He opened the lid of the box and peeped inside. The mirrors had been reduced to shards and powder. They glinted back at him. Not small enough, though. He tossed in the hammer, then banged the lid down again.
A few more minutes of noise and sweat, and Aubrey had had enough. He looked inside. ‘Perfect,’ he said, with some relief.
‘Now,’ he said to Sophie. They hadn’t paused in their cutting, tying and gluing, but she was paying attention. ‘What I need is something to make a suspension.’
George lashed two lengths of bamboo together. ‘I think I know what you’re getting at. It’ll need to be thick if you want to make mirror paint.’
‘And clear, of course.’
Sophie pointed at Aubrey with her scissors. ‘But this is impossible. The mirror pieces will not all be facing the same way. They will be random, no?’
‘Ordinarily, yes,’ Aubrey said. ‘Notebook, notebook, notebook ... Ah, there it is.’ He flipped through it until he found fresh pages. ‘You see, Sophie, the Law of Constituent Parts maintains that when something is fragmented, each fragment retains characteristics of the whole. In this case, I intend to emphasise their alignment. In the original mirrors, they were all facing one way – shiny side one way, dull side the other. With some spellcraft, I can get the pieces to reassert that alignment and all should be well.’
‘And that is all?’
‘Not exactly, no.’ Aubrey heard George snort, but went on, ignoring such commentary. ‘Once we have nice, shiny kites, I intend to apply a spell that combines the Law of Completeness, the Law of Inverse Attenuation, the Law of Amplification and ... several other laws to make the kites receptive to images. After that, I will use a spell relying on the Law of Sympathy and the Law of Entanglement.’ He paused for effect. ‘So that a mirror we have here will mirror the images that the kite is capturing and enhancing.’
‘This is what they teach you at your university?’
‘Er, not exactly. This is something of my own.’
‘Something you’ve done before?’
‘Not in its entirety.’
George snorted again. ‘Not to any extent at all, am I right, old man?’
‘That may be the case.’ Aubrey grinned. ‘But the principle is sound, don’t you think?’
‘You convinced me,’ George said, ‘but you could read a spell out of a Christmas cracker and I’d be impressed.’
Sophie looked from George to Aubrey and back again. ‘So he is making this up?’
‘As he goes along,’ George said. ‘Not to worry. He usually makes it work. In the end.’ George rubbed his chin and studied the array of finished kites: two large box kites and three diamond kites, all with their lacquer drying. ‘I take it then, old man, you want to fly the kites from our roof and come as close as possible to the battle lines?’
‘I was getting around to that.’
‘You realise, of course, that the height and distance of a kite is dependent on its lifting power?’
Aubrey affected an airy wave. ‘So obvious, I would have thought, as not to require noting.’
‘And the weight it has to lift includes the string? Which gets heavier the longer it is?’
Aubrey bounced through the implications of this. ‘String isn’t exactly what I had in mind.’
‘You didn’t? Pray tell, what were you planning to use instead of string? Something that is lighter, but stronger, I hope.’
‘Find me a spider, would you?’
With a roll of destickied spider silk, thanks to the Law of Contiguity and an inverted application of the Law of Cohesion, they were nearly ready.
The challenge of working with such limited ingredients gave Aubrey great enjoyment, but it was tempered by the constant, intrusive memory of the events of the previous day. His concentration was interrupted a number of times by flashes where he saw the bridge erupt, and memories of the half-glimpsed, broken train plunging to its doom. He recalled the panic among the onlookers, the valiant but vain efforts to help. Because of this, he twice bungled his thread-making spell, which meant that George and Sophie had to hunt up more cobwebs in the dusty recesses of the factory, a duty they didn’t seem to mind. Sophie’s attentiveness and perceptive questions were helpful and also kept Aubrey on his game. Nothing like explaining something to an intelligent audience to help one’s own thought processes.
While they were off hunting up the spider silk – or whatever they were doing – an unhappy Caroline appeared.
‘Why didn’t you wake me?’
Because you looked so comfortable where you were, he only prevented himself from saying with a huge effort. ‘Sorry. I thought you were awake.’
She glanced at him, then frowned, then went to speak, rethought, frowned again, then shook her head. ‘That doesn’t make any sense at all.’
No, but it’s giving you time to calm down. ‘It doesn’t? I beg your pardon. We’re busy kite-making here.’
‘Kite-making?’ She narrowed her eyes. ‘You’re deliberately throwing up non sequiturs, aren’t you?’
Yes. ‘No, honestly, we’re making kites. I had an idea about intelligence gathering. Let me explain.’
He had to give Caroline credit. She gradually put aside her annoyance at not being wakened to listen to his plan for the kites – and she was good enough to be impressed.
She picked up one of the spare bamboo struts and examined it. ‘So we’ll have some idea of what’s happening at the battlefront, without too much risk?’
‘If it works.’
‘I’m sure it will. Most of your lunatic schemes seem to, one way or another.’
‘That’s me. Aubrey Fitzwilliam: purveyor of lunatic schemes to the rich and famous.’
They caught and held gazes for a moment – a still heartbound moment – and then Caroline waved the bamboo strut and the moment was gone. ‘Don’t you want to know about the message to the Directorate?’
‘The Directorate?’ Aubrey’s putty-like brain coughed and wheezed into action. ‘Of course, the message to the Directorate.’
‘I sent it, but I’m not happy. It took a long time – there was much to report – and I have the feeling that it may have been intercepted.’
Aubrey shrugged. ‘It shouldn’t matter. That code is unbreakable.’
‘Famous last words.’ She rolled her shoulders and stretched. ‘But it’s not the code-breaking that I’m most worried about. It’s triangulation.’
Aubrey grimaced. ‘Of course. The longer you’re broadcasting, the easier it is for the Holmlanders to get a fix on our position.’
‘If they’re looking for us. I may simply be overreacting.’ ‘In this case, I’d most definitely prefer to overreact than underreact. Underreacting is likely to get us some unwelcome visitors hammering on the door.’
In the middle of the tiredness and tension, Aubrey realised that he was very comfortable with Caroline. Then, with a start, he wondered how that happened. Being with Caroline had always been exhilarating, but he would never have claimed it was comfortable. Comfortable suggested old slippers and cardigans, and he could never imagine Caroline in a cardigan.
Their relationship had changed. In their earnest efforts to remain good friends, they’d become just that. Good, comfortable friends. Cocoa and ginger nut friends. How are you and very well thank you friends. It was an eminently practical and workable way of living, but Aubrey felt as if he’d lost a diamond and found a hundredweight of coal.
‘Sorry?’ he said, realising that Caroline had continued speaking while he was wool-gathering.
‘I said that I asked the Directorate for an urgent response, but all I was told was to wait for further instructions. Again.’
‘I can’t imagine they’ll be able to send another remote sensing team straight away. If the rest of the Directorate is stretched thin, I’d say that the remote sensing department must be stretched almost transparent.’
It was close to dawn, after a frustrating night of waiting at her station, when Caroline received
her response. This time, Aubrey was awake and alert, thanks to seven cups of very strong coffee, each one regularly spaced through the night-time hours. The message was terse, and Caroline had to ask for a repeat transmission, as the brevity made her think the message had been interrupted.
‘HOLD POSITION,’ Aubrey read after decoding. ‘GATHER INTELLIGENCE.’
Caroline made a face. ‘A distinct lack of imagination there.’
‘No,’ Aubrey said distantly. Without thinking, he rolled up the piece of paper and tapped it in his hand like a baton. ‘Tomorrow, we’ll follow orders and test our intelligence-gathering kites.’
‘And then?’
‘Hold our position. Gather intelligence.’
Twenty-one
A week – seven frustrating, maddening days – later, no further news had arrived from the Directorate. Aubrey wished the message had given some sort of time expectation. ‘GATHER INTELLIGENCE FOR THREE DAYS’ or ‘HOLD POSITION FOR A FORTNIGHT’ would have been preferable. The lack of certainty was frustrating but, he was starting to understand, it was the military way of doing things.
The makeshift kite intelligence-gathering devices worked well. More or less. Dazzling to look at, especially in the full sun, the kites flew high and true in the consistent breeze from the west. The spider silk was strong, if a little difficult to handle due to its extreme thinness. Leather gloves were definitely needed when handling the line, even after George had rigged a clever hand-cranked spooling mechanism on the roof.
The mirror dish that had been linked magically to the kite surface, however, was problematic. It was a large, shallow dish a few feet across, made from a concrete bird bath Aubrey had found standing forlorn in a corner of the yard. Aubrey could look into it for a maximum of an hour, and Sophie not at all. The image in the bowl was hugely unsteady, despite everything Aubrey tried to stabilise it. Looking into it provoked nausea and headaches within minutes. The first viewing, with all four crowded around it on the roof of the factory, showed the Gallian countryside, heavily wooded and ridged, as soon as Aubrey completed his binding spell. Then, almost immediately, the image swooped sickeningly, even though the kite itself appeared quite placid, high above Divodorum. Soon, Sophie had to flee, decidedly green in the face. George and Caroline held out for longer, but eventually Aubrey was left alone, clutching the sides of the bowl, forehead sweaty, insides a turmoil, trying to make sense of what he saw. With a sketchpad nearby, he endured the shuddering image for nearly an hour before he staggered away to gather himself.
All that day, Aubrey alternated between working on intensifying spells, levitation spells and balancing spells and steeling himself for another bout with the surveillance bowl. At the end of the day he thought he had an impression of the actual placement of forces on both sides, but he also felt as if he’d been adrift in a bathtub in the middle of a hurricane.
A week of it and he was sure that joining the undead would be an actual improvement on how he felt. He lost weight, as he couldn’t stomach food at all. Caroline took it upon herself to act almost as an animal trainer; she forced him to take some of Sophie’s clear chicken broth at regular intervals. Sleep was a welcome visitor, but when he finally pitched onto his pallet each night, it swayed and swooped beneath him, so ingrained was the nauseating motion.
He did find time, however, to marvel at how unintimidating this physical malaise was. He was reasonably certain he wasn’t about to die from it – especially with Caroline’s eagle eye on the case – and the distressing physical symptoms certainly weren’t signs of his soul wrenching away from his body and leaving him spiritually torn apart. All in all, his projectile vomiting and dry retching were relatively minor discomforts to one whose body and soul had once been on the verge of separating.
He took arid pleasure in the notes he’d compiled, the maps he’d sketched. These would be priceless to the Directorate and the Army. Within a few days, Aubrey had divined the dispersal of Holmland forces in this area, the battlelines, the trenches, the supply routes. This was intelligence gold.
While he was engaged in this, the others were busy. Caroline spent time perfecting the antenna array and restructuring her telegraph cubicle area. George and Sophie kept meals coming as well as doing more work on the factory floor, making it appear even more like a recently active bookbindery. They also spent time in the basement, improving the facilities for what everyone was still expecting to be an influx of Directorate operatives.
George and Sophie were also the main excursionists. They were the ones who went into Divodorum to shop and to reconnoitre a town that they reported as being resolute, terrified – and half-deserted. Reinforcements hadn’t appeared, according to talk, as the main Holmland push was to the north-west and all Gallian forces were being rushed in that direction.
After one of these excursions, Sophie gleefully showed Aubrey a small globe of light she’d conjured, the first spell she’d cast for years. She confided that it had taken numerous attempts, but Aubrey praised her efforts and pointed out some useful refinements for her to practise. When she left, excitedly seeking George, he promised himself he’d organise an instructional program for her – when he had time. It would be useful to have someone else on the team who could cast spells.
They had tried to communicate with Major Saltin, only to find that an airship had arrived from Lutetia with orders for him to assume command. George reported, gloomily, that on a reconnaissance mission over the battlelines it had been shot down. While it apparently hadn’t exploded, it had come to ground some miles into Holmland, with no news of survivors.
Aubrey was saddened by this news. Major Saltin had been a stalwart, a comforting presence in the area. He would be much missed.
The only optimistic piece of news that George and Sophie managed to garner was the rumour that Albion troops were on their way to relieve Divodorum.
George and Sophie heard this repeated in more than one place. Albion forces were on the way, with thousands of soldiers, hundreds of artillery pieces and tons of equipment. They would save the day.
Which was useful, for a neighbourhood on the eastern edge of Divodorum had actually sustained shelling from long-range guns. After that one instance, it wasn’t repeated – but the event was ominous and morale sapping.
Each night, alone in the dark, Caroline listened, intent on the ghostly whispers that flew across the ether. Each night, the same message came: ‘HOLD POSITION. GATHER INTELLIGENCE.’
Aubrey studied the map he’d spread on the table. He’d painstakingly pencilled in the battle lines, the troop and artillery emplacements and the trenches that both sides had dug – at least, to the best of his ability. He was sure that the kite surveillance would be a useful method of gaining intelligence in the future, but right now it was frustrating. He needed a few months of uninterrupted time, a bank of experts to consult, weeks of experimentation before he could effectively refine his procedures.
From the corner of his eye, he could see Caroline examining him as he studied the map. She was dressed in the no-nonsense silk fighting suit under the short leather jacket she’d come to favour. Her hair was pulled back and tied with what looked like a piece of insulated wire. The whole effect was devastating but, then again, he couldn’t remember any outfit of hers that hadn’t devastated him.
She crossed her arms. ‘We’re not going to stay here, are we?’
He straightened, rubbing the small of his back. He had no idea how generals managed, bent over maps all day. ‘We’ve learned about as much as we can from the kites.’
‘So you’re going to get all twitchy at any minute.’
‘I’m patience personified, but I understand if you’re getting a little housebound. Factorybound. Hideoutbound.’
‘Need I point out that we haven’t learned anything about this factory that we were sent to find out about?’ She stabbed a finger at the map. ‘Stalsfrieden.’
‘Two points about that. Firstly, we weren’t sent to find out about it. That was a job for
the remote sensers.’
‘Pooh.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
She narrowed her eyes dangerously. ‘You heard me.’
‘I heard; I simply didn’t believe it.’
‘Harrumph,’ she said, adding to Aubrey’s incredulity. ‘I was about to say that while it may have technically been the job of the remote sensers to find out about this Stalsfrieden factory, it was actually the job of this base. The base you’re in charge of. Also technically. Your second point?’
Aubrey rocked in place, buffeted by the force of Caroline’s argument. ‘Second?’
‘To follow “firstly”.’
‘Of course.’ He did his best to retrack his derailed train of thought. ‘Secondly, Stalsfrieden is twenty miles on the other side of the Holmland border. Which is on the other side of the Holmland army.’ He eyed her nervously. ‘You’re going to pooh again, aren’t you?’
‘Perhaps. Your point deserved it.’ Instead, she tapped her foot and glared at the map. ‘Well, you’re not going to let a small thing like a Holmland army stop us, are you?’
And so, that night they found themselves with George and Sophie creeping through the woods to the north of Divodorum and peering down on the battlefield they were skirting on their way to Stalsfrieden.
Originally, Aubrey had tried to convince George and Sophie to stay behind, but Sophie had united support from George and Caroline. Unspoken was the thought that they would be close to where her brother was, and Aubrey could see a spontaneous side mission waiting to spring upon him. He also knew the inevitable when he saw it. The romance of reuniting a family would appeal to Caroline, while George had only grown closer to Sophie.
Moment of Truth Page 21
