‘I couldn’t have put it any better myself,’ Aubrey said. ‘It’s the shaping and wielding that cost the magic user. The more shaping, the more wielding, the higher the cost.’
‘So transference magic has traditionally been small scale and with less-than-bulky objects. Very rarely over distances and rarely on living objects.’ Stanley addressed the others, who had given up on their transparent pretence of not listening. ‘Living objects being more complex than inert ones, you see.’
‘I’m confident I can construct a spell that will take account of all the required elements – parameters, variables, constants – and bring these important Holmlanders to the front. What I want to build into the spell is a mechanism that will deflect reactive flow – the cost, if you will – back onto the collective humanity in this region.’
‘Good grief!’ Stanley straightened. ‘I’ve never heard of such a thing.’
George snorted. ‘Welcome to working with Aubrey Fitzwilliam, sir.’
‘Is such a thing possible?’ Stanley asked, and he stroked his chin. ‘I mean, I can imagine it -’
‘“If it can be imagined, a magician can do it,”’ Aubrey quoted. ‘Baron Verulam.’
‘Of course, of course.’ Stanley’s voice shook with excitement. ‘With so many people in this area, the shared cost would be negligible. No-one would notice it.’
‘That’s what I was hoping.’
Stanley stood. He smacked a fist into a palm. ‘But this is remarkable. Extraordinary.’
‘Innovative?’ Sophie offered.
‘Well, naturally it’s innovative…’ The colonel trailed off. ‘This could change the course of magic studies for decades.’
Aubrey shrugged and added the codicil that was hanging unspoken in the dugout. ‘If it works.’ He shuffled in his satchel and pulled out the papers that von Stralick had supplied. He spread them on the map. ‘The Central Staff. The Cabinet.’
‘Ah.’ Colonel Stanley’s face fell. He sat, heavily. ‘For a spell like this to work, you’d have to know exactly where they are. Not to mention their height and weight, necessities like that. I don’t suppose you do.’
‘Not exactly,’ Aubrey said. ‘I was thinking of splicing some other sorts of spells into the usual transference spells.’
Stanley wrinkled his forehead. ‘Splicing?’
‘I’ve had some success in bringing spells together, to make the best of each. I know it’s not exactly the traditional way of going about things…’
Stanley literally chewed this over, working his jaw while he examined the photographs. Aubrey had to give the man his due – he was taking Aubrey’s wild suggestions seriously instead of dismissing them out of hand.
Or dismissing them any other way, Aubrey thought, dismissing being rather final, whether done manually or by some sort of mechanical device.
‘Exactly what are you suggesting?’ Stanley said finally.
Exactly? Aubrey thought. Good question. ‘I want to use aspects of an application derived from the Law of Seeming, the Law of Completeness and the Law of Intensification.’
Stanley’s jaw sagged again. ‘What? But you can’t just mix and mash like that. It’s magic we’re creating here, not some sort of goulash.’
‘I think we can take these photographs and use them, thanks to the Law of Seeming, as our locative element of the transference spell. We can use them to pinpoint our subjects, as it were.’
‘You can’t do that,’ Stanley said. ‘I mean, one wouldn’t ordinarily consider using that sort of magic in this application. Transference needs coordinates, densities, figured as precisely as possible.’
‘It has, true, but has this sort of thinking actually limited applications of transference magic? The failure of specialising, perhaps? If I can wrangle something out of the Law of Similarity, it will make the newspaper pictures more real, more like their subjects, and that’s what I’ll splice the aspect of the Completeness principle into so that the spell will be urgently seeking the original based on the Law of Familiarity -’
‘Wait. Stop. Please.’ Stanley put his hand to his forehead and actually swayed. ‘You want to juggle all of these spell elements on top of the mind-cracking difficulty that is a standard transference spell?’
‘In a nutshell, sir, that’s about it.’ Aubrey rubbed his hands together. ‘I wouldn’t be attempting this for a lark, sir, but in this situation I think something out of the ordinary is called for.’
‘Quite, quite,’ Stanley muttered, his head down. He looked up, sharply. ‘Off hand, I can think of a hundred different reasons why such a lunatic approach wouldn’t work, but you’ve also made me think of a few improbable ways in which it could.’
‘You’ll help me, sir?’
‘Help you? I’ll do what I can but you’re already well beyond my magical help. What do you need on a more mundane level?’
‘A lot of paper, some pencils, erasers, plenty of food, coffee, tea, water and some camp beds.’
‘Camp beds?’
‘For my friends here. They need it.’
‘Excellent, old man,’ George said from where Caroline, Sophie and he were sitting, watching the discussion. ‘I was beginning to think you’d forgotten about us.’
‘Never, George. Never.’
51
Aubrey gave up measuring the hours in any conventional way. Instead, as the night drew out, he understood that his working was marked by the number of times that Caroline or George put a cup of tea into his hands while he pored over maps, photographs and screeds of paper. Colonel Stanley and Sophie worked by his side, elbow to elbow. Early in the process, their contributions were important and saved him from knocking his head against the innumerable brick walls that constructing a revolutionary spell entailed, but gradually their suggestions grew less and less frequent until they mutely watched as he built magic of dizzying complexity.
Stanley, at first, was horrified at Aubrey’s decision to use a number of ancient languages in the one spell, and argued against it with impeccable precedents on his side. Aubrey calmly presented his alternatives, with examples, and gradually won the colonel’s grudging acquiescence.
Aubrey covered page after page in a large ledger, scrawling elements and operators, bringing together disparate variables that, at times, seemed to be surprised at finding themselves in the company they did. Dimly, he became aware that more lantern light was required in order to see his workings properly but, before he asked, George attended to the situation. Equally dimly, he knew that the dugout was a still centre in the middle of turmoil, with much hurrying and shouting just outside, and the more ominous noises of war – firearms, small and heavy, whistles and artillery – not far away.
Aubrey sweated, particularly, over the elements meant to control location and time. He wanted the entire War Cabinet and the Central Staff to arrive together, and they’d be coming from vastly different starting points. Trying to restrain these factors into a single manageable area was like trying to catch a cloud with a colander. His head ached but he ploughed on with no thought of giving up.
Enhancing the images of the men he wanted to transport was also the stuff of headaches, and once he had a solution to this he was then faced with the difficulty of splicing what was essentially a complete spell into the body of another. In what order should the components unfold? Was there one answer for this, or was it a matter of sorting through possible solutions for the one that was best?
False starts came more and more often. Sophie and Colonel Stanley began to murmur encouragement until even that fell away. Stanley became more of an office boy, handing Aubrey paper and sharp pencils, brushing away the debris from furious erasing. Sophie took on a proofing role, gently correcting any basic errors of expression that were creeping in more and more often as Aubrey feverishly scribbled down the elements that captured the vista of his conception.
His body became a distant thing, its discomfort shallow. Knots in his neck, pain in his fingers from gripping the pencil, twinges in the small of his back from bending over the table, trying to keep the spread of papers organised, but he ignored them all. They were insignificant.
