Laws of Magic 6

by Michael Pryor

  Aubrey had seen it before, but he was still impressed. It was as if the whole chamber, bigger than any arena, had suddenly become smaller when Mordecai Tremaine entered it, striding out from between two pillars.

  Without thinking, Aubrey raised the rifle, sighted – and then it disappeared from his grip. He blinked and staggered a few steps, thrown off balance by the sudden lack of weight in his hands.

  Dr Tremaine had the rifle. He grunted and brought it up to his face, to inspect.

  Normally a sartorialist’s dream, the rogue sorcerer had no top coat, his sleeves were rolled up and his white shirt – smeared with grease and unidentifiable stains – was missing a collar and open at the neck. His trousers were held up with black braces. His boots were scuffed and stained.

  He shook his head in either disappointment or disgust, then took the rifle by the muzzle. He swung it in a great circle at the full extent of his arm, then let go.

  Aubrey gaped. The rifle sailed in a great arc, tumbling end over end, traversing the hundreds of feet to the column of light. It struck and disappeared, with only the tiniest flare to show its demise.

  Dr Tremaine’s gaze fell on Aubrey. He pulled a greasy rag from his back pocket and wiped his hands. ‘Fitzwilliam. I felt you nearby.’

  Aubrey straightened, touching his chest where the magical link had jumped at Dr Tremaine’s entrance. He shrugged, hiding his dismay at how easily Dr Tremaine had disposed of his careful plan. ‘I wouldn’t want to miss the show.’

  Dr Tremaine finished with the rag and shoved it in the pocket of his trousers. He glanced at his sister with a combination of affection and exasperation. ‘There’d be no show if not for her. I would have just gone ahead.’

  ‘Ah, Mordecai.’ She linked arms with him. ‘How many times do I have to tell you? Never miss a chance for a gesture that is both extravagant and grandiose!’

  He snorted. ‘Whatever for? We’re the only ones here.’

  ‘If we don’t do it for ourselves, who else matters?’

  Dr Tremaine gave that some thought, then shrugged. ‘Why haven’t you removed him?’

  ‘A moment’s entertainment,’ she said, ‘but now you’re here.’ She raised the pistol again. Aubrey shuffled to the left, then the right. ‘Stand still,’ she ordered.

  ‘I think not.’

  ‘Very well then. A moving target is the sort of challenge I enjoy.’

  Aubrey was prepared to admit that beauty came in many forms. A well-proportioned building, for instance, was beautiful, as was the countryside on a spring day. A flower could be beautiful, if it were the right sort. Caroline Hepworth was undoubtedly beautiful, in any circumstances.

  He’d never considered an act of mayhem beautiful, but when George Doyle swung down from the heights on the end of a silk rope, bowling both Sylvia and Dr Tremaine from their feet, it was beauty of such an exalted kind that he wanted to weep, or cheer, or both.

  Sylvia was thrown up against the base of a pillar, her pistol spinning along the marble floor. She lay motionless. Dr Tremaine rolled and was on his feet in an instant, just in time to encounter a second act of beauty, one that transcended the first in the same way that an angel transcends the lowest pig in the sty.

  George Doyle was ready for the rogue sorcerer. With every sinew and every muscle working perfectly, George delivered an uppercut that began somewhere around ankle level and accelerated until it struck Dr Tremaine on the point of the chin with enough force to lift the rogue sorcerer’s feet off the ground. His eyes rolled and he fell backward, toppling to the floor like a tree. He, too, didn’t move.

  Aubrey had never seen Dr Tremaine even inconvenienced by their attempts to assault him but the unexpectedness and the perfection of George’s assault had slipped under his guard. Aubrey went to applaud. George grimaced and shoved his hand under his armpit. ‘What are you waiting for, old man? Do something magical!’

  The booming of a shot made both Aubrey and George duck. Aubrey whirled to see Sylvia staring at her pistol again before Caroline sprang on her from behind the column. Caroline wrenched the pistol from Sylvia’s hand and flung her aside with a blinding shift of weight and a flurry of arms. ‘Hurry, Aubrey!’ she cried.

  Hunching his shoulders, and calling himself craven for running away from helping his friends, he ran for the pillars. Another report echoed, from Caroline’s pistol this time as she spared a moment from grappling with Sylvia to snap off a shot. All Dr Tremaine did, as he shook his head and climbed to his feet after George’s magnificent blow, was to irritably slap the bullet out of the air. It struck the base of the nearby column hard enough to take a sizeable chunk out of it, but Dr Tremaine showed no signs of hurt.

  So much for the magical projectile, Aubrey thought. It’s time for the other plan.

  Aubrey liked to think he was no fool. For too long, he’d seen Dr Tremaine’s mode of operation. Plots within plots, parallel schemes running alongside fallback plans, feints masking important subsidiary operations, all the complex weavings of a master strategist. Along with these observations, he’d had the words of the Scholar Tan to guide him: Plans are like birthdays. One is good, many is better.

  Aubrey had learned.

  While he’d had great hopes for his magical projectile, he’d been careful to have a number of alternative plans in case of failure. With the renewed vigour of the magical connection, one of his alternatives had leaped up and insisted on being used.

  He dived, sliding on his stomach between two columns. He skidded a few feet past the bases and came up against a grey wall of nothingness.

  Aubrey lifted his head, tilting it back and staring at the featureless barrier. His ordinary senses told him that it was smooth to the touch, almost slick. It had a sheen that shifted subtly. His magical senses told him that it was alive with unshaped magical potential.

  He’d seen it before. It was the same material that underlay the refuge that had kept the unwell Sylvia Tremaine safe, the prison inside the Tremaine Pearl. This was the stuff Dr Tremaine bent to his will to create mazes, sanctuaries, and this impossible construction inside a battleship. It was magic, waiting to be shaped.

  He shot to his feet. As much as he’d like to investigate this material further, he had more important work to do. If he wanted to help his friends, he had to do it quickly.

  A hand fell on his shoulder and he did his best to convert the yell of fright into a battle cry. He did, however, seize the arm attached to the hand and wrench it around, but when he did so, he realised that Sophie must have been taking some lessons from Caroline, for with three quick movements, she jabbed him in the armpit, causing him to gasp with pain, twisted his elbow, causing him to loosen his grip, and bent his wrist, causing him to repeat his initial gasp with an extra layer of agony.

  Sophie let go and put both hands to her mouth. ‘Oh, Aubrey.’ Her Gallian accent was stronger in her distress; Aubrey would normally have found it charming, but pain interfered with his appreciation.

  ‘Sophie,’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I cast a spell,’ Sophie said. ‘We seem to be not where we are.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  She waved a hand, distressed, groping for the words. ‘Displaced. We are displaced. A few feet. They miss when they aim at us.’

  ‘Splendid.’ Aubrey now understood why Sylvia had failed to shoot him. ‘You have your pistol? Watch over me while I do some magic, will you?’

  She smiled bravely. ‘I shall,’ she said, then her mouth formed a O and her eyes went wide. Immediately, she had her pistol in both hands and fired three shots in rapid succession, carefully bringing the revolver back into position after each round.

  Aubrey whirled, and cried out at what he saw.

  Sylvia had backed away to the perimeter and was leaning against one of the great marble bases. Blood trickled from the corner of her mouth. She glared at George and Caroline, who were standing, shoulder to shoulder, pistols in hand, but instead of firing at Dr Tremain
e – who was fifty feet away, ignoring them and stalking toward the window in the middle of the floor – all their attention was on the target of Sophie’s well-aimed shots.

  A towering mechanical figure had clanked out from the greyness behind the pillars. It stood close to Sylvia, towering over her protectively, red eyes glowing, balefully taking in the scene. She glanced up at it and pointed at George and Caroline. The gesture was curt and dismissive, the way someone would ask a servant to get rid of an unappetising dish left on a sideboard.

  Even though Aubrey knew that assumptions were dangerous where Dr Tremaine was concerned, he’d thought that his spells had ruined all of the ghastly mechanical golem hybrids. If Sylvia Tremaine were in need of a bodyguard, however, she couldn’t ask for better.

  This creature was slightly larger than those he’d seen at Baron von Grolman’s factory in Stalsfrieden. It was fully twenty feet tall and it moved with well-oiled grace. The open armature on its limbs showed the extraordinary blending of clay and metal that marked Dr Tremaine’s hideous innovation, and Aubrey wasn’t surprised that in this giant prince of golem hybrids the copper wire had been replaced by shining silver.

  Red eyes fastened on Aubrey’s friends. The short chimney stack over its left shoulder blasted a jet of black smoke and it bounded toward them.

  Sophie fired her last shot, reloaded, then sent all five rounds hammering into the golem’s back. Six rounds from both Caroline and George chased the echoes of Sophie’s shots around the dome but the golem wasn’t inconvenienced at all. It advanced on George and Caroline, who had wisely separated as they shot. Footfalls booming on the marble, it took a huge swipe at George, who ducked and rolled away, but he needn’t have bothered. Thanks to Sophie’s displacement spell, the creature’s massive fist missed by a good few yards, leaving George unharmed and decidedly perplexed. He lay on his stomach and sought for a vulnerable spot, then gave up and simply blasted away at the creature.

  Sophie ran out into the open space, pushing cartridges into her pistol as she went. Caroline fired her pistol twice, darted away, then fired twice more. The right knee of the creature shuddered – but it didn’t fall. Whirring, it swung an arm at her just as Sophie sent a volley of shots at its head.

  Dr Tremaine was ignoring the bedlam. He stood with a hand on his chin, gazing down at the round window. Then he reached into a pocket and took out something so mundane, so ordinary that Aubrey had trouble understanding what the rogue magician brandished in his hand.

  A spanner. A large but perfectly commonplace spanner. Dr Tremaine hefted it for a second or two, then raised it over his head. With a grunt that could be heard over the clamour of the fighting, he flung it at the window at his feet.

  The window shattered. Immediately the atmosphere in the cavernous place changed, becoming less taut, less strained as the air from the outside world rushed in. Aubrey saw how Caroline, George and Sophie were taken aback for an instant until they found the source of the change. It was only Sophie’s quick action in dragging on George’s arm that prevented him from being swatted by the mechanical golem while he gaped.

  Dr Tremaine glanced down and nodded. Then, with one finger, he pointed up at the highest point of the dome directly overhead. Instantly, a large crystal disc detached itself. It drifted down, sedately, and settled precisely into the gap.

  Instantly, a column of light shot up, forcing Dr Tremaine to stagger back a step or two, cursing, and the atmosphere in the chamber changed again. The shaft of light splashed against the dome and the entire place tightened, as if every constituent part, every particle, were being squeezed. It became charged with potential, thick with magic, and Aubrey knew that the Crystal Johannes was doing its job.

  His magical senses told him raw magic was boiling through the lens and shooting upward like a geyser. A fantastic conglomeration of sensations sprayed from it, spinning off in whorls – a flash of apricot, a greasy noise, a heavy taste, a touch of harsh, discordant sound – then they shifted and a whole new panoply of sensations replaced them.

  Aubrey was awe-struck, both excited and dismayed at what he was perceiving. The column of light was the physical manifestation of the magic that came from the people of Trinovant, concentrated by Dr Tremaine into an almost solid shaft, which struck the dome and was fed by the silver tracery all over the arena.

  We’re inside a machine, Aubrey thought, still trying to come to terms with what he saw. A machine dedicated to gathering and channelling magic.

  Dr Tremaine stood facing the dazzling column of light with his arms outstretched, as if he were about to embrace it, and he began to chant.

  Aubrey felt a profound shift about him, as if the entire universe had been lifted for an instant and then dropped back into place. He blinked, saw random motes of queasiness in his vision, and realised that Dr Tremaine had begun the most terrible magical spell in ten thousand years.

  George let out an angry bellow and, immediately after, a cry of distress came from Sophie. More shots and Sylvia Tremaine’s laughter, cold and hard, joined the echoes of Dr Tremaine’s voice rolling about the dome.

  Aubrey closed his eyes. Magic surrounded him, sparkling along the silver tracery embedded in the dome, the pillars, the floor, boiling in the shaft of light streaming up through the lens. On top of his already awesome power, Dr Tremaine had summoned an unheard-of concentration of magic ready to shape to his will. If he succeeded, not only would he become immortal – he would use up the consciousnesses of those trapped in the pillars about them, and of the populace of Trinovant below.

  Aubrey had to do what he could. As much as he wanted to come to the aid of his friends, he couldn’t waste a moment. He was torn and, not entirely sure he was making the right decision, he wished his friends luck and went to work.

  His task? As it had ever been: to stop Dr Tremaine.

  THE LAW OF DIVISION AND THE LAW OF ENTANGLEMENT had been much on Aubrey’s mind. Whenever he had a moment to spare – in between coping with ghostly cavalry raids, summoning the Holmland war leaders and making sure he and his friends weren’t killed in an ornithopter crash – he’d grappled with them. He probed them, he analysed them, he tried to recall everything he’d ever heard or read about them.

  The Law of Division was a useful principle used to derive spells where objects were divided into parts, but where the parts had to retain the characteristics of the original. The Law of Entanglement described a peculiar, awkward and little-used phenomenon where magic could be used to unite two objects that could be separated by a distance, but would continue to mirror each other’s state.

  It wasn’t their traditional applications that he was interested in. He wanted to use the ‘dividing’ part of a Division spell, and combine it with an inverted form of an Entanglement spell to create something to sever the magical connection Dr Tremaine and he shared.

  Aubrey was aware that this was not without its risks. Messing about with magical connectors was fraught with danger, something that he knew more than most, having spent more than a year in a state of near death thanks to a spell that had severed the connection between his body and his soul. The experience, however, had taught him a great deal. He’d learned much about preservation while in a precarious state and he had invented many magical applications to strengthen and promote his essential integrity. Complete restoration had proved beyond him – only a freak accident had reunited his body and soul again – but he did have an almost unparalleled appreciation of the effects of magical connectors.

  He was hoping that if he were successful with his spells and was able to sever the connector, both Dr Tremaine and he would be affected by the shock. To what extent and how seriously, he had no idea. The connector had, at times, been a conduit for memories, feelings, impressions, and at times it was almost like an organic link, something that belonged to both of them. Slicing it in two would inevitably debilitate them. He was wagering everything, hoping that his experiences in the past would stand him in good stead.

  Firstly, he concen
trated on the connector, bringing his magical senses to bear on it. He groped for where it merged with his chest, then he sought for its blend of Tremaineness and Fitzwilliamness. He brought up a version of the spell he’d used earlier to rouse the link. He cast it softly, increasing the intensity factor. The connector became more tangible and he was rewarded with a startled noise from Dr Tremaine, clear even over the sounds of mayhem.

  Aubrey was pleased to see a cord as thick as his thumb, snaking and curling from his chest along the floor until it reached the rogue sorcerer – who was still facing the column of magic.

  Aubrey lifted the cord to eye level and, for a moment, allowed it to undulate there. It was a strange phenomenon, one that had only been hinted at in a handful of medieval texts he’d found. It bore further study. Who knew how it could be useful, between doctor and troubled patient, for instance?

  Plenty of time for regrets later, he thought, as usual.

  He began his disconnection spell, starting with the elements plucked from applications he’d constructed using the Law of Division. He favoured the clear, blunt language of Achaean for this and he spoke each term, each operator with as much calmness as he could summon, moving into the elements derived from the Law of Entanglement, inverting each one so that they would work to disentangle rather than keep together.

  The spell was monolithic. It felt as if he were a slave of one of the ancient Aigyptian kings, attempting to move great blocks of stone into place. He had to strain, to summon his strength to keep the elements moving, slotting them into their positions one by one. Sweat ran from his forehead and he heard a worrying waver in his voice – but he was nearly there. An element of directionality, one of a particular dimensionality – tricky – then his signature element and he was done.

  A glowing knife appeared in his hand. Aubrey’s spell hadn’t prescribed the form it would take. He assumed that it had been plucked from his unconscious, for it was the very model of a cutting implement, an almost perfect representation of sharpness. The handle was golden and the blade curved slightly from hilt to tip, as subtle as a dancer.