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, he saw Dr Tremaine striding across from the main house and entering the building where the mechanised golem had been taken.
A tense hour later, Dr Tremaine had shouldered through one of the gates at the rear of the main building, his arms full of metalwork. He strode to the edge of the cliff and, with one disgusted motion, flung the pieces wide. They fell in a glittering arc, but Aubrey had time to see a boxlike head and what was unmistakably a stubby chimney.
Aubrey was relieved. To judge by Dr Tremaine’s displeasure, it appeared as if Aubrey’s spell had worked. The rogue sorcerer had little patience with anything that didn’t live up to his expectations. Having failed a test, the golem suffered the consequences.
In between tending to von Stralick and working on the raft of interlocking spells that he hoped would achieve his goal, more than once his mind had drifted to Caroline and the way she’d farewelled him after the Stalsfrieden mission. He’d examined it from a dozen different points of view, a hundred different points of view. He’d probed it, dissected it, weighed and analysed it. Then he’d 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 actions as pity, as irritation, even as forgetfulness, before he’d veer around and start thinking they might be signs of actual affection. This being the conclusion he hoped for most, it was naturally the one he was quickest to discount.
Of course, 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 his hands? He had to laugh at that, without much humour. As if matters of the heart were ever in his hands.
Wearily Aubrey put aside the spellcraft notebook. He rubbed his eyes, glanced at von Stralick, then at Dr Tremaine’s retreat. Even at this time of night, it was alive with lights and activity. He reached for the surveillance notebook, checked his watch and made an entry, then flipped back through the pages of observations he’d made, just in case he could communicate them to the Directorate.
And just in case your spells don’t work, a traitorous voice whispered at the back of his mind.
He lingered over the entries for the people who he’d seen brought to the stronghold. Aubrey had found it hard to believe the number of well-known magicians who were bundled into one of the outbuildings. He recognised Maud Connolly, Parvo Ahonen, Charles Beecher and a score or more other prominent theoreticians and scholars. None of them showed any signs of delight at being there, unless manacles and gags had suddenly become fashion items rather than devices of restraint.
This influx of magical practitioners and theoreticians was alarming, especially when Aubrey added Professor Mansfield and Lanka Ravi to their numbers. Dr Tremaine had mentioned that he had these two luminaries in his keeping, which meant that he was assembling a formidable array of magical talent, but to what end? Aubrey couldn’t imagine many of them – the Albionites and Gallians, most obviously – cooperating with the ex-Sorcerer Royal. Was he simply removing them from the possibility of helping the allied cause?
It did explain the disappearances of prominent magical people over the previous few months, and Aubrey’s record keeping could help the analysts who pondered these things. More intelligence, more information, pooled together, might throw up a conclusion.
Aubrey had even seen Professor Bromhead, Trismegistus chair of magic at the University of Greythorn for twenty years, when he was first brought to the complex, struggling and kicking. A few days later, Aubrey had seen him in a walled garden to the west of the complex. He’d been wandering about, attended by an armed guard. Aubrey hadn’t recognised Bromhead 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 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. Over the next weeks, they were taken on this exercise time for an hour every second day, but otherwise they were hidden away in the clutch of outbuildings to the east of the sprawling two-storey hunting lodge.
Over the month 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, all of the Army High Command and the Navy Board were present two nights ago, only leaving well after midnight. Two hours later, Dr Tremaine had leaped into his roadster and shot down the road after them.
At times, Aubrey wondered if the man slept at all.
If Aubrey didn’t understand what was happening in the retreat, he at least knew something – that Dr Tremaine used the formidable estate as 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 were enough to let him know that.
Aubrey lifted von Stralick’s head and held the canteen to his lips. Water dribbled out of his mouth, but Aubrey thought he swallowed a little. He sighed at the prospect of the water wasted, knowing he’d have to gather more, spending hours holding the canteen to the rock crevices to catch the remnants of the frequent rain that swept across the heights. When he was so close to finalising the construction of his spells, he hated losing time like that.
The weather was trying. In this northern part of Holmland, summer had hurried off the stage and autumn had well and truly taken its place. The nights had become decidedly chilly, the rain more frequent, the days noticeably shorter. None of this helped von Stralick’s condition.
Aubrey studied von Stralick’s face. The spy’s teeth were bared as he shivered, and Aubrey decided he had no choice but to risk a gentle heat spell.
He’d been avoiding magic. With Dr Tremaine so close, he didn’t want to do anything to alert the rogue sorcerer to their presence, not before he was ready to implement the spells he’d spent so much time over. With von Stralick this ill, however, it seemed as if he had little choice.
He composed himself and reworked a basic Thermal Magic spell, adjusting the parameters for location and dimension to encompass von Stralick’s wasted frame. Aubrey tugged his filthy jacket around him as he took care with the intensity variable, too, to provide a gentle warmth rather than a roasting heat.
Von Stralick’s shivering faded as the spell began to work. Aubrey nodded and ran a hand through his hair – hair that had long forgotten its military cut and was starting to resemble a shaggy pelt. He was remotely glad that the only human being in close proximity was insensible, for he was sure he smelled dreadful. If he looked anything like von Stralick’s red-eyed, grimy, dishevelled appearance, he was ready to apply for a position as understudy to the Wild Man of Borneo.