‘She did?’ Aubrey was startled and pleased. Madame Zelinka was not effusive, but she had seen enough magic and operational magicians for Aubrey to value her judgement.
‘And Dr Tremaine had a high opinion of your abilities, too.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
Von Stralick eased his way around the corner of the room. ‘It was in your file. Don’t look so surprised. You should have known that the Holmland intelligence agencies have a dossier on you. One that I helped to compile.’
Aubrey remembered first encountering von Stralick when the Holmlander was a trusted part of the Holmland spying machinery. Naturally he would have reported his encounters with Aubrey. ‘I suppose the son of the Albion Prime Minister deserves a dossier.’
‘The foreign Prime Minister’s son who just happens to be a remarkable magician, with a decidedly heroic bent. The last I saw it, your file was a rapidly growing one.’
‘Nothing scurrilous, I hope,’ Aubrey said faintly. It was all logical, but it was unsettling, nonetheless, to think of strangers dissecting his life.
‘They tried, but couldn’t find anything.’
‘I’m glad,’ Aubrey said, but he found himself perversely irritated by this. Did this mean there was nothing in his past that was scandalous, or that any incidents weren’t worth reporting, or was it that he’d managed to keep his mishaps secret? He wasn’t sure which was preferable.
Aubrey reached the nearest bay, while still trying to assimilate this latest information. He assumed von Stralick himself would have a dossier by now – his erstwhile employers would have begun one immediately he disappeared from their network. But would George have one? Caroline? His mother? Such considerations made him queasy.
Grappling with the metal uprights, Aubrey dragged himself around until he faced the open door of the first stall. The door had no lock, just a simple latch. Inside, it was barely more than shoulder wide. Aubrey sniffed. The magical residue was a dull orange aroma mixed with a salty sound, a melange of disquieting sensations, but cutting through it was a more ordinary sensation: a genuine smell. He wrinkled his nose at its unpleasant, slightly rotten, meaty odour.
He asked for the lantern. Von Stralick held it up while Aubrey pulled himself closer to inspect the straps, making sure not to touch the floor. The leather was new, still unsupple, and the buckles were bright brass, except where they were stained. Aubrey scratched at the crustiness on the straps, then rocked backward.
‘Dried blood,’ von Stralick said.
‘I’d say so.’ Not a lot of it, but enough to mean that someone had been strapped against the wall – one set of straps around the throat, one at chest height, one around the hips, and the last keeping the legs and feet together – and then suffered something that had made them bleed.
Numbly, Aubrey inspected the floor. It was scuffed and slightly dusty, but unstained. The bleeding hadn’t been substantial.
The next bay showed no signs of blood, but the next did, and the one after that. After checking the thirty-six bays they found nearly half of them showed signs of blood – and one of them had something else.
Aubrey scooped up the wire mesh helmet. It was the same as he’d seen prisoners wearing when they were exercising in the gardens. It wasn’t heavy, and the lantern light glinted from its surface. Inside, a swivel-bolted mechanism was clearly designed to hold the tongue and stop the wearer from talking, but what intrigued Aubrey most was what looked like an electrical socket, firmly welded to the back of the helmet.
‘This is to keep magicians quiet?’ von Stralick said. ‘So they can’t cast spells?’
‘Apparently,’ Aubrey said, but he had an inkling that its purpose was much more sinister than that. He peered at the socket at the rear of the helmet, deeply unhappy at the implications that were circling like carrion crows. Then he looked up and all the suspicions he’d been harbouring coalesced into a moment of profound horror.
8
A single cable dangled from overhead. when von Stralick moved the lantern to get a better view, Aubrey saw that the cable was tangled and would easily have extended into the stall if it were straightened.
It had a plug on the end of it.
Abruptly, the helmet felt unclean. He dropped it and wiped his hands on the seat of his trousers. Filthy though they were, it was good, clean dirt rather than the taint this device carried.
‘All of the bays have cables, don’t they?’ Aubrey asked von Stralick.
The Holmlander held up the lantern. The next bay had a cable hanging into it, and so did the one after that. Propelling themselves by dragging on the uprights, they floated along the row of doors, opening and leaning in. Cables led into all of them.
‘This is magic?’ von Stralick asked.
‘Of a kind. Blended with electrical engineering.’
‘For what purpose?’
‘I’m still thinking about that.’ And I don’t like what I’m coming up with.
Von Stralick sighed. ‘Mysterious is all well and good, but I’d prefer the mystery were on our side rather than the other.’
‘I’m sure there are people in Holmland saying the same. All Dr Tremaine’s cards are unlikely to be on the table.’
It never hurt Aubrey to remind himself that Dr Tremaine’s goal was to perform the Ritual of the Way to achieve immortality for himself and his sister. To that end, he was fostering bloodshed, which he needed on a huge scale to implement the spell. Bringing the world to war was the first step, but he needed a titanic battle, one that would unleash death on a hitherto unimaginable scale. Since the beginning of the war, forces had been massing on the eastern front with Muscovia and on two western fronts: one through the Low Countries and on the border with Gallia, and one on Gallia’s north-east border near Stalsfrieden and Divodorum.
In the long, worrying days watching over a delirious von Stralick, Aubrey had time to wonder about the disposition of the Holmland armies. Having two fronts on the Gallian border a hundred miles apart puzzled him, but his brooding had thrown up an awful possibility. Could Dr Tremaine be planning to link the two fronts? It would make a battlefront of staggering proportions, just the thing he would need to achieve his ends.
The prospect was horrifying. Such a battlefront would commit huge quantities of war materiel, directing the entire output of whole nations to destruction. It would throw thousands, tens of thousands, of soldiers against each other. It was a possibility that any sane person would recoil from. No-one with any semblance of humanity would plan such a thing.
This, of course, meant it was entirely within Dr Tremaine’s scope of imagining, which left Aubrey grappling not with what but with how.
Aubrey found that he had drifted up toward the ceiling. He reached up and steadied himself, then turned to his magical awareness. Immediately, he bared his teeth as the basement became a chaos of magical splatters, cast-off residue from the intense magic that had taken place. Through the pseudo-sight that came with being magically endowed, it was like being in the studio of an extremely careless and extremely prolific artist, one who specialised in subjects malignant, festering and brooding.
Aubrey didn’t want to get close to the residue smears. They throbbed, which suggested that they still contained some magical power – the nature of which he couldn’t divine. Something unhealthy, something to do with channelling and amplifying was the best guess he could make.
‘Hugo.’ Aubrey pushed against the ceiling, moving himself until he was directly over one of the desks in the middle of the basement. With a few syllables, he adjusted his elevation until he could nudge a pile of sodden papers with a toe. ‘If you were in charge of the Holmland forces, how would you go about uniting the division that is currently bogged down in the Low Countries with the one that’s dug in around Divodorum?’
Von Stralick was peering at where a thick electrical conduit entered the room, high up on the wall near the stairs. Hand over hand, he lowered himself, then cocked an eyebrow at Aubrey. ‘Ah, the hypothetical! You Albionites love your games to fill in time. Charades, Donkey Tail Pinning, Hypotheticals.’
