Blood Red (9781101637890) (7 page)

But then, the train began to slow. By the time she reached the dining car for breakfast, it had completely stopped.

“There is trouble on the line,” the steward told her, as he handed her a menu. “Some sort of accident, I believe. We will be about three hours late, the engineer tells us.” Then he smiled at her. “Do not concern yourself, good lady. This train is completely safe.”

She made herself smile at him.
It isn't the train I am worried about,
she thought unhappily.
It's me.

T
HE
train had been stopped for an hour, and the steward kept coming around urging wine and beer, and even stronger drinks, on the passengers in the parlor car. To Rosa's mind, this did not bode well for whatever was causing the train to remain stationary. After about an hour, some of the gentlemen got up and went to the door of the car. By this point, Rosa herself was more than curious enough to do the same.

The steward was not brave enough to try and interfere with the men, but he did interpose himself between her and the door, as the first of the gentlemen demanded—and got—the door open and the steps lowered. “Dear lady,” the steward said, trying to forestall her. “Please sit down, there is nothing to be concerned about.”

“I am sure there is nothing to be concerned about,” she replied, making it very clear with her posture that she fully intended to get down out of the car and find out what was going on herself. “But I am not accustomed to sitting about for hours at a time. I require some air. I shall have a little walk.”

The steward looked very much as if he wanted to stop her, but what could he do? He was only the steward, and she had enough money to be riding in the most expensive way possible. If he objected, while the other gentlemen might support him, it was far more likely that they would support her on the basis of class. He let her pass, and she alighted from the car onto the ground beside the track. They were in the midst of a forested part of the land—possibly some great estate's private forest, in fact—and there was no sign of a road or so much as an animal track on this side of the train. But she immediately felt at ease;
this
was where she belonged, with proper earth beneath her feet, and nothing artificial but the train and its track for miles. There was little or no wind, and beneath the smell of hot metal and coal smoke was the scent of good, green, growing things. She heard the calls of dozens of birds—finches, sparrows, a raven, rooks, starlings, tits, warblers, pipits—there were probably more birds than that out there, but the chatter of the people going to see what was wrong drowned out their songs as she approached the gathering crowd.

She was by no means the only person on the train who was curious enough about what was going on to have alighted—in fact, the passengers from the more crowded cars seemed to have taken this as an excuse to escape the crowding. There were four men from the parlor car, and many other men and a few women from second and third class making their way alongside the stopped train on this side. As she passed the great steam engine, waves of heat radiated from it, and she looked up at the cab of the enormous construction to see the crew sitting at what must be rare leisure, only occasionally throwing on a shovel-full of coal to keep the fires stoked.

Then she was out in front of the train with the rest, and saw what had happened.

There was a tree down across the track—quite an enormous tree at that. It looked to be hundreds of years old, and its girth was tremendous. There were half a dozen men sawing and hacking at it, and teams of patient horses waiting to take the pieces away. It was very clear that the thing could not simply be cut in half and dragged off. It would have to be cut apart in several pieces, or the horses could never haul it away. It was obvious from the limited progress they had made that this was going to take a great deal longer than the three hours the steward had promised.

It was also clear—to her, at least—what had felled the forest giant. Smoke still rose from the splintered stump. It could only have been struck by lightning, but it must have been a massive blast. Now—that was very suspicious to her mind. She had spent most of her life in the Schwarzwald, and she had never seen a lightning strike that powerful that was directed to the
base
of a tree rather than the top. She wanted to get closer, but could not think of a way to do so without drawing the ire of the working crew.

As she stood there at the back of the crowd, staring in astonishment and growing suspicion, a low voice spoke in her ear. “If I might trouble you for a moment of your time, Earth Master?”

The voice was male, and spoke German, and the fact that the speaker had identified her as an Earth Master came as a shock. She turned quickly. Immediately behind her was a tall, lean, pale-blond man with a pronounced jaw, little round wire-rimmed spectacles, and an extremely worried expression. She identified him immediately—not that she knew him, but she knew
what
he was. The green swirls of Water Magic surrounded him in a simple shield. Too simple a shield for him to be very powerful.

Water Mage.
Not a Master. Not that there was anything wrong with that! Plenty among the Bruderschaft were mages rather than Masters, and the specific and skillful application of a little power could get as much done as brute force.

Things were going a little faster than she liked. She hadn't even had time to analyze the downed tree, and here was an unknown Water Mage addressing her. On the other hand, maybe
he
had exactly the information she was looking for.

She nodded at him, and inclined her head back along the train. Once they got past the engine again, they were alone—everyone that was curious enough to go to the front of the train had gathered in a crowd there, drawn together by the universal urge of people who do not have to do a particular piece of manual labor wishing to watch someone
else
do it.

“What can I do for you, sir?” she asked politely. She was not particularly concerned for her safety; invoking lightning was not a Water ability. And given that he was, by her standards, a distinctly
weedy
young man, she had no doubt she could best him in a direct confrontation. His own sheer astonishment that she could and would deliver a good punch to the chin would allow her to get back to the safety of the parlor car before he recovered.

“It is what I can do for you, Earth Master,” he said, looking as if he was trying very hard to be brave. “That tree coming down was no accident. It was meant to stop me.”

She blinked at him. “And whoever it was needed to stop you so badly he stopped an entire train?”

The young man swallowed hard. “I was sent to Vienna to discover, if I could, the identity of an Air Master that had gone to the bad. I did so—but in the process, I myself was discovered. I fled on this train before I could send a telegram to the Master of the Munich Lodge, Graf von Stahldorf. I thought I had escaped, but it is clear the man intends to stop me before I can reveal his identity, and yes, he was fully prepared to stop an entire train, and perhaps even slay innocents in the process. I must tell—”

Evidently his intention was to tell her the man's name. She had a much better idea. “Say no more,” she said firmly, and let her sense of the Earth find the nearest game trail. “Such a fiend is too dangerous to be left at large. We must deal with this now.”

“But dear lady—” he began, startled. This, clearly was not what he expected to hear from her.

“Pray do not interrupt me,” she snapped. “I am a Hunt Master of the Schwarzwald. I know what I am doing. I need but a moment. Follow me.”

With that, she strode purposefully to the door of the parlor car. “Wait here,” she ordered him, and mounted up into the car. Once there, she secured her portmanteau from the overhead rack—or rather, the steward hastened to get it down for her—and she retired with it to the bathroom.

Knowing that her petticoat and dress would be freshened by the maids on the sleeper trains, she had secured most of the useful objects she usually wore inside the hidden compartment at the bottom of the bag. She extracted them now, distributed them about her person where she could reach them despite her gown, and then returned the portmanteau to the rack. Or rather, allowed the steward to do so.

“We are likely to be here for much longer than two more hours,” she told him, quietly. “If I sit here listening to the gentlemen bluster and the ladies fuss like a coop full of hens, I shall be strongly tempted to scream. I shall take another brief walk.”

When the steward looked aghast, she added, “I am accustomed to riding hunters in the Schwarzwald for at least three hours daily. An hour walking will do me no harm.”

At that, he looked both mollified and impressed. She knew that he assumed, of course, that if she was riding hunters, she must be very wealthy, and was riding them all over some vast estate. Once again, she spoke pure truth, as a magician must adhere to; she
did
ride hunters all over the forest, often for far longer than three hours at a time. It was not her fault he made some other inference from her words.

The steward made no other effort to prevent her from descending from the carriage. She walked very close to the car to prevent him from seeing she was with a gentleman—and the gentleman himself did the same. Only when they reached the baggage car did he come up beside her. “Your pardon, Hunt Master, but what do you intend to do? This man may be Air, which might seem insignificant to you, but he is immensely powerful. If he had not been—”

She interrupted him impatiently. “If he had not been, he could not have hidden himself in Vienna. Please do not tell me my job, sir, I beg you. I have been in the tutelage of the Schwarzwald Bruderschaft since I was ten years old. If he dropped that tree
here,
he cannot be miles away. He must have coerced some very powerful Air Elementals to bring him here ahead of the train so that he could ambush you. He would know, of course, that you would recognize his handiwork and immediately get out of the vicinity of the train in order to protect the innocents.”

Now that she knew what he was, she was “reading” him—just to be sure this wasn't some sort of two-tiered trap, intended to snare
her
rather than him. She was not as good at reading Water as she was Earth, but she thought he was just what he appeared to be. Only one way to be sure, however.

She let her sense of the Earth tell her where there was a game trail ahead of them; after a moment with her eyes closed, feeling the way that life threaded its way through this forest, she found that there was one, just past the end of the train. She led the way down to it, glancing back at him.

He looked like a worried hound, which would have been comical had the situations not been so serious. “Yes, that is so, and I was going to ask you to guard them as well—”

“They will be safer with both of us away from the train,” she said firmly, parting the branches to show the trail. “Come along.”

The real test of him would come if she could just find a stream. Even a little trickle of water would do. She let her senses move ahead and—yes. Only a few hundred yards away. She hurried, and he scrambled along behind her, obviously not used to walking in the woods. Well of all of the Elemental Magicians, it was Air and Fire that did best in cities—with Water not too far behind, provided it wasn't an industrial city. She reached the tiny thread of a brook well ahead of him, and waited to see what would happen when he reached it.

She was pleased to see that the little undines immediately reached out of the water for him, wrapping their naked arms anxiously about his ankles.
They
knew he was in trouble, and he looked down at them and smiled weakly.

“Act as if you were making a stand,” she told him, and when he straddled the brook, in order to increase the amount of power he could draw from it, she added. “Don't try to hide.”

“I'm not sure I could hide from him if I tried, good lady,” the Water Mage said, his voice trembling a little. She didn't blame him. After all, he was facing a Master powerful enough to draw down a truly terrible lightning strike, one that had felled a tree with a girth of several yards. He was but a mage, and Water was not much protection against lightning.

And that was the point where she
felt
their enemy. He was coming through the forest, not from the train tracks. She hadn't expected that, but—fine. She stepped back toward the tracks so that the young Water Magician was between her and the approaching Air Master. She wanted him to concentrate on the young man, and disregard her. She hoped that he would not even notice she was an Elemental Magician, much less that she was another Master.

The Air Master wasn't being subtle. Long before he got close to them, wind began to make the trees around them toss in something that was very near to a gale. She readied herself, prepared if she needed to cast her shields over them both. Earth shields were the strongest there were. No Air Master, no matter how strong or skilled he was, would ever be likely to crack them.

Holding the power of the storm in their hands, even the best-intentioned of Air Masters tended to arrogance. That was what she was counting on. He wouldn't be content to strike from afar. He would want to see his victim's face, and savor his terror. And as a female, it was likely that she would be utterly dismissed from his mind if he even noticed her.

Still, in case she was wrong, she attuned herself very closely to the feel of the earth under the young Water Mage. She knew from experience that before lightning could strike him, the ground around him would be energized. She should have just enough time, if that happened, to throw up her shields.

But she had read the Air Master's character aright. As the wind howled among the trees, he came sauntering up the game trail, looking for all the world as if he was taking a stroll in a Viennese park rather than what was essentially wilderness.

He was the sort of Nordic blond that artists used for models for heroic statues, but the expression in his eyes was enough to make her shiver. This man was a cold killer. And he enjoyed it. He was dressed conservatively, but well, which was wise of him. There was no point in being ostentatious when you were an Elemental Master who had gone to the bad, unless you were born to a title. This way he would blend in seamlessly with the rest of society, hiding in plain sight, and only using his powers when the only person who would see them in action would soon be dead.