Time of Trial

by Michael Pryor

  to make really good shadows, but that was about all. If he took more than a few steps, he’d be swallowed by darkness.

  Aubrey crouched and swept around, looking for something to help. Wood shavings and scraps of paper, some of which he stuffed in his vest for later scrutiny, were good fuel sources, but – of all the things – he’d forgotten to stow matches, even though he’d brought two candle stubs along.

  He bit his lip, feeling the malignant beating of the magical residue. The Beccaria Cage on his chest began to feel warm and he swallowed. The magic was testing the strength of his bond between body and soul; the cage was responding.

  He shifted his weight and something tinkled. He cocked his head and saw his boot had disturbed some broken glass, the remains of a bottle, to judge from the tattered label.

  At that moment, Aubrey had an odd, familiar sensation. It was as if he were moving out of himself. His body continued to function – he picked up a piece of the broken bottle, held it up, admired the clarity of the glass – while his mind was bounding ahead like a hound that had caught wind of an exceptionally desirable fox.

  Glass. Focus, he thought . Lens. Concentration.

  He turned the glass over in his hands. It was a sizeable chunk, most of one side of the bottle. It was first rate, too, not wavy, very few bubbles. For moment he wondered what Dr Tremaine had kept in it, then his mind caught wind of the fox again.

  Light. Heat. Law of Intensification.

  He held the glass up to the light and turned it, first concave, then convex. Peering through it, he saw his hand as larger. Only slightly, but it was enough for him to smile.

  He’d caught his fox.

  He scrabbled for one of the candle stubs in his vest. Clutching it in his left hand, he held the glass shard between it and the light. Then he raced through a spell to intensify the light coming through the glass, magnifying it – and magnifying the heat.

  A bright spot landed on the floor. Aubrey adjusted, moving the glass until the spot fell on the candle wick. In seconds, the wick began to smoke. He grinned, held the glass steady, and the wick sprang into flame.

  Pleased with himself, Aubrey slipped the glass shard into one of the reinforced vest pockets and held up the candle. One little light dispels all the dark, he thought and realised he had a metaphor on his hands as well as dripping wax – but no time to ponder it.

  Armed with light, he advanced into the face of the magical outpouring.

  At first, he was surprised that the candle didn’t flicker and he had to remind himself that the disturbance he felt was magical, not physical. It was only apparent to magical senses, not impinging on the physical world.

  Not yet, he reminded himself.

  ‘Aubrey?’

  George’s voice came from above and Aubrey stopped in his tracks. ‘Stay where you are.’

  ‘Need any help, old man?’

  It was a well-meant question, but Aubrey didn’t need the sort of help that George could provide. A crack team of specialist magicians, trained in dealing with high-intensity magical residue, would be more than useful, but he doubted that George had such a thing in his back pocket.

  ‘Not at the moment,’ he managed to reply without looking around. ‘But if you back away a little, and stay handy, I’ll make sure to call if I need you.’

  ‘Ah. You’re messing about with magic again.’

  ‘Not for long.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘Just long enough to stop it from destroying us all.’

  A pause.

  ‘Right. I’ll let you get on with it, then.’

  ‘Capital idea.’

  Aubrey was pleased that the light was steady. It meant that the candle was burning well and unlikely to go out, and it also meant that his hands weren’t shaking.

  It was the curse of having too much imagination and too much knowledge. He knew enough about wild magic to understand what it was capable of, and his imagination was quite happy to race ahead and supply all sorts of details about messy transmogrifications, arbitrary changes and long, lingering, painful deaths.

  If he were alone, it may have been different, but in the immediate vicinity were two people he cared for, and three others he wouldn’t wish ill on.

  Steady-handed, he advanced in the face of the howling magical storm.

  When the candle light fell on the wall, his ordinary sense of sight told him a patch of moss or lichen was growing there. A dark, unhealthy green-grey, it was an irregular shape splashed on the stone, about as large as a dining table. If he hadn’t the evidence of his magical senses he would have ignored it and kept searching for the source of the magical disturbance.

  And the way it ripples is a bit of a giveaway, too, he thought and rehearsed his method of attack.

  When Aubrey had been able to disrupt Dr Tremaine’s spell casting under Trinovant, the rogue magician had abandoned his scheme but had left the magical flame running amok, out of control, more dangerous than ever. Aubrey’s experiences with magical suppression devices, and the parlous situation of his friends, trapped close to the runaway flame, had sharpened his mind wonderfully, to the extent that he was able to craft a spell under great duress, a spell that achieved the same end as magical suppression devices – it quelled and negated the magical flame, snuffing it out completely.

  So he inspected the residue with as much coolness as he could summon, glad for the hand-steadying, gut-settling confidence that comes from having done something before.

  He leaned forward, slowly. Close up, he decided, it didn’t look so frightening. Even when he closed his eyes, the tumult that assailed him was rather less disconcerting now that he knew that it emanated from something that looked as if it would be at home in an unsanitary bathroom.

  Time to clean you up. A faint, dissenting thought flitted through his mind, something about famous last words, but he ignored it.

  He’d been rehearsing the quelling spell as he approached, recalling it and taking the opportunity to polish some of the roughness, the understandable awkward phrasing that had come from trying to formulate an intricate spell while bound by copper wire to a possibly living mechanical construction in the face of a magical flame that was threatening to wipe out the largest city in the world.

  He tightened the elements for distance and duration, estimating the area of effect by eye. He rearranged the order of the elements that controlled the negation, the anti-magic heart of the spell, to speed up its efficacy. No sense in letting it rampage any longer than it needed to.

  He rolled the long, complex string of elements backward and forward, settling them in his mind, ready to go. He adjusted his stance, squarely facing the belligerent patch of dross. Then he gathered himself and began.

  The spell came to him as easily as a well-rehearsed speech on opening night, each element falling into place with the sort of solid certainty that was the mark of a well-crafted piece of magic. He was pleased. His focus, his concentration was absolute – the rest of the world had gone away. He was in the realm of magic, shaping and wielding the power that humanity had struggled with since time immemorial. It was the Great Test, taking the mystical energy that arose from the interaction of human consciousness with the universe itself and using language to control and direct it.

  He was doing magic.

  A smile came to his lips as, only a third of the way through the spell, the patch of residue quivered, as if struck. He kept his focus, working on the Principle of Negation, taking the magic, appraising it, and applying the equal and opposite to make it disappear.

  About halfway through the spell, however, he wished he could spare the effort to wipe his brow. He’d begun to sweat. Things weren’t going as smoothly any more.

  The problem was the shifting nature of the residue. The unpredictable coming together of many cast-off spell fragments had created something that was so raw that it defied categorising. Aubrey was finding it hard to pin down, to construct the precise opposite needed to negate it. The residue was a many-he
aded beast, a hydra made of slippery magic. When he’d clamped down on one aspect of it, another oozed out on the other side, malignant and ready to do mischief.

  But he’d coped with this sort of thing before, he reassured himself. The flame under Trinovant had been much larger and much more menacing. This was puny in comparison.

  It had, however, been strong enough to shatter souls across Fisherberg.

  Aubrey gritted his teeth and ploughed on. He spat out the elements one after the other and was grimly satisfied to see that the residue was losing its shape and colour. And was it smaller?

  Shortly, he was certain that was the case. The residue was shrinking. While he continued chanting, it contracted unevenly, a jelly having scoops taken out of its edges, definitely growing smaller. No longer the size of a dining table, it had shrunk to the size of a sideboard. Even as he watched, it dwindled until it was only as large as a hall table, but before he could compare its diminishing with any other items of household furniture it shrank quickly, drawing in on itself until it was a fist-sized circle just as he finished with his signature element on the spell.

  Then, in a desperate last effort, it lashed at him.

  A solid extrusion jumped from the remains of the residue, an arm as thick as a tree trunk. It struck Aubrey in the chest, hard, with a blow that was both magical and physical.

  Dimly, he felt himself toppling backward. Then it was a numb, painful, cracking sensation that was probably the back of his head – but it was distant and almost unimportant. Most of his being was taken up, absorbed, by an assault on his senses.

  The world was a whirlwind of experience where colours, aromas, textures, sounds and flavours were shredded, combined, recombined, layered and mixed together in a chaos that defied shape and meaning. He was being twisted, contorted, disassembled, remade.

  Some time passed before he understood that his eyes were open, and that he was looking up at the charred and splintered ceiling of the sub-basement.

  I’ve fallen over, he thought. His head throbbed. His chest hurt.

  Hands on his shoulders. They weren’t his, he decided, because he could see his in his lap as he was propped up.

  Bone grated in his chest and he hissed, mumbling a smothered oath.

  ‘Broken ribs?’ George said brightly.

  Aubrey nodded, which was a bad idea. He swore again, which was marginally better.

  ‘Take your jacket off,’ Caroline snapped.

  He considered this. ‘Can’t.’

  ‘I see.’ She came into his vision. She was holding her mother-of-pearl-handled knife. ‘Don’t move,’ she said unnecessarily.

  She disappeared. He felt a tugging from behind. It hurt, but not too badly.

  ‘Lean forward,’ Caroline’s voice said. He couldn’t see her and it took a few seconds to realise that she was doing something. Something to his jacket?

  He leaned. This time, it hurt. His jacket separated and fell apart into his lap. He considered protesting about the damage, but decided to save his energy. And his protesting. He might need it later.

  More tugging. His necktie fell and joined his suit remnants in his lap. He pondered it philosophically. He didn’t like mulberry anyway.

  The sound of rending cloth came to him from somewhere nearby. His shirt became two half shirts. ‘Tear it into strips, George,’ Caroline said. She scrooched around and put her face close to Aubrey’s. He tried to smile, but his mouth was wobbly. ‘We’re going to strap those ribs,’ she said. ‘They’ll still hurt but we’ll be able to get you out of here. You’ll have to take off that vest, too.’ Then she stared, wide-eyed, at his chest. ‘What happened to your cage thingy?’

  Aubrey looked down. The action made him grind his teeth but what he saw nearly made him forget about it.

  The Beccaria Cage was gone. Only a vivid red mark on his chest showed where it had been.

  ‘Where’s Sylvia?’ Aubrey asked. The trunk of the tree he was sitting against was rough. He tried to make himself comfortable. It was a mistake, as his ribs told him in no uncertain terms, but it was balanced by the unaccustomed pleasure of having Caroline’s arm around his shoulder supporting him. It meant she was kneeling, close and warm. As he studied the ruins of the Tremaine house, he could feel her breathing.

  Madame Zelinka looked at Fromm. ‘Sylvia?’

  Aubrey went to answer but was forced to bite down on the grunt of pain. Caroline, who looked fetching in her black fighting suit, put a hand on his chest. ‘Sylvia was the name of the ghost we were looking for. She lived here.’

  Fromm touched his nose and looked at the ruins speculatively. ‘She has no presence here any more. Your magic has dispelled the eruption, cast out the ghost.’

  ‘Dead?’ Aubrey gasped.

  Fromm shook his head. ‘It was close at hand. But before Fromm could snare it, it was whisked away to its home.’

  ‘Home?’ George said. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Reuniting with the other soul fragments, in the husk of a body they left behind.’ He pointed. ‘There, in the city.’

  Other soul fragments. Husk of a body. Aubrey would have groaned if he had been able. Nothing was straightforward.

  ‘Can you take us to her?’ Caroline asked.

  ‘Ghost hunters hunt fragments, not body and souls united. Fromm doesn’t know where the body is. This fragment streaked past, back to the city, but then was gone.’

  ‘The pearl,’ Aubrey croaked. He reached for the vest Caroline had folded neatly on the ground, but he nearly fainted. His ribs were a sharp, red pain slashing along his side.

  ‘Here,’ Caroline said. She bit her bottom lip, endearingly, as she concentrated on finding the pearl while still supporting him. Aubrey found her efforts fascinating.

  Fromm took the pearl and eyed it unhappily. Then he put it to his nose and inhaled.

  ‘All gone.’ He held the pearl up to the light. ‘Empty now.’

  Aubrey was concentrating on breathing. George asked the obvious question. ‘Where?’

  ‘With all the other bits. To the body it left behind. It was the magic, in the basement. You reversed it.’

  Through gritted teeth, Aubrey asked, ‘All of it?’

  ‘Most of it.’ Fromm sniffed the air. ‘Ghosts are coming together, all over. People will wake up soon, whole again.’ He slapped his chest. ‘Not much work for Fromm, now. Time to leave the city.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Aubrey mumbled, and Caroline shushed him.

  Fromm chuckled. ‘It’s not so bad. People will need us, sooner or later.’ He rubbed his hands together. ‘Money?’

  ‘What?’ George said. ‘You didn’t find our ghost.’

  ‘Fromm brought you to it. You let it go.’

  Von Stralick haggled, for form’s sake more than anything else, it appeared to Aubrey. While the dickering was going on, with some trepidation he took some time to assess his condition.

  With the ease that came from plenty of practice, he closed his eyes and turned his magical awareness on himself, only to be shuttled from bafflement to disbelief to dawning hope.

  Ever since the unfortunate experiment that had torn his body and soul apart, whenever he inspected his condition he always saw a fractious, unhappy state. His soul, loosened from the normal bond with his body, was being tugged by its golden cord, summoned to the portal behind which lay the true death. The spells to delay or impede this had various degrees of efficacy, but it was only the Beccaria Cage that had endured. With it gone he fully expected the mortal tug-of-war to resume, and he was already trying to construct variations on spells that had had some success in the past.

  Instead, he saw an entirely different state of affairs.

  His perspective was the usual out-of-body view, as if he were hovering a few yards over his own form. He could make out the others in the shade of the shrubbery as they talked and argued, but dimly, as if they were fish in a poorly lit aquarium. His magical awareness was not suited to observing everyday things.

  His body was motionle
ss in the shade. His soul was an almost transparent duplicate nestled inside, snugly. The left hand of the soul-self was holding a golden cord. The other end was looped around the wrist of his body-self. They were united, bonded as body and soul should be. Automatically, Aubrey looked at the soul-self’s right hand, but he couldn’t find the dangerous golden cord there, the one he’d become so used to seeing. It was a shock and he turned his attention around, looking for the portal to the true death, the doorway that had been hovering near him ever since the experiment.

  It was gone.

  This change was so fundamental, so dramatic that Aubrey had some difficulty in taking it in – and it took him some time to realise that something else had changed.

  His body was encased in a fine silver mesh.

  He concentrated and brought his attention closer, using his magical senses to inspect the shimmering web that was hovering on the edges of perception. Probing it, he detected powerful magic, magic of a patient and enduring sort, a spell that was made for lifetimes – and perhaps more. It had a flavour, too, that he was familiar with.

  The Beccaria Cage.

  As soon as he realised it, he saw that the silver mesh was the Beccaria Cage, but a Beccaria Cage that had expanded and encompassed his whole body in its protection – like a suit of armour. His body and soul were united, joined to such an extent that the golden cord leading to the true death had gone. The portal had vanished, the call of the true death was no more.

  He was cured.

  Twenty-five

  The embassy had a fine doctor on staff, and she had a medical magician on call. Together they patched up Aubrey so that his ribs were merely painful instead of a knife in the side. While they worked, Aubrey swooped between exhilaration and a stubborn unwillingness to believe that his body and soul were actually reunited.

  In between his mood extremes, he found time to appreciate the irony – that he could be a beneficiary of Dr Tremaine’s carelessness in cleaning up after himself. He would have laughed if not for his sore ribs.

  Caroline and George were waiting for him outside the infirmary. Caroline was tapping her foot. ‘Well?’