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 dismissing female Masters out of hand. Or, like many Masters of a "superior" Element, he could have assumed that an Earth Master was in control of an inferior power.
If that was the case, he should have known better. There was a reason why opposite pairings were considered inimical to each other. It might be a bit more difficult for an Earth Master to get an Air Master in a position where he was under her control, but when it happened— the results were unfortunate for the Air Master.
Or it might be because he had never seen an Earth Master who had dominion over the hostile creatures of the Element. Earth Masters tended to be healing, nurturing types. Alison curled her lip in contempt. If that was the case, if he hadn't bothered to do his research, he deserved what he was about to get.
She placed both hands on the wall, and summoned her own creatures. They would bypass the protections on this place—one great fault Air Masters often had was that they forgot that things could come up from below as well as down from above. Their protections tended to be domes rather than spheres. Water Masters and Fire Masters rarely made that mistake.
Up they came, slow and cold, investing the walls and the floor with their presence, swimming through the stone as an undine would swim through water. Kobolds and tommyknockers, mostly, those creatures that invested rock rather than earth, and who hated mankind with an enduring passion as the invader and despoiler of their secret underground fastnesses. They had the power to bring down mines when angered, and the only reason that they weren't more dangerous than trolls and giants was that they were slow to work on their own, and solitary, and found it difficult to work with one another.
She bound them with spell and command, it wasn't difficult, given what she intended them to do. They hated mankind in general, and Air Magicians worst of all. Ah, the benefit of working against a Master of the inimical Elemental; it was seldom that she commanded any of her creatures under these circumstances that was not pleased to do her will.
The spell was set, the trap laid, and there was no point in remaining. The Air Master would be returning soon. He would check his boundaries and find them untouched, because her invaders had not forced, had not even crossed them. Only when the clock crossed into the dark side of the night, at just past midnight, would her minions—"strike" was not the correct word, for they would approach by stealth. "Envelop" was more accurate. As he slept, they would creep upon him, imprison him, paralyze him. And then, they would slowly, so slowly, squeeze the breath out of him, sitting on his chest while he struggled for air, until the lungs collapsed and the laboring heart gave out. There would be no sign that he had died of anything other than natural causes.
This was far superior to invoking a were-creature and tearing her victim apart, which is what she had been forced to do the last time. Stealth was always preferable to direct conflict. Whenever she could avoid a mage-battle, she felt that she had won two victories in one.
She sauntered back to the waiting automobile, feeling altogether pleased with herself. The amount of terror and pain that this particular murder would produce would be remarkable, and that in turn, would enrich the power given up at the death. The victim might well last most of the night. The kobolds would absorb that power—retain some for themselves—but deliver the lion's share to her.
Which would, in turn, give her more power for the conquest of Reginald Fenyx. She would need extra power; Earth Elementals had already feasted on his fear and pain, and would hunger for more. If she had meant to destroy him, that would have been fine, but she would need all her magic and cunning to keep them restrained and held in check.
She drove back home in the sunset; the auto was constructed of enough of the materials of Earth—though it was powered by Fire and Air—that it did not dare misbehave under her hand. Which was more than could be said of horses, or, for that matter, any other living beast that she hadn't specifically bred, altered, and trained. That was the drawback to being a Dark Master; animals didn't much care for you.
Well, the antipathy was mutual.
She brought it to a halt inside what had been the stable, and turned it off as the last light of the day slowly faded. Through the garden door she came, walking briskly up the path as light shown warmly through the kitchen windows.
Of course, she did not have to go through the kitchen, for there were two doors into the garden—the kitchen door and this one. It would never do for her to take a servant's entrance, not even when there was no one there to see; the passage from the garden led directly to the sitting and dining rooms. However, the savory aroma coming from the kitchen told her that the girl had concocted something tasty with the potted pheasant.
She went upstairs to clean herself from the drive, and smiled at herself in the mirror. It had been a most satisfactory day.
Orders to use potted pheasant for dinner had made Eleanor seethe with repressed anger, and this time, it was not only on her own behalf. Outside these walls, people were getting by on a few ounces of meat in a day, stretching it by stewing, putting it in soup, concocting pie— using parts of the cow, pig, sheep, and chicken that no one would have dreamed of using before this. Here within the walls of The Arrows, the announcement that there would be no ham or roast had been met with an order to make a meal with a potted pheasant, as if this was a great hardship. While the trio had been gone, Eleanor had learned a great deal about life in the village in this third year of the war, and she knew that the steady submarine attacks on convoys coming from the United States were taking a significant toll on what was getting to the island. It wasn't only munitions. Far more than she had ever dreamed came into Britain from across the oceans.