Or something even more dire, he thought, judging from what he’d glimpsed of the activities of Dr Tremaine’s retreat in the weeks since they’d arrived at their destination.
Dr Tremaine’s stronghold was a local landmark. From its position right on the edge of an impressive granite cliff, it had a view over the mountains and the woods that surrounded it, then the open expanses of farmland. The city of Bardenford was perhaps twenty miles away, clearly seen by day or by night. The retreat wasn’t cut off, however. A tarmac road had been rammed through the forest, switching backward and forward up the face of the mountain until it arrived at the gatehouse. The road was wide enough for supply lorries and comfortable enough for town cars.
Over the time of Aubrey’s enforced vigil, Dr Tremaine had come and gone, sometimes several times in one day, mostly driving himself in a bright red, open-topped roadster. Aubrey had come to recognise the scream of the motor as it hurtled along the road in a way no other driver dared.
When Dr Tremaine was present, prominent Holmlanders often visited. As well as the Chancellor, many uniformed figures were brought to the door, the amount of brass and the number of medals on their chests signalling that these men were important and probably bullet-proof, thanks to the amount of metal they wore.
After several of these meetings, Dr Tremaine had leaped into his motorcar and shot down the road, and Aubrey had been wracked with frustration. Had Dr Tremaine some afterthought that couldn’t wait? Was he going somewhere else with news of what he’d just learned? Or was he looking for a rendezvous with one or more of the Holmlanders, a roadside meeting that they might not welcome?
Aubrey wondered if the man slept at all. He was a whirlwind, a force of nature in his machinations to turn the formidable estate into a base and a site for magical operations of an as-yet-unspecified nature. The tell-tale wafts of magic that prickled Aubrey’s magical senses had been alternately tantalising, puzzling and extremely, extremely worrying.
Within the walls of the estate were a number of buildings. From the thick cables and the unceasing whine, one clearly housed an electrical generator. Another sported a tall chimney and could be a foundry or furnace of some kind.
The purpose of the scattering of other structures – clearly newer than the main house, and perhaps temporary – was uncertain, but Aubrey wouldn’t have minded wagering that at least one was a laboratory. The others? Living quarters, perhaps? Workshops? Prisons?
Cut off as they were, the lack of information frustrated Aubrey. He was desperate to know what was going on. What about the siege of Divodorum? What about the progress of the wider war? And what about his friends?
He worried about Caroline and the way she’d farewelled him after the Stalsfrieden mission. He examined the incident from a dozen different points of view, a hundred different points of view. He probed it, dissected it, weighed and analysed it. Then he abandoned any effort at a scientific approach and he began to alternate between wild optimism and unutterable pessimism, both states being totally resistant to evidence. With little effort, he was able to construe Caroline’s action as pity, as irritation, even as forgetfulness, before he veered around and started thinking it might have been a sign of actual affection. This being the conclusion he hoped for most, it was naturally the one he was quickest to discount.
Long ago he’d accepted that his mission – his personal mission to win Caroline – had gone by the board. Matters of the heart were out of his hands, overtaken by matters military and political. Out of my hands? He nearly laughed. As if matters of the heart had ever been in his hands.
He had to derive satisfaction from properly undertaking his intelligence gathering task, and he took some grim pleasure when he saw something that indicated the level of success of his sabotage at Baron von Grolman’s factory.
This noteworthy observation had occurred a week ago, when a lorry had made a canvas-shrouded delivery. When it unloaded, Aubrey had been instantly on his feet.
Three Holmland soldiers were needed to manhandle the ominous metal shape from the back of the lorry. When they stood it upright on a trolley, it towered over them. It took all their effort, but the monstrous golem-machine hybrid was eventually wheeled into one of the temporary buildings to the north of the main house.
Aubrey had hoped that his efforts to destroy the hideous creations back in Stalsfrieden had been successful. The contagion spell embedded in the enhanced coal that was the vital, energising element in the creatures would infect golem after golem. Besides, if the spell hadn’t been successful, Dr Tremaine would have had hundreds of ghastly mechanised soldiers ready to storm through Allied lines and lead a Holmland assault on Gallia, and he was sure that they would have heard of such a triumph while crossing Holmland.
But why had a single mechanised golem been brought to Dr Tremaine’s retreat?
Movement below had caught Aubrey’s eye and when he had the binoculars focused again, Dr Tremaine was entering the building where the mechanised golem had been taken.
A tense hour later, Dr Tremaine burst out of the back doors of the building, his arms full of metalwork. He shouldered through one of the gates at the rear of the estate. He strode to the edge of the cliff and, with one disgusted motion, flung the metal wide. The pieces fell in a glittering arc, but Aubrey had time to see a boxlike head and what was unmistakably a compact chimney.
Since leaving Caroline and George, Aubrey had had few moments of pleasure, but he smiled as he noted Tremaine’s actions in a notebook – adding to the pages and pages of observations, all in fine, approved Directorate form.
The most alarming development he’d seen, however, had been the magicians who had been brought to the stronghold. Aubrey had found it hard to believe the number of well-known experts who’d been bundled into the outbuildings, though it did explain the disappearances of prominent magical people over the previous few months. He’d recognised Maud Connolly, Parvo Ahonen, Charles Beecher and a score or more prominent theoreticians and scholars. None of them showed any delight at being there, unless manacles and gags had suddenly become signs of honour rather than devices of restraint.
This influx of magical practitioners and theoreticians was disturbing, especially when Aubrey added Professor Mansfield and Lanka Ravi to their numbers. At Baron von Grolman’s factory, Dr Tremaine had mentioned that he had these two luminaries in his keeping, which suggested that he was assembling a formidable array of magical talent, but to what end?
One of the first magical theoreticians to arrive at the complex had been Professor Bromhead, Trismegistus chair of magic at the University of Greythorn for twenty years. A few days after he’d been dragged from a motorcar, the aged savant had appeared in a walled garden to the west of the main house. He’d wandered about, attended by an armed guard. Aubrey hadn’t recognised him at first and he had focused on the lonely figure simply because of a strange device attached to his face. It was a cross between a muzzle, a helmet and a clamp, a metal and wire contraption enveloping the man’s head, but particularly strong around his mouth and jaw. After some careful focusing of the binoculars, Aubrey was finally able to make out who it was and, grimly, he understood that at least part of the function of the device was to stop Professor Bromhead from speaking – and to stop him from casting a spell.
Each of the savants who arrived – some in the middle of the night – appeared later in the walled garden, guarded and wearing the same cage, confirming their identity as magicians, even the ones who Aubrey didn’t know by sight. They were allowed this exercise time for an hour every second day, but otherwise they were hidden away in the clutch of outbuildings to the north of the sprawling two-storey hunting lodge that was the main house.