The Serpent's Shadow (21 page)

He struggled for a moment with an analogy, and finally the conservatory in which they sat gave him one. “Magic is—oh—like sunlight; it's everywhere, even moonlight is reflected sunlight, after all. We just deal with it inside of a structure
we
understand—and in the case of the Elemental Masters, the structure is mostly Greek, some Egyptian, and a bit of all the old pagans that ever roamed Europe.”

Did she smile? It was hard to tell if there had been a faint smile on her lips, or if the subtly shifting lamp-light had put the fleeting expression there. “We are a bit like that in India, too,” she murmured. “A little borrowed from this, a minor god of the crossroads added there—the hand of Buddha, the touch of Mohammed—and who knows? Perhaps even the words of Christian teachers who came even before Constantine ruled. We are great borrowers.”

Her voice soothed his nerves, for they were certainly playing him up in her presence, and he went on, encouraged. “The thing is, that over time—centuries! —that structure's taken on a life of its own, just as yours has, I suppose. Magic's also like metal; heat it and pour it into a mold, or sculpt it like wax, and it's going to keep that shape. So here, in the West, we have Water, Earth, Fire, and Air Magic, and the corresponding Elemental Creatures to serve our uses—that's the structure, the mold that we pour the magic into to give it shape, and what we use to shape the magic to our own ends.”

“I wish I had the benefit of a structure,” she said wistfully, for a moment just speaking her thoughts aloud. “I have never learned the structure of the magic of home. I have been groping in the darkness, like the blind men with their elephant. I have bits, but no grasp of the whole.” Maya did not pause long for any self-pity, but drove back to the subject at hand. “But why do you have
this
shape and no other? How is it that you actually have creatures of the Elements to command?” she asked.

Here he was on solid ground, and felt comfortable providing an explanation. “It's my theory that we can blame the Greeks, since they were the first old fellows to have much of a written tradition. It's easier to preserve a way of thinking if it's written down, you see. It's easier to
have
a structure and build on it if you've got it written and less subject to change.”

“I
do
see,” Maya said, nodding, oblivious to the soft strands of hair that had escaped from her chignon and curled charmingly around her face. Peter tried to remain oblivious too, but with less success.

“
I
think that's the entire reason for why our magic works this way,” Peter continued. “I think we've got the Elementals because we've believed in ‘em for so long, but there are those who say the Elementals came first.”

“There is probably no way to tell now,” Maya replied, tapping one finger thoughtfully on the arm of her chair. “And except for a scholar, who cares only for hunting down the roots of things, I cannot see that it matters.” She shrugged. “It is. So I must and will work with it. If my patient has a wound, it is my duty to treat and heal it, not wonder about how he got it.”

“It matters to the insatiably curious,” Peter amended, thinking with amusement of Almsley. “I can think of a couple of my colleagues who'll want to stir about in your recollections and try and pick out the differences between Western magic and Eastern.”

She made a dismissive gesture. “They will have to wait until we—I—have more leisure. You say that
I
have the magic of Earth? How did you know? And what, then, is yours?”

“I knew because of affinities,” he responded. “That is—how
my
magic responded to yours. I'm Water; Water nourishes Earth, or washes it away, and I saw that in the colors, in the
sense
of your magic. You do know that magic has colors?”

“Oh, yes!” she responded. “My mother's was like mine, all warm golds and yellow-browns; it tastes of cinnamon and saffron, and feels like velvet warmed in front of a fire.”

“Well, mine's greens and turquoise, and it tastes of exactly what you'd expect—
water
. Every kind of water there is, depending on where I am and what I'm doing,” he told her. “It feels like water, too—in every way that water can be felt, especially things like currents. If I'd been Fire, I'd see and feel things about Fire that are just as subtle. I'd also have recognized that you were Earth, and have known—just in the way that you can recognize the familiar accent of someone from India speaking English when you hear it—that Earth can support Fire, or smother it. Now, Earth and Air have no affinity at all, and if I'd been Air, I would have felt that as well—a lack of anything connecting us. Earth and Air are the complete opposites; so are Fire and Water.”

“I should think more so—with Fire and Water,” Maya said, weighing her words. “Wouldn't they be enemies?”

She picked up that quickly enough.
“Ye-es, sometimes. Mind you, any mage who's gone over to the Black Lodges can be the enemy of any mage of the White. But, well, it's prudent on the part of a Fire Master to be circumspect with a Master of Water. In a duel of equals, should it come to that, Water almost always has the advantage.”
Which might account for the way that Alderscroft treats me.
“By the same logic, though, Air and Fire are natural allies, and work very well together.”

“And so are Earth and Water.” She tilted her head to one side, and added dryly, “How fortunate for me.”

“So are Earth and Earth!” he said hastily. “The
only
reason I haven't turned you over to an Earth Master for training is that there aren't any in London. They don't like cities, as a rule. I don't think you've got the time to trot out to Surrey two or three times a week or more—that's where the nearest one I know of is—and I couldn't get Mrs. Phyllis into London with a team of horses dragging her here. Peter Almsley's got another in his family—a cousin—but that's even farther out, and Cousin Reuben won't ever leave his gardens or his flock. He's a vicar, you see.”

“I can't say that I blame him,” Maya replied, with a hint of a wistful note. “No, I can't leave my patients any more than he can leave his charges. Not at the moment, anyway. If I'm to go haring off into the countryside, I'll have to find another physician to take some of my days at the Fleet, and that won't be easy. Not a full physician, anyway, not even another female physician; they all have their own concerns.” Once again, she was thinking aloud, and he was secretly pleased that she had sufficient trust in him to relax enough to do so. “I
might
be able to get those who want surgery practice, though, so they can be certified ... if I offer to pay them for other work on condition they act as surgeons for gratis.” Making her own calculations, she didn't need any opinions from him, and Peter held his tongue. “It can wait, though—you said as much.
You
can teach me for now, without my trying to find substitutes.”

He nodded. “It's the affinities—Water can serve as an initial teacher to Earth easily enough, just as Fire can to Air. And vice versa, of course.”

“Of course,” she echoed, her eyes reflecting that her mind was already elsewhere. “Is that why you became a man of the sea? That you were already a Water Master?”

Oh, he liked the quick way she picked up on things! “I wasn't a
Master
at the time, but yes.” He nodded. “I went straight off to the first ship that
felt
right, and applied as a cabin boy when I was eleven. Would it surprise you to learn that the captain of
that
ship was a Water Master?”

She looked amused. “Not very, no.”

He made a gesture with his upturned hand. “There you have it. If we have the choice, mages tend to pick occupations that reflect their magic,
and
if they aren't singled out by a Master of their own element, they go looking for one. Earth—well, you get some trades that are obvious, farmers, herdsmen, herbalists, gamekeep-ers, gardeners—but there are also a fair lot of midwives, animal handlers, and trainers, and although you're the first physician I know of, there're clergy-men, a lawyer or two, and the odd squire here and there. Water's almost always a sailor or fisherman, a riverman, a canal worker, but I know of a couple of artistic types, another lawyer and an architect and several fellows who work in the city and never have anything to do with sailing. And Lord Peter, of course; he's some sort of diplomat. Fire—metalsmiths, glass-workers, firefighters, but also soldiers, the odd lad in government service. Air, though, they tend to be the scholars, the artists, or the entertainers. Lots of creative types in Air.”

“But not always.”

“But not always,” he agreed. “Lord Peter Almsley's Water and, as I mentioned, diplomat—I think. They're always sending him off to the continent chasing this or that, anyway. He's really creative in his own sphere; he's certainly entertaining, and he's as persuasive a speaker as any great actor. It isn't his Element that gave him his purpose and job, it's his glib tongue. It's not just the magic, you see, it's what situation in life you were born to, and your natural talents, which don't necessarily march in time with your magic. And anyway, you never
start
with learning Elemental Magic.”

Her eyes grew puzzled. “Why not?”

“Because you either have to coax or coerce the Elementals to work for you, and that takes practice and working in the raw basics first. Not all Elementals are—nice.” He thought for a moment about some of the habits of his own affinity. “Some are vicious. If they heard your call, they might come to it, just so they could hurt you. If you weren't strong enough to defend yourself, they
would.
Hurt you, that is.”

Maya's lips formed a surprised “O” although she made no sound.

He decided at that point that both of them had enough of abstracts for the moment. “Just so you know. Forewarned and all that. Are you ready to try some of those basics?”

“I think so. Can we work here?” Her last words were hesitant, and he suspected that she had preserved a chamber here in the house where she worked her spells. He also suspected that it was an annex of her own bedchamber, and she hesitated to bring a man and a stranger so near to it.
I
am
a stranger,
he reminded himself.
No matter that it seems less that way with every minute that passes. I'm lucky she lets me in here alone with her at all.

“We can,” he said, and was rewarded with a genuine smile of relief. “Of course we can. Especially since the first of your lessons will be in constructing protections between your household and whatever is—” he waved his hand in the general direction of the street, “—out there. The difference between what you've been doing until now and what I'll show you is that we'll be building those protections on a foundation based in your own Element.”

Oh, Peter,
that
made you sound like a right pompous ass!
He winced. She didn't notice, though; or at least, she was too polite to show that she had.

He rose; she did the same. “Would you feel more comfortable with some concrete symbols of what we're doing, or not?” he asked diffidently. “I mean, would it help you if I actually drew chalk diagrams on the floor, or outlines, or whatever?”

“I think,” she said, with a flavoring of irony, “that we needn't frighten the others with chalked diagrams. As a doctor, I have to imagine what is going on inside my patients, to lay them bare in my mind so that I can treat them.”

He flushed with acute embarrassment, and tried to cover it by getting to his feet. “Right—ah—well, if you were a real beginner, I'd have told you how to cleanse the area that you're going to protect, but as it happens, it's already cleansed. If it wasn‘t, they wouldn't be here.”

He pointed to the fountain where, attracted by a Master of their own element inside their domain, two undines drifted in the lower pool, forms visible as an occasional undulation of wave-into-arm or a transparent face briefly showing on the surface. Maya looked, and then looked again, staring.

“I never saw
them
before!” she exclaimed.

“They wouldn't show themselves, not to you, without me being there; you aren't their Element, and you aren't a Master yet,” Peter replied, hoping that she didn't think his automatic smile was patronizing. “The point is that they're here, which means that the earth through which they had to go to get into your fountain is clean. By that, I don't mean that it's sterile or anything like that; I mean that there's none of the usual city poisons in the water and earth here—you can't help the ones in the air—and no poisonous energies here either.”

“But how—” she began.

“They probably got in here the last time it rained, following the runoff, or perhaps there's a connection to an underground water supply on your property. There are lots of old wells and springs that have been forgotten.” Peter shrugged. “The point is that this kind of Elemental can't move through anything that's unclean.”

“But how did it become clean?” she asked, frowning. “I did nothing—”

Peter could only shrug again.
I wish she'd stop asking questions I don't know the answer to. I really don't want to look like a right dunce in front of her.
“I don't know,” he admitted. “But there are parts of the city that manage to stay clean no matter what. A lot of them are old shrines or even the sites of old churches that got built over. What's been cleansed stays cleansed, unless someone comes along and deliberately deconsecrates it. Gods have a way of hanging onto what's theirs, and of making where they live into a place where they can be—oh, I don't know—I suppose the word is
comfortable.
And only a Dark god is comfortable in a place that's contaminated.”