Moment of Truth (24 page)

You looked so comfortable where you were that I didn't want to disturb you. I'll report in the morning.

Aubrey studied the note, gave it time to sink in, then shuffled off in search of coffee. With a steaming mug in hand, and his body recovering from his uncomfortable sleep, he went to find Caroline – only to see that she was sleeping the sleep of the exhausted, still in her clothes, curled up on her straw mattress, breathing softly and slowly.

He gazed at her for a while, then a while longer. It was only the thought of her waking and finding him midgaze that made him leave, reluctantly.

Half an hour later, the kite-making cottage industry was in full swing. George sawed light bamboo into appropriate lengths, Sophie cut brown paper into the required sizes, and Aubrey puzzled over how he was going to achieve the effect he needed.

It was a vague idea to begin with, but one that he believed had promise. It drew on a number of different magical principles, synthesising them in the sort of way that appealed to him. He needed to use the Law of Amplification, and Intensification, and Sympathy, and Contiguity ... he ticked them off as he fiddled with the tiny mirrors.

‘It's all a matter of care,' he said, raising his voice over the sound of George's sawing. ‘Can you pass me that hammer, please, Sophie?'

‘Take these first, Sophie,' George said and passed several lengths of bamboo across the bench.

‘Care is vital in any magical enterprise,' Aubrey continued. ‘One element loosely employed can wreak havoc.' He paused. Why was havoc the only thing that was ever wreaked? Could you wreak boredom, for instance? What about wreaking envy?

‘Have you finished with that glue pot, Aubrey?' George asked.

‘Mmm?' Aubrey blinked, remembering where he was. He stared at the glue pot on the bench nearby. A brush stuck out of it like a flag at the North Pole. ‘I wasn't using it.'

‘I know. It was a roundabout way of asking you to shove it over here because we have our hands full.'

‘Oh. There you go.'

‘Care, Aubrey,' Sophie prompted. ‘You were – how do you say, George? – droning on about it.'

‘Droning on?'

‘In an interesting way, old man.'

‘Of course.' Aubrey hefted the hammer. ‘As I was saying, care is vital for finely functioning magic. Care in preparation, care in execution, care in monitoring. If you care to care, care will care for you, as Professor O'Donnell always said.'

‘Was that Ding-Dong O'Donnell, the world's most baffling lecturer?'

‘Where did you hear about Ding-Dong O'Donnell?'

‘You told me.'

Aubrey spied an empty ammunition box lying in a corner. With a bound, he hauled it up from the floor by one of the handles. ‘Just the thing.' The box was made of sturdy wood, with metal clasps and hinges. With it, he wouldn't need the hammer, so he dropped it on the nearest bench.

‘Just the thing for what, Aubrey?' Sophie asked, and Aubrey was glad for her interest. His decision to involve her was working. Left alone, brooding about the fate of her brother would only have been all too easy. Here, she was doing something practical; her natural intelligence and curiosity were asserting themselves.

Aubrey brought the ammunition box close to the bench and trapped it there, level with the surface, with a hip. ‘Just the thing for this.'

With a flourish, he swept the pile of mirrors into the box with a crash. Seizing the handles with both hands, he lifted the box onto the bench and shut the lid. While Sophie watched, aghast, he fastened the latches.

‘But the mirrors,' she said. ‘They are broken.'

‘Not broken enough.'

Aubrey shook the box from side to side, up and down, then side to side again. ‘I should have thrown the hammer in,' he said, panting.

‘I have never seen magic done like this before,' Sophie said.

‘Aubrey has a special way about him,' George said. ‘You'll get used to it.'

Something Sophie said made Aubrey pause. He stopped his vigorous shaking and dropped the box on the bench. ‘You've never seen magic done like this before?'

She shook her head. ‘No. It has always been more formal than this.'

‘More formal? You've actually seen magic done before?'

Sophie looked at George. ‘Sophie did some magical studies, old man. Quite talented, she was.'

‘George.' She dimpled. ‘It was years ago.'

‘You have some magical talent?' Aubrey said.

‘I did, but now?' She shrugged. ‘I lost interest.'

It baffled Aubrey, but many people who showed early signs of magical ability turned away from it later. It may have been the discipline needed, or the debilitating effects that spell casting sometimes had, but only a few had the necessary combination of ability, determination and perseverance that resulted in competent magicianhood.

‘You never lose it,' Aubrey said. ‘It's part of you forever. With some practice, you'd get it all back.'

She looked thoughtful. ‘I would?'

‘Of course. It's like picking up a golf club after years away from the game. You'd be rusty at first, and it would take time, but you'd be hitting it sweetly before you know it.'

‘Then tell me, Aubrey, what you are doing, while you do it. Who knows? I could be useful.'

‘You already are, my gem,' George assured her.

‘Thank you, George, but I want to do what I can.' She put her hands together decisively. ‘So, Aubrey, magic is not always formal?'

‘Ah, yes,' Aubrey said. ‘Sometimes it is. It depends on how you go about it.'

Aubrey knew that his approach to magic was rather different from the norm. Most professors and scholars conducted their magic as if they were holding a funeral service. He'd seen it many times since he'd been at the university and sometimes it made him want to shout out loud. He
always
found it thrilling to be doing magic, and when it was treated with such boring solemnity it made him frustrated to the extreme.

He opened the lid of the box and peeped inside. The mirrors had been reduced to shards and powder. They glinted back at him. Not small enough, though. He tossed in the hammer, then banged the lid down again.

A few more minutes of noise and sweat, and Aubrey had had enough. He looked inside. ‘Perfect,' he said, with some relief.

‘Now,' he said to Sophie. They hadn't paused in their cutting, tying and gluing, but she was paying attention. ‘What I need is something to make a suspension.'

George lashed two lengths of bamboo together. ‘I think I know what you're getting at. It'll need to be thick if you want to make mirror paint.'

‘And clear, of course.'

Sophie pointed at Aubrey with her scissors. ‘But this is impossible. The mirror pieces will not all be facing the same way. They will be random, no?'

‘Ordinarily, yes,' Aubrey said. ‘Notebook, notebook, notebook ... Ah, there it is.' He flipped through it until he found fresh pages. ‘You see, Sophie, the Law of Constituent Parts maintains that when something is fragmented, each fragment retains characteristics of the whole. In this case, I intend to emphasise their
alignment.
In the original mirrors, they were all facing one way – shiny side one way, dull side the other. With some spellcraft, I can get the pieces to reassert that alignment and all should be well.'

‘And that is all?'

‘Not exactly, no.' Aubrey heard George snort, but went on, ignoring such commentary. ‘Once we have nice, shiny kites, I intend to apply a spell that combines the Law of Completeness, the Law of Inverse Attenuation, the Law of Amplification and ... several other laws to make the kites receptive to images. After that, I will use a spell relying on the Law of Sympathy and the Law of Entanglement.' He paused for effect. ‘So that a mirror we have here will mirror the images that the kite is capturing and enhancing.'

‘This is what they teach you at your university?'

‘Er, not exactly. This is something of my own.'

‘Something you've done before?'

‘Not in its entirety.'

George snorted again. ‘Not to any extent at all, am I right, old man?'

‘That may be the case.' Aubrey grinned. ‘But the principle is sound, don't you think?'

‘You convinced me,' George said, ‘but you could read a spell out of a Christmas cracker and I'd be impressed.'

Sophie looked from George to Aubrey and back again. ‘So he is making this up?'

‘As he goes along,' George said. ‘Not to worry. He usually makes it work. In the end.' George rubbed his chin and studied the array of finished kites: two large box kites and three diamond kites, all with their lacquer drying. ‘I take it then, old man, you want to fly the kites from our roof and come as close as possible to the battle lines?'

‘I was getting around to that.'

‘You realise, of course, that the height and distance of a kite is dependent on its lifting power?'

Aubrey affected an airy wave. ‘So obvious, I would have thought, as not to require noting.'

‘And the weight it has to lift includes the string? Which gets heavier the longer it is?'

Aubrey bounced through the implications of this. ‘String isn't exactly what I had in mind.'

‘You didn't? Pray tell, what were you planning to use instead of string? Something that is lighter, but stronger, I hope.'

‘Find me a spider, would you?'

With a roll of destickied spider silk, thanks to the Law of Contiguity and an inverted application of the Law of Cohesion, they were nearly ready.

The challenge of working with such limited ingredients gave Aubrey great enjoyment, but it was tempered by the constant, intrusive memory of the events of the previous day. His concentration was interrupted a number of times by flashes where he saw the bridge erupt, and memories of the half-glimpsed, broken train plunging to its doom. He recalled the panic among the onlookers, the valiant but vain efforts to help. Because of this, he twice bungled his thread-making spell, which meant that George and Sophie had to hunt up more cobwebs in the dusty recesses of the factory, a duty they didn't seem to mind. Sophie's attentiveness and perceptive questions were helpful and also kept Aubrey on his game. Nothing like explaining something to an intelligent audience to help one's own thought processes.

While they were off hunting up the spider silk – or whatever they were doing – an unhappy Caroline appeared.

‘Why didn't you wake me?'

Because you looked so comfortable where you were,
he only prevented himself from saying with a huge effort. ‘Sorry. I thought you were awake.'

She glanced at him, then frowned, then went to speak, rethought, frowned again, then shook her head. ‘That doesn't make any sense at all.'

No, but it's giving you time to calm down.
‘It doesn't? I beg your pardon. We're busy kite-making here.'

‘Kite-making?' She narrowed her eyes. ‘You're deliberately throwing up non sequiturs, aren't you?'

Yes.
‘No, honestly, we're making kites. I had an idea about intelligence gathering. Let me explain.'

He had to give Caroline credit. She gradually put aside her annoyance at not being wakened to listen to his plan for the kites – and she was good enough to be impressed.

She picked up one of the spare bamboo struts and examined it. ‘So we'll have some idea of what's happening at the battlefront, without too much risk?'

‘If it works.'

‘I'm sure it will. Most of your lunatic schemes seem to, one way or another.'

‘That's me. Aubrey Fitzwilliam: purveyor of lunatic schemes to the rich and famous.'

They caught and held gazes for a moment – a still heartbound moment – and then Caroline waved the bamboo strut and the moment was gone. ‘Don't you want to know about the message to the Directorate?'

‘The Directorate?' Aubrey's putty-like brain coughed and wheezed into action. ‘Of course, the message to the Directorate.'

‘I sent it, but I'm not happy. It took a long time – there was much to report – and I have the feeling that it may have been intercepted.'

Aubrey shrugged. ‘It shouldn't matter. That code is unbreakable.'

‘Famous last words.' She rolled her shoulders and stretched. ‘But it's not the code-breaking that I'm most worried about. It's triangulation.'

Aubrey grimaced. ‘Of course. The longer you're broadcasting, the easier it is for the Holmlanders to get a fix on our position.'

‘If they're looking for us. I may simply be overreacting.' ‘In this case, I'd most definitely prefer to overreact than underreact. Underreacting is likely to get us some unwelcome visitors hammering on the door.'

In the middle of the tiredness and tension, Aubrey realised that he was very comfortable with Caroline. Then, with a start, he wondered how that happened. Being with Caroline had always been exhilarating, but he would never have claimed it was comfortable. Comfortable suggested old slippers and cardigans, and he could never imagine Caroline in a cardigan.