Reserved for the Cat

better now,” she said, over the noise of the motor.

“I was disposed to be very angry with you when you told us how you had lied to us,” Jonathon replied, after a long moment of thought.

“But?” she persisted.

He answered honestly, but reluctantly. “Well. You are a good dancer, a very good dancer. There is no doubt that you are very popular with the audiences. And there is also no doubt that you work as hard as any of us. I don’t think anyone gives a hang whether you’re Russian or Red Indian, the point is you give them good entertainment. But still, you lied to us . . . I don’t like being lied to.”

“Mais ouis. But . . .” She looked out the windscreen, her mouth in a small pout of melancholy. “Would any of you have listened to me, let me audition for you, if I had not come with this story, this lie?”

Jonathon grimaced. “To be honest, no.”

“Then I should have starved. Or jumped into the river. Or gone into many men’s beds.” The matter of fact way she said it made him flush uncomfortably. “I did not want to do any of these things. And actually, I think I really did not know I wanted so badly to dance, either, until the people began to pay attention to me.”

“It’s a drug,” he said quietly. “That admiration. It’s a drug like any other, as bad as absinthe. You want it. You can’t do without it. And once you’ve had it, you’d rather die than give it up. At least—” he added honestly “—it’s that way for some.”

“It could be for me, I think,” she admitted. “I am taking care, I hope. You understand me? I am trying not to believe that I am so wonderful. But I feel something, out there—”

He debated a moment. “It’s magic. You have a touch of it,” he told her, deciding to make a clean breast of it. “You’re not like me, or even Arthur—you’re more like Wolf. You’ll never have more than that touch of it, never work spells, but this much is yours. When you dance, when you give yourself to the audience, when you forget about everything and try to please them, you feed them. You make them happy. Your magic makes them forget that the tinsel isn’t gold, that the props and scenery are only painted canvas and wood. And when you feed them, they feed you. Don’t you always feel stronger and better when you come off stage?”

“Oui!” she exclaimed. “And I could not understand it! I never used to feel this way when I danced! I was exhausted! And then, after a while, here, I began to feel so full of energy when I came off the stage! Sometimes I need to settle and quiet myself, for otherwise I could not sleep! And you say this is my magic?”

He nodded. “It’s you feeding them, feeding them something to take their minds out of themselves for a little while, and then they feed you. It wouldn’t be enough to keep you going for hours and hours,” he warned. “But I think that all the dancing that Nigel has planned for you in his big production will ultimately be no problem for you.”

But with that, she laughed. “Poo! You have not seen a great ballet, then! The prima is onstage for almost all of it! Swan Lake, sacre bleu, nearly every scene! It would have been no problem without this magic . . .”

But then she smiled. “Still!” she added cheerfully, “With it, things will be very good indeed.”

But as he wound his way through the streets to the theater, something occurred to him. What if this was what her unknown enemy wanted, this rare “performance” magic?

The attacks, then, would not be so much directed at her, as they would be to take what she had away.

Well, it looked as if he had some research ahead of him. It was going to be a long night. But, he hoped, a fruitful one.

17

NINA had wound up her first distraction and let him go. Now for the second.

They would be looking for Earth Mages; her use of the homunculus betrayed her origin. Very well. She would give them some. Or at least, she would give them something that looked like an Earth Mage.

She chose her decoy candidates very, very carefully, for they had to appear to be Earth Mages of the vilest sort, right up until their protections were exploded. The more plausible they were, the better. She could, of course, find mortals that ardently desired the powers of an Earth Mage, and who had just enough of the Gift in them to counterfeit Mastery without ever having anything more than what she granted them. But firstly, that would be wasteful, and secondly, she knew from past experience that such people were dangerous. They got ambitions, and they thought they could take what she would not give them. Such, in fact, had been her original summoner. When mortals got ambitious, things got . . . messy. And while she was not at all averse to mess, she knew that in this case, it could betray her. So she would set up the unknowing as her decoys, in a way that could not be traced back to her.

Her first choice was a natural one: a particularly nasty brothel-keeper of the lowest and most brutish sort. His customers were the same, and as for his “wares,” well, they were in no condition to think about much of anything. His girls were all addicted to the drugs he gave them, most were Chinese, and he kept them in nasty little cells lining the corridors of his building on the water-front, cells a mere six feet by eight, with nothing more than a pallet and a blanket, and a rag or two for clothing. They plied their trade, ate, slept, were drugged, and eventually died in these little “cribs,” as they were called. For pure misery, his establishment had to be high on the list of those creating negative energies, and Nina, surprised by the amount she was able to make use of, made a note to try this particular method at some time in the future. But for now—all she needed was her decoy.

She set herself up in a dingy room in the building next door, wearing the form of one of her vagrants in order to rent it and its noisome contents for a week. There was no lock for the door; she was forced to make do with a chair wedged beneath the knob. She worked swiftly, and without a protective circle, but within shields. A Circle where none should be would only attract attention, and besides, there was not much in the Earth realms that would dare take her on now.

She tapped into the energies boiling out of the brothel next door; siphoned off a cornucopia of rage, hate, shame, lust, and pure despair, and used it to create some of the most powerful Earth-shields she had ever built. Carefully she placed them around both the brothel and the building of flats she was in now. This would further serve to confuse the matter; it would not be clear whether the “Mage” was to be found in the flats or in the brothel. When she was done, she was satisfied; the shields were like stone walls; if they had been the walls of a fortress, not even the guns of a naval warship would be able to break them with a single shot. She added a “tap” to keep those shields supplied from the never-ending stream of soul-sickening darkness. Anyone who saw shields that strong would assume that the Mage inside them was stronger still. Unfortunately for them, this was hardly the case. She left the shields permeable to herself alone until she left the building. Then she closed them even to herself; the perfectly ordinary, non-magical people who belonged there would have no difficulty in crossing, but any creature of magic would be stopped dead in its tracks. This, of course, now included her.

Now what would happen when those shields were broken by a concerted, unrelenting attack? Nina wasn’t entirely certain. Perhaps nothing. Or, perhaps the power would backlash on those who were supplying it. In that case, it would backlash on the girls; in their weakened mental states, that might drive them mad, or it might kill them. If the latter—well, that would be delicious. It would mean the oh-so-noble fellows guarding the imposter would be personally responsible for the deaths of up to two dozen girls who, at least in the sense of harming them, were innocents.

She walked away from that place with a grin on her face that made people who saw it cross to the other side of the street. Nina liked this plan so much that she decided to repeat it.

A few hours’ worth of walking in similarly unsavory neighborhoods netted her more of what she was looking for; by nightfall, she had found two more establishments in which to do the same. The first was a gin palace, the second, an opium den. In both, she was able to rent rooms in which to do her work, undisturbed, once she had purchased, respectively, two full bottles of “blue ruin” and a pipe and sticky ball of black-tar opium.

She used the gin palace first, pouring the poisonous stuff out of the window, then getting to work. It was a trifle more difficult to set up a “tap” here, since the people who were systematically destroying their health, their lives, and their brains with the stuff didn’t actually live there. But she got the notion of putting the “energy sinks” into the benches that they sat on, and that worked admirably.

The next day, it was the turn of the opium den; she mashed the drug into a crack in the floor where it was