In the magic firmament, Aubrey Fitzwilliam was making a spell, most powerful, most sweeping. He didn’t flag. He had the fate of nations and of individual people in his hands. When he saw, far away, his signature element at the end of the line of spell elements, he realised that he was nearly finished. He gritted his teeth, knowing it would be mad to waver now, so he took each element as it came and gave it its due. He spoke them and made them real.
Finally, only his signature element was left. He uttered it, proud to have completed what he’d done.
Then he doubled over as if kicked in the stomach. His magical senses flared. He felt as if he were caught in a vast current, one that was tearing him in all directions, dragging his limbs, his torso, his very essence. Then it surged and spread, and he had an apprehension of it moving away, a wave, a ripple spreading and being consumed by the hundreds, thousands of consciousnesses in the area.
Including Caroline. She gasped and her eyes widened, but before she could say anything Chancellor Neumann, the head of the Holmland government, was standing in front of them.
Aghast, Aubrey watched as Caroline levelled her pistol at the chancellor and fired.
Aubrey reached for her, but the magical wave chose that moment to roll back and smash him into oblivion.
56
Aubrey opened his eyes. He regretted it immediately because every square inch of him hurt. His eyelids hurt as he levered them upward. Even the act of regretting opening his eyes caused him pain.
He was propped against one wall of the shell hole. A surge of panic struck him until he checked with his magical senses and was relieved to find that his body and soul were still united.
The effects, then, of the massive spell were physical rather than spiritual. For a moment, he wallowed in knowing that he wasn’t going to die – at least not straight away – but the battering he’d received from the magical backwash soon overwhelmed that small pleasure.
A measure of triumph filtered through the pain. The fact that he was alive meant that he’d been able to deflect the worst of the spell’s reaction onto the collective consciousness around him. The fact that Chancellor Neumann was here in front of him meant that the spell had worked, at least in part.
Numbly, with his enhanced sight still working, he looked past his outstretched self – every movement of his eyeballs a twitch of agony – to see a dozen angry men sitting like schoolboys on the floor of the crater. They glared at him, but the most furious, his bald head a beacon of anger, was Chancellor Neumann.
Chancellor Neumann was wearing extremely formal clothes – swallow-tail jacket, striped trousers, starched collar – and Aubrey wondered what he’d been doing when the spell plucked him away. At the opera? An audience with Elektor Leopold?
In a land where facial hair was a point of pride, the Chancellor was a leader in more ways than one. Currently it looked as if two extremely fluffy cats had clamped themselves to his cheeks, but they were having trouble clinging, so livid was the leader of Holmland.
The others were a mixture of middle-aged and older Holmlanders, conventionally well dressed or in uniforms that showed little sign of the wear that comes from being at the front lines. Some looked stunned while others were working themselves up to the level of self-righteous anger their leader was displaying. Aubrey recognised General Sterne and the aging Admiral Tolbeck, both of whom were composed. Gerhard Moln was near them, the industrialist who had been brought into Chancellor Neumann’s inner circle and who had become the Minister for Armaments. He was eying the sides of the crater.
All of the Holmlanders, quite obviously, were not accustomed to sitting at the bottom of a shell hole. While Aubrey mastered his physical discomfort, they were bobbing their heads, jerking and hunching their shoulders as a hail of bullets criss-crossed just above them, humming and buzzing like angry insects.
Carefully moving as little of his body as he could, he inched an elbow aside – more pain, red rockets going off inside his skull – and touched someone he hoped was Caroline. ‘Tell me you have a pistol trained on them.’
‘I do, with another prominently in my lap.’
‘It hurts.’
‘What does?’
‘Everything.’
‘That might make things difficult.’
‘Things?’
‘Getting back to our lines, for instance.’
Aubrey wasn’t thinking that far ahead. ‘You didn’t shoot him?’
‘The Chancellor? I fired over his head. It was the quickest way to get him to sit down. I didn’t want him shot by an alert Holmlander who saw someone standing in the middle of no-man’s-land.’
‘You will die for this,’ Chancellor Neumann said in guttural but fluent Albionish. ‘Both of you.’
Without changing her expression, Caroline raised her pistol and fired straight up into the air. Immediately, their position came under even heavier fire, machine gun as well as rifle. Caroline didn’t flinch, but several of the Holmland generals and politicians pulled their necks in so far they looked like tortoises who’d decided that staying at home was better than going out.
‘We’ll die like all the young men you’ve sent here?’ Caroline asked.
It didn’t take Aubrey’s enhanced sight to see realisation at work. Eyebrows rose, eyes widened, heads shook uncertainly. Several of the Holmlanders evidently refused to believe the conclusion that was becoming more and more obvious, and looked offended at the state of affairs.
‘Where are we?’ one of the generals demanded. ‘What is going on?’
‘We are in the disputed stretch of land between the Holmland trenches and the Allied trenches,’ Aubrey said. ‘Right where your army is about to launch a major assault, if our intelligence is correct.’
‘Fremont?’ another general burst out. ‘We will all be killed! We must leave this area immediately!’
With uneasy satisfaction, Aubrey noted the confirmation that the Holmland assault was about to fall on this area.
‘It’s acceptable for young Holmlanders to die, but not you?’ Caroline said.
‘We are important men! We do not belong here!’
‘I’ll leave you for a moment to consider the unintended irony of that statement,’ Caroline said.
The Holmlanders huddled, muttering, casting evil glances at Caroline and mostly ignoring Aubrey. He was glad for this. It was about all he could handle.
‘Now, Aubrey,’ Caroline said without taking her eyes from the Holmlanders. Her face was faintly luminous, a sheen on her skin where the burnt cork didn’t reach. Aubrey wondered if dawn were on its way, or if it was the effect of his enhanced eyesight. He was willing to contemplate that he might simply be delirious. ‘What are we going to do with you?’
‘That’s what Matron used to say just before she dosed us with castor oil.’ Speaking still hurt, but he felt as if he’d left agony behind and moved to a steady state, the relativity of pain being brought home in a new and interesting way.
‘I don’t doubt you deserved it, but that’s neither here nor there. You’ve achieved your aim, bringing these men here. Now it’s time for us to get back to the trenches before the artillery bombardment starts.’
‘That’s right. That was part of the plan, wasn’t it?’ Woozily, he groped for his watch, but he had trouble finding the end of his arm. ‘What time is it?’
‘Nearly 0130. Is there anything you want to say to these men before we leave?’
Aubrey nodded. Unwisely, as it proved, for it felt as if his teeth were about to fall out, with minor detonations accompanying each one. After a moment of intense wincing, he hunched himself until he was as upright as he could manage. Bullets continued to crack not far overhead, a reminder, if any was needed, of the peril of their situation.
‘Fitzwilliam,’ Chancellor Neumann snarled, ‘for a boy, you are causing us considerable nuisance. Dr Tremaine was correct in saying we should be wary of you.’
‘I’m flattered that Dr Tremaine thought I was that important.’
