Phoenix and Ashes

Good. She dismissed the creature, which melted back into the stone. She entered the garden gate and sauntered up the path to the cottage—it had been gravel once, but was now as overgrown as the road, and as she took in the rather picturesque little dwelling, she could not help but smile broadly. A vine-covered cottage—and beneath the vines was stone. Good Cotswold stone. Thatched roof. Earth and earth and earth. What had he been thinking?

Probably not that an Earth Master would come hunting him.

She laid one hand on wall beside the thick oaken door, and allowed the stone to speak to her. Her duster blended nicely with the gray of the stone, and even if anyone came along here and saw her, she could claim to be looking for the tenant. Not that anyone would. The spell of avoidance she had laid across the lane would keep even cattle from wandering down this way.

Needless to say, the German agent did not work his spells within the confines of the cottage, the spells he had laid here were all of protection, a dome of mixed shielding that melded with the walls of the cottage. His purpose here was twofold: to gather information by means of his Air Elementals, and, whenever possible, to disrupt the training of the Royal Flying Corps. Now, from the little that Alison had learned about the RFC, it took very little to disrupt that training. Fog, rain, contrary winds—things that were all easy to direct and create would render it difficult and dangerous to go up, and they were all things that occurred frequently and naturally. Impossible to say how many casualties, if any, were due to his interference. Possibly none whatsoever; the Flying Corps was quite efficient at killing off its young recruits all by itself. One recruit a day died at each of the two training fields, so Alison had been told, and there could be upwards of two dozen crashes a day, and that was without any magical interference whatsoever.

Insane. But no more insane, presumably, than the generals whose only strategy seemed to be that of amassing men in trenches, then sending them in charges against machine-gun nests across open land littered with shell-holes, razor-wire, and bits of the last lot to make the charge.

Absolutely insane. If Alison had been in charge of the war, the slaughter would certainly have been as great, but it would have been to more purpose. There were other ways of killing men than flinging them straight to their deaths. And she would not have pursued a policy that spent so much to gain nothing.

She didn't know this man's real name, and she didn't care to learn it. She didn't want to know precisely what he was doing, outside of what he was doing magically. She did not care to know who he was reporting to, or how. The War Office, of course, did want to know these things.

The War Office would have to go on wanting.

If the War Office was interested discovering these things, the War Office could send its own men.

Of course . . . they had tried doing just that. They had sent conventional agents against Elemental Masters before, but like the generals, it seemed that they never learned what not to do. They had gotten less than satisfactory results in their investigations of this man, for instance. Those two agents that had been sent to find out what this man was up to, at least according to what the Lodge had told Alison, had been found wandering around the countryside, scorched and witless.

Lightning, of course. Well known as the weapon of choice for Far Eastern Air Elementals, especially the ones associated with Tibetan shamanism.

Alison might have started life as an ignorant working-class girl, but knowledge was power, and she intended to be as powerful as knowledge could make her. It was astonishing, the amount of information that she had accumulated about traditions other than her own. Thus far, the magic of choice for Germans seemed equally split between Nordic and Tibetan; agents of the Irish in league with the Germans stuck to their dark Celtic ways. The walls of this cottage spoke to her of foreign creatures with multiple limbs and eyes, and boar-like tushes. Definitely Tibetan.

So, her quarry was out in a field somewhere, communing with his slant-eyed demons, interfering with the lives of the young bucks at the two Schools of Military Aeronautics, one at Reading, one at Oxford. And all without going more than a half mile from this house.

So why choose Stratford as a base? That Alison couldn't guess, and didn't really care. Perhaps it was simply that there was nothing much of military significance around her, and so there was less chance of his being found out. It didn't matter where an Air Master was in relation to what he wanted to investigate. The only question was how long he was willing to wait to find out the information, and how sure his control over his Elementals was. He could operate at a distance of a couple hundred miles if he had firm control of his creatures. It was certainly less than that from Stratford to Oxford or Reading. He would have no difficulty at all in controlling weather from here, and depending on how fast his Elementals flew, he could have his information within an hour or two. Of all of the Elemental Masters, it was the Air Masters who made the best spies, for precisely that reason. Earth and Water Masters tended to have more control over their creatures, but needed to be in close proximity to what they were investigating, because their Elementals could not travel nearly so fast. And Fire Masters could work at a distance, but their control tended to be problematical. If Fire Elementals did not like you, they didn't have a great deal of difficulty in slipping their bonds. And when they did, even the friendliest ones could prove deadly. So Fire Masters, in general, were very poor intelligence agents.

Well, the one thing that this Air Master had neglected to do was to leave one of his little servants here to guard his dwelling in person.

That had certainly been a mistake. Even an Elemental with no power could have run to alert his Master that there was another Elemental Mage in his territory, and she probably would not have been able to catch or stop it.

Well, perhaps he had made the mistake that so many in the past had. He had looked for a male Master, assuming that a female would be inconsequential. The Germans seemed to have that habit of