Phoenix and Ashes

war had been no easier on the ranks of the Elemental Masters than it was on the common man.

Today, however, triumph was not even in the agenda. 'He's in wretched shape, my lord,' she said slowly. 'It is not helping that so many physicians and most officers, all of whom should know better, are convinced that shellshock is just another name for malingering. Even as he, himself, acknowledges that he is not well, there is the subconscious conviction that if he only had an ounce more willpower, he would get over it and back to the fight. I can tell him differently until I turn as blue as Rama; until he believes it in his heart, he will continue to berate himself even as he suffers.'

Lord Alderscroft—who, not that long ago, would have agreed with those physicians and officers—sighed heavily. He knew better now. All Elemental Masters knew better; the war was hellish, but it was worse on the minds and nerves of Elemental Masters. The truth was, most of the Masters that had gone into the trenches, if they survived the senseless, mindless way in which the War Department threw away their lives, were there for less than six months before their minds broke. 'So he is in no fit state, as Doctor Boyes reports, with a ripe case of shell-shock as well as physical injuries. And as if that were not enough, then there is what he faced, in the earth.'

She shook her head, and swallowed, as her husband closed his hand over hers. She had closed herself off as much as she had dared, but as a Healer and a physician, she had needed to know something of what he had experienced.

She had been ready for it, and of course, it had come at second hand, but it had been too horrific for anyone to really understand without sharing it.

She gave Peter a faint smile of thanks. 'You do not wish to know the details, my lord. Horrors. That is enough, I think. The inimical forces of all four Elements can terrify, but I think that those of Earth are most particularly apt at destroying the mind with fear. They swarmed him and tormented him from the moment the earth was shattered around him to the moment that the rescue party broke through and got him out. The records say he was more dead than alive. I am not at all surprised. What I am surprised at is that he has a mind left at all, much less a rational one.'

'Well,' Alderscroft rumbled, his face creased and re-creased with lines of care, 'We humans have taught them about torment and horror all too well, have we not?' He sighed again.

'Do not lay too much upon the shoulders of mere mortals, my lord,' Maya replied, grimly. 'Recall that it is Healing that is in the Gift of the Earth Mages and Elementals. The converse is harm, and it is naturally true of the dark side of that Element.' She thought with pity of the poor fellow, who she last recalled seeing as a bright young Oxford scholar, utterly shattered and weeping his heart out, bent over her knees. It was a state she had wanted to bring him to—for without that initial purging, he could not even begin to heal—but it had been painful for her to do so, and only the fact that she had done it before, to others, even made it possible for her to carry it through. But she was a surgeon, and surgeons became hardened to necessity after a time. You could not cleanse a wound without releasing the infection. You could not heal the mind without letting some of the pressure off. 'The larger consequence for us, my lord, is that he has cut himself off from any use of his powers.'

Lord Alderscroft closed his eyes. 'I feared as much. And we cannot afford that. Too many of us are gone —'

'Nevertheless, he has closed off his mind to his power,' she replied. 'And it is of no use trying to get him to open it now. He tells me that the things that attacked him destroyed his Gifts, and he believes it with every iota of his being.'

'And that isn't true?' A second figure stepped away from the shadows beside the fireplace; another nobleman, Peter Almsley, lean and blond, nervously highbred, and the Scotts' best friend. He was in a uniform, but he was on some sort of special duty with the War Department that kept him off the Front. She suspected that special duty was coordinating the magical defense of the realm. Certainly Alderscroft wasn't young enough anymore to do so.

She closed her eyes for a moment. Even if Fenyx never flew again, he could be put to doing what Almsley was doing—with more effectiveness. The Air Elementals actually controlled winds and weather to some extent, and if an Air Master could see to the physical defenses of the country—

She did not shudder, she had endured worse than bombardment by Zepps and Hun aeroplanes, but—it was hard, hard, to hear the drone of those motors in the sky, in the dark, and look up helplessly at the ceiling and wait for the first explosions and wonder if you were sitting on the target, or if you would be able to scramble away to somewhere safer when you knew where the bombs were falling. And if the latter—who, of your friends, was sitting on the target. If Reggie could be persuaded—

She shook her head. 'There is nothing wrong at all with his Gifts,' she said, decidedly. 'But I think that, in those dreadful two days underground, he understood instinctively that his very power was what attracted the Earth creatures to him, and that if he closed that power off, they would cease to torment him. At some level deeper than thought—Doctor Freud would have called it the id—in the most basic of his instincts, he walled that part of himself away. And now he truly does not believe it exists anymore.'

'So you can get him back—' Alderscroft began, eagerly, looking optimistic for the first time this interview began.

But she shook her head emphatically. 'Not I. This is too complicated a case for me. Doctor Andrew Pike in Devon is the man you need—'

But Almsley groaned. 'Not a chance of a look-in there, Maya. Not now, not ever. It's one thing to unburden his weary soul to you, my heart—but if you call in the good Doctor Pike, or