A watery light beckoned at the bottom of their descent.
'Cellar?' Aubrey looked around. The place was full of trees. 'Forest?'
Lady Rose swept the lantern beam and it ran across dozens of tree trunks. Some were slender, some were broad and gnarled. Branches and leaves completed the unexpected picture. 'These are props. We use them for dioramas. You know: "The Animals of the African Plains" and suchlike.'
Aubrey had seen some strange things underground lately, but he'd never expected to see an underground forest.
'Careful,' Lady Rose said as Aubrey turned away from the trees.
Directly in front of him was a gap in the concrete floor. It was a few feet across, and when his mother pointed the lantern down he stared.
Tracks. Tiny train tracks a foot or two across. He followed them and saw that they disappeared into the wall.
'It's a parcel railway,' Lady Rose said. She pointed the lantern up the tunnel, but the darkness ate the beam before it made any real impression. 'Between the Art Gallery, the Houses of Parliament and St Michael's Hospital, for some reason. It's fallen out of use, but it once had a regular, circular route.'
Aubrey felt as if he was learning about a hidden side of an old friend. 'The underground life of this city astonishes me.' He toed the rusty rails with his boot, then frowned. Had the rail just shuddered?
He drew back his foot to try again, but his mother tugged on his jacket. 'We should hurry.'
Reluctantly, Aubrey allowed himself to be led away from the mysterious parcel tunnel.
Lady Rose took them through unlit corridors and dusty, cobwebbed staircases. In some places, they had to squeeze past forgotten crates, stacked high against the walls. Other passages were empty and echoed to their footsteps. It was as if they were in another world.
The workshop was quiet. From other parts of the museum, however, Aubrey could hear the noises of pursuit – whistles, shouts, ominous crashes. Further away again, sirens and bells spiralled through the night, suggesting that urgency was a useful attribute.
One side of the crate had been removed. With his mother holding the lantern steady, Aubrey crouched and peered inside.
Cloth had been torn aside. Nestled inside it was the irregular black shape of the Rashid Stone.
'Can you leave the lantern, please, Mother? And listen at the door? Let me know if we're likely to have visitors.'
'Very well.' She composed herself. 'I was working late, became extremely worried by all the commotion, tried to find out what was going on and ended up here.'
'Excellent. Who could doubt you?'
After she left, Aubrey spared himself a moment of awe. This fragment was a time voyager. It had travelled four thousand years – and several thousand miles – with its mysteries intact. It had messages which had lasted longer than kings and queens, longer than empires.
But underneath it all, the Rashid Stone was still a very large, very heavy lump of granite. And I want to walk out of here with it.
This, at least, was something he had prepared for. His makeshift spell in Lutetia, which had levitated a whole building, was one he'd spent some time refining since that adventure. He felt confident about applying it to the Rashid Stone to reduce its weight. He didn't want it bobbing along like a balloon, though, as a slab of granite drifting through the air was likely to attract attention.
He wanted to slip it in his pocket.
Weight-negating, then, was under control. But he needed to compress the size of the stone to something more manageable.
And this is where his pondering over the dimensionality spell he'd seen in action on the submersible came in handy. By combining aspects of his levitation spell (the Law of Reversal) and the dimensionality spell he could produce something which would shrink the stone to an unnoticeable size, but not leave it in a state where its weight would be unmanageable.
Of course, such a novel combination of spells, crossing distinctly different principles, was something that needed careful experimentation, in controlled laboratory conditions, so that variables could be noted and countered, the results could be tabulated and mused over, a paper could be written on 'Some Aspects and Applications of Combining Spells Derived from the Law of Inversion and the Principle of Dimensionality', preferably with the name of a respected professor attached, the one who dropped into the lab looking for his tea cup.
With no time for that, Aubrey took a deep breath and started.
The thrill he felt at embarking on a new magical direction almost overcame his exhaustion. He'd done much of the preparatory work on the way to the museum, and he pulled out the scrap of paper he'd used while in the cab. It was hard to read, even when he angled it to catch the lantern light. He'd hammered out the variables for duration (open-ended – he didn't want to be held up on the way back to Maidstone and have a suddenly massive chunk of stone tear a hole in his pocket) and direction (heavier rather than lighter) but he hadn't been able to do much more before seeing the slab. He squinted and worked up some dimensional and positional parameters, translating them into Demotic as he went. He'd felt that using the ancient Aigyptian language might be fitting in this circumstance; he'd had some experience using it for spells that dealt with physical variables.
He stood, knees popping alarmingly, fixed his gaze on the stone in the crate, and began.
It was a long spell, of necessity. It had many elements to control, and all had to roll out in the correct order.
It helped that the language was pleasing to work with; Aubrey had always enjoyed it. When he used Demotic, it felt as though he was constantly talking about flowers.
He finished with his signature element and closed his eyes. The wave of exhaustion that struck him wasn't unexpected, but even so he had difficulty not slumping to the floor. His legs trembled, his chest felt tight. His stomach was hollow as if he hadn't eaten for days, but the thought of food made him nauseated. He swayed, steadied, and opened his eyes to see that at least one aspect of the spell had worked. The Rashid Stone had disappeared.
He bent, not trusting himself to crouch, but it was nearly a mistake. His vision swam, little black suns swelling and bursting in front of his eyes. He gasped and caught himself on the edge of the crate, rubber-legged. After a moment, he groped inside with his other hand.
He found something in the bottom of the crate, something important that wasn't there. By not thinking about the contradiction, he was able to push his lump of beeswax over it.
Carefully, he straightened, still swaying a little, with the non-dimensional, light-as-air Rashid Stone pressed into the beeswax. He slipped it into his pocket.
'We should go,' he croaked just as his mother appeared.
She was by his side in an instant. 'You sound terrible.'
'A cold. Coming on.'
'I hope not. Fitzwilliam men are terrible invalids.'
Twenty-one
THE NEXT MORNING, A TENTATIVE KNOCK CAME AT the door. It opened and Tilly stepped in. 'If you please, sir, Sir Darius would like to see you in his study. He's just got in and is asking for you.'