Time of Trial

by Michael Pryor

Twenty-eight

  They split up. In the crowds that were thronging through the Academy it was the only sensible thing to do.

  Aubrey decided to head for the library, the obvious place for Kiefer to do last-minute research. Kiefer wasn’t an evil person, he reminded himself as he pounded along the cloistered walkways of the Law Faculty, glad that the crowds had thinned this far away from the Academy Hall. But he wouldn’t be the last who’d be duped by Dr Tremaine, either.

  The rambling collection of stone buildings that was the Medical Faculty led Aubrey directly to his destination, but he skidded to an abrupt halt when he saw the two people in earnest conversation in the forecourt of the library.

  Handing Manfred an envelope was Mr Thomson, of Thomson and Sons, Fine and Rare Books.

  Plots, plans and suppositions ran together in Aubrey’s mind and smashed into a million pieces. Frantically, he sorted through them, discarded most and started building a new whole theory.

  The Security Intelligence Directorate wouldn’t have found anyone coming to the Trinovant bookshop to collect the secret documents because the owner was the one who the documents were for. Here he was in Holmland handing a suspiciously similar envelope to the suspiciously ubiquitous Manfred. Aubrey could see that in a short time, Holmland agents would be making a move on the precious guano cargoes.

  He smiled. Tallis’s reworking of the document would mean the information may not be as helpful as Manfred thought.

  Regardless, Thomson’s business was a perfect cover. Moving back and forward between Albion and the Continent, managing shipments of books and documents. Thomson would have plenty of opportunity to ferry useful information to whoever he was working for.

  Another peek and Aubrey saw that Manfred and Thomson were moving off together, Manfred with a small leather suitcase in one hand. Aubrey chewed his lip, glanced in the direction of the prominent clocktower overtopping the Academy Hall, and set off after them.

  After only a few minutes, they reached a laneway between a service building and the Biology Department. Aubrey crouched behind a large rose bush and almost groaned when Manfred and Thomson shook hands and parted. Thomson took the lane that led to Fransman Street and the city, while Manfred marched off toward the Academy Hall.

  Indecision, then decision. Aubrey would make sure to get a report to the Security Intelligence Directorate about Thomson. The only books he’d be seeing when he got back to Albion would be in a prison library.

  He’d follow Manfred.

  Manfred strode through the campus. His suitcase swung like a pendulum and Aubrey was certain that nothing would have changed if the way had been packed with people. Manfred was a man of purpose, a man on a mission. He would have ploughed through them.

  He reached the Academy Hall. The forecourt was still crowded with Holmland’s finest edging along, filing through the massive arched doors.

  The crowds actually made Aubrey’s job of following Manfred easier as he could hide in the numbers, but he was conscious that time was growing short. Surely the Elektor and the Chancellor would be arriving soon, and that would be the signal for proceedings to begin.

  Manfred surprised Aubrey by veering wide and heading along the outside of the Academy Hall. Aubrey was forced to ease his way through an untidy garden bed to keep the man in sight as the way narrowed to a service lane sandwiched between the long side of the Academy Hall and the Physics Laboratory. Manfred pressed on, past rubbish bins, piles of wooden boxes and the assorted debris of countless academic functions. When the laneway reached a brick wall, Manfred didn’t pause. Relentless, he climbed on top of an old, broken handcart and then vaulted over the wall. He landed on the other side with a grunt that Aubrey could hear from his position in a clump of acanthus.

  The sound of the assembled multitudes in the Academy Hall was like the buzzing of the world’s largest bee hive. Aubrey stared at the brick wall, then at the hall, then back again. He rubbed his side and wished for more time.

  Five more minutes. He’d follow Manfred for five more minutes and then he’d have to find Kiefer.

  Aubrey ran through the garden bed, bent almost double. When he reached the cart he bounded, barely touched the wall and was over.

  Only to see Manfred, waiting and smiling coldly at him. ‘What took you so long?’

  Aubrey took a step backward and found how close he was to the wall when he had no more room to move. He felt a drop of sweat slide down his throat and disappear under his collar. ‘Manfred.’

  Manfred clicked his heels together and bowed. The whole performance was heavy with irony. ‘I knew you were following me. Dr Tremaine warned me about your persistence.’

  Aubrey was grimly satisfied when Manfred’s words confirmed what he’d been thinking. Manfred’s shadowy involvement in affairs was connected with the master of conspiracies, Dr Mordecai Tremaine. ‘He’ll betray you in the end, Manfred. He’s using you and then he’ll spit you out.’

  Manfred shrugged. ‘He pays well, though. I’ll take his money for as long as I think it’s safe. Then I’ll get out.’

  Aubrey nearly laughed. Greed tended to cloud one’s sense of timing.

  ‘But I have you now,’ Aubrey said. ‘One less henchman to help Dr Tremaine.’

  Manfred picked up his suitcase. ‘You might be able to hold me. And then again you might not. So I prepared a little insurance.’ He pointed. A brown paper package was sitting against the rear wall of the Academy Hall. ‘A compressed spell. It’s due to go off at any minute, taking your Prince down with this place. You can stop me, or try to stop it. You can’t do both.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘You shouldn’t go up against him, Fitzwilliam. You don’t know what he is capable of.’

  Aubrey was about to retort, but at that moment, Manfred hurled his empty suitcase. It spun straight at Aubrey, and he had to duck to stop it hitting him in the head. When he straightened Manfred was sprinting in the opposite direction, and was already halfway along the rear of the hall.

  Aubrey was left alone.

  The package looked harmless, a brown paper parcel such as one would see under the arm of a happy shopper. It looked as if someone had dropped it while hurrying to an appointment.

  With urgency hammering at him, he closed his eyes and readied his magical senses. He had visions of the compression giving way at any second, but he steeled himself – and tried to ignore the way his heart was racing. Carefully, with as much delicacy he could summon, he extended his awareness.

  With his magical pseudo-sight, the package blazed like a sun. It was so overwhelming that Aubrey didn’t know where to start. After taking a deep breath in order to steady himself, he imagined his magical senses as a thin needle, the better to probe the package. His lips drew back from his teeth as he edged his awareness closer, with as much gentleness as he could, looking for a spot of weakness in the magical inferno.

  There, he thought, and he was in.

  He hissed, then cut it off. He knew this magic. The texture, the construction, the signature. It was typical of the ex-Sorcerer Royal’s arrogance, not disguising his efforts, confident that the outcome would obliterate all traces of the origin of the spell – after it had obliterated much, much more.

  Inside the package was a coil of compressed weather magic. And unlike the weather magic spell that Aubrey had encountered in Albion, this was a perfectly constructed, expertly compressed magical object, a perfect example in a fiendishly difficult area. The weather spell in Albion had erupted prematurely, and Dr Tremaine had mocked Rokeby-Taylor for it. This one was an example of how to do it right.

  He opened his eyes. The sunburst of magical power disappeared and he was once again looking at a nondescript brown paper parcel.

  He rubbed his hands together slowly, trying to stem a rising tide of panic.

  He’d learned who had constructed the spell – and he was determined that it wouldn’t be the last thing he learned. The spell was beautifully refined as well as being tightly controlled. It wasn’t the sledgehammer approach
of an entire thunderstorm. It took a single aspect of a storm and concentrated it, singling it out and intensifying it, winding it up and packing it tightly, then meshing a timing component among the compression layers so that it would erupt at the appropriate time.

  Lightning. A dozen or more individual lightning bolts had been twisted together and packed into a brown paper parcel that was about to give way.

  But even with this imminent danger, Aubrey’s curiosity wouldn’t give up. He probed a little further and was puzzled to uncover a number of complex limiting elements in the spell. If he was interpreting correctly, this was an intricately shaped spell. When released, the lightning bolts would erupt solely in a vertical plane.

  He looked up. The bulk of the clocktower soared overhead – in the direct line that the unbound lightning bolts would follow.

  The clocktower would be blasted. Destroyed, almost certainly, with some damage to the Academy Hall itself – but this spell wasn’t intended to slaughter the assembly inside. It would be noisy and highly destructive, but not the lethal weapon that it had appeared at first.

  Then what was it for?

  Aubrey slapped himself on the forehead. The spell was a sower of discord. The people inside were Holmland’s most important, most influential. If they experienced, first hand, an attack that would no doubt be blamed on Holmland’s enemies, they would be galvanised behind the Chancellor and his plans.

  So I have another reason to stop it, Aubrey thought with a slight trembling in his knees, apart from a desire not to be blown apart myself.

  He took a deep breath and shook himself, as if he could dislodge the fear that was doing its best to take hold of him. He locked his knees, the better to stop them trembling, then relaxed them.

  It’s simple, really, he thought. All he had to do was either reinforce the compression, delay the release of the compression, or render the tightly-packed lightning inert.

  I’m spoiled for choices. He looked along the length of the rear of the Academy Hall, but he was still alone. No help within earshot, no police constable, no convenient corps of genius magicians, no-one.

  It was up to him.

  Tinkering with a compression spell that had already been set was a delicate affair, somewhat akin to shaving a tiger, especially if that tiger had particularly sensitive skin. He couldn’t use magic suppression – no magic was actually in action yet. The compression spell and the timing spell were inert, passive magic that would release the lightning in an instant. He could try casting the suppression spells as soon as the spells let go, but they needed time to work and he was sure the lightning wasn’t about to wait around.

  He gnawed his lip. He knew that a theoretical approach existed. He’d read about it in a biography of Harland James, a Caledonian magician who died a horrible – and quite spectacular – death. The trouble was that James’s theoretical approach was the cause of his demise and, sensibly, no-one had ever tried it again.

  The principle was sound, though. Cast another spell that would latch onto the end of the existing spell. The new spell would contain variables that would alter the effects of the original spell, extending the time before the release of a timing spell, for instance. Naturally, casting a spell to attach to a spell that had already been cast some time ago meant including some sort of temporal inversion constant. In other words, the tricky little appending spell had to send itself back in time to grab onto the compression spell at the moment of its utterance. And in this case, it had to avoid all notice by the original spell caster and blend itself seamlessly, doing its good work unseen and undetected.

  All in all, it struck Aubrey as about as simple as teaching a goldfish calculus. On the other hand, the alternative was being crisped by an angry lightning bolt, so he didn’t have much to lose.

  While his body went through the physical symptoms of fear – churning stomach, dry mouth, propensity for his feet to want to take the rest of him well away from this undeniable source of danger – he concentrated on constructing a taut, well-defined spell and not on imagining the results of a suddenly uncompressed lightning storm. Not knowing when the compression spell was due to release added a certain urgency to his deliberations, but he needed to do it right. If he didn’t, he was likely to trigger the compression spell and release the lightning himself. In fact, he realised, there was a number of ways for him to come to a messy, charcoaled end here, and only one way not to.

  He had to cast a perfect spell.

  Duration was simple – he wanted to add a few days to the release of the lightning, enough to allow for safe disposal of the package. Range, dimensions, intensity, all these factors were easy to put into place. The tricky part was the temporal inversion component.

  He had to define the temporal inversion so that, once the spell was cast, it would effectively disappear, fold itself back into time and attach itself to the compression. He could use the signature element from the compression spell – Tremaine’s signature – splice it into his spell so that the inverted spell would be able to track the compression spell to its source, the same way a bloodhound would use a scrap of cloth from a burglar to track the villain to his den. Straightforward, in a rather twisty way.

  Aubrey opted for Sumerian. He was comfortable with it and its circumscribed vocabulary left little room for ambiguity, which was always helpful when time elements were concerned.

  He ran through the spell twice, then a third time, before readying himself to pronounce it aloud.

  He paused for a moment. The lane was silent. The hubbub from inside the hall was a far-off drone, business, diplomacy and simple human interaction going on oblivious to the imminent disaster that was taking place not far away. Aubrey spared a moment to smile wryly over how much that was like all of human history, then he pressed his hands together.

  A few mildly curious pigeons looked down from the roof below. Aubrey decided they’d have to take their chances. He began.

  The elements marched from his mouth like well-drilled soldiers. It was a long spell, as he’d spared no detail in trying to get it right. Dimensionality, duration, range of effect all fell into place one after the other and his hopes rose. He felt confident in his delivery and his final, signature element was firm and steady.

  The package tilted.

  Aubrey took a step back and waited to be blasted out of existence.

  Then he patted himself. He glanced at the pigeons, who hadn’t moved and were giving him a look of ‘What was that all about?’, decided he was still in reasonable physical shape, and reassessed. The parcel hadn’t moved at all. He’d simply had the impression that it had tilted. It had shifted its existence, but not in a physical way. He waited a moment, savouring the feeling of not being charcoal, then probed the parcel with what was becoming his customary delicacy.

  The compression spell was nailed down tightly. Probe as he might, he could find no signs of weakness, no signs of release, nothing that indicated destruction was a heartbeat away.

  He sighed. With a hand that was only slightly trembling, he touched his brow. Then, his control lapsed for an instant and his body reasserted itself, relief warring with the desire for immediate flight from danger. The result? He felt like throwing up. He sagged, as if all the air was being let out of him by way of a valve in his heel, and had to steady himself against the wall. He let his head rest on the brickwork.

  This can’t do, he thought, eventually. He straightened, and then realised how tense he’d been, because every muscle protested as if he’d been in the gym for hours. He shook himself, then he bent and picked up the parcel.

  Now, he thought as he limped off, to find Kiefer.

  Twenty-nine

  Outside the entrance to the Academy Hall, Aubrey found a police officer herding the crowds. He pushed the parcel on him, explained in a few words what it was, watched the police officer blanch and rush off, then he went off to try to get backstage.

  He did his best to slide through the crowd that was emptying from the trade annex. Hundreds of peop
le had apparently realised, simultaneously, that the opening ceremonies were about to start and they were all seeking their seats.

  Aubrey was distracted from his quest for an instant when he saw a tall, dark-clad figure standing near one of the ornamental columns in the foyer of the Academy Hall. He was startled, for he hadn’t known that Craddock was going to be present, but it made some sense. He assumed Quentin Hollows had let Craddock know of the developments in Fisherberg. Craddock would have lost no time crossing the Continent once he heard the details of the plot against Prince Albert.

  It was an explanation that needed following up, but it didn’t account for the extremely familiar manner in which the habitually taciturn Craddock was talking the sublimely beautiful Madame Zelinka.

  Aubrey would have been gobsmacked if he’d had time. As it was, he had to postpone his amazement for another time – but he promised himself he’d have an explanation from Craddock before too long. The man was actually laughing!

  Aubrey’s plans to get backstage, however, were dashed when he was turned away from the wings by a pair of commissionaires. They were older men, but sharp-eyed and straight-backed, obviously ex-military, and serious about their job of keeping riff-raff away from the important speakers who were gathering offstage.

  ‘I have an important message for Mr Kiefer,’ he said in his best Holmlandish. ‘It’s urgent.’

  ‘We’ll take it to him.’ The larger of the two commissionaires eyed him suspiciously.

  ‘Sorry, but I’ve been honour bound to place it in his hand. I must see him.’

  ‘You’ll have to wait until after the speeches,’ the smaller one growled. ‘What did you say your name was?’

  ‘Von Stralick,’ Aubrey said without hesitating. He looked over the auditorium. It was filling rapidly – the rows and rows of seats had few gaps. ‘Are you sure I can’t see him?’

  ‘He’s busy, Mr von Stralick,’ the larger one said. ‘You’d better find your seat. Speeches are starting soon. You wouldn’t want to miss them.’