Word of Honour

'Trouble, George,' he managed to gasp. His vision wavered and blurred before settling. He felt as if he were being jabbed all over with icy needles.

'I gathered as much. Here, can you make it to the wall?'

Caroline brought the lantern close. 'What's going on?'

Aubrey gave a weak laugh. 'This is what I didn't want you to see.'

'Your condition?' She glanced at George. 'I know, you know.'

'Magic.' Pause, gather breath – not too deep. 'I convinced the shrine that we belonged here.' He shuddered as another wave of pain rolled through him, his soul wrenching at the confines of his body with enough force to make him nauseated. He used his magical awareness and wasn't surprised to see that the golden cord was shining brighter than ever.

The mystical golden cord. Every soul was bound by two aspects of the golden cord. One disappeared into the portal that leads to the true death. The other linked the soul to the body. When the time was right, the golden cord that linked body and soul melted, and the surviving cord guided the soul to the true death.

It was the natural order of things. The order that Aubrey had messed up with his experiment.

His time was not due, but the true death called him constantly, tugging his soul towards the final journey. Now, its summons was greater than ever.

George eased him down so his back was to the wall, near the stone table.

Caroline crouched and held the lantern so it wouldn't shine in his eyes. A wisp of hair had escaped the knot she'd tied at the back of her head. She pushed it away irritably, but with such grace and economy of movement that Aubrey nearly wept.

'You idiot,' she said. 'What have you done?'

'That's all right,' he croaked. 'Any time.'

'What?'

'Sorry. I thought you were thanking me for saving you.'

She thought about this for a moment. 'No. I was upbraiding you.'

'Ah. That's what it was.' Aubrey closed his eyes for a moment. The darkness behind his eyelids swelled and surged in time with his pulse.

'Is there anything you can do?' she asked.

'I hope so.' He concentrated on his breathing. It seemed to help.

'Is it like this all the time?'

'Like this?' Small breath in, tiny breath out. 'No. Not all the time. My hold has been loosened.'

'What caused it then?'

'Magic. Strains me. Weakens my grip.' He probed at his teeth with his tongue, checking to see if any were loose.

'I see. You tried not using magic, didn't you?'

'You noticed?'

'It was as if you'd stopped talking.'

'Ah. That noticeable.' Aubrey took a breath, a deep one that didn't hurt, and he saw that as a good sign. He counted another ten painless breaths, and then – hesitantly – felt he may have things under control. Apart from the iron spike being pounded into his head. And the tremors in his hands. And a hundred other small symptoms that he was going to address by hoping they'd go away.

'Indeed.' She studied him. 'You can't stop doing magic, Aubrey. It's too important to you.'

'That's what I discovered.'

'So we'll just have to manage you. Somehow.'

She rose to her feet in one lithe movement. Aubrey followed her by tilting his head back and staring, unmindful of how this made him look.

Did she say 'we'?

Before he could query her, George spoke up. 'Aubrey. I think you should have a look at this.'

Caroline offered him a hand, but Aubrey didn't think his dignity could stand it so he dragged himself up via the wall.

His soul was uneasy, but at least it wasn't battering at its confines any more. His head was tight and he thought he was slightly feverish. He resigned himself to being on the roundabout of feeling out of sorts once again.

Aubrey limped to where George was crouched in the corner of the room. 'What is it?'

'A stone tablet, broken into fragments,' George said. 'The writing has been defaced on all of them, so it's unintelligible. Except for this bit.'

He held up a piece of stone, roughly five-sided, about the size of his hand. It was covered with minute script, in three distinct bands.

'It's Roman?' Caroline asked.

'As the expert here on Roman history, I can confidently say that the writing at the top is Latin. Most of it. Of a sort, anyway,' George said. 'But there are two other sorts of writing. This spiky one in the middle, and that mess at the bottom. Or are they pictures?'

Aubrey squinted. The writing was almost microscopic, and the light wasn't the best, but he could make out some sections. 'The middle one, the spiky one, is cuneiform. Late cuneiform, the writing of the Sumerians. I think the Latin section is a translation of the cuneiform, or the other way around.' He stared. 'They're both talking about magic.'

'Magic, eh? That'd fit. I'd say that this tablet was broken as part of a ritual,' George said. 'See the black soot on the other bits? Someone poured oil over them and lit it.'

'Whatever for?' Caroline asked. Her eyes gleamed with interest.

'Who knows? Maybe sending a message to the gods, or someone in the afterlife. Or a ritual attempt at destroying them. Educated guesswork, this is.'

Aubrey leaned closer. 'If the top two scripts are translations of each other, it would stand to reason that the bottom one is as well.'

'Interesting.'Caroline leaned on Aubrey and peered at the stone. He nearly buckled at the knees but managed to hold himself up. 'I've seen something like it before,' she said.

'Really?' George said. 'Where?'

'In the museum. The Rashid Stone.'

For a moment, excitement drove away Aubrey's terrible weariness. 'You're right. The messy script. That's the Rashid Stone script!' 'Good Lord,' George said, and his voice was hushed, almost reverential. 'You understand that this means we could crack the mystery of the Rashid Stone? After two hundred years of trying, we stumble across a touchstone.'

'It's more than that,' Aubrey said. 'This could be an early treatise on magic. Maybe the earliest we have.'

Aubrey's heart pounded, but with exhilaration this time, not fear. The few bits and pieces he could make out suggested that stone was dealing with fundamental aspects of magic – where it came from, how it was influenced by people, how to shape it to one's will, and some terms that seemed to be about city magic, which was a puzzle to him, a small one in the larger puzzle of the stone itself.

If the unknown language was early, primeval, could it be closer to a source language, something which could serve as a universal language of magic? He blew on the stone, trying to clear the dust, and more characters emerged.

Death. Protection. Soul. Three cuneiform characters became clear and he nearly dropped the stone. He checked the Latin inscription above and it seemed to echo the Sumerian. The corresponding characters in the unknown script were distinctive, but puzzling.

'I need to study this. I need to talk to Professor Mansfield.' Aubrey rubbed his thumb on a soot-stained section. Was that the Latin word for 'connection'? He tried to remember, but his Latin was more than rusty; it was badly corroded and in need of major restoration.