Phoenix and Ashes

With the precision of a surgeon, Alison placed a deceptively plain bowl (made of clay dug from a graveyard and fired in the same fire as a cremation) in the center of her Working cloth. Into it she dropped a tiny bit of rotting meat (she always kept some sealed in a small jar with her when she traveled), and several more equally distasteful ingredients, burying them all beneath a layer of dirt dug from the piles of tin-waste near a mine. Then she closed her eyes, held her hands over the bowl, and let the power flow from her, into it, chanting her specific invocation under her breath and concentrating with all of her might, and the sullen ocher-colored energies flowed out of her fingertips and into the bowl, pooling there in the candlelight.

Carolyn gasped, and at that sign, she opened her eyes.

The Earth Elemental standing in the now-empty bowl might not look like much—it was a squat little putty-colored nothing, with the barest suggestions of limbs and a head, the sort of crude and primitive object that might be found in an ancient ruin. It looked utterly harmless—but properly used, it was one of the most powerful of all of the inimical Earth Elementals, because it was one of the most insidious.

It was called a maledero, and it brought, and spread, disease.

"I need an illness," she told it. "One that spreads in the air. It should seem harmless, but kill. I don't want it to fell everything that catches it, no more than one in four, but no less than one in ten. It should bring death quickly when it does kill, it should lay out those it does not kill, and it should be hardest not on the very young nor the very old, but those in the prime of life. It should spread rapidly, and be impossible to stop, because by the time victims are dying, it should have passed on to others."

The putty-colored thing smiled, showing a mouth full of jagged and rotting teeth, while above the mouth, a pair of bottomless black eyes looked at her. "How if it spreads through a sneeze?" it suggested. "If it be spread by any other means, this might be countered."

She nodded. "Ideal. There will be six young men here tomorrow night for dinner before they journey homewards. You will infect them, and only them, and you will lie dormant within them until they have ended their journey in a place where there will be thousands of young men like them. Then you will release yourself, and be free to spread as far as you please, across the whole world, if you like—except to myself and my daughters."

"Easily done," the thing croaked, and it—divided, right before their eyes, into six identical creatures, each one-sixth the size of the original. "We pledge by the bond," they chorused.

Alison nodded, and tapped the side of the bowl with her willow-wand. "Then I release from the bowl. When you have infested the young men, you will be released from the room."

She inscribed the appropriate sigils in the air, where they glowed for a moment, then settled over the six creatures and were absorbed.

"When you have come to the place across the sea where thousands of young men have gathered to train as warriors," she continued, still inscribing the sigils of containment in the air, "You will be free to infect and spread as far as you please, save only myself and my daughters," she wrote her own glyph and those of Carolyn and Lauralee, and the sigil of prohibition on top of those three names. All this sank down to rest briefly on the little Elementals, before being absorbed into them. The flow of power was minimal—one of the reasons why this was such a useful conjuration.

"And now, you may conceal yourself within this room, until the vessels have come," she concluded, breaking the containment with a flourish of her wand. The entities gave her a mocking little bow, and faded away.

The girls looked at her, wide-eyed. "Did you just—create a disease?" Lauralee gaped.

She shrugged. "It is better to say that I altered one to suit our purposes. It will probably be a pneumonia or influenza, but when it is released, it will be something quite different from any other of its kind. It will certainly be bad enough to decimate the ranks of the Americans long enough to keep them from winning the war in a few months. And that is all that we will need." She smiled at her girls, who stared at her, wide-eyed. "I doubt it will kill one in four of those that are really healthy; the Elemental I conjured is not strong enough for that. But it will cause a great deal of havoc. That is something else to remember. Sometimes you do not need to confront your enemy directly; you only need to interfere with him."

She began putting her supplies away; neither girl offered to help, as was proper. She would not have allowed them. They were never to touch her Working materials.

That, after all, was how she had managed to get control over her teachers.