Heart of Gold

'What about a bear trap?' George suggested.

'We want the Heart of Gold,' Aubrey said, 'not the transformed foot soldiers.'

'Some sort of magical sniffer?' George tried again.

'Good idea. Work on the details and get back to me.'

'The brick dust,' Caroline asked. 'Is it as depleted as the fragments?'

'Even more so, I'm afraid.'

'There is no way of recharging it? Giving it more power?'

'Not in any practical sense, especially since Maurice won't let us harm his building.'

Something niggled at Aubrey, like an itch between the shoulder blades. He tried to bring it to light but it slipped away.

'Let me see if I have this right,' Caroline said. 'The tower is impregnated with magic, so much so that it is attuned to great sources of magic.'

'Correct.' Aubrey almost had it again, but it still eluded him.

'So you noted the way the tower leaned and then cross-referenced it against the yearning of the brick fragments.'

'Yes.' Aubrey stopped dead. 'That's it.'

'I knew you'd think of something, old man,' George said. 'He always does,' he added to Caroline.

'If we can't use the bricks to find the Heart of Gold, we'll use the tower.'

'Oh,' George said. 'We tried that.'

'We found direction via the tower, but I think we can find the actual location using the tower.' He appealed to them. 'I'm sure it will work.'

George and Caroline shared a rueful glance. George shrugged. 'He's full of ideas, you know.'

'So I've noticed,' Caroline said. 'Let's hope this is a good one.'

Twenty

MAURICE STARED. 'YOU WANT TO FLOAT THE FACULTY of Magic into the air and let it drift across the city like a balloon?'

'Don't worry,' Aubrey said with his best attempt at an encouraging smile, 'it'll be perfectly safe.'

They were standing in the tiny room that served as the caretaker's office. Aubrey was impressed, for Maurice's office was immaculate, from the small desk with invoices arranged in baskets, to the hooks on the walls with a variety of dustcoats.

'You are crazy.' Maurice looked at Caroline and George. 'He is crazy, isn't he?' he said in Albionish.

'He may seem like that,' George agreed. 'At times. Often. But he isn't really, despite appearances.'

'That's true, Maurice,' said Caroline. 'His schemes may sound bizarre, but he's not mad, as such.'

Aubrey glanced at his friends, who both seemed to be stifling smiles, then he turned back to Maurice. 'I'm sure you've heard of more outlandish plans than this, in your time as caretaker of the faculty.'

Maurice scratched his chin. 'There's madness and then there's madness, I suppose.'

'Come now, Maurice,' Caroline said. 'You were worried that the faculty had been forgotten. This is a grand opportunity to make it renowned again. Doesn't the old faculty deserve such a thing instead of mouldering away forgotten? Imagine the fame if the Faculty of Magic is responsible for finding the missing Heart of Gold.'

'The university will be grateful,' George said. 'It might put some funds into the old place.'

Maurice was hopeful. 'The tower. It won't be damaged?'

Aubrey clapped the caretaker on the shoulder. 'Trust me.'

ONE BENEFIT OF CONSTRUCTING A SPELL TO LEVITATE A building that had once contained a Faculty of Magic was that there was no shortage of precedent. While Aubrey walked around the interior, circling the great iron staircase, Maurice regaled him with previous experiments in the area of weight negation.

'Monsieur Pascal, he was a wag,' the caretaker cackled. 'Made the bust of the Dean float around the professor's quadrangle for an hour before it fell into the fountain. And then there was Madame Carillon. She came up with a way to cause anything made of antimony to shoot straight up in the air, like a skyrocket.'

'Must have been useful,' George chipped in and Aubrey was grateful. He needed to concentrate and Maurice's happy reminiscing was hard to ignore.

George and Caroline took Maurice aside and gave him an audience for his stories. Aubrey continued to circle the staircase, hands behind his back, humming tunelessly as he tried to piece together a spell to lift the whole tower.

His idea was simple. The tower was yearning for the Heart of Gold. If it could be unmoored, set free of the earth, it would be able to achieve its goal.

All I have to do is wrench a thousand-year-old tower out of the ground and set it drifting across the city, he thought. Shouldn't be too hard.

At first he considered the Law of Opposites. Perhaps magically linking the tower with a pile of lead and then circumscribing a weight inversion would produce the desired effect. He shook his head. It would be too hard to get the control he needed to vary the lift. Besides, he didn't have a large pile of lead nearby.

He stopped pacing and looked up at the light filtering down from the turret. In some ways, it was similar to the problems that dirigible engineers and captains had to face. Too much helium in the gasbags and an airship would rocket to the stratosphere. Too little and it would never leave the ground. Balance was the essential principle, so that the airship would be just a little lighter than the air around it. Then it would rise like a soap bubble, not like a rock hurled from a volcano.

Balance. He rubbed his hands together, hard. It was all a matter of balance. He needed a spell that would not only cancel the weight of the tower, but also be adaptable enough to handle the changing density of the air they would travel through.

He kneaded his forehead with a knuckle, trying to think.

He remembered reading about ancient sorcerers in the east and their attempts to construct bamboo aircraft for warfare. These fantastic constructions in the shapes of dragons were equipped with gunpowder bombs, but were never able to lift far from the ground, despite the sorcerers' best efforts. The most successful only rose to head height before flipping over and crashing to the ground.

Flipping. His face cleared. Perhaps he'd been thinking about the problem in entirely the wrong way. The great seventeenth-century scientist-magician Sir Isaac Ayscough declared that weight was indistinguishable from falling. In effect, the weight of the tower was as if the tower was trying to fall toward the centre of the earth. If Aubrey could reverse the direction of that falling, the building would – in effect – fall upwards. The challenge would be to control the rate of that falling, so that the tower would float easily and safely.

A reversal spell was what he needed. He chewed his lip. He would have to be very careful. It wouldn't do to reverse aspects or qualities such as height, or permanence, or age, although it may be interesting to see how the tower looked when it was first built. Reversing such qualities would require an enormous application of magic. The resulting state would be very unstable, even with tightly circumscribed variables of location, intensity and duration.