Laws of Magic 6

by Michael Pryor

  ‘I need to do some magic,’ he announced.

  ‘I hope this isn’t just a whim,’ George said. Like the others, he was scanning their surroundings, as if expecting a horde of Holmlanders to descend on them at any minute. ‘Tell me it’s something useful.’

  ‘If I’m right, it should tell me where Dr Tremaine is.’

  As one, Aubrey’s friends looked at each other. A brief, silent conversation ensued, with a minute nod here, a tiny shrug there, and then, without a word, his friends deployed themselves, leaving Aubrey standing in the middle of the intersection. Caroline took up a position behind a fire station, some ten yards away. George was near a ventilator shaft. Sophie stood where she could watch three ladders leading upward. All had drawn their sidearms and all were very obviously giving him time and room to do what was needed.

  Aubrey shuffled his feet a little and pushed his hands together in front of him, feeling the tension in his shoulders and upper arms, and he realised that he’d spent much of his time since arriving on the Sylvia in the singularly useless act of clenching his fists. Even his palms were aching, so hard had he been at it. Frustration? Anger? His body reacted to what was going on around him, even when he was doing his best to remain calm.

  He settled himself, then whispered a subtle intensification spell that attempted to replicate Dr Tremaine’s effortless augmentation of the magical connector. Aubrey paid particular attention to the scaling of the intensification and built in a difficult metrical factor which he monitored while he cast the spell. When he felt the stirrings of the connector, he cut off the augmentation and ended the spell, conscious that he wanted a more secure link without arousing Dr Tremaine’s suspicions.

  He touched his chest, lightly, then pointed left. ‘That way.’

  Caroline was at his side in an instant. ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘He’s not on the bridge. He’s down here. Toward the stern.’

  George had his arm around Sophie’s shoulders as they approached. She was rubbing her temples under George’s concerned gaze. ‘What is it, Sophie? The noise?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I felt something.’

  ‘What did it feel like?’

  ‘Pressure, like a headache, but from the outside.’

  Aubrey gnawed his lip. Magic was cascading all about them. At the moment, he felt it like paisley on his palate, but how was Sophie experiencing it? Her newly awakened magical awareness was undeveloped. Not everyone gained that synaesthetic jumbling, which was as much a curse as a blessing. Aubrey heard saltiness, and he caught his lower lip with his teeth. ‘You’re feeling magic. Can you tell where it’s coming from?’

  She shook her head, distressed. The curls of hair on her brow, protruding from her beret, were damp with perspiration. ‘It is all around. Everywhere.’

  ‘That it is.’ Aubrey gazed about, then he turned in a slow circle. So perfect was the construction, so realistic was it, that he had to keep reminding himself that it was all created out of cloud by the master magician. Magic was embedded in every bolt, every stanchion, every hand rail. It was a formidable display, but as Aubrey concentrated his magical senses he could tell that the magic about him was stable, holding the cloudstuff in the necessary battleship configuration – but not all the magic about was as settled. When he faced the stern of the ship – in the direction his magical link insisted that Dr Tremaine lay – it was like gazing into the open door of a furnace.

  ‘It’s going to get worse,’ he said to Sophie. ‘I think the magical artefacts that Dr Tremaine has been collecting are down there too.’

  They set off. The pulling on his chest was faint, but it steered him sternwards, every step drawing closer to both Dr Tremaine and the intense magic that was – to his magical senses – fairly lighting up the stern of the ship.

  Soon, after passing immense boilers and vast uptakes that disappeared to the funnels above, they reached a bulkhead that blocked their way. A single hatch, dogged and toggled, waited for them. Aubrey felt the steady stream of magic that poured straight through the bulkhead and confirmed that they’d reached the magical heart of the ship.

  ‘What is it, old man?’ George said. ‘Stop looking so cool and collected.’

  ‘Me? I was admiring your calm. All of you.’

  ‘I’m far from calm,’ Caroline said. She checked her revolver again. ‘My heart’s beating like a clockwork toy.’

  Sophie’s eyes widened. ‘I was thinking how brave you all were. I promised myself I would be, too.’

  ‘Brave?’ George said. ‘Us? I’m a quivering jelly.’ He looked down. ‘Underneath, that is.’

  Aubrey loved them all. ‘Let’s unite in abject terror, then, accepting our foibles, checking our weapons, and sallying forth.’

  ‘And leaving our pompousness behind,’ Caroline added with a quirk of her lip that Aubrey wanted to capture and hold forever.

  PREPARED AS AUBREY WAS FOR ANYTHING – A USEFUL operating standard whenever Dr Tremaine was concerned – the sight that met them on the other side of the hatch was simply outside the realm of rational anticipation. It was like a fish trying to imagine what a dust storm would be like.

  Aubrey had to remind himself that they were inside the belly of a battleship – albeit a magical one made of cloudstuff – because as soon as they stepped through the hatch they could have been in the Museum of Albion.

  Silence had replaced the head-aching drone of the warship’s turbines. A cathedral-like space spread in front of them, with light coming from expanses of glass, skylights in any rational building but impossibilities this deep in the heart of a warship.

  It’s Dr Tremaine’s work, Aubrey found himself repeating. It’s Dr Tremaine’s work.

  The ex-Sorcerer Royal’s name was almost a spell in its own right. Using it, perversely, reassured Aubrey that he hadn’t gone insane.

  The museumness of the space was created not just by the hush that filled it, the air of respectful studiousness, but by the rich blue carpet, the rows of tall glass cabinets and the slightly dusty smell that is essential in every serious collection. Where the chamber ended was difficult to determine; the far wall was so distant as to be misty, but the perspective was unsettling enough to make Aubrey suspicious.

  The place was so much like the Hall of Antiquities at the Museum of Albion that Aubrey’s sense of déjà vu thought it was looking at itself in a mirror, backwards.

  Swamping all this, Aubrey felt a swell of potent magic from all around, clashing with his ordinary senses and making him grit his teeth to maintain a grasp on his surroundings. Sophie gasped at the surge, a flood of fickle magic. It was volatile, shifting in nature, but blazing with immense power. Aubrey had encountered something like this last year, but the magical blaze that Dr Tremaine had summoned beneath the streets of Trinovant was a much diminished version of what he was experiencing now. That magic inferno had been a torrent of chaotic, unformed magic still being shaped by Dr Tremaine’s will. What he was now sensing had some of the same flavour, but the presence of Dr Tremaine – although bright and central to this outpouring of magic – wasn’t the sole shaping consciousness involved. Aubrey had the impression of dozens of others working with the magic, and he vaulted over uneasiness and moved directly to being distinctly alarmed.

  ‘Can you tolerate it, Sophie?’ he asked.

  ‘I am well,’ she said with more determination than conviction. ‘I was taken by surprise, but it’s easing now.’

  Aubrey told himself to keep an eye out, to make sure that the chaotic sensory impressions didn’t overwhelm her.

  He studied the nearest cabinet, then the others. They stood well away from each other, a hundred feet or more separating each one. The arrangement struck him as odd, so isolated were the cabinets. Either some arcane configuration was satisfied by the array, or having them nearer each other was a bad idea – and this notion only served to heighten the disquiet that had been a permanent inner lodger, ever since he’d set foot on the Sylvia.

  He approach
ed the nearest cabinet, then stopped, suddenly, and counted.

  Nine rows of three. Twenty-seven. The number of magical artefacts that the remote sensers detected at Fremont, just before Aubrey’s great spell caused them to scatter.

  Except he could feel no magic coming from these cabinets.

  Caroline pointed, unwilling to disturb the silence, at the wrist-thick cable that entered the top of each cabinet. They each snaked away to join a bundle of cables that ran along the ceiling – another clue that this wasn’t an ordinary museum. Magical power throbbed in the nearest cable, pulsing until it joined the bundles overhead, which were thick with magical potency.

  George came close, scanning the heights, shading his eyes. ‘We could have a hundred snipers up there.’

  ‘This doesn’t seem like the sort of place to have snipers,’ Sophie said quietly. She touched her forehead with a finger, lightly, and winced.

  ‘Can you feel any illusions here, Sophie?’ Aubrey asked.

  ‘I cannot tell. This place … I am drowning in magic.’

  George put a hand on her shoulder. He had his revolver in the other and while he comforted Sophie, his gaze didn’t stop roaming about.

  On closer inspection of the cabinets, Aubrey decided that the place was less like a Museum of Antiquities than a Collection of Curiosities. The first displays would have been at home in any respectable institution – a bronze platter the size of hat, a small golden brooch, a carved totem – but mingled with these were peculiar items that any serious curator would have laughed at: a cracked glass marble, a stuffed gerenuk, a battered tin bath with a hole in the side.

  The cabinets themselves were intriguing. While they had the four stubby legs and the solid, dark wood frames that would have seen them at home in any well-endowed collection, the glass was embedded with fine silver wires, creating a meshwork, each square the size of Aubrey’s thumb tip.

  He stood back for a moment. What were the properties of silver? Apart from being valuable, it had some useful physical attributes that he had trouble, for the moment, recalling. All that came to mind was how dentists used silver for fillings in teeth.

  He narrowed his eyes. Craddock’s cryptic query about thefts from dentists – had this been an indication that Dr Tremaine had been accumulating silver on such a scale as to need thievery from the guardians of oral hygiene?

  He let his mind work while he bent and peered into the nearest cabinet. Despite his being unable to find any light source, the cabinet glowed, displaying its contents to fullest effects: a vase of some classical origin or other. The next cabinet had a leather shield embossed with a faded green horse, rearing.

  Carefully, inspecting the carpet before each step, Caroline had eased her way around to the back of the cabinet. Aubrey joined her to find that she was studying the cable arrangement that emerged from the top of the display.

  The cable was as thick as Aubrey’s wrist and sheathed in black rubber. He stood on tiptoe. ‘It’s attached to the silver mesh,’ he said after careful scrutiny, shifting his rifle from one shoulder to the other so he could reach for the junction. ‘And I’d suggest that if we sawed through the covering, the cable would be silver all the way through.’

  ‘To what purpose?’ Caroline said. She ran a finger along the wooden frame and then, to Aubrey’s alarm, she tapped on the glass with a fingernail.

  ‘I’m considering propounding a number of new laws. Not laws of magic, but Laws that Could Prove Useful in Staying Alive. The First Law of Dealing with Dr Tremaine would go something like this: “With Dr Mordecai Tremaine, anything, no matter how disconnected and outlandish, is likely to be part of a scheme of his.”’

  ‘Very droll, Aubrey. I take it that silver cables fit into this?’

  ‘Remember the loss of the Gallian silver plate? And the dentists?’

  ‘Aubrey, I know that your brain is probably fizzing at the moment, but slow down. The dentists aren’t lost.’

  ‘I know that.’ Aubrey rubbed his hands together. Things were falling into place. ‘Do you recall how Dr Tremaine has used copper in some of his magic?’

  ‘The thing that attacked you in that Holmlander café, its body was made of copper wire.’

  ‘All the better to mesh with the copper wire of the telephone line.’

  ‘And the golems in the Stalsfrieden factory, they had copper components.’

  ‘Again, a combination of magic and electricity – with some biological elements in this case.’ Aubrey chewed his lip for a moment and a hum started to rise in his throat. He clamped down on it. ‘Copper is a wonderful metal if you want to work with electricity, but it has its limitations. Dr Tremaine needs more.’

  ‘More?’

  ‘More of everything. In order to achieve his goal, he needs more power, more effort, more magic. He’s making each component of this magic as efficient as possible, to maximise its chances of success.’ Aubrey looked towards the stern of the battleship. ‘Silver is a better electrical conductor than copper, and I’ll wager that Dr Tremaine has found a way to use this to increase the channelling of magical power.’

  Aubrey paced a few steps, grappling with the observations, theories and deductions he’d been juggling for weeks. ‘These are the twenty-seven magical artefacts that were at Fremont. Dr Tremaine has brought them here to help power his magic.’ He put both hands on the cabinet frame and leaned close. The vase was tall and black, with antique figures incised on its sides, caught for millennia in their chariot race. ‘I can’t feel any magic coming from the displays because the silver mesh catches it, then conducts it up and into the cables overhead. The mesh is a shield.’

  THEY FOUND SOPHIE AND GEORGE PEERING AT A RUSTY spear. With reverential tones, Sophie said, ‘I think this could be the Spear of Salange.’ She winced and rubbed her forehead. ‘Salange was a great hero who died defending the king of Gallia against a thousand warriors. He was fearless and loyal, but his spear was lost hundreds of years ago.’

  ‘Dr Tremaine has managed to find it,’ George said. He gestured with his head. ‘Your Rashid Stone is over there, old man.’

  ‘I thought it would be here somewhere.’ Aubrey hesitated. He would have liked to investigate the Rashid Stone but he was conscious of the time they had already spent in their cautious advance. ‘Caroline, what’s the best way to organise our approach?’

  ‘The manual says it’s a matter of using the available cover.’

  ‘What does it say about the element of surprise?’

  ‘“In an offensive manoeuvre, surprise effectively doubles the numbers of your force.”’

  ‘Much like the Scholar Tan: With surprise, one becomes two.’

  ‘You obviously have a plan, Aubrey – why don’t you share it? This is hardly the time or place for guessing games.’

  ‘The cables. What if I levitate us and we can haul ourselves along to wherever they’re going? That way, we should have the element of surprise on our side. No-one will be looking up.’

  Caroline tapped her foot while she stared at the floor. Then she looked up. ‘It’s a good plan.’

  ‘Won’t we be exposed, floating about like that?’ George asked.

  ‘It depends on how fast you can pull yourself along,’ Aubrey said. ‘I’ll make sure that I can get us down quickly, if your hundred snipers happen to appear.’

  George grimaced. ‘I have a feeling that I’d much rather be facing a hundred snipers than what’s waiting for us down there, but we can’t have everything, can we?’

  DESPITE AUBREY’S OBJECTIONS, CAROLINE INSISTED on organising the order of their advance. She ticked off his objections one by one until he even tried ‘I’m in command’, fully knowing how feeble it sounded.

  She smiled tolerantly. ‘And a fine commander you are, too. Now, I’ll lead off. George, you take the rear.’

  Aubrey contented himself with staying very close behind Caroline as they swarmed along the festoons of cables that were strung along the barrel-vaulted ceiling. He found time, in between rehe
arsing an extremely localised heat spell and a dazzling light spell, to admire her litheness as she made the awkward hand-over-hand grappling look like flying. He knew it may have been improper or poorly timed or inappropriate, heading as they were to a confrontation that could mean the end of everything, but it was hard not to notice some things.

  More than once, his Symons rifle was nearly his undoing. It slipped from side to side, unbalancing him and once dangling directly underneath him. His shoulders were in constant motion, and his rifle strap worked its way around his body in the most incommoding way. Finally, he worked out that it sat best if he thrust his head through the strap, crossing it over his chest. It was more secure, but it also meant that he’d be unable to access the rifle quickly.

  They followed the main bunching of cables that ran along the centre of the ceiling. Lesser cables and wires joined from either side of the hall, gradually making the ceiling look as if a fishing net were suspended there.

  As they pulled themselves forward, Aubrey’s fingers began to tingle, as if he were receiving a low-level electrical shock. He looked back to see that Sophie was frowning and he guessed she was feeling the same.

  The end of the hall gradually resolved itself from what had appeared a misty distance. At first, Aubrey doubted his eyes but, when they came to within a stone’s throw, he gave up and accepted that they were, indeed, facing the entrance to a classical temple.

  At the end of the Collection of Curiosities, giant pillars stood on either side of a gap. They supported what Aubrey thought was an arch, but he realised it was essentially a continuation of the barrel-vaulted ceiling they’d been following.

  Caroline led off and they floated ahead, then they clustered together, hanging, using their closeness to cope with the scale of what they were entering.