Inside the package was a coil of compressed weather magic. And unlike the weather magic spell that Aubrey had encountered in Albion, this was a perfectly constructed, expertly compressed magical object, a perfect example in a fiendishly difficult area. The weather spell in Albion had erupted prematurely, and Dr Tremaine had mocked Rokeby-Taylor for it. This one was an example of how to do it right.
He opened his eyes. The sunburst of magical power disappeared and he was once again looking at a nondescript brown paper parcel.
He rubbed his hands together slowly, trying to stem a rising tide of panic.
He’d learned who had constructed the spell – and he was determined that it wouldn’t be the last thing he learned. The spell was beautifully refined as well as being tightly controlled. It wasn’t the sledgehammer approach of an entire thunderstorm. It took a single aspect of a storm and concentrated it, singling it out and intensifying it, winding it up and packing it tightly, then meshing a timing component among the compression layers so that it would erupt at the appropriate time.
Lightning. A dozen or more individual lightning bolts had been twisted together and packed into a brown paper parcel that was about to give way.
But even with this imminent danger, Aubrey’s curiosity wouldn’t give up. He probed a little further and was puzzled to uncover a number of complex limiting elements in the spell. If he was interpreting correctly, this was an intricately shaped spell. When released, the lightning bolts would erupt solely in a vertical plane.
He looked up. The bulk of the clocktower soared overhead – in the direct line that the unbound lightning bolts would follow.
The clocktower would be blasted. Destroyed, almost certainly, with some damage to the Academy Hall itself – but this spell wasn’t intended to slaughter the assembly inside. It would be noisy and highly destructive, but not the lethal weapon that it had appeared at first.
Then what was it for?
Aubrey slapped himself on the forehead. The spell was a sower of discord. The people inside were Holmland’s most important, most influential. If they experienced, first hand, an attack that would no doubt be blamed on Holmland’s enemies, they would be galvanised behind the Chancellor and his plans.
So I have another reason to stop it, Aubrey thought with a slight trembling in his knees, apart from a desire not to be blown apart myself.
He took a deep breath and shook himself, as if he could dislodge the fear that was doing its best to take hold of him. He locked his knees, the better to stop them trembling, then relaxed them.
It’s simple, really, he thought. All he had to do was either reinforce the compression, delay the release of the compression, or render the tightly-packed lightning inert.
I’m spoiled for choices. He looked along the length of the rear of the Academy Hall, but he was still alone. No help within earshot, no police constable, no convenient corps of genius magicians, no-one.
It was up to him.
Tinkering with a compression spell that had already been set was a delicate affair, somewhat akin to shaving a tiger, especially if that tiger had particularly sensitive skin. He couldn’t use magic suppression – no magic was actually in action yet. The compression spell and the timing spell were inert, passive magic that would release the lightning in an instant. He could try casting the suppression spells as soon as the spells let go, but they needed time to work and he was sure the lightning wasn’t about to wait around.
He gnawed his lip. He knew that a theoretical approach existed. He’d read about it in a biography of Harland James, a Caledonian magician who died a horrible – and quite spectacular – death. The trouble was that James’s theoretical approach was the cause of his demise and, sensibly, no-one had ever tried it again.
The principle was sound, though. Cast another spell that would latch onto the end of the existing spell. The new spell would contain variables that would alter the effects of the original spell, extending the time before the release of a timing spell, for instance. Naturally, casting a spell to attach to a spell that had already been cast some time ago meant including some sort of temporal inversion constant. In other words, the tricky little appending spell had to send itself back in time to grab onto the compression spell at the moment of its utterance. And in this case, it had to avoid all notice by the original spell caster and blend itself seamlessly, doing its good work unseen and undetected.
All in all, it struck Aubrey as about as simple as teaching a goldfish calculus. On the other hand, the alternative was being crisped by an angry lightning bolt, so he didn’t have much to lose.
While his body went through the physical symptoms of fear – churning stomach, dry mouth, propensity for his feet to want to take the rest of him well away from this undeniable source of danger – he concentrated on constructing a taut, well-defined spell and not on imagining the results of a suddenly uncompressed lightning storm. Not knowing when the compression spell was due to release added a certain urgency to his deliberations, but he needed to do it right. If he didn’t, he was likely to trigger the compression spell and release the lightning himself. In fact, he realised, there was a number of ways for him to come to a messy, charcoaled end here, and only one way not to.
He had to cast a perfect spell.
Duration was simple – he wanted to add a few days to the release of the lightning, enough to allow for safe disposal of the package. Range, dimensions, intensity, all these factors were easy to put into place. The tricky part was the temporal inversion component.
He had to define the temporal inversion so that, once the spell was cast, it would effectively disappear, fold itself back into time and attach itself to the compression. He could use the signature element from the compression spell – Tremaine’s signature – splice it into his spell so that the inverted spell would be able to track the compression spell to its source, the same way a bloodhound would use a scrap of cloth from a burglar to track the villain to his den. Straightforward, in a rather twisty way.
Aubrey opted for Sumerian. He was comfortable with it and its circumscribed vocabulary left little room for ambiguity, which was always helpful when time elements were concerned.
He ran through the spell twice, then a third time, before readying himself to pronounce it aloud.
He paused for a moment. The lane was silent. The hubbub from inside the hall was a far-off drone, business, diplomacy and simple human interaction going on oblivious to the imminent disaster that was taking place not far away. Aubrey spared a moment to smile wryly over how much that was like all of human history, then he pressed his hands together.
A few mildly curious pigeons looked down from the roof below. Aubrey decided they’d have to take their chances. He began.
The elements marched from his mouth like well-drilled soldiers. It was a long spell, as he’d spared no detail in trying to get it right. Dimensionality, duration, range of effect all fell into place one after the other and his hopes rose. He felt confident in his delivery and his final, signature element was firm and steady.
The package tilted.
Aubrey took a step back and waited to be blasted out of existence.
Then he patted himself. He glanced at the pigeons, who hadn’t moved and were giving him a look of ‘What was that all about?’, decided he was still in reasonable physical shape, and reassessed. The parcel hadn’t moved at all. He’d simply had the impression that it had tilted. It had shifted its existence, but not in a physical way. He waited a moment, savouring the feeling of not being charcoal, then probed the parcel with what was becoming his customary delicacy.