Time of Trial

by Michael Pryor

  He wasn’t trying to cast a spell. It shouldn’t arouse the interest of the guardian. Using his magical awareness was passive, like a radio antenna catching messages crossing the ether.

  He closed his eyes and concentrated, extending his awareness to the surroundings, and immediately gasped. To his magical senses, the walls of the prison corridor were dull, glowing blocks, beating ruddily like coals in the heart of a fire. When he turned, he could also feel the floor and ceiling, radiating magic with the same muted intensity.

  He took a step, eyes still closed, and bumped straight into someone. Immediately, he knew it was Caroline. His eyes flew open and he apologised, but Caroline shook it off. ‘Didn’t you see me?’ she asked.

  ‘I had my eyes closed.’ He thought about it. ‘I can sense the walls, but not you.’ He shut his eyes and extended his awareness again. He swivelled his head. The construction of the prison corridor was clear, if dim, but all he could sense with his pseudo-sight was the structure. He couldn’t see Caroline, or George, or von Stralick. And when he looked down, he couldn’t see himself. The only things that registered were those imbued with magic.

  ‘It helps to keep my eyes closed, but I need to keep moving,’ Aubrey said to them after he opened his eyes again. ‘That way I can detect the fluctuations in the magic field and steer us in the right direction.’

  ‘Here.’ Caroline offered her arm. ‘I’ll lead you.’

  It was all Aubrey could do not to jump at the opportunity.

  He took Caroline’s arm gently. She drew him close, and he sternly told himself that made good sense, the better to guide him past any obstacles. He refused to linger on her perfume (violets) or the fact that her forearm was slim but strong under the crepe de chine.

  They walked on, Caroline leading with firm confidence, murmuring the occasional warning when it seemed he was veering too close to a wall. Soon, however, Aubrey was lost in the magical radiance about him. At times, he had the impression of layers, hinting at the expanses that lay beyond the nearer walls. This double-sense was unsettling at first, experiencing the magical world so pressing, smouldering with subdued power, while other senses reported the real world. He heard the footfalls of his friends, their breathing.

  Gradually, he was able to sense differences in the magic. Mostly, the walls, floors and ceilings were a dim red, almost brown. But sometimes patches of wall glowed more urgently, a brighter red, almost shading into orange. He stopped at one of these and placed his palm on it to test his judgement. He felt a tingling on his skin that confirmed his growing feeling that when the phantom colours were brighter, the magic was more intense.

  Gradually, the changes in field intensity began to resolve themselves. Aubrey was sure he was looking at interlocking pieces, as if the whole place were a gigantic, shifting puzzle, one of those wooden ones where the configuration could be changed – with the right will and the right intent.

  ‘On and on it goes,’ von Stralick muttered. ‘A lack of imagination is present here, I fear.’

  ‘A lack of imagination, perhaps,’ Caroline said, ‘but not a lack of determination. I think we’re being followed.’

  Aubrey winced. ‘Sylvia?’

  ‘I imagine so,’ Caroline said.

  ‘If it’s not her,’ George said, ‘I don’t think I want to find out who it is.’

  ‘What could she want?’ von Stralick said.

  ‘She might be wondering where her new exhibits have gone,’ Aubrey said. ‘She might want them back.’

  ‘Back in her terrarium?’ George said. ‘I’m not enchanted with that prospect. How far have we got to go?’

  ‘It goes on forever,’ von Stralick said.

  ‘Not forever,’ Aubrey said. ‘This way.’

  According to his sensing, they’d turned three left-hand corners and crossed four intersections. Each time, he’d briefly opened his eyes and found that the real world did not mirror his magical senses.

  Nevertheless, he was sure they were headed in the right direction. The background glowing was increasing in intensity and the walls were now a dark cherry-red, with highlights of orange and yellow where a corner or intersection appeared.

  He noted that each corner was in the same direction. When faced with a choice of direction, the increasing intensity was always to the left, even if his friends didn’t notice it.

  And he was sure they were going inward.

  This impression was nothing to do with his magical awareness. It was a suspicion, nothing more. Were his feet, his calves telling him that the floor was sloping? Was the floor subtly grading downward? If so, with the left-hand turns that were coming more frequently, did that mean they were spiralling inward?

  To the heart of the place?

  He only realised that he had tensed his grip when Caroline spoke. ‘Is something wrong?’ He admired her self-possession. She had no trace of alarm or even tension in her voice. If there was something wrong, she was looking to do something about it rather than to panic.

  ‘We may be getting nearer to our goal,’ he said. They reached a three-way intersection. Aubrey led them to the left-hand branch.

  ‘Good. You have a spell ready?’

  Aubrey nodded. ‘Just in case.’

  ‘We may not need it. But better to have something ready and not use it than to need something and not have it available.’

  Good sense, Aubrey thought. But then again, Caroline was nothing if not sensible.

  He did enjoy it, though, when she wasn’t. The sensible, dutiful Caroline often overwhelmed the carefree, cheeky Caroline, the one that was only seen in glimpses. But he couldn’t quibble. Duty tended to rule his life as well. With such prominent parents, with such expectations from society, what choice did he have?

  It could be worse. They took another left-hand turn. I could be Bertie. Now there’s someone where duty comes first, middle and last.

  Aubrey absently took another left-hand turn while he pondered the thorny issue of duty and individual dreams. This meant that he didn’t notice the blazing wall of magic until Caroline nudged him.

  ‘Aubrey. What are we going to do?’

  He lifted his head, eyes still closed, and gasped. ‘Good Lord!’ Automatically, he flung up a hand to protect himself.

  Their path was blocked by a burning wall of fire – at least, that’s what it looked like to his magical pseudosight. Bright orange-white, it seared, a crackling, potent magic barrier.

  Confronted by such an outpouring of raw magic, he staggered and opened his eyes.

  And gaped at a featureless stone wall.

  ‘A dead end, it looks,’ von Stralick said. ‘I hope you’ve brought us here for a reason.’

  ‘Aubrey never does anything without a reason,’ George said. He paused. ‘Well, he does sometimes but then it turns out that he had a reason after all. After the fact, if you know what I mean.’

  Aubrey shook himself. The difference between his magical apprehension and what confronted them in the real world was so extraordinarily vast that he was having trouble coming to terms with it. They both reinforced each other – one was a magical barrier, the other an equally effective material barrier – but as he dealt with the overlapping double-sensed impressions he realised that it was what lay on the other side that was important.

  Though the wall itself was highly charged with magic, he could feel even more forceful magic coming from the other side and it made him extremely nervous. It was like hearing a tiger behind a closed door and wondering how strong the timber was.

  Despite this, there was only one way to go.

  ‘We have to get through,’ he said. ‘What we’re seeking is on the other side.’

  He inched closer to the wall. He felt as if he were walking into a stiff breeze as the magical power pushed against him and he had to lean into it. He placed a hand on its surface and felt a prickling, a tingling. Drawing back, he sensed that the surface of the barrier wasn’t as uniform as he had first thought. In his pseudo-sight, it actually rippled
with power, shimmers of brighter colour streaking across it, forming patterns, a subtle, lace-like tracery. He took a step back and tried to take in the whole wall, tried to apprehend the delicate weaving and twisting of magic, but he found it difficult. The further away he was, the harder it was to make out as it merged and blurred into one fiery whole.

  Then, just a pace or two away to his left, he noticed a fine silvery-orange line that was suspiciously straight and well-defined against the branching rivulets of magic that ran across the wall. He moved closer and, with some difficulty, was able to discern that the line turned at rightangles. He sighed with relief.

  ‘I think we have a door.’ He touched the surface to make sure. He opened his eyes and rubbed his hands together. The tingling persisted, turning into a fading sense of pins and needles.

  ‘Where?’ Caroline asked.

  ‘Here.’ Aubrey stepped back when the stone wall swung inward.

  George steadied him with a hand. ‘Good show, old man!’

  ‘Wait. Can you hear something?’

  Von Stralick frowned. ‘Voices. Many.’

  ‘But they’re whispering,’ George said. ‘Whatever for?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ Aubrey said, ‘but I think we need to find out.’

  Aubrey waited for a moment, giving anything lethal a chance to lunge out at them. He was grateful when it didn’t. Finding secret doors into areas of great magic only to have something ravenous and many-toothed swarm out wasn’t one of his favourite pursuits.

  He eased through the doorway, his blinding light spell on his lips and every nerve alert. Then he stopped, gaping, as the others entered. George and von Stralick stifled oaths, while Caroline’s eyes were wide with astonishment.

  The space was too grand to be called a room, and too outlandish. It was a white ovoid twenty yards or so in diameter, softly shimmering with the lustre of...

  Pearl, he thought, but it was more than that . The walls, the ceiling were curved and the sheen captured all the subtle iridescence of nacre and magnified it a thousandfold. It was the heart of the pearl.

  The entire space was filled with ghosts – and all of them were Sylvia Tremaine. Murmuring, whispering, vacant-eyed replicas of their host.

  Aubrey prided himself on being a rationalist. A modern magician couldn’t be anything else, since contemporary magic insisted on empirical observation, measurable evidence and reproducible results.

  He may have known that, but deep in his primitive self didn’t. He backed against the gently curving wall, his skin feeling two sizes too small. His stomach knotted as fear took hold.

  The ghosts ignored him. A score or more of them, transparent, insubstantial, drifted around the room whispering to themselves, their voices combining to fill the room with the sound of moth wings.

  Aubrey’s breathing slowed as he began to sort through what he was seeing. It wasn’t a conscious decision, it was simply an extension of the way he saw the world. It was a place that could be made sense of – with enough thought, intelligence and insight.

  The insubstantial figures were indeed replicas of Sylvia, and they didn’t seem to notice him watching them. With interest, he saw how they disregarded each other even when their gliding, erratic paths brought them close to another ghost. His eyes widened as two of the insubstantial figures actually intersected, passing through each other as if neither was there.

  Observation, he thought shakily. More data needed. He signalled to the others, taking them from their silent amazement, and indicated that they were to be ready to act. He steeled himself and held out a hand, right in the path of one of the wanderers.

  Blank-eyed, hands clutched at breast level, the transparent Sylvia replica didn’t pause in her step. She simply passed straight through Aubrey’s hand, leaving him wringing it and frowning.

  It had felt as if he’d dipped his hand in ice water, but that was all. The Sylvia replica had drifted through him as if he wasn’t there. Aubrey could make out her whisperings, but the words made no sense to him: ‘Lost, lonely, lost and lonely. Lost, lonely, lost and lonely.’

  He trotted alongside, but the words didn’t vary. Over and over again: ‘Lost, lonely, lost and lonely. Lost, lonely, lost and lonely.’

  Curious, he turned and followed another only to hear a similar nonsense. ‘Far away, far away, far away.’

  He shuddered when he listened into a third – ‘It hurts so, make it stop. It hurts so...’ – delivered with what he could only call a deadpan expression, and he hoped Bertie would forgive him for that.

  He’d only ever seen one thing that had any resemblance to these apparitions – and that was his own soul, once it had been disrupted from his body. These were similar. More insubstantial, less real – if that made any sense in this sort of thing – but there was definitely a similarity.

  A hand fell on his shoulder and he yelped, the noise cutting through the echoing susurrus of whispers and echoing around the pearl chamber.

  ‘Steady on, old man,’ George said. ‘We’ve got to get out of here.’

  ‘What? Why?’

  ‘Sylvia says so.’ George pointed at the ghostly figures in their endless promenade around the pearl chamber. ‘They mustn’t be let out.’

  ‘I am a larger piece than those poor things,’ Sylvia said. ‘They are tiny splinters, hardly holding themselves together.’

  Once again, they were in the sitting room. Outside, it appeared to be later afternoon, shadows creeping over the garden.

  ‘We are all made of many parts,’ Aubrey said carefully, unsure what she meant.

  ‘So true. So true.’ Sylvia pondered this for a time. She stared at the wall over Aubrey’s left shoulder for so long that he turned to see what was so interesting. Unless she’s fascinated by flat, pale blue paint, he thought, then she’s lost her train of thought.

  ‘Now then, Sylvia,’ George said, taking advantage of what was proving to be a very large gap in the conversation, ‘d’you think you could help us get out of here? We’d like to go home, you see.’

  ‘Home.’ Sylvia lingered over the word. ‘I had a home, once.’

  ‘Of course you did,’ von Stralick said. ‘Now, about getting us out of here...’

  ‘They spoke like you, there.’ She looked at him with a flicker of interest. ‘They sounded like you.’

  ‘Holmlanders?’ Aubrey jumped in. He wanted to keep that flicker alive. ‘Did you once live in Holmland?’

  ‘I was born there,’ she said simply. ‘And so was Mordecai. I seem to remember we were happy.’

  Aubrey sat back in his chair. This was a remarkable piece of information: the first hint Aubrey had ever heard that the great Dr Tremaine was actually a Holmlander.

  ‘Now,’ Sylvia said. ‘You must go back in your places. You have been so inventive, so elusive, that I’m sure I have much to learn from you.’

  George coughed. ‘Look here, Sylvia. I think I’m speaking for everyone here when I say that’s not what we’d prefer.’

  ‘I agree with Doyle,’ von Stralick said, without a trace of irony. ‘We must leave. Now.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ A touch of a frown wafted across Sylvia’s brow. ‘You will stay here.’

  Even though her voice was soft and wan, Aubrey could hear the surety in her voice – and it was the absolute certainty of her brother. To Dr Tremaine, the universe was simply how he saw it, nothing more complicated than that.

  Occasionally, Aubrey found himself admiring such unswerving self-belief, but more often he found himself wondering what such an attitude missed. He felt it could lead to overlooking things, ignoring things that were only ever thought of if one bothered to reflect.

  It doesn’t seem to have stopped Dr Tremaine, though.

  His thoughts were interrupted by George standing up and pacing the room. His friend didn’t look happy. ‘Sylvia, I don’t mean to be rude, but we don’t belong here. It was an accident that brought us inside your place.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’ Sylvia brushed th
e cushion of the settee with her hand, even though it looked perfectly clean. ‘You’ll be happy here.’

  ‘That’s not the point,’ Caroline said. ‘We don’t want to be here.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter either.’

  Aubrey tried another tack. ‘Sylvia. What were those things in the pearl chamber? Why shouldn’t they be let out?’

  ‘The pearl chamber?’ Sylvia tilted her head back and studied the ceiling. ‘I remember.’

  ‘Of course you do. You said we had to keep the door closed.’

  ‘Yes. Or else they’d find the open door and wander. It took so long to find them all last time.’

  ‘Last time?’

  ‘When we came here. After Mordecai’s spell.’

  ‘Wait. You said you were a larger part than those things in the chamber.’

  Sylvia nodded. ‘Mordecai. To save me from my sickness. He said he was manipulating the Law of Separation.’

  Aubrey saw it immediately. ‘Oh.’

  ‘What is it, Aubrey?’ Caroline asked.

  He chose his words carefully. ‘The Law of Separation states that a whole can be divided and reunited again without any harm, as long as all the correct limitations are placed on the constituent parts.’

  When Sylvia spoke again it was as if it was from a long way away. ‘He wanted to separate me. He said he would divide me into my constituent parts, thus separating my illness from the rest of me.’ She paused. ‘After that, he said he would bring me back together without it.’

  ‘But that’s not the way the Law of Separation works,’ Aubrey said. ‘That’d be like disassembling a clock, putting it back together and then expecting it to work with a few gears and springs left out.’

  ‘Mordecai knew what he was doing. He told me so.’

  The conclusion was inescapable. ‘The spell would have rebounded,’ Aubrey said. ‘Horribly.’

  Sylvia put a hand to her cheek. ‘Our soul shattered into fragments.’