Heart of Gold (23 page)

'Ah!' Saltin exclaimed. 'The Beast! That is why I have
come!'

'You know this thing?' George asked.

'We are old foes.' The airman took off his cap and
jacket. He folded them on a bale of paper and rolled up
his sleeves. 'Let us face the enemy together, as our treaty
demands, Gallia and Albion as allies!'

Saltin pressed their supervisor into service. He sulked
while he cranked the machine, but his shoulders were
well suited to the task. He tolerated no nonsense from
the printing press, either. A snarl and kick from him did
wonders, where Aubrey's careful adjustments had failed.

It took another hour, but eventually they stood back,
exhausted, with a working printing press.

Gabriel came back alone, with paper-wrapped lunch,
in time to see handbills emerging from the maw of the
Beast. They were clear, well trimmed and presentable.
Gabriel gave the lunch parcels to Saltin and slapped
Aubrey on the back. 'You are one of us, now. Free
Marchmaine!'

'Free Marchmaine,' Aubrey and George echoed.

Gabriel's other comrade slipped in, slamming the door
behind him and cursing.

'Dumont!' Gabriel said. 'What is it?'

He spat on the floor. 'A soulless one. In the street.'

Aubrey wiped his hands together. His knuckles hurt.
'Are the police on their way?'

It was Gabriel's turn to curse. 'We don't want the
police poking around. Shut down the press until they're
gone.'

'But we've just got started,' Saltin protested.

'You can start again when they've gone.'

Aubrey frowned. Saltin had said that the Marchmaine
movement wasn't illegal. What had Gabriel to hide from
the police?

Aubrey pushed a bale of paper close to the brick wall,
then made himself comfortable. Comfort, he'd discovered,
was a relative thing. At this time and in this
place, it was a damp brick wall to lean against and a
bundle of coarse paper to sit on. Blissful.

Gabriel, Saltin and the two taciturn offsiders went into
one of the back rooms. George arranged four bales of
paper into a couch and stretched out on them with his
hands behind his head.

Aubrey straightened, startled. The tang of magic had
drifted into the room, like salt breeze from the ocean. A
low rumble shook the walls, a deep growling sound.
George came to his feet and the four others emerged
from the back room. Aubrey went to the window. He
peered through a gap in the boards but could see nothing
in the street.

'What was that?' Gabriel demanded

'I thought it was a convoy of lorries,' George said.

By craning his neck, Aubrey could see four or five
police officers at the end of the street. They were on foot,
and moving away up the slight hill.

'It looks quiet out there.' He moved away from the
window and dusted his hands together.

'The floor shook,' Saltin said. 'Like an earthquake.'

'An earthquake in Lutetia?' Gabriel snorted. 'Rubbish.'

If it wasn't an earthquake
, Aubrey thought,
then what
was it?

Voices and the noise of a motor drew him back to the
window. 'More police,' he said, after peering through the
crack.

'Probably reinforcements to help with the soulless
ones,' Gabriel. 'Fools, they are.'

Aubrey remembered Inspector Paul's words. 'The
police have scaled down their work on the soulless ones.
I don't think –'

He was interrupted by thumping on the door.

'It's open,' George shouted, but the door crashed aside.
A pair of husky constables lurched in, followed by a
grizzled police captain with a patch over one eye. He
stood at the top of the stairs, taking in the scene, while a
squad of junior officers milled behind him.

He and Gabriel locked eyes. Gabriel snarled, the police
captain smiled. 'Arrest them all,' the captain ordered.

Aubrey didn't want to tax himself more than he
needed. Unfortunately, he had little choice.

He seized a sheaf of handbills and flung them toward
the police. He snapped out a spell he'd perfected for card
games, an application of the Law of Patterns. He hoped
his quick estimation of the size of handbills was accurate
enough, then he added a short, but difficult spell that
used the Law of Origins. He was relying on the fact that
paper had once been wood and with the right spell it
could regain an aspect of that material. In this case, with
the emphasis on the correct element, he was looking for
the
strength
of wood.

In flight, the papers scattered and whirled, but then –
seized by the power of the first spell – assumed an orderly
grid, four feet or so across and twice that high. It dropped
and blocked the bottom of the stairs, then changed
colour from off-white to a dull brown, while expanding
until it was a yard thick.

The first of the police constables descending the stairs
ran right into the wooden wall and staggered back. Those
behind ran into them and soon the staircase was a tangled
mass of constabulary, curses and oaths.

'This way!' Gabriel barked while the police captain
tried to sort out the chaos.

A
UBREY STRUGGLED TO KEEP UP WITH
G
ABRIEL AS HE LED
them over the brick fence and down a fetid lane. The
effort of casting the spells had sapped him and without
George's helping hand he would have been in danger of
falling behind and being lost.

Barrels of what looked like offcuts from a tannery
were leaking into the drain that ran along the middle of
the lane and – judging from the expression on George's
face – Aubrey was glad that his sense of smell had diminished.

How long can I keep this up?
he thought as they
squeezed through a gap in a wooden fence. On the other
side was an abandoned coachbuilder's yard, taken over by
waist-high grass and thistles.
How close to the edge am I?

Gabriel pushed through a sheet-metal door in a
building that should have been condemned years ago. It
was dark and damp inside, but Gabriel didn't hesitate. He
guided them through the empty space as confidently as a
judge, directly to a set of stairs. The stairs took them to a
first floor that was as crowded as the ground floor was
empty. Crates and boxes stretched from wall to wall,
a solid mass, but again Gabriel didn't hesitate. He leapt
onto a small box, then stepped up onto a large wooden
cabinet, then onto a massive crate that could have held
an omnibus. From here, Gabriel forged along an uneven
way that took them to a window, soaped over and
opaque.

The window screeched open and a short drop brought
them to the roof of the building next door. After a quick
crossing, down the fire escape and then through a yard
full of horses, wagons and broken bottles, Gabriel called
a stop behind an immense, rusty furnace, abandoned
behind a foundry that was a tumult of pounding metal.
On the other side of the foundry was a hole in the
ground that smoked and reeked.

While a curious dog watched, Aubrey leaned against a
vent door and tried to catch his breath. 'I thought you
said that the Marchmaine movement was legal?' he said
to Saltin.

The airman was woebegone. 'It is.'

Gabriel seemed preoccupied, but shrugged, frowning.
'It was just a matter of time. All governments become
oppressive when threatened.'

Aubrey frowned. The words lacked conviction.
Something else seemed to be on Gabriel's mind.

'But what about liberty? What about freedom for all?'
Saltin said. 'The ideals of the revolution, what happened
to them?'

'Pragmatism overrules ideals,' Gabriel said absently. 'It
is time for us to go underground.' He sized up Aubrey.
'I did not realise you had magic. It will be useful to our
struggle.'

'I have a little,' Aubrey lied. 'It's not very reliable.'

'It worked,' Gabriel said. 'Go now. Wait for our call.'

Aubrey translated for George, who frowned. 'Won't
the police be waiting for us?'

'It was dark,' Gabriel said in Albionish. 'We were not
recognised, I'm sure. Go about your normal business.
They won't suspect Albionites, not even the grandson of
the Steel Duke.'

Gabriel spoke with more certainty than Aubrey felt,
but he nodded. This could be the chance he needed to
get to the university.

Aubrey and George walked through the Maltarre
district with its garment manufacturers and Aubrey
wondered at Gabriel's farewell. He was used to being
noted as the son of the Albion Prime Minister, but noone
had connected him with his grandfather for years.

He was snapped out of his ponderings by a short, sharp
earth tremor, then another. He glanced at George, who
shrugged and pointed at a series of poorly printed posters
on the wall of a telephone exchange. They seemed to be
calling for action, but it was hard to determine of what
sort and against whom, so bad was the text.

They trudged on. Aubrey's hands and feet felt as if they
enormous weights attached to them, and he had to shake
his head, often, to keep his eyes open. Blood seeped
through his bandaged hand, and the unhealed wound
throbbed.

Magic use was accelerating his decline. It drained him,
much faster than mere physical effort did.
Not that there
was much alternative
, he thought.

With gloomy fascination, Aubrey probed his teeth
with his tongue and found that several at the back were
loose. His gums were tender, as well.

'Where to, old man?' George asked.

'The university. Now.'

T
HEY SKIRTED THE UNIVERSITY, KEEPING TO THE
Boulevard of Wisdom and its busy cafés, before entering
the campus via the medieval gate that led to the
Faculty of Magic.

The doors to the tower were locked. George pounded
on them and they were eventually greeted by the
bemused face of Maurice, the porter.

'Maurice,' Aubrey said after he'd introduced George,
'has anyone come for Monsieur Bernard's things?'

Maurice ushered them inside and closed the door
behind them. 'No, sir. I've packed them up, but the boxes
are waiting in his workshop.' He wrung his hands.
'Dreadful times, sir. Dreadful times.'

'Yes,' Aubrey said, while George sauntered around the
space, inspecting the staircase. 'Terrible.' Then he paused.
'What sort of dreadful times, Maurice?'

The porter patted the nearest wall. 'It's this building,
sir. It's moving.'

'Moving?'

'It leans, it does – questing, like a hound sniffing the
breeze.'

Maurice's simile was unexpectedly vivid, and Aubrey
looked upward toward the turret. He could see how a
building like this must have absorbed some magic, after
having been exposed to centuries of it. With magic
embedded in its brickwork, strange things could happen.
'How can you tell?'

'It tilts, straining in one direction for a while, then
another. Tiny, it is, but I notice.' Maurice scratched his
head. 'What it's after, though, that's the question.'

'It would have to be something of great magical
power.' The theft of the Heart of Gold had been noticed
by the Magisterium magicians in Albion. Aubrey
wondered if it mightn't be sensed by a questing tower.
'Do you mind if I examine Monsieur Bernard's workshop?
I'm interested in his work.'

Maurice shrugged, his face downcast. 'I'm glad
someone is. A good man was Monsieur Bernard.'

Maurice had been thorough in his cleaning up. The
benches of Bernard's workshop were empty, the floor
scrubbed, the bookshelves cleared. It could have been a
vacant studio waiting for a tenant.

George strolled to the window. 'Good view of the
Library wall from here. Fine-looking bricks.'

'I'm sure Monsieur Bernard appreciated them.' Aubrey
went to the entry vestibule and examined the tea chests
and boxes that Maurice had stacked there. 'Lend a hand,
would you, George?'

Together, they wrestled a number of boxes into the
workshop. While George opened them with a pry bar he
begged from Maurice, Aubrey took Bernard's notebook
from his jacket pocket and flipped through the pages,
looking for something relevant. Anything describing the
time Bernard had experimented with death magic . . .
Not weather magic, not the Law of Transformations, not
post-Babylonian syllabic utterances . . . He paused, as
something odd caught his eye.
There.

Opposite a page of notes on limiting diagrams,
Bernard had written a page in a peculiar black ink. It had
a double line border around it and the number 7 in the
bottom left-hand corner.

It was a shopping list – eggs, milk, bread and wine –
and so out of place that Aubrey's curiosity ran around
in circles, with bells on. A shopping list had no place in
the middle of a magician's notebook. It had to be a code.

He ran his finger over the words and felt the texture of
magic.

A speck of light danced over the page, and he looked
up. The glass in the light fitting glinted back at him. He
stared at its brass base, where it joined the ceiling.
He moved to one side, then climbed on top of the workbench
to get a better view, despite his aching knees.

'What are you doing?' George asked.

'The light fitting is on a ratchet.'

George peered upward. 'I'll take your word for it. But
why would anyone do that?'

'To turn it.' Aubrey frowned. 'Can you see a rod?
Something long enough to reach? It'll have a fitting on
the end to slot into the base.'

George crossed to the window. 'Like this?'

George held up a long pole with a metal hook on the
end, obviously meant to open the topmost windows of
the workshop, but quite easily having another use.
Aubrey took the pole and stood directly underneath the
light fitting. 'Let's assume that the door is twelve o'clock.'

'By all means.' George put his hands in the pockets of
his jacket. 'I assume you'll clarify that cryptic statement
when you're ready.'

'I'm glad you used the word "cryptic".' Aubrey
grimaced. He needed to fit the hook into the hole at the
base of the light fitting. The pole wobbled, the hook slid,
but finally he fitted it home. 'Because I suspect we're
dealing with steganography here.'

'I'm sure we are. Go on.'

'Codes and ciphers are close cousins, ways to encrypt
messages in an effort to make sure no-one else reads
them. Unless you know the encryption key.' Aubrey's
arms were aching from holding them up for so long.
He gritted his teeth, flexed his forearms and the light
fitting shifted. A click at a time, it ratcheted until he'd
moved the slot to the seven o'clock position. 'Here.' He
gave George the pole and he climbed down from the
bench. Even that small physical exertion had him panting.
'Steganography,' George prompted.

Aubrey looked up. If he placed the notebook in the
middle of the workbench it should be right underneath
that slightly grey-coloured mirror. He arranged it carefully,
open at the page with the shopping list. 'Can you
turn on the light, please, George?'

'In the middle of the day?' George protested, but he
was already on the way to the switch by the door. 'There.'

And there
, Aubrey thought. The mysterious list on the
page vanished. In its place were lines of minute, but
perfectly readable, writing.

'Steganography is the science of hidden writing,'
Aubrey said. 'If an enemy doesn't know that a message is
there, it can slip past undetected. In ancient times it was
said that a king shaved the head of a slave and tattooed a
message on it. When the hair grew back he sent the slave
across the border, where the recipient of the message
shaved the slave's head again and read the message.'

'Not much fun being a slave.' George examined the
journal. 'Bernard used steganography to hide his notes?'

'His notes on death magic.'

George grunted. 'Death magic? You're not going to
mess around with that again, are you?'

Aubrey sighed. 'Anything else is simply fiddling at the
edges.'

George closed Bernard's journal. He scowled. 'No.'

'No?'

'You can't, old man. Not after what happened last
time.' He looked distressed. 'It's wrong, Aubrey. Death
magic is
wrong
.'

'I don't have much choice,' he said in a small voice,
moved by his friend's concern.
'I know, I know,' George said. He sighed. 'I simply
thought that someone should tell you that this is a very bad
idea. You need to be reminded, every now and then, that
you're not infallible.' George gave Aubrey a sharp glance.
'Especially since you're going to go ahead, regardless.'

Aubrey started to object, but George held up a hand.
'I want you to get well again, old man. If this is the only
way to do it, let's meet it head on.'

'Tally-ho,' Aubrey murmured.

George shook his head and gave Bernard's journal
back to Aubrey. 'What does it say?'

'There's a lot here. I'll need time to read it.'

It took nearly an hour and Aubrey's head was spinning
when he finished. Bernard had done more than skirt the
edges of death magic. His experiments had probed some
of the darkest areas of the deadly art. His notes were
concise and well ordered, recording the effects of spells in
accurate, clear terms, but a sense of horror lay underneath
every word he wrote.

Aubrey felt sorry for the man. Working alone, forgotten,
doing his best to keep alive the traditions of his
faculty, it must have been a hard life. Based on his journal,
Aubrey thought that Bernard could have been a feted
savant if he lived in Albion. Universities would have
clamoured for his services. Other magicians would have
been eager to work with him. Yet here, in Lutetia, he had
died a solitary death, unknown and unheralded.

Aubrey hoped that he could honour Bernard by using
his work to good effect. It was a practical, useful homage.

He straightened and massaged the back of his neck.
Near the window, George had stretched out on the bare
floor, his new straw boater on his chest, his hands behind
his head, sleeping the sleep of the untroubled. With some
regret, he nudged his friend awake with his toe.

George shook himself and yawned. 'Dashed rude of
you, old man. I was having a splendid dream. I was with
this very charming –'

Aubrey gave a half-hearted smile. 'Enough. Keep your
dreams to yourself.'

'Happy to.' George stood and brushed himself off. 'Are
you ready?'

'Accoutrements, George. I need your help to find
some spell paraphernalia.'

'Is that the sort of stuff you sneer at and call claptrap?'

'I don't sneer, do I?'

'Not often. Occasionally.'

Aubrey made a mental note to avoid sneering; he'd
never liked it. He took a deep breath. 'Bernard was keen
on using candles, braziers and the like. My feeling is that
they're just scene setting and don't really contribute to a
spell's effects, but Bernard felt more comfortable using
them. Perhaps they helped focus his attention.'

'Sounds like they can't hurt, anyway.'

'Consider it a touch of theatre.'

It was a measure of Aubrey's nervousness that he was
willing to contemplate using such ornaments. If he'd felt
more confident, he would have jettisoned such stuff as
superstitious nonsense.

George peered into the box they'd already opened.
'What exactly are we looking for?'

'We need four green candles. Twisted ones, preferably,
but even Bernard admitted that was a nicety.'

George grunted. 'You're in luck. This box is full of
'em. Give me a minute and I see if I can find four twisted
green candles.'

Aubrey took the pry bar to the vestibule and levered
up the top of another box. When he examined the
contents, his admiration for Bernard grew. The Lutetian
magician may have been a recluse and an eccentric, but
he had been a careful craftsman. Every casket, jar and
bottle in the crate was clearly marked in Bernard's
distinctive, spiky handwriting. They showed that his
intellect roamed not just across magical fields, but also
into natural history and science. Aubrey sorted through
fossils, geological specimens and magical curios from the
past. He was surprised to see a slim case marked 'unicorn
horn', but then saw Bernard's wry note: 'actually carved
ivory'. He smiled to see that Bernard had an interest in
collecting such fakes. He found two Philosopher's
Stones, a Phoenix feather, three magic wands, two sacks
with 'magic beans' written on them (one empty) and a
stringless harp.

At the bottom of the crate he found what he was
looking for: a tripod and brass brazier plus a roll of shimmering,
golden cloth.

Aubrey couldn't imagine how the penniless magician
had come by such a thing. He ran his hand over the
fabric, feeling its cool, supple resilience, and he knew it
was true cloth of gold, made entirely of fibres of the
precious metal. It was worth a fortune, and the fact that
Bernard had not sold it suggested something about its
importance.

George loomed in the doorway. 'Found what you
need?'

'Here.' Aubrey thrust the brazier on him. 'You have the
candles?'

'Four: green and twisted as a corkscrew.'

'Excellent.' Aubrey hefted the cloth of gold and tried
to quell his rising nervousness. 'Now, to work.'

Aubrey hunted for the restraining diagram he'd used
to trap the mindless Bernard, but couldn't find it thanks
to Maurice's careful scrubbing. This did mean, however,
that he had a clear field to work with.

On hands and knees, he used white chalk to inscribe
the simple ring that Bernard's notes had suggested.
Aubrey was careful with the dimensions, so that the result
was more oval than round. When he finished, he lay on
his back. 'I'm not poking out, am I?'

'No, but you don't have much room. The line's about
an inch away from the top of your head.' George craned
his neck. 'The same gap's between your feet and the line
– about an inch.'

'I don't need much room. I won't be moving around.'

The narrow confines were an intentional refinement
on Aubrey's part. Bernard's notes hadn't specified dimensions
of the restraining diagram, but Aubrey thought it
might help to limit the extent of the spell, and thus
intensify it.

Aubrey stood, careful not to smudge the chalk line.
'Now. Candles. Two on my left side, two on my right.
Outside the ring.' He heard how clipped his voice was
and tried to relax.

'Shall do. The brazier?'

'About half a yard away from my feet. Outside the ring.'

'Of course.' George tapped his chin. 'You'll be wanting
something burning in the brazier?'

Aubrey groaned. 'Bernard's notes said he always had
charcoal smouldering while he experimented with death
magic. He said it helped soothe his soul.'

'Probably helped to warm his toes.' George shook his
head. 'I didn't see any charcoal lying around. I'll ask
Maurice if he has some.'

While waiting for George, Aubrey inspected the
diagram, flexing his hands in an effort to keep them from
trembling.

Aubrey was afraid. This wasn't the stealthy, tiptoe
pickpocket fear, the fear that crept up from behind and
stroked with ice-cold fingers; it was the fear that overwhelmed
in a frontal assault – crushing, teeth-chattering,
bowel-loosening fear.

He bit his lip, hard, and the sharp pain – added to the
many discomforts that he endured – was like a dash of
cold water in his face. He threw off the fear, took a deep
breath and examined the cloth of gold.