So he inspected the residue with as much coolness as he could summon, glad for the hand-steadying, gut-settling confidence that comes from having done something before.
He leaned forward, slowly. Close up, he decided, it didn’t look so frightening. Even when he closed his eyes, the tumult that assailed him was rather less disconcerting now that he knew that it emanated from something that looked as if it would be at home in an unsanitary bathroom.
Time to clean you up. A faint, dissenting thought flitted through his mind, something about famous last words, but he ignored it.
He’d been rehearsing the quelling spell as he approached, recalling it and taking the opportunity to polish some of the roughness, the understandable awkward phrasing that had come from trying to formulate an intricate spell while bound by copper wire to a possibly living mechanical construction in the face of a magical flame that was threatening to wipe out the largest city in the world.
He tightened the elements for distance and duration, estimating the area of effect by eye. He rearranged the order of the elements that controlled the negation, the anti-magic heart of the spell, to speed up its efficacy. No sense in letting it rampage any longer than it needed to.
He rolled the long, complex string of elements backward and forward, settling them in his mind, ready to go. He adjusted his stance, squarely facing the belligerent patch of dross. Then he gathered himself and began.
The spell came to him as easily as a well-rehearsed speech on opening night, each element falling into place with the sort of solid certainty that was the mark of a well-crafted piece of magic. He was pleased. His focus, his concentration was absolute – the rest of the world had gone away. He was in the realm of magic, shaping and wielding the power that humanity had struggled with since time immemorial. It was the Great Test, taking the mystical energy that arose from the interaction of human consciousness with the universe itself and using language to control and direct it.
He was doing magic.
A smile came to his lips as, only a third of the way through the spell, the patch of residue quivered, as if struck. He kept his focus, working on the Principle of Negation, taking the magic, appraising it, and applying the equal and opposite to make it disappear.
About halfway through the spell, however, he wished he could spare the effort to wipe his brow. He’d begun to sweat. Things weren’t going as smoothly any more.
The problem was the shifting nature of the residue. The unpredictable coming together of many cast-off spell fragments had created something that was so raw that it defied categorising. Aubrey was finding it hard to pin down, to construct the precise opposite needed to negate it. The residue was a many-headed beast, a hydra made of slippery magic. When he’d clamped down on one aspect of it, another oozed out on the other side, malignant and ready to do mischief.
But he’d coped with this sort of thing before, he reassured himself. The flame under Trinovant had been much larger and much more menacing. This was puny in comparison.
It had, however, been strong enough to shatter souls across Fisherberg.
Aubrey gritted his teeth and ploughed on. He spat out the elements one after the other and was grimly satisfied to see that the residue was losing its shape and colour. And was it smaller?
Shortly, he was certain that was the case. The residue was shrinking. While he continued chanting, it contracted unevenly, a jelly having scoops taken out of its edges, definitely growing smaller. No longer the size of a dining table, it had shrunk to the size of a sideboard. Even as he watched, it dwindled until it was only as large as a hall table, but before he could compare its diminishing with any other items of household furniture it shrank quickly, drawing in on itself until it was a fist-sized circle just as he finished with his signature element on the spell.
Then, in a desperate last effort, it lashed at him.
A solid extrusion jumped from the remains of the residue, an arm as thick as a tree trunk. It struck Aubrey in the chest, hard, with a blow that was both magical and physical.
Dimly, he felt himself toppling backward. Then it was a numb, painful, cracking sensation that was probably the back of his head – but it was distant and almost unimportant. Most of his being was taken up, absorbed, by an assault on his senses.
The world was a whirlwind of experience where colours, aromas, textures, sounds and flavours were shredded, combined, recombined, layered and mixed together in a chaos that defied shape and meaning. He was being twisted, contorted, disassembled, remade.
Some time passed before he understood that his eyes were open, and that he was looking up at the charred and splintered ceiling of the sub-basement.
I’ve fallen over, he thought. His head throbbed. His chest hurt.
Hands on his shoulders. They weren’t his, he decided, because he could see his in his lap as he was propped up.
Bone grated in his chest and he hissed, mumbling a smothered oath.
‘Broken ribs?’ George said brightly.
Aubrey nodded, which was a bad idea. He swore again, which was marginally better.
‘Take your jacket off,’ Caroline snapped.
He considered this. ‘Can’t.’
‘I see.’ She came into his vision. She was holding her mother-of-pearl-handled knife. ‘Don’t move,’ she said unnecessarily.
She disappeared. He felt a tugging from behind. It hurt, but not too badly.
‘Lean forward,’ Caroline’s voice said. He couldn’t see her and it took a few seconds to realise that she was doing something. Something to his jacket?
He leaned. This time, it hurt. His jacket separated and fell apart into his lap. He considered protesting about the damage, but decided to save his energy. And his protesting. He might need it later.
More tugging. His necktie fell and joined his suit remnants in his lap. He pondered it philosophically. He didn’t like mulberry anyway.
The sound of rending cloth came to him from somewhere nearby. His shirt became two half shirts. ‘Tear it into strips, George,’ Caroline said. She scrooched around and put her face close to Aubrey’s. He tried to smile, but his mouth was wobbly. ‘We’re going to strap those ribs,’ she said. ‘They’ll still hurt but we’ll be able to get you out of here. You’ll have to take off that vest, too.’ Then she stared, wide-eyed, at his chest. ‘What happened to your cage thingy?’
Aubrey looked down. The action made him grind his teeth but what he saw nearly made him forget about it.
The Beccaria Cage was gone. Only a vivid red mark on his chest showed where it had been.
‘Where’s Sylvia?’ Aubrey asked. The trunk of the tree he was sitting against was rough. He tried to make himself comfortable. It was a mistake, as his ribs told him in no uncertain terms, but it was balanced by the unaccustomed pleasure of having Caroline’s arm around his shoulder supporting him. It meant she was kneeling, close and warm. As he studied the ruins of the Tremaine house, he could feel her breathing.
Madame Zelinka looked at Fromm. ‘Sylvia?’
Aubrey went to answer but was forced to bite down on the grunt of pain. Caroline, who looked fetching in her black fighting suit, put a hand on his chest. ‘Sylvia was the name of the ghost we were looking for. She lived here.’
Fromm touched his nose and looked at the ruins speculatively. ‘She has no presence here any more. Your magic has dispelled the eruption, cast out the ghost.’