Phoenix and Ashes by Mercedes Lackey Page B

especially here, in the
city. We are going to call an Earth Elemental. The trick to this is that you have
to remember to be
very
specific about what you want from this entity.
You already know that one of the great Gifts of the Earth Mage is to
heal—but the converse is also true. Watch.”
    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 you 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,