Blaze of Glory

'Make yourself useful, George. We have to move the table and chairs out of the way. Then the rug.'

George grumbled, but soon the floor was clear. Aubrey studied it with a scowl. 'I really should be tidier,' he muttered.

'That awful scrawling? Looks as if someone gave a baby a packet of chalk.'

'It's the remains of the last focusing figure I drew here. I should have erased it better. I can't leave it as it is – it will interfere with the new one I need to draw.'

Focusing figures were the refinement of the pentacles and mystical symbols from the dark days of magic. They were a diagrammatic representation of some aspects of the spell being cast – mostly the restraining and limiting factors. They tended to be combinations of geometrical shapes, and Aubrey found the clarity and precision of their drawing aided his concentration.

He took out his pocket handkerchief and got down on his hands and knees. With George's cheerful supervision, he scrubbed at the parquetry until every trace of previous figures was gone.

He sat back on his haunches. 'How's that?' he asked George.

George was leaning against the wall, arms folded on his chest. He cocked his head. 'You missed a tiny bit near your right knee. Apart from that, you've done enough to suggest you'll be a wonderful charlady one day. Outstanding, using a silk cleaning cloth like that.'

Aubrey stood and dusted off his knees. 'Admirable though charladies are, my ambitions go a bit further.'

George dropped his arms. 'I say, old man, this isn't about ambition again, is it?'

'George, don't you have dreams, goals? There's so much I want to do that the hardest thing is to decide what to try first.'

'I'll wager that you've been specifically told not to do this,' George said gloomily.

'Sorry to disappoint you, but I haven't.' Not that I'd let that stop me if it was important enough. 'Mr Ellwood simply said that this was a forbidden area of magic.'

'Aha!'

'But he didn't say we weren't allowed to explore it.'

George looked unconvinced. 'Explore what?'

Aubrey had hoped to avoid telling George this, but his friend had left him no choice. 'Death magic.'

George's eyes went wide. 'You're joking.'

'It's perfectly safe, George. I just want to do some simple experimenting, and then document my findings. There's been nothing done in this area for ages!'

'With good reason, I'd say.'

Aubrey began to pace the length of the narrow room, his hands behind his back. 'But it's so crucial! Death magic impinges on the whole question of the Nature of Magic. How does humanity create this remarkable magical force? At what point do we stop creating it? It's our very place in the universe that's at stake here!'

'And if you can find something useful, you'll make a name for yourself?'

'I never said I wasn't ambitious, George.'

'And you can do this? Safely?'

'It's all under control,' Aubrey said, waving a hand. 'This isn't some primitive hocus-pocus we're talking about. This is a rational, empirical exploration of natural forces. I can do it.'

'Aubrey, you think you can do anything.'

Aubrey didn't even answer this. He stood in the middle of the room, mapping out in his mind the complex diagram he was about to draw. At the same time, he was rehearsing the elements in the spell, making sure he had them all memorised.

The outcome Aubrey wanted for this spell was quite simple. The laws for death magic had never been quantified and clearly expressed. Throughout history, it was an area of magic only attempted by the mad, the desperate or the depraved. The results – when recorded – had been horrible beyond belief. Sacrifice, massacre and insanity stalked the murky history of death magic, with practitioners who survived being shunned. And yet, because it dealt with the threshold between being and unbeing, death magic held the prospect of uncovering much – perhaps the fundamental nature of magic itself.

Aubrey wanted to see if he could establish some parameters for safely dealing with death magic. If he could determine limiting factors, ways to shield an experimenter probing this area, it could be of incalculable worth. He could turn death magic into life magic and open a whole new field for research.

He put his hands together and prepared to cast a spell that would momentarily put him in a state of death.

When he'd first contemplated this, he was quick to discard it as foolishly dangerous. Then, after the notion refused to go away, he decided that people suffered worse every day. Hearts stopped and were restarted, with no ill effects. People were discovered not breathing and revived none the worse for wear. Eventually he decided that, although some risk was part of this procedure, it was reduced by careful preparation. Aubrey was proposing a spell which would stop his life for an instant, much less than a heartbeat, much less than the time between one tick of the clock and the next, and then he would resume his normal state. He would be stepping across from life to death and back again in a perfectly controlled way. A well-thought-out, careful, rational procedure from which he'd eliminated the danger.

His heart began to pound, apparently not convinced.

He got down on his hands and knees again and began drawing the first of the many-sided figures on the floor. It was soothing, familiar work, but – despite his confidence – he felt his nervousness increasing. His throat grew dry, but his palms were sweaty and the chalk became slippery in his fingers.

Somewhere between tracing the second and third interlocking figures, Aubrey's stomach began to knot. It was like the feeling he had before a performance on stage, but it gripped more fiercely. He winced.

'You all right?' George asked from his vantage point in the corner of the room nearest the door.

'Fine, fine,' Aubrey muttered, but vowed to hide any further discomfort from his friend.

When he had finished, Aubrey stood and dusted his hands. He slipped the tiny nubbin of chalk into his pocket. 'Done.'

George frowned. 'Looks like some of those mathematical curvy things . . .'

'Parabolas?'

'They're the ones. You've got a bunch of them trying to dance with some sort of lopsided stars. And you've thrown in a few twisty rings for good measure. Very nice.'

'Thanks, George. I'll see if I can get you a spot as one of the judges for the next school Art Show.' He drew a breath and tried to slow his racing heart. It felt as if it was knocking on his ribcage and trying to get out. 'Now, keep your distance and whatever happens, don't interfere. It's all perfectly safe, but the focusing figure will confine the effects of the spell, regardless.'

'That's reassuring,' George muttered. 'Perfectly safe, you say?'

'Perfectly.'

'As safe as the time you made that set of wings out of cardboard?'

'That was a long time ago. Now, I need some quiet. I must concentrate.'

Most of the language for the spell was derived from ancient Sumerian, but the difficult middle section was a variation of an Akkadian spell he'd found recorded in an ancient text lent to him by a friend of the family. The Akkadian spell was mostly nonsense, but Aubrey had been excited by what he saw as some extremely useful, but throat-straining, elements which he couldn't wait to link with two fragments of Latin spells that dealt with death magic in an oblique way. He'd found these Latin spells misfiled under 'Hearth Magic' in the National Library on one of his frequent research trips to the city.