Reserved for the Cat

The tiger nodded.

I can see where these forms would be useful, the cat said thoughtfully. If you wanted to hunt someone, but did not want to chance the blame falling on you, all you would need to do would be to get him alone, take on the animal, and—

The tiger made a snickering sound, nodded, and the shape writhed again, and Thomas found himself staring up into the long tusks and whiskered cheeks of a walrus. I cannot imagine how that shape would be useful, he said doubtfully.

The troll returned to the shape of Nina. “Then you have never fallen off a ship in winter,” she said, with an air of superiority. He wondered about that statement. Had she fallen—or had she been pushed? He’d have bet on the latter.

I will take your word for it. Can you become a bird?

“Of course. But—” She frowned more deeply. “I do not care to do so for long. There is only so much thinking so little a head can do.” She made gesture of impatience. “So, why is it you have come to me, cat? Have you no loyalty to your mistress?”

Thomas snorted. I am a cat. When is a cat loyal to anything but his own best interest?

The feral smile that greeted that statement made him shudder. “Ha! Well said. And you wish to be on the winning side in this?”

He looked at her sideways. Let us say that I know where my own best interest lies.

“And what is it that you can do for me, cat?” Nina asked, taking her place on her chaise longue again, and curling up in a rather catlike pose herself. “I have servants. In fact, I have more than I need. You do not have hands, you cannot even do what they do.”

But I can go where they cannot. His keen hearing had detected something. A familiar footstep, coming slowly, cautiously forward.

Ninette! He very nearly leapt to his feet and ran out of the room then, and it was all he could do to keep himself from calling out Ninette’s name. The Troll clearly had no difficulty hearing and understanding his projected thoughts, and he was afraid to warn Ninette lest it should hear. How had she found him? Why was she here? How could he get her to escape? Could she escape?

Say you want to know what your lover is saying about you when you are on stage. I can creep under the seats, or into the private boxes and listen. He began speaking rapidly, hoping to hold the Troll’s attention. I can spy on him, or anyone else, as they sleep. I can find out the secrets of your rivals, I can learn anything you wish to have found out. A cat can go almost anywhere.

She laughed. “So you say. But I can become a cat too, or better still, a rat or a mouse. You say that a cat can go anywhere, but if I need to learn something all that badly, I can go where even a cat cannot, between the walls where no one would even suspect my existence.”

The footsteps had ceased; Thomas could tell that Ninette had stopped just out of sight, at the side of the doorway. Was she listening? Did she understand what she was hearing?

Had she thought to summon help before she came after him?

Oh come now! Thomas reproved. All these other things you have turned yourself into were quite large. It is one thing to make yourself into something human-sized or larger. But to make yourself into a mouse? I believe you are telling me a tale.

Nina reddened slightly with anger. “You doubt my abilities?”

Oh, I am sure you can make yourself into the form of a mouse, but it would have to be a mouse the size of a tiger. He licked his paw and rubbed it nonchalantly across his whiskers. It takes real skill in magic to be able to shrink yourself that way, and I have never actually seen anyone that could do that—outside of a spirit, since they don’t have any material body to begin with and can look like whatever they like.

“You think I don’t have the skill?” Nina shouted. She jumped up from the chaise longue. “I will show you, skill, cat! I will show you skill such as you have never seen!”

There came one of those moments in magic when the world seems to turn itself inside out.

This is because, in many ways, it is doing just that.

No human could have done what the Troll did, because no human had control over Earth magic energies and the Element of Earth that the Greater Elementals themselves did. Few humans could travel to any of the Elemental Planes, and fewer still returned to tell their story. And to tell the truth, Thomas had not really expected that the Troll had that level of skill. He had mostly been taunting it, to keep it from noticing Ninette.

The room suddenly seemed simultaneously far too small, and as large as a cathedral. The air thickened, and grew desert-hot. Thomas could not look at the Troll—not because he didn’t want to. He literally could not look at it. It had become some strange amorphous conglomeration of swirling energy clouds that wrenched at the eyes and felt all wrong, with something vaguely human-shaped in the middle of it. All the senses revolted at what was going on. It was impossible. It should not be. The eyes refused to believe what they were seeing, and then mind shied away from contemplating how the laws of physics were being shattered. The cloud of energies pulsed and vibrated and shuddered.

And the human shape was shrinking.

The more it shrank, the more things felt wrong. The air throbbed with power; power that tasted foul and made Thomas’s stomach heave. There were no names for the colors in that swirling cloud, no names for the fetid scents that wreathed around him, and above all, no names for what the troll was doing.

Thomas wasn’t entirely sure himself.

In theory, what the troll was doing was dividing himself, some of “himself” going back to wherever it was Earth Elementals came from, the rest slowly forming itself into a mouse.

Finally, with a whuff of displaced air, the energies dissipated. The air cleared a trifle. And Thomas looked down.

I told you, the mouse said, smugly.

24

NINETTE froze for a moment at the sound of a voice, then moved forward, inch by cautious inch, sliding her feet along the carpet so as not to make any noise at all. She identified the right door, partly from the fact that it was half open, and partly from the voice—

A female voice, oddly without any accent at all, and—speaking only one side of a conversation—

Then she edged a little nearer and suddenly the second “voice” faded into her head.

Thomas.

What was being said still made no sense to her, though:

I must say, I have heard about you Earth Elementals, but I never heard of one as powerful or as clever as you.

“Nor will you, I am unique!”

I can see that. Is it true that you can change shape? I mean, change it to something other than your native form and this one? I had heard that some of the most powerful of Elementals can do that, but I have never seen it. Truly, I was thinking it must be some kind of myth.

“I can take any form I care to, as long as I have absorbed the original. Watch.”

Thomas was talking to an Earth Elemental? But what kind? The Brownie couldn’t change shape, and what did this have to do with the man who had attacked her?

Surely—surely that man was not somehow connected to the mage that was trying to hurt her and her friends? But his attack had been completely ordinary, the assault on her mind, she was sure, a matter of mere accident. Why suddenly switch from magic to a completely mundane attack?

To throw us off the track? To distract us?

But this Elemental, why was Thomas talking to it?

She felt something, a kind of air-quake, and then there was the sound of completely animalistic growling. She pressed her back flat against the wall, her skin crawling with primitive fear at the sound. Whatever was in there, it