All Aubrey could assume was that Commander Craddock was untroubled by age or sex. Talent was his sole criterion. Although exactly what talents were of utility to the Department waited to be seen.
Doing his best to appear confident and assured, Aubrey presented his papers. They were stamped, filed, his name was crossed off a list, and he was given a sheaf of brand new forms and a slip of buff paper with instructions to go to Room 14a.
Aubrey hesitated, then turned back to the corporal who had processed him, but she was already working through the details of the next recruit. Aubrey nearly interrupted her but at the last moment he had second thoughts. He treated the situation as a test. What good would he be as a Department operative if he couldn’t find a room in the headquarters building?
He could use logic, or gather information before setting off, or he could try to elicit instructions from people who belonged, but instead he chose the time-honoured method of wandering around and keeping an eye on people who gave the impression of knowing where they were going – or those who were looking for the same thing he was.
As he wandered, he was reminded that he was in a place that was obsessed with security. Many doors bore admonitions about authorised personnel only, or security clearance required, or the blunter – and unmistakeable – ‘Keep Out’.
He had no desire to test how well policed these signs were and he gave them a wide berth.
Aubrey found Room 14a on the first floor. Along with Room 14b, Room 14c and Room 14d, they were in Corridor 14 and Aubrey congratulated himself on concluding the obvious once he blundered into the right part of the building.
He knocked and entered. A depressingly cheery man in a white coat looked up from his desk. ‘Forms on the desk, buff slip in the basket, then take off your clothes.’
Aubrey swallowed. He looked around at the screen, the scales and the patient table. His recruitment may be somewhat unconventional, but it looked as if he wasn’t going avoid the indignity of the medical examination.
After a chilly time of being thumped, prodded, jabbed and peered at, Aubrey was given a green slip to add to his sheaf of papers and directed to the Quartermaster’s section. The bored operative eyed Aubrey for something rather less than a split second, then he glanced at a list on the counter before stalking off and returning with a bundle of black clothing, a pair of boots, and a slip of blue paper. He pushed all of this on Aubrey. He was about to ask where he could change when the operative jerked his head to the curtained booths on the left.
The uniform – trousers, long-sleeved shirt, pullover and beret – was comfortable and fitted surprisingly well, apart from the beret, which was a little tight. Aubrey had difficulty believing that the grizzly man had picked his measurements so well and so quickly, but shrugged it off as a benefit of experience. He pulled on the black boots and they too fitted perfectly – even though the operative had no chance of seeing Aubrey’s feet.
Aubrey stood back and looked at himself in the mirror. This wasn’t the uniform he’d been accustomed to seeing on Craddock’s operatives, so he assumed it was the equivalent of a regular soldier’s barrack dress, to be worn while stationed at headquarters. Regardless, he thought the simple black was dashing. Understated but stylish was his estimation. He had a fleeting pang wishing Caroline could see him, and then he was struck by the guilt he’d managed to put to one side.
He hadn’t let Caroline know that George and he were going to enlist, and he hadn’t communicated with her in the forty-eight-hour home period either.
His motives for this were mixed, and he was still trying to sort them out for himself. To begin with, he wasn’t sure of her reaction, and he’d learned enough not to presume where Caroline was concerned. She might be cool about the decision, or outraged, or simply angry about it. On the other hand, she might be supportive. Not knowing, Aubrey had taken the coward’s route and avoided telling her at all.
Which is only going to make it worse when she finds out, he thought. He considered sending her a letter, but glumly knew that his mother would let her know before a letter could possibly reach her.
So much for my mission.
Aubrey rolled his civilian clothes into a bundle and fastened his belt around them to keep them together. When he exited, an eager-faced recruit was at the counter, drumming his fingers while waiting for his turn. Aubrey took a moment to examine the place with his magical senses.
He grinned. Right where the recruit was standing, a spell had been embedded in the floor. A little examination showed that it was a passive spell that measured and weighed a body in the vicinity, a neat and minor application of the Law of Dimensionality. The operative must have some connection on his side of the counter that directed him to the correct uniform components for each recruit. Aubrey’s tight beret must have been a hiccup in the spell, which was only to be expected with such a complex application.
The slip of blue paper directed Aubrey next door to a large room that was bright with electric light. He winced when he saw the walls lined with mirrors and the halfdozen barber chairs on each side. The rotund fellow in a white coat nearest the entrance pounced. ‘A customer! At last!’
His eleven colleagues watched enviously as Aubrey was guided to the nearest chair. ‘Now, what would you like?’ the barber cheerily said as he tied a smock around Aubrey’s neck. The white linen covered him entirely. ‘Something along the lines of the latest from Lutetia? Or were after the Venezian look?’
‘Venezian?’
The barber barked a laugh. ‘Only joking, youngster. Just one style here, so hold still.’
A few minutes of buzzing, clipping and slashing later, Aubrey grimaced at the image in the mirror. Over his shoulder, the barber was grinning. ‘Done, and it’s not going to grow back while you’re sitting there. Next!’
The barber whipped the sheet away. Aubrey was given a slip of yellow paper and pointed toward the door. Automatically, his hand went to his head to feel the closely shorn sides. On top, it was a little longer, but nothing like the luxurious crop he’d become used to. He had a fleeting pang, but he had more important things to worry about. The slip in his hand, for instance.
On his way to the main hall Aubrey found that his beret now fitted perfectly; his admiration of the measurement magic rose.
Everyone was going in the same direction. Most of the recruits were rubbing their arms and – to judge from their expressions – giving every impression that the main purpose of a medical examination was to make one feel quite unwell.
The main hall was enough like a lecture theatre to make Aubrey feel quite nostalgic. At the front was a dais, a long desk or bench, and a pair of lecterns. On the wall behind the dais was a large blackboard, which looked freshly cleaned.
Rows of hard, wooden chairs faced the stage. Aubrey found a spare seat three rows from the front, in between a middle-aged man who looked as if he’d just walked out of his position managing a bank, and a woman a few years older than Aubrey, who glanced at him through her glasses before clutching the bag on her lap as if he’d made a move to steal it. She was trembling and Aubrey had a great deal of sympathy. He’d been in Darnleigh House before. These new recruits must be uneasy, given the reputation of the Department and its chief.
Within a few minutes, the doors at the rear were closed. Aubrey twisted and looked to see that the hall was only a third filled and he nodded, thoughtfully. A hundred, he thought, maybe a hundred and twenty. Not many, but not bad for a couple of days’ recruiting.
Commander Craddock entered. As he strode to a lectern, he swept his gaze over the new recruits. From his face, Aubrey couldn’t tell if Craddock were impressed, dismayed or bored with what he saw.
Without any preamble, he began. ‘Most of you in this room did not volunteer for the Magic Department. Most of you went to enlist, in good faith, in more regular branches of the service. For that, I applaud you. For being diverted, I apol
ogise. Each of our recruitment centres was given a list of names to look for, but they were also equipped with a device which detected incipient talents, those that will better serve Albion here rather than slogging in trenches or stoking engines in a battleship.’
Aubrey straightened. That explained why so many of them were looking stunned. They hadn’t known that they had magical ability!
Magical ability wasn’t common, any more than a talent for higher mathematics or concert-level music. Hard work and training could make the most of natural ability, but little could be achieved if a person was devoid of it in the first place. Some schools tested for magical ability, but many people never had the chance to find out if they possessed the raw skill. Aubrey often compared it to someone who lived all his life in the desert. He may potentially be the world’s best swimmer, but would never, ever know it.
To hear that the Department had a device to detect incipient magical ability, though, that was news indeed. He added it to his list of things to be investigated.
Craddock cleared his throat and Aubrey was jolted from his cogitation to find the commander looking straight at him. ‘Others, particularly the ladies here,’ Craddock continued, ‘were sought out for known talents and skills. I’m afraid the already depleted magical departments of the universities will be under-staffed for some time. I won’t apologise for that, for this is a time of crisis. Albion needs you.’
Aubrey rubbed his chin. The already depleted magical departments of the universities? He’d heard rumours that various positions in magical faculties were currently unfilled, with a number of prominent researchers taking sabbaticals while others had simply disappeared. Dark mutterings in the cloisters of Greythorn suggested numerous possibilities, each more outlandish than the last.
‘All of you need one thing,’ Craddock said after a pause. ‘Training. For the next month you will live here at Darnleigh House. All of you will receive physical training. In addition, each of you will receive specialised training according to your skills. Any questions?’
One tall youngster put up his hand and Aubrey had to admire his pluck. ‘When will we see service, sir?’ he asked in a voice that didn’t quaver too much.
Craddock looked down for a moment. When he looked up, he said, ‘Before you know it.’
Aubrey was one of the few close enough to hear what Craddock added under his breath. ‘And before you’re ready, most likely.’
Nine
One month. Four weeks. Thirty days. Seven hundred and twenty hours. Lying on his bunk in the dormitory, Aubrey thought he had an aching muscle or a bruise for every one of those hours.
He had been looking forward to the training because he thought it could give him another chance to investigate the copy of the Rashid Stone. Or perhaps he’d have an opportunity to work with magical suppression, or to inspect the golem-making machine he’d captured and sent back from Holmland.
Instead, with the other Department recruits, he became accustomed to being ferried most days via motorbus to a Directorate facility an hour away. On the edge of the city to the east, near where the Harwell River came down through the hills, in essence, it was a combination parade ground, firing range and hell on earth.
Soon, Aubrey felt as if he’d been sent back to his cadet training at Stonelea School – or perhaps the school’s notorious Physical Education classes. Except that instead of mildly sadistic masters propelling him over vaulting horses, he had instructors made of some bulletproof material whose main delight, in all weather, was shouting.
So much shouting. Shouting while he ran over broken ground. Shouting while he scrambled under barbed wire. Shouting while he swung from ropes. Shouting while he crawled through mud. Shouting while he assembled and disassembled a variety of firearms and then used them to blast away at targets that were eye-strainingly far-off and – sometimes – startlingly close.
Hand-to-hand combat produced the most bruises and, unsurprisingly, as he was flung through the air again by another shouting instructor, it reminded him of Caroline. Her skills in unarmed combat came from early instruction with a variety of oriental masters, friends of her father. When Aubrey picked himself up from the mats, time after time, he knew that a handful of sessions wasn’t going to bring him up to Caroline’s standard, but he was willing to do his best. He had a new appreciation for her, as if he needed any extra grounds for such a thing.
The shouting, thankfully, disappeared during explosives training. The instructors here were just as intense – older men, often with a disturbing number of missing fingers – and somehow managed to make their whispers just as effective as the bellowing of the others.
He was thankful that his explosives training was brief, a mere introduction to the discipline, and was sorry for the recruits who showed aptitude for this sort of work. They were whisked off for more intensive training, the prospect of which made Aubrey shudder.
Another relatively quiet session came from a mildfaced, older man who was the instructor in disguises. When he explained how to change appearances subtly and with a minimum of artifice, Aubrey was embarrassed at his own earlier efforts. With a deft application of tiny strokes around the eyes and some tightening wax inside the cheeks, an effect was created that would have taken Aubrey hours and laborious amounts of makeup. In hindsight, his Tommy Sparks alter-ego was embarrassingly crude.
Aubrey excelled in the communications training. He picked up the telegraphic code easily, tapping away with alacrity, never confusing T and P. His earlier experimenting with ciphers held him in good stead. While other recruits around him spent much time on head-scratching, he knew the theory and practice of one-time pads and was able to encipher and decipher at a rate that impressed the instructors. They whisked him off for advanced training and introduced him to the encoding machine, a recent advance that sped up the process and, if intercepted, made messages even harder to crack. After some familiarisation, Aubrey was able to punch keys and substitute the geared wheels with relentless speed.
Magical training was organised with clinical efficiency. Grim-faced operatives circulated through rooms full of recruits sitting at desks, trying to perform a basic light spell given to them on slips of light green paper. When Aubrey conjured up a shining globe within seconds, one that rotated slowly on its axis thanks to a minor embellishment he’d added, he was herded into a smaller room, with others who had passed through this coarse sieve. A handful were astonished, never having suspected that they had magical talent, and Aubrey wondered where they’d end up. What part of a military service entering a war needed untrained magic users? Could the Department spare the personnel to train them?
One frail youth winced throughout the spell-casting efforts. Even though he stumbled through them, he was treated with some respect by the instructors, and after he’d fumbled a straightforward, if lengthy, Patterning spell, he was taken aside and then escorted elsewhere.
Aubrey wasn’t consciously eavesdropping. He simply found the spell undemanding and when the instructors were speaking softly with the frail youth, he couldn’t help overhearing one fascinating phrase: remote sensing.
Aubrey knew that the Department had a long-established cohort of remote sensers, sensitive magicians whose job was to monitor for magical disturbances. The best could detect major magic being undertaken thousands of miles away.
The remote sensing team operated constantly, day and night, and it was always looking to build its numbers of operatives.
It looked as if it now had one more to add to its ranks.
After a day of successfully transforming, heating, inverting, manipulating, translating, concealing and amplifying, Aubrey had begun to get bored. The grim-faced operatives weren’t chatty and they wouldn’t let him read the notes they were taking. They refused to be impressed by Aubrey’s enhancements, and he wondered if showing initiative in this area was a good thing or a bad thing...
The handful of other talented recru
its had dwindled as the day went on, winnowed out by the increasingly difficult spells set for them. Having reached a level of competence, they were directed to intensive training in their speciality.
Aubrey caught up with all of them over the subsequent few days, though, for at the end of the first day of magical training – Aubrey having performed all tasks with ease – the grim faces consulted, threw their hands up in the air, and directed Aubrey to participate in each of the specialised intensive magical training sessions.
Most were straightforward and almost painfully practical, at least for people who may have to perform magic in battle situations – covert lighting, sound deadening, distraction techniques, spells both offensive and defensive. A few were wrinkles on techniques Aubrey knew well, variations interesting enough to fascinate him and leave him disappointed when he had to move on to the next. Some were completely new applications, profoundly practical again, like the panoply of spells useful for securing a perimeter from intrusion, both physical and magical. Aubrey was intrigued and wanted to spend more time investigating what he suspected was a connection between these spells and the magical neutralising spells he’d been working with.
These sessions were a relief in many ways. A relief from the mud, a relief from the burning pain of tired muscles, but most of all, a relief from the shouting.
The best set of lungs belonged to Sergeant Wallace, the non-commissioned officer in charge of Aubrey’s platoon of twenty recruits. Sergeant Wallace was the NCO who roused them in the morning – Aubrey only had to have his bed tipped over once before he understood that now meant now – and who chivvied them about from parade ground to classroom to mess hall. Aubrey thought that the sergeant must have some sort of magically enhanced voice box, with the amount of roaring he did, only relaxing when he handed over to someone who took the platoon on specialised instruction, accompanied by more shouting.
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