Fire Rose
Prologue
Golden as sunlight, white-hot, the Salamander
danced and twisted sinuously above a plate sculpted of
Mexican obsidian, ebony glass born in the heart of a
volcano and shaped into a form created exactly to
receive the magic of a creature who bathed in the fires of
the volcano with delight. It swayed and postured to a
music only it could hear, the only source of light in the
otherwise stygian darkness of the room. At times a
manikin of light, at times in the shape of the mundane
salamander that bore the same name, this was the eyes
and ears of the mage who had conjured it. He was a
Firemaster, and all creatures of the element of flame
answered to him. They brought him the news of the
world now closed to him; what better source of
information could he have? Where fire was, there they
lurked; candle-flame, or gaslight, coal-fire or stoked box
of a steam-boiler, burning hearth or burning forest — aIl
held his informants, any of which could impart their
observations to him. What one saw, all saw; speak to one
and you spoke to all of them, for such was their nature.
Their patience was endless, but his, being mortal, was
not. At length, he tired of watching it dance, and
determined to set it upon its task. He summoned the
creature from the dish with a thought; obedient to his will,
it hovered above a pristine sheet of cream-laid vellum.
This was special paper, and more exclusive than it seemed,
pressed with his own watermark and not that of the maker.
He spoke out of the darkness of his velvet-covered,
wingback chair, his voice rising from the shadow like
the voice of the dragon Fafnir from its cave. He was
Fafnir; like the giant, now utterly transformed to
something no one who knew the former self would
ever recognize.
Time to construct his letter, while the Salamander
and all its kin considered his requirements. “Dear Sir;”
he said, and the Salamander danced above the vellum,
burning the characters into it, in elegant calligraphy. “I
write to you because I am in need of a special tutor for
my —
He paused to consider the apocryphal child of his
imagination. A son? A lonely, crippled waif, isolated
from the laughter and play of his peers? No, make it
two children. If the crippled boy was not bait enough
for his quarry, an intelligent, inquisitive girl would be.
“— my children. Both are gifted intellectually beyond
their years; my son is an invalid, crippled by the
disease that claimed his mother; and my daughter the
victim of prejudice that holds her sex inferior to that of
the male. Neither is likely to obtain the education their
ability demands in a conventional setting.”
He weighed the words carefully, arid found them
satisfactory. Appropriately tempting, and playing to the
“enlightened” and “modern” male who would be the
mentor of the kind of tutor he sought. He wanted a
woman, not a man; a male scholar with the skills he
required would be able to find ready employment no
matter where he was, but a woman had fewer options. In
fact, a female scholar without independent means had no
options if she was not supported by a wealthy father or
indulgent husband. A female had no rights; under the laws
of this and most other states, she was chattel, the property
of parents or husband. She could take no employment except that of teacher, seamstress, nurse, or domestic help; no trades were open to her, and only menial factory work. There were some few female doctors, some few
scientists, but no scholars of the arts, liberal or otherwise,
who were not supported in their field by money or males.
He wanted someone with no options; this would make her
more obedient to his will.
“My needs are peculiar, reflecting the interests of
my children. This tutor must be accomplished in
ancient Latin, classical Greek, medieval French and
German, and the Latin of medieval scholars. A
familiarity with ancient Egyptian or Celtic languages
would be an unanticipated bonus.”
The Salamander writhed, suddenly, and opened
surprisingly blue eyes to stare at its master. It opened
its lipless mouth, and a thin, reedy voice emerged.
“We have narrowed the field to five candidates,” it
said. “One in Chicago, one in Harvard, three in New
York. The one in Chicago is the only one with a
smattering of ancient tongues and some knowledge of
hieroglyphs. The others are skilled only in the European
languages you required; less qualified, but —“
“But?” he asked.
“More attractive,” the Salamander hissed, its mouth
open in a silent laugh.
He snorted. At one point he would have been
swayed by a fairer face; now that was hardly to the
point. “Have they relatives?” he asked it.
‘The one in Chicago is recently orphaned, one of
those in New York was raised by a guardian who cares
nothing for her, and her trust fund has been
mismanaged as she will shortly learn. Those that do
have families, have been repudiated for their
unwomanly ways,” the Salamander told him. “They
are suffragettes, proponents of rights for women, and
no longer welcome in their parents’ homes.”
Tempting, But relatives and parents had been known to change their minds in the past, and welcome the prodigal back into the familial fold.
“Show me the one in Chicago,” he demanded. She
seemed to be the best candidate thus far. The
Salamander left the vellum page’ and returned to its
obsidian dish, where it began to spin.
As it rotated, turning faster and faster with each passing
second, it became a glowing globe of yellow-white light. A
true picture formed in the heart of the globe, in the way
that a false picture formed in the heart of a Spiritualist’s
“crystal ball.” The latter was generally accomplished
through the use of mirrors and other chicanery. The
former was the result of true Magick.
When he saw the girl at last, he nearly laughed aloud at
the Salamander’s simplistic notion of beauty Granted, the
girl was clad in the plainest of gowns, of the sort that a
respectable housekeeper might wear. He recognized it
readily enough, from a Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalog
left in his office a few years ago by a menial.
Ladies’ Wash Suit, two dollars and twenty five
cents. Three years out-of-mode, and worn shabby.
She wore wire-rimmed glasses, and she used no
artifice to enhance her features. In all these things, she
was utterly unlike the expensive members of the
silk-clad demimonde whose pleasures he had once
enjoyed. But the soft cheek needed no rouge or
rice-powder; the lambent blue eyes were in no way
disguised by the thick lenses. That slender figure
required no over-corseting to tame it to a fashionable
shape, and the warm golden-brown of her hair was
due to no touch of chemicals to achieve that mellow
hue of sun-ripened wheat.
“She is orphaned?” he asked.
The Salamander danced its agreement. “Recently,”
it told him. “She is the most qualified of them all,
scholastically speaking.”
“And possessed of no — inconvenient — family
ties,” he mused, watching the vision as it moved in the
Salamander’s fire. He frowned a little at that, for her
movements were not as graceful as he would have liked,
being hesitant and halting. That scarcely mattered, for
he was not hiring her for an ability to dance.
From the look of her clothing, she had fallen on
hard times — unless, of course, she was a natural
ascetic, or was donating all of her resources to the
Suffrage Movement. Either was possible; if the latter
was an impediment to her accepting employment, the
Salamander would have rejected her as a candidate.
“We will apply to her — or rather to her mentor,”
he decided, and gave the Salamander the signal to
resume its place above the half-written letter. “I am
willing to pay handsomely for the services of any male
or female with such qualifications, to compensate for
the great distance he or she must travel. The tutor will
be installed in my own household, drawing a wage of
twenty dollars a week as well as full room and board,
and a liberal allowance for travel, entertainment, and
books. San Francisco affords many pleasures for those
of discriminating taste; this year shall even see the
glorious Caruso pelforming at our Opera.” Clothing
he would have supplied to her, having it waiting for
her if she consented to come; easier to supply the
appropriate garments than to hope the girl had any
kind of taste at all. He would not have a frump in his
house; any female entering these doors must not
disgrace the interior. While his home might not rival
Leland Stanford’s on the outside, the interior was
enough to excite the envy of the richest “nob” on “Nob
Hill.” There would be no cotton-duck gowns from a
mail-order catalog trailing over the fine inlay work of
his floors, no coarse dark cottons displayed against his
velvets and damask satins.
“I hope you will have a student that can match my requirements,” he concluded without haste. “Your scholarship is renowned even to the wilds of the west and the golden hills of San Francisco, and I cannot imagine that any pupil of yours would disgrace the master To that end, I am enclosing a rail ticket for the prospective tutor” It was not a first-class ticket for a parlor car; such might excite suspicion. A ticket for the common carriage would be sufficient, and a journey by rail would be safe enough, even for a woman alone. “I am looking forward to hearing from you as soon as may be.”
“The usual closing?” the Salamander asked delicately. He nodded, and it finished, burning his name into the vellum with a flourish. It continued to hover above the paper, as the paper itself folded without a hand touching it, and slipped itself and a railway pass into a matching envelope. The Salamander sealed it with a single “hand” pressed into the wax, then burned the address into the obverse of the envelope.
‘Take it to Professor Cathcart’s office and leave it there,” he instructed, and the Salamander bowed. “If she does not take this bait, we will have to devise something else.
“She would be a fool not to take it,” the Salamander replied, surprising him a little with its retort. “She has no other place to go.
“Women are not always logical,” he reminded the creature. “We were best to assume that the initial attempt will be balked at, and contrive another.”
The Salamander simply shook its head, as if it could not understand the folly of mortals, and it and the sealed letter vanished into thin air, leaving the Firemaster alone in the darkness.
—Reprinted from Fire Rose by Mercedes Lackey, by permission of BAEN Books, Copyright © 1995 by Mercedes Lackey. All rights reserved. This excerpt, or any parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.