Hour of Need tlom-6 Read online

  Immediately, he was gratified to hear a Holmlandish voice cry, ‘What was that?’

  Von Stralick scurried to his side. He held his revolver at the ready and peered into the night. ‘Something dramatic would be useful, Fitzwilliam. Soon, too, by preference.’

  ‘One moment.’

  Aubrey ran through another spell, then cupped a hand over his mouth. He rehearsed his Holmlandish and whispered ‘Over here’ into his hand. Then, as if he were throwing a stone, he whipped his arm in a long arc. Instantly, his voice cried out from the far edge of the estate: ‘Over here!’

  ‘I have them,’ he growled into his hand and after he flung it a shout boomed from the parterre, the formal geometric garden directly in front of the main house: ‘I have them!’ Quickly, he followed these outbursts with more, distributing them about the estate: near the cliff top, by the gates, past a dimly seen collection of outbuildings that were still standing near the fountain.

  The Holmland guards were clearly startled by this assault. They shouted warnings, adding to the tumult as Aubrey continued to send his voice to all corners of the estate. Within minutes, the Holmlanders were convinced they were set upon by an army, outflanked, possibly surrounded.

  The guards’ level of jumpiness was heightened by the stick figures Aubrey had sent scurrying about the estate. They crept from bush to bush, darting between trees and rushing along paths before diving into garden beds. Their insubstantial nature made them hard to see, but the suggestion was enough to make the guards extremely panicky.

  Of course, armed guards being armed guards, panic led to shooting. Aubrey and von Stralick flattened themselves against the ground as bullets whipped overhead, accompanied by more shouts from guards who warned their colleagues they were being shot at. The fact it was their colleagues who were doing the shooting was a possibility that none of them countenanced. They were more concerned, naturally, with the clear danger coming from the intruders, who they were sure numbered in the hundreds.

  The stick figures continued to scamper about, man-sized now and taking on more substance as Aubrey exerted himself. They shook vegetation, crunched along the gravel of the driveway, rattled through the debris of the explosion. One managed to break a window on the glasshouse – which was immediately rendered an unglasshouse when two guards sent a volley of shots in that direction.

  Aubrey kept the phantom sounds and movements working, not giving the guards time to regroup or confer. He threw a line of confusion around them, shouting and shaking, flitting and threatening, pushing them in the direction of their remaining lorry, which stood near the gatehouse.

  Once they were backed up against it, peering into the dark and firing away while shouting at the others not to waste bullets, Aubrey summoned his strength and drew on the smouldering coals of the nearest ruin.

  A dozen of the stick figures scampered to the heat and dived in, combining and instantly becoming a stick figure giant – insubstantial, but terrifying in its flaming presence, towering at the height of the treetops, alive with fire and wrath. In careful Holmlandish it boomed, ‘WE HAVE THEM NOW!’

  One of the guards screamed. The others began shooting at the gigantic fiery figure, which affected it not at all. Then, as Aubrey had hoped, fingers crossed so hard they hurt – one of the guards had the presence to leap into the lorry and start it.

  Aubrey didn’t blame the guards. Even he was impressed by the angry flaming giant, stick figure or not.

  The sound of the engine was better than any order to embark. The other Holmlanders flung themselves into the lorry, still firing wildly at the stick giant – which hadn’t moved – and then the lorry roared out of the gates.

  Von Stralick stood and dusted himself off. He flipped the safety catch on his revolver. ‘I could have managed all of them.’

  Aubrey ran a hand across his brow and let out a long, slow breath. The flaming giant collapsed. ‘I’m sure you could have, Hugo.’

  7

  While the main house was tantalising, Aubrey wanted to start their investigation in the ruins of the outbuildings. If, as he suspected, they’d been specially constructed for whatever project Dr Tremaine was pursuing – and destroyed now that this project was done – they might hold some important clues.

  Von Stralick found a rake in a potting shed. Aubrey relit one of the lanterns discarded by the terrified guardsmen and held it steady while von Stralick sifted through the ashes of the building that had been nearest to the wall.

  It didn’t take long before Aubrey decided that the fire following the explosion, at least, had been deliberate. ‘Do you smell that?’ he asked von Stralick.

  The Holmlander was using the rake to topple the remains of a long, metal bench. ‘I smell many things. What do you smell?’

  ‘Petrol.’ Aubrey kicked at some wooden panelling, then crouched next to it. He ran his finger along an uncharred section then held it up to his nose. ‘Can you think of any good reason for petrol to be splashed on walls?’

  Von Stralick snorted, which was response enough to indicate that he, too, could only think that the application of petrol to the walls of buildings was unlikely to be an attempt to brighten up the place.

  The use of a fire accelerant made Aubrey all the more curious as to what the buildings had formerly held. ‘Formerly’ was the key word here, for he would have expected to find more debris, more ordinary, everyday contents half-destroyed by the blast and blaze combination. The convoys of lorries had stripped the buildings quite effectively.

  Except…

  A glint caught Aubrey’s eye. He tilted his head, the better to see it, and another mirror-bright streak flashed near the first. Carefully, he raised his lantern and picked his way through the debris until he crouched and inspected what he’d found.

  It was a river of silver.

  ‘Hugo, can you come and use your rake here? Let’s see what we can uncover.’

  A few minutes work with the rake, assisted by some judicious kicking and shuffling, and Aubrey and von Stralick were able to stand back. Amid the ash and charred timber, a fine silver tracery stood out, many branched like a white tree in winter.

  ‘And what do we have here?’ von Stralick said softly. ‘Melted metal?’

  ‘That’s what it looks like.’ Aubrey scuffed at it with his boot. It came away easily, breaking into pieces. Gingerly, he picked up a fragment and was glad it had cooled.

  ‘How many metals are silver-coloured?’ von Stralick asked.

  ‘Most of them, apart from gold and copper.’

  ‘That narrows it down somewhat.’

  Aubrey dropped the fragment into a pocket, stepped over a pile of shattered window frames and made his way to the next hut. He scuffed about for a moment. ‘Whatever it is, it’s over here, too.’ He shook ash from his boot. If it actually were silver, what did that mean?

  He glanced up at the main house, which glowered back at him with flaming eyes, the windows reflecting the last of the fires.

  ‘Come on, Hugo,’ he said, holding up the lantern. ‘Let’s see if we can get into the main house.’

  Von Stralick twisted the rake in his hands. ‘Patience, Fitzwilliam, patience – an intelligence operative’s first lesson.’ He grunted. ‘Now, what do we have here?’

  Von Stralick pushed aside some ash, then he flipped the rake over and let the head drop. A hollow boom made him pause. ‘There you have it.’

  Aubrey directed the lantern light at the trapdoor von Stralick had found. ‘I should have known.’

  ‘That all is not as it meets the eye? That is an intelligence operative’s second lesson. A hidden trapdoor suggests that we have something worthwhile beneath it.’

  ‘How do we know it was hidden? It could have been prominent, in the middle of the floor.’

  Von Stralick jabbed with his rake at an offensively smouldering object off to the side of the trapdoor. ‘If you want something to be prominent, you do not put a big mat on top of it. If you do want something to be hidden, you put a big mat
on top of it.’

  ‘You make a good point, Hugo, if a little heavy-handedly.’

  Aubrey reached for the latch, but the metal was still hot. Von Stralick deftly used the rake to tip the door back. When it fell, Aubrey slashed a hand in front of his face in a feeble effort to keep ash and dust from choking him. He screwed up his eyes and, when he opened them again, he was confronted with a set of metal stairs.

  ‘You have the lantern,’ von Stralick said. ‘After you.’

  ‘You have your revolver and a rake. You should go first.’

  ‘This was Dr Tremaine’s estate. I think that your magic could be more useful than a revolver. Besides, I know you have this perverse need to be heroic.’

  ‘Hugo, you are too generous.’

  Aubrey stood at the top of the stairs and extended his magical awareness, hoping that his hesitation would be seen as sensible preparation rather than nervousness. Immediately, he was struck by a wave of magic coming from magical residue in the basement below. His magical awareness meant that he saw rising and falling pitch and he tasted pressure, which was an unsettling grey-green colour. Dozens of other sensations assailed him. He gritted his teeth, refusing to let the assault unsettle him but still uncertain of what it meant. It was like standing in front of a fire hose and trying to determine the shape of a specific drop of water. He had to get closer if he were to divine anything specific.

  Something that was a little more than apprehension and a little less than fear surfaced in his stomach. This was, as Hugo had pointed out, Dr Tremaine’s estate – and they were intruders. While they had remained unscathed so far, it didn’t mean that they were safe. All it meant was that they hadn’t run into the serious dangers yet.

  If cowardice were surrendering to fear and heroism prevailing over it, Aubrey wondered what trying to distract fear by whistling in an erratic manner was.

  ‘Is that wise?’ von Stralick said. ‘Unless it’s part of a magical ritual, I’d advise you stop it.’

  Aubrey took a deep breath, and marched down the stairs with his lantern before him.

  The stairs led to a heavy steel door, riveted and reminiscent of the doors Aubrey had seen in submersibles. With Hugo at his back, Aubrey unlatched it, stretched out his arm and shone the lantern inside.

  The basement space was large, extending far beyond the range of the lantern. It was low-ceilinged, a barrier of earth separating it from the building above and from the effects of the explosion and fire.

  Having learned a thing or two about entering places that were potentially magically hostile, Aubrey stood just outside the basement and studied it as carefully as he could without actually setting foot inside.

  He was immediately taken by the cables that were slung along the walls. Thick bundles were wrapped at intervals with tarred rubber, looping around the perimeter of the room and criss-crossing the ceiling like gloomy Christmas decorations. He tried to estimate how much electrical power the basement would take.

  A few tables and chairs, a desk or two and a single filing cabinet were the mundane features of the room and wouldn’t be out of place in an office in Trinovant. The bays that were measured out along the walls, however, were anything but ordinary. For a moment, Aubrey searched for the plumbing fittings, for the bays looked like nothing as much as stalls for a row of shower baths. Each one was a yard or so in width, with a swinging louvred door that left plenty of room top and bottom. Many of the doors were ajar, to show that instead of brass plumbing fittings, these stalls had leather straps attached to the back wall.

  Aubrey had never given much credence to the belief that buildings could absorb the influence of deeds conducted within their confines but, for a moment, he was prepared to dust off that conclusion and re-examine it. This basement made him extremely uneasy, had him flicking his gaze from side to side, into corners, at shadows. It wasn’t just the magical residue, although the place was thick with it. He was certain that bad things had happened here.

  He glanced over his shoulder. Von Stralick was looking as troubled as Aubrey felt. He was gripping the rake and holding it in front of him like a weapon.

  ‘I’m going to have to step inside,’ Aubrey said, ‘if we’re going to learn anything more.’

  ‘Be my guest.’

  As soon as Aubrey’s foot touched the floor on the other side of the doorway, he plummeted through space.

  Even the shock of finding himself outside, in the night air, falling at a great rate, didn’t stop Aubrey – for a split second – being lost in admiration at the cleverness of the spell. He’d been immediately translated from the basement to a position off the edge of the cliff at the rear of the estate. For a normal burglar it would be a death plunge, but after a moment’s panic – in which he let go of the lantern – Aubrey was able to bring his rapid descent to a halt, thanks to his refined levitation spell. As he steadied himself, bobbing with one hand outstretched and touching the cliff face, he watched the lantern continue its long fall to the rocks below, where it splashed in a burst of burning oil.

  Aubrey bit his lip as his stomach lurched. Briefly, he wondered why an organ of digestion would react in such a way to narrowly escaping death like that, and then he consigned the question to the Unknowable Mysteries of the Universe file.

  The night was still, clouds hiding the stars. In the distance the lights of Bardenford twinkled and made the town look like a fairy kingdom. Like thistledown, Aubrey bobbed alongside the sheer granite immensity of the cliff until he was calmer, then he spoke the syllables to take him up again.

  He had the levitation spell so much to heart now that he only paid his ascent half a mind while the other half analysed what had just happened. Dr Tremaine must have left a compressed spell behind. With the right trigger, it would dispose of intruders without his having to worry about the efficiency of the guards.

  All of which implied that the rogue sorcerer perhaps hadn’t finished with this facility at all.

  Aubrey drifted over the lip of the cliff, where a stretch of lawn ran toward the house and the outbuildings. The grass was longish, which Aubrey attributed to the difficulty of finding volunteers to mow so close to the edge of such a precipitous drop.

  With solid ground underfoot and still pondering deeply, he hurried in the direction of the ruins, only to meet a wild-eyed von Stralick, who advanced on him, revolver at the ready.

  ‘Fitzwilliam!’ Von Stralick lowered the revolver. ‘Where did you go? What happened?’

  ‘Dr Tremaine left a nasty little spell behind. Clever, but nasty. I was shifted bodily off the edge of the cliff.’

  Von Stralick’s eyebrows shot up. ‘I’m glad you went first then.’

  The same thought had occurred to Aubrey. ‘Your revolver wouldn’t have been much use to you if you’d gone ahead.’

  Von Stralick squinted at it and thrust it into his belt. ‘Perhaps not.’ He laughed. ‘I am glad you yelled.’

  ‘I did?’

  ‘I heard you, so I ran out of the basement instead of following you into it.’

  On the way back to the basement, von Stralick found another lantern, and then picked up the rake he’d abandoned. He lit the lantern and hung it from the rake that he carried over his shoulder.

  ‘It is a light burden,’ he said carefully.

  Aubrey had to award him points for making a pun in a language that wasn’t his own, and he promised himself that he’d share it with Prince Albert, that most avid collector of puns.

  When Aubrey again found himself falling, wind whipping his hair, he was extremely impressed. Dr Tremaine had been careful in his warding, leaving two compressed spells to fling burglars off the cliff.

  After the third time, however, Aubrey began to fume.

  He found von Stralick sitting on the stairs leading to the basement. ‘Again?’ the Holmlander asked.

  ‘Again. But this time…’

  Aubrey held the doorframe and leaned inside while von Stralick poked the rake and lantern past him to provide illumination. What A
ubrey saw made him rock back so quickly that von Stralick had to juggle the rake to avoid losing the lantern.

  Just inside the door, in a neat row flush with the wall, was a line of a dozen or more metal cylinders, smaller cousins of ones that Aubrey had seen only too recently in Baron von Grolman’s golem-making facility.

  Aubrey’s curiosity immediately ordered him to leap inside and inspect the cylinders, to pull them apart until their nature was ascertained to the last detail. Accustomed as it was to getting its own way, when Aubrey didn’t immediately comply his curiosity went off and sulked, allowing him to proceed with more rational care.

  ‘Don’t set foot in there, Hugo, until I can work out what’s going on.’

  ‘Fitzwilliam, you will find me patience incarnate.’

  Aubrey extended his magical awareness and hissed. Each one of the cylinders held an identical clutch of spells. Not just similar, as would normally be the case in casting the same spell a number of times, but absolutely, manifestly identical.

  His curiosity roused from its sulking. It was as if this one datum, this one piece of information, was a particularly juicy-looking rabbit lobbed in front of a dog. This time, Aubrey couldn’t help but let his curiosity loose to chase it and see where it led.

  Could it be that Dr Tremaine had made great strides in efficient spell reproduction? Had he perfected a method of copying spells quickly and accurately? It fitted with other data Aubrey had been assembling – the machine-golem hybrids, the spells to control wounded soldiers, the enhanced coal that powered the golems. All of this was too much magic for one person, even Dr Tremaine – but Aubrey had difficulty thinking of Dr Tremaine recruiting and training other magicians to take over this burden of replicating spells.