Aubrey straightened. That explained why so many of them were looking stunned. They hadn’t known that they had magical ability!
Magical ability wasn’t common, any more than a talent for higher mathematics or concert-level music. Hard work and training could make the most of natural ability, but little could be achieved if a person was devoid of it in the first place. Some schools tested for magical ability, but many people never had the chance to find out if they possessed the raw skill. Aubrey often compared it to someone who lived all his life in the desert. He may potentially be the world’s best swimmer, but would never, ever know it.
To hear that the Department had a device to detect incipient magical ability, though, that was news indeed. He added it to his list of things to be investigated.
Craddock cleared his throat and Aubrey was jolted from his cogitation to find the commander looking straight at him. ‘Others, particularly the ladies here,’ Craddock continued, ‘were sought out for known talents and skills. I’m afraid the already depleted magical departments of the universities will be under-staffed for some time. I won’t apologise for that, for this is a time of crisis. Albion needs you.’
Aubrey rubbed his chin. The already depleted magical departments of the universities? He’d heard rumours that various positions in magical faculties were currently unfilled, with a number of prominent researchers taking sabbaticals while others had simply disappeared. Dark mutterings in the cloisters of Greythorn suggested numerous possibilities, each more outlandish than the last.
‘All of you need one thing,’ Craddock said after a pause. ‘Training. For the next month you will live here at Darnleigh House. All of you will receive physical training. In addition, each of you will receive specialised training according to your skills. Any questions?’
One tall youngster put up his hand and Aubrey had to admire his pluck. ‘When will we see service, sir?’ he asked in a voice that didn’t quaver too much.
Craddock looked down for a moment. When he looked up, he said, ‘Before you know it.’
Aubrey was one of the few close enough to hear what Craddock added under his breath. ‘And before you’re ready, most likely.’
Nine
One month. Four weeks. Thirty days. Seven hundred and twenty hours. Lying on his bunk in the dormitory, Aubrey thought he had an aching muscle or a bruise for every one of those hours.
He had been looking forward to the training because he thought it could give him another chance to investigate the copy of the Rashid Stone. Or perhaps he’d have an opportunity to work with magical suppression, or to inspect the golem-making machine he’d captured and sent back from Holmland.
Instead, with the other Department recruits, he became accustomed to being ferried most days via motorbus to a Directorate facility an hour away. On the edge of the city to the east, near where the Harwell River came down through the hills, in essence, it was a combination parade ground, firing range and hell on earth.
Soon, Aubrey felt as if he’d been sent back to his cadet training at Stonelea School – or perhaps the school’s notorious Physical Education classes. Except that instead of mildly sadistic masters propelling him over vaulting horses, he had instructors made of some bulletproof material whose main delight, in all weather, was shouting.
So much shouting. Shouting while he ran over broken ground. Shouting while he scrambled under barbed wire. Shouting while he swung from ropes. Shouting while he crawled through mud. Shouting while he assembled and disassembled a variety of firearms and then used them to blast away at targets that were eye-strainingly far-off and – sometimes – startlingly close.
Hand-to-hand combat produced the most bruises and, unsurprisingly, as he was flung through the air again by another shouting instructor, it reminded him of Caroline. Her skills in unarmed combat came from early instruction with a variety of oriental masters, friends of her father. When Aubrey picked himself up from the mats, time after time, he knew that a handful of sessions wasn’t going to bring him up to Caroline’s standard, but he was willing to do his best. He had a new appreciation for her, as if he needed any extra grounds for such a thing.
The shouting, thankfully, disappeared during explosives training. The instructors here were just as intense – older men, often with a disturbing number of missing fingers – and somehow managed to make their whispers just as effective as the bellowing of the others.
He was thankful that his explosives training was brief, a mere introduction to the discipline, and was sorry for the recruits who showed aptitude for this sort of work. They were whisked off for more intensive training, the prospect of which made Aubrey shudder.
Another relatively quiet session came from a mildfaced, older man who was the instructor in disguises. When he explained how to change appearances subtly and with a minimum of artifice, Aubrey was embarrassed at his own earlier efforts. With a deft application of tiny strokes around the eyes and some tightening wax inside the cheeks, an effect was created that would have taken Aubrey hours and laborious amounts of makeup. In hindsight, his Tommy Sparks alter-ego was embarrassingly crude.
Aubrey excelled in the communications training. He picked up the telegraphic code easily, tapping away with alacrity, never confusing T and P. His earlier experimenting with ciphers held him in good stead. While other recruits around him spent much time on head-scratching, he knew the theory and practice of one-time pads and was able to encipher and decipher at a rate that impressed the instructors. They whisked him off for advanced training and introduced him to the encoding machine, a recent advance that sped up the process and, if intercepted, made messages even harder to crack. After some familiarisation, Aubrey was able to punch keys and substitute the geared wheels with relentless speed.
Magical training was organised with clinical efficiency. Grim-faced operatives circulated through rooms full of recruits sitting at desks, trying to perform a basic light spell given to them on slips of light green paper. When Aubrey conjured up a shining globe within seconds, one that rotated slowly on its axis thanks to a minor embellishment he’d added, he was herded into a smaller room, with others who had passed through this coarse sieve. A handful were astonished, never having suspected that they had magical talent, and Aubrey wondered where they’d end up. What part of a military service entering a war needed untrained magic users? Could the Department spare the personnel to train them?
One frail youth winced throughout the spell-casting efforts. Even though he stumbled through them, he was treated with some respect by the instructors, and after he’d fumbled a straightforward, if lengthy, Patterning spell, he was taken aside and then escorted elsewhere.
Aubrey wasn’t consciously eavesdropping. He simply found the spell undemanding and when the instructors were speaking softly with the frail youth, he couldn’t help overhearing one fascinating phrase: remote sensing.
Aubrey knew that the Department had a long-established cohort of remote sensers, sensitive magicians whose job was to monitor for magical disturbances. The best could detect major magic being undertaken thousands of miles away.
The remote sensing team operated constantly, day and night, and it was always looking to build its numbers of operatives.
It looked as if it now had one more to add to its ranks.
After a day of successfully transforming, heating, inverting, manipulating, translating, concealing and amplifying, Aubrey had begun to get bored. The grim-faced operatives weren’t chatty and they wouldn’t let him read the notes they were taking. They refused to be impressed by Aubrey’s enhancements, and he wondered if showing initiative in this area was a good thing or a bad thing...