill all this time? Has he been lying there since I left, alone, in pain? She reached the landing outside the door to Cameron's suite only to find the Salamander there before her, hovering before the open door, a door that had not once been open in all the time she had lived here.
'Hurry!' it said, and flitted inside, lighting the way for her with the illumination of its own body. Still clutching her skirts, with her heart racing and a trickle of perspiration trickling down the back of her neck, she followed it. There was hardly any light in here that was not already supplied by the Salamander.
He can't have been lying here unattended for three days, she told herself, as she ran through the apartment in the Salamander's wake, paying no attention to anything except her footing. Du Mond was here all that time. The Salamanders would not have allowed him to lie there uncared-for. This must be something that just happened. But what? The heels of her walking-boots made a muffled staccato beat against the carpeted floor.
And now her heart began to race with a different flavor of apprehension. Now she would see Jason Cameron, not just speak to him with a mechanical instrument; she would finally see the results of Jason's accident, see what dreadful disfiguration had turned him into a recluse. Surely it must be hideous to have made him close himself up on a single floor of his palatial mansion! Shepaid no attention to the rooms she passed as she ran down a hallway very similar to the one a story above. The Salamander knew where Cameron was; at least she did not need to search for him, rummage through rooms that must be very personal to him.
She steeled herself for the dreadful revelation as the Salamander darted into a doorway. She followed it, and stopped, seeing it hovering above the shadowed bulk of a powerfully-built man. He was lying huddled, face-down on the floor, as if he had collapsed there; the hood of the robe he wore enshrouded his head. The robe was similar to those worn by monks, except that it was made of crimson velvet rather than coarse, homespun wool.
There was something peculiar about this room, echoing and larger than she had thought possible, so barren of furniture that all sound reverberated hollowly, and with no sign of the carpets that softened the footstep everywhere else in this house. The floor itself was of slate or a similar stone, and inscribed with chalk-marks now
