Reserved for the Cat

Having constructed three of these decoys, Nina knew that her labors were not at an end. Oh my, no. The hunters might not be lured by something so obvious. She turned her mind to more subtle decoys; something that would serve exactly the same purpose as her blatant works, but would not trumpet its existence for anyone with the eyes to see it.

Even if they took the first bait, she actually didn’t think her targets would be fooled twice, but you never knew, and the hollow shields were in any event the easiest and fastest to create. They bought her time. Let the enemies waste their time stalking the premises, trying to determine who among all the vile inhabitants was the Mage, and then destroying the shields. While they were distracted, she would be stalking the dancer, and when she finally struck, they would never see her.

She brooded about what to do for three days, then worked out something that would serve. The next set of decoys was going to be a deception within a deception. Instead of creating obvious shields, she used the same principle of using the energies of despair to fuel the magic, only this time, it was to hide, rather than protect.

Once again, she stalked the streets of Blackpool, a nondescript ruffian, looking for the best places to use for her loci. After two days of testing the energies, looking for sustainable concentrations of despair, she found what she was looking for. A workhouse provided the first source, an orphanage the second.

The workhouse was fairly ordinary as such things went. People only came there because they had been wrecked on the reef of debt and financial ruin, and yet had some small hope that they could, with hard work, get themselves and their families out of it all. They quickly found, of course, that they could not; that the workhouse offered the barest of living on starvation rations, but the only place you could go from the workhouse was into the street, where there would be no food, no roof, and nowhere to go. Families were separated, men from women, children from parents. Despair there was in plenty, but it was the dull despair of those who had been pounded on the rocks of life until there was little spirit left in them.

The orphanage, however, was actually very difficult for her to give over to her intended plan, as it was such a huge generator of senseless death. Infants were swaddled and stacked like cordwood on beds in cheerless rooms, to remain in their increasingly soiled wrappers until the scheduled time for feeding and changing. Never were they allowed to move freely, and the thin skimmed milk they were fed was not enough to sustain the majority of them. They were so starved and dull they failed even to cry—this was pointed out to visitors as an example of how “good” they were.

They were not “good,” of course. They were dying, most of them. Pneumonia and flu, chicken pox and measles, whooping cough and diphtheria . . . these childhood ailments would carry off battalions of them at a time. The infant wards could go from full to empty in a matter of days. The death rate was nearly ninety percent.

Children too old to be swaddled were left tied to bed-steads with no toys and little or no exercise, and fed equally inferior food of more skimmed milk, gruel and bread. As soon as it was possible to put them to work, they were rented out to mill owners. Not one in four lived.

It was delicious. All those little lives, cut short so soon . . . every life fraught with unrealized potential. She determined then and there that she was going to begin looking for an orphanage to patronize once all this was sorted out. It would be delightfully ironic to be seen as the Lady Bountiful to the little orphans in public, while in private she battened and prospered on their deaths.

All that took less than a week to set up. And meanwhile she was carefully watching the progress of her toy, Terrance Kendal.

He had come away from the failed assignation in a rage, but rage cooled too quickly, especially in a bloodless thing like him. He had, in all of his life, never sustained anything like passion for very long. Passion required commitment to something other than one’s own self, because it required being focused on the object of passion, rather than one’s own self. She needed to engender more than rage, she needed him to tip over the edge of sanity into obsession. If she had been forced to wait for it to happen naturally, she might have been waiting long. However, she had a number of resources she could use to manipulate his mind.

To begin with, dreams.

Dreams were very useful. They existed outside of logic, outside of normal behavior, and cut straight into emotion and instinct. Mortals did and experienced things in dreams that they would never think of doing, much less actually do, when awake.