Time of Trial

by Michael Pryor

  The compartment was small and compact. The beds had not been pulled down and the two bench seats faced each other. In this cramped space, the bloody-browed man was throwing punches at someone whose presence astonished Aubrey into immobility.

  It was Manfred, the erstwhile stage performer, the sleight-of-hand artist who had been revealed as a double agent – and who had led a cadre of Holmland rebels to their deaths.

  Manfred looked the same as when Aubrey had last seen him – tall, well groomed, neat pointed beard – but his composed stage persona was a million miles away from what Aubrey was presented with here. Manfred was absorbing the battering from Bloody Brow while keeping one arm flung out to prevent a woman from leaving the corner where he’d trapped her. He stood unflinching, taking the punches on his body and face as he concentrated on keeping the woman confined. She wasn’t helpless, either. She was hammering at the back of his head with cold fury.

  Then she saw Aubrey and she froze. She pointed at him. Bloody Brow turned and gaped, letting his fists fall to his side. Manfred didn’t move.

  ‘That’s him, Guttmann, he’s your competitor,’ the woman said, and Aubrey saw that it was Madame Zelinka, his mysterious contact from the lounge car. She didn’t have a veil this time and her exotic beauty was on full display.

  Manfred stared, and appeared as astonished as Aubrey. ‘You?’ He looked over his shoulder at her. ‘That’s him?’

  In two steps, Bloody Brow crossed the compartment and seized Aubrey by the shoulders. He smiled, and the effect was disturbing. As well as the rivulets of blood coursing down his face, Bloody Brow had very bad teeth.

  ‘Well,’ Aubrey said. ‘It looks like you have this all under control. I’ll just be going.’

  ‘I don’t sink zo,’ Bloody Brow said. He yanked at Aubrey and stuck out a foot. Aubrey tripped and stumbled into the compartment. Before he knew it, Manfred had grabbed him and pulled him closer. He squinted, staring at Aubrey, studying his face as if he had writing on it that was small and hard to read. Then a gust of cold air whipped over his shoulder and he smiled.

  Aubrey saw that the outer door had been flung open. He flailed, but all he managed to grab was a feather from Madame Zelinka’s hat. Then, suddenly and awfully, Manfred heaved and Aubrey was sailing through the air.

  He had time to see that the train was crossing a steel bridge before he began the long arc to whatever lay below.

  Sixteen

  Aubrey was falling. He was relatively happy about this state of affairs; it meant that he hadn’t yet reached the sudden stop at the bottom.

  Wind tore at him. A yell was wrenched from his throat as he flailed uselessly. Every fibre of his being wanted him to be perched cosily on solid ground instead of falling free and heading toward certain death.

  It made rational thought difficult, but in the middle of his terror, his attention was taken by what he had in his left hand.

  An ostrich feather. Long, black, flapping wildly, it was indisputably an ostrich feather. Dimly he remembered snatching for something solid as he was hurled from the compartment. He saw his hand seizing the most flimsy handhold imaginable – the feather in the hat of Madame Zelinka.

  Suddenly, a spell wrote itself across his mind in blazing letters a dozen feet high. Like to like, the Law of Sympathy, the ostrich feather. He barked out syllables that were torn from his throat by the wind. He finished, sought desperately for any sign of taking on featherlike floating, then he hit the ground.

  That’s a good sign, Aubrey thought groggily as he lay on his back and gazed at the branches overhead. I can open my eyes.

  He groaned. He felt as if a herd of elephants wearing concrete boots had wandered over him on the way to a meeting, then come back to look at the lumpy patch they’d stumbled over. He closed his eyes and waited while the thundering in his head abated. In the painful interim, he scrabbled at the ground and his hands came back full of pine needles. He stared at them numbly. They must have helped cushion his fall. Then he felt the rocks under the pine needles and he decided that his hasty feather spell must have worked.

  Slowly, with every movement revealing a new bruise – but nothing more serious – he sat up. A few deep breaths and he felt rash enough to attempt to stand. When he did, he swayed on rubbery legs, glad he could feel anything at all. He checked, and the Beccaria Cage was still around his neck, and it was undamaged.

  He heard the sound of water nearby. Limping and shuffling like a crab, he winced his way to the edge of a stream, silver in the moonlight. He stood watching the ripples for a moment, then he looked up at the dark sky. He stared for a moment, then all the strength went from his knees and he sat, heavily, on the soft, muddy bank.

  Some time later, he realised that the stream lay at the bottom of a gorge. The railway bridge stretched across it. It was high above the tallest trees and Aubrey’s head spun as he tried to work out how far he’d fallen. Two hundred feet? More?

  He looked back to where he’d landed, half-expecting to find an Aubrey-shaped outline imprinted in the ground. Then he crawled over and searched the area until he found the ostrich feather. He held it up and laughed. Just a little. It hurt too much otherwise.

  After tucking the feather inside his jacket, he trudged to the stream again and washed his face. The water was icy cold and took his breath away. He drank a sip or two, not because he was thirsty, but for something to do while he thought.

  His body must have taken on just a little of a feather’s lightness before he struck the ground. He still had momentum, but that last instant transformation may have saved his life.

  Giddy with relief, he stood and pushed back his hair. He was alive, and that at least gave him a chance to try to work out what had happened. The mysterious Madame Zelinka had obviously been having a disagreement with Manfred and another equally mysterious man. A deal gone wrong? An old grudge? Three people – who was allied with whom? Or was it a triangle of mistrust, each of the other two?

  And why was Manfred here? He’d disappeared after betraying Count Brandt and his people, but Aubrey doubted that he’d gone to an idle retirement. A Holmland spy like him could be involved in a hundred different plots.

  Aubrey had admired Manfred’s stage skills, and had been assured of his loyalty to the exiled Holmlanders’ cause during the Brandt episode. When the truth of Manfred’s treachery became known Aubrey had been outraged. The notion of that sort of betrayal offended him in a deep and affecting way. It wasn’t just the loss of life, it was the baseness of the act, the calculated, cold-hearted ability to doom others for personal gain.

  It made his head hurt all over again. All that was clear was that the instant Aubrey arrived, at least two of the people in that compartment had suddenly decided he was more important than their disagreement. United against him, they pitched him out of his train.

  To his death.

  He shuddered, then took a deep breath. George would miss him soon, and his mother would too. Eventually. It wasn’t that she didn’t care for him, he added to himself. It was simply that when she was busy, little things like food and missing offspring tended to slip by her.

  George would realise something was wrong, but Aubrey could imagine it taking some time before he could convince the authorities on the train of this. Then there would have to be a search of the train. And after that? How far away would the train be by then? Could George, and his mother, make it stop?

  He shook his head. He was on his own in the shadowy wilderness. He had to do his best to get to civilisation. The border crossing was only a few hours away. If he could get word to an Albion consul by telegraph, then all would be well.

  Now. Which way to the nearest telegraph station?

  A breeze made its way down the course of the stream. The trees lining the banks sighed; the sound spread across the night like a chorus of disapproving librarians. The landscape was alive with motion – shadowy, half-glimpsed movements as branches swayed, leaves bent and dipped. Aubrey could hear nothing artificial, not a s
ign of humanity. No machinery, no voices, no music. He may as well have been the only person on the face of the planet.

  He rubbed his hands together. Twenty or thirty of his bruises demanded his attention but he ignored them and studied the water. Right, he thought. If I follow it downstream, it’s bound to reach a bigger stream. If I follow that, I’ll come to a river. And so on.

  All he had to do was keep working in the direction of the current. Eventually he’d find a settlement, or a town, or something that took advantage of the waterway. If he were in luck, it would be big enough and well connected enough to have a telegraph station.

  He found his wallet was still in his inner jacket pocket. Failing a telegraph station, he’d hire a local to drive him to the border, or ferry him. He’d even buy a horse if he had to.

  He touched the Beccaria Cage for luck, then set off.

  Aubrey had camped out enough not to be spooked by the noises of the night. As he slogged along the bank, pushing through reeds and skirting huge thickets of blackberries, he tried to reconstruct the map of the area in his mind. Dense forest was what he could remember, and he couldn’t argue with that level of accuracy. The Stallaard River was the main waterway in the region, but he thought that it was rather north of the train line. He tried to work out from the moon’s position which direction he was heading, but he couldn’t remember the formula. Was it forty degrees right of the moon at midnight or left of the moon at some other time he couldn’t remember anyway?

  This poser kept him occupied for some time as the land fell way steadily and the stream on his left-hand side grew noisier and noisier. Without noticing it, he’d picked up a handy stick. When the way underfoot became rocky, he was grateful for it, using it as a staff to help his passage.

  Footing and direction kept him busy enough so that he didn’t notice the man standing in his way until he almost bumped into him.

  Aubrey stopped dead and stared. The man was gigantic. In the moonlight and shadow, it looked as if he were carved out of rock, roughly, with great slabs for a face. If ever I’ve seen a brigand, Aubrey thought, this is one. In fact, he decided this was such a good example the man deserved to be stuffed, mounted and put on display in a museum with a neatly lettered card saying ‘Brigand’ underneath.

  ‘What kept you so long?’ the giant growled in rough Gallian. ‘We’ve been waiting for you.’

  Aubrey almost laughed. Being mistaken for someone else was becoming almost commonplace. ‘I had a fall.’

  The giant looked down at him. ‘A fall? You seem all right.’

  ‘It could have been worse.’

  The giant decided that this was an appropriate response. ‘This way.’ That was the last Aubrey heard from him for some time.

  The noise of rushing water grew louder as the giant guided Aubrey through what had become a rough and ready path between clefts in the rock. The stream had grown up into a wild and rushing river. Soon, they were deeper in the gorge, a chasm where the night sky far above was a narrow sliver, its darkness considerably lighter than the blackness around them. The giant picked his way carefully but confidently, pausing and extending a massive hand to help Aubrey in tricky sections. He kept his silence, only breaking it with a grunt now and then to draw Aubrey’s attention to a slippery section, or loose shale underfoot or any one of a hundred perils concealed by the shadows that didn’t seem to inconvenience him in the slightest.

  After five minutes, they began to climb up the side of the gorge. Aubrey divided his time between concentrating on his guide’s broad back, making sure he was secure on the narrow ledge, rehearsing a few spells that might be useful, and trying not to think about the fall that was waiting for him on his left. He’d had quite enough neardeath plummeting for one night.

  Caves, he thought glumly when he glimpsed a flicker of light in the rock wall. I should have known we were going to end up in a cave.

  He shrugged, nearly overbalanced, steadied himself against the rough rock on his right. He hoped that the caves were the dry and cheery sort, well ventilated, with none of the dankness that made grottoes so depressing, despite what the poets say.

  The entrance was four or five yards wide, and tall enough for the giant to enter with only the slightest bowing of his head. He stood just inside and beckoned Aubrey forward.

  For a moment, Aubrey was indecisive, then he stood straighter. It wouldn’t do to appear hesitant. He reminded himself that the brigand’s friends – whoever they were – were expecting someone, so he needed to be that someone. Someone bold enough to turn up in the middle of nowhere for a rendezvous. Someone confident enough to be out in the wilderness alone. Someone to be taken seriously and not dispatched immediately.

  Having decided all that, he strode into cave looking right and left, and stood, hands on hips. ‘Now, who’s in charge here?’ he demanded into the murky firelight, while his eyes adjusted.

  The cave smelled not of damp, but of the soot and ash that came from the large fire in the middle and from the lanterns and torches that were sitting on rock ledges or jammed into crevices. This gave the effect of a marquee filled with party lights, but those assembled, staring at Aubrey, scowling and suspicious, looked as if they’d be rather out of place at a summer evening soiree.

  He could make out a dozen, maybe a score of them. Dark haired and dark eyed, they had a wild and abandoned look about them. He cast his gaze around the cave – slowly, confidently, with a touch of impatience – and they studied him with weather-beaten faces. Their clothes were a mixture of browns and greens, looking remarkably durable. Each one of them had firearms, cudgels or knives close at hand – tools of the trade, Aubrey guessed. The brigands were sitting on rough stools or benches, a few standing and leaning against the cave walls as smoke whirled past them and up into the black heights, drawn by a natural chimney that was no doubt one of the attractions of the place.

  The only ones without extravagant black moustaches were the three women. Their eyes were just as flinty as the men and Aubrey had no desire to cross them, not the way one of them was honing a long and obviously much-used knife. She looked at him speculatively and he wasn’t reassured. It made him feel like a Sunday roast just before carving.

  These had to be the brigands his father had mentioned, and Aubrey’s situation became more than simple survival. He now had a duty to observe, investigate and report.

  ‘In charge?’ came a voice in rough Gallian that was overlaid with a Goltan accent. It was followed by the sound of spittle sizzling in a fire. ‘I am in charge, for my sins. Who did you expect?’

  Aubrey bit his tongue. He’d had an overwhelming impulse to say, ‘No-one, really. I’m a stranger here and you’ve got the wrong person entirely,’ but he managed to clamp down on it. ‘And you are?’ he said with what he hoped was professional wariness.

  The man stalked out of the shadows. He was tall and rangy, with a neatly pointed beard to complement his drooping moustache, and with a melancholy, brooding aspect about him. ‘Rodolfo.’

  ‘Just Rodolfo?’

  ‘Rodolfo is enough.’ Rodolfo pushed back his wide-brimmed hat and studied Aubrey. ‘You’re younger than I expected.’

  ‘I’m not responsible for your expectations,’ Aubrey said, ‘and I can’t do much about my youth.’ He eyed the cavern sceptically. ‘But I’m old enough to find this place disappointing.’

  The brigands muttered at this. Aubrey felt a trickle of sweat slide down the back of his neck as he heard the sound of knives being drawn. And did that ‘click’ come from the safety catch of a Tolmeyer Military Pistol?

  Rodolfo squinted at him. ‘You are Castellano?’

  Aubrey was exquisitely aware of the number of hand weapons in the immediate vicinity, but he knew that he had to stake his claim to being taken seriously. So he went for something that he imagined would be impressive to a band of brigands. He couldn’t pretend to be Castellano – he knew nothing of the man and would be tripped up in seconds. Reaching for an alternative, he remembered playing
the part of Captain Green in Those Darkest Hours at Stonelea School. Green was a mercenary and a bully, but a highly intelligent one. He was perfect.

  ‘Of course I’m not Castellano.’ He did his best to bristle with indignation. ‘What sort of unit are you running here? If you don’t know what Castellano looks like, you could be fooled by anyone!’

  ‘You’re not Castellano?’ Rodolfo’s eyes were steady. ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘I killed him,’ Aubrey said in his best Captain Green voice. Menacing and authoritative were the keys to getting that character right. ‘He was a careless fool. When the train slowed down before the bridge, it was obvious that he was about to leave. I followed him.’

  ‘He’s dead? What about his body?’

  ‘It won’t be found. Not with the spells I used.’

  To judge from the hush that fell, this was appropriately demonstrative of a ruthless nature. Rodolfo studied him with what Aubrey hoped was respect. ‘So. And you are?’

  ‘Call me Mr Black. I represent certain interests. Interests that are old rivals of Castellano.’

  ‘He mentioned nothing of this.’

  ‘Did he represent his company as a leading supplier?’ Of what, Aubrey desperately wanted to know. ‘Did he say he could help you?’

  ‘He did.’

  ‘Hah. He was lying. He was a fly-by-night operation. He would have taken your money and that would have been the last you saw of him.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ Rodolfo thoughtfully fingered the bandolier of bullets that ran across his chest. ‘We have ways of making sure we get what we want.’

  And what do you want? ‘My colleagues and I do not like competitors, even ones so puny as Castellano and Co. Especially those that do not deliver. It is bad for business.’

  ‘So you can supply the weapons that Castellano could not?’

  Weapons! ‘Of course. What are you looking for?’

  ‘Magic. If we are to stop Veltran from destroying itself, we want some of the compressed spells we hear so much about.’ He nodded. ‘Of course, we may use such to continue causing havoc in Holmland as we make our way home.’