George and Sophie, who were huddled behind the conning tower.
Dr Tremaine may have a magically enhanced aerial weapon platform, Aubrey decided, holding onto his beret with both hands, but someone quick-thinking in the Albion military had decided that two could play that game.
He signalled to his friends and then he ran for the nearest deckhouse – a narrow structure near the gun turret – and flung it open. He took one last look at the crazily brave A 405 and its crew firing for all they were worth and he wished them well. If it didn’t take any more damage, it should be able to land safely, but it wasn’t about to continue the battle, which was a pity. More ornithopters were joining the fray, however, as the pilots came to terms with the altitude enhancers. In the distance, a brace of incendiary devices struck a destroyer. It was ablaze, but still kept formation in the dogged circling of Trinovant.
Aubrey found himself in an ammunition supply shaft, something that he wasn’t sanguine about. When under attack, he would have preferred not being near ordnance or anything else explosive. He climbed down the ladder hastily, to allow his friends to escape from the dangerously exposed deck. The deckhouse hatch slammed shut, George crying out that they were all safe. Aubrey descended faster, past the racks and racks of shells waiting to be fed into the hungry maws of the guns above.
At the bottom of the shaft was the generous powder and shot magazine, which not only provided the shells for the big guns, but was also one of the main stores for the ammunition for the rest of the ship’s armaments. A knuckle rap confirmed that the walls were far thicker than in the rest of the ship, which was sensible even in a ship made of cloudstuff, as the munitions store was a place that any enemy would love to hit. Aubrey found time – a lingering instant or two – to admire the magically enhanced conveyance and loading apparatus, a combination of clever machinery and friction-reducing spellwork that worked entirely without human intervention. Remarkable stuff.
When Aubrey reached the bottom of the shaft, he waited anxiously for his friends to join him while the Sylvia rang to the battle around it. Caroline steered him out of the munitions store and onto a heavy meshed walkway. It extended out over a dark and clangorous area that shook with the hammering of pumps, so his ears had no respite from the assault they had been exposed to. Again, Aubrey wondered at Dr Tremaine’s efforts at verisimilitude. The ship had no water to pump out of the hold – what was the point of operational pumps?
Gone were the narrow corridors of the upper decks. This part of the ship was more like a large factory with open walkways and exposed machinery, the ceiling far overhead, studded with electrical lights.
They reached an intersection. Boiler rooms were ahead, but a ghostly wave of magic brushed Aubrey as he tried to puzzle out the Holmlandish sign that detailed what they might find to their left and right. The industrial clamour of the bowels of the ship was overlaid with a pungent floral sensation, sound and smell being swirled together as his magical senses tried to cope with what they were experiencing.
Then Caroline asked the question which had remained unasked – but needed asking. ‘Where is he?’
Aubrey touched his chest. The magical connection that linked him with Dr Tremaine was quiescent, barely there at all and giving no indication of the rogue sorcerer’s location, but having come so far he wasn’t about to let such a thing stop him, especially not since he’d been thinking about the challenge of finding Dr Tremaine ever since the ornithopter had left the ground.
Back in Stalsfrieden, in Baron von Grolman’s factory, Aubrey had observed Dr Tremaine enhance the connection when he wanted to examine its nature – and Aubrey’s curiosity made him a very good observer. If Dr Tremaine could augment the connector, why couldn’t Aubrey do the same? He’d have to be careful, but if he could awaken it – just slightly – it could be enough to show the way.
‘I need to do some magic,’ he announced.
‘I hope this isn’t just a whim,’ George said. Like the others, he was scanning their surroundings, as if expecting a horde of Holmlanders to descend on them at any minute. ‘Tell me it’s something useful.’
‘If I’m right, it should tell me where Dr Tremaine is.’
As one, Aubrey’s friends looked at each other. A brief, silent conversation ensued, with a minute nod here, a tiny shrug there, and then, without a word, his friends deployed themselves, leaving Aubrey standing in the middle of the intersection. Caroline took up a position behind a fire station, some ten yards away. George was near a ventilator shaft. Sophie stood where she could watch three ladders leading upward. All had drawn their sidearms and all were very obviously giving him time and room to do what was needed.
Aubrey shuffled his feet a little and pushed his hands together in front of him, feeling the tension in his shoulders and upper arms, and he realised that he’d spent much of his time since arriving on the Sylvia in the singularly useless act of clenching his fists. Even his palms were aching, so hard had he been at it. Frustration? Anger? His body reacted to what was going on around him, even when he was doing his best to remain calm.
He settled himself, then whispered a subtle intensification spell that attempted to replicate Dr Tremaine’s effortless augmentation of the magical connector. Aubrey paid particular attention to the scaling of the intensification and built in a difficult metrical factor which he monitored while he cast the spell. When he felt the stirrings of the connector, he cut off the augmentation and ended the spell, conscious that he wanted a more secure link without arousing Dr Tremaine’s suspicions.
He touched his chest, lightly, then pointed left. ‘That way.’
Caroline was at his side in an instant. ‘You’re sure?’
‘He’s not on the bridge. He’s down here. Toward the stern.’
George had his arm around Sophie’s shoulders as they approached. She was rubbing her temples under George’s concerned gaze. ‘What is it, Sophie? The noise?’
‘I don’t think so. I felt something.’
‘What did it feel like?’
‘Pressure, like a headache, but from the outside.’
Aubrey gnawed his lip. Magic was cascading all about them. At the moment, he felt it like paisley on his palate, but how was Sophie experiencing it? Her newly awakened magical awareness was undeveloped. Not everyone gained that synaesthetic jumbling, which was as much a curse as a blessing. Aubrey heard saltiness, and he caught his lower lip with his teeth. ‘You’re feeling magic. Can you tell where it’s coming from?’
She shook her head, distressed. The curls of hair on her brow, protruding from her beret, were damp with perspiration. ‘It is all around. Everywhere.’
‘That it is.’ Aubrey gazed about, then he turned in a slow circle. So perfect was the construction, so realistic was it, that he had to keep reminding himself that it was all created out of cloud by the master magician. Magic was embedded in every bolt, every stanchion, every hand rail. It was a formidable display, but as Aubrey concentrated his magical senses he could tell that the magic about him was stable, holding the cloudstuff in the necessary battleship configuration – but not all the magic about was as settled. When he faced the stern of the ship – in the direction his magical link insisted that Dr Tremaine lay – it was like gazing into the open door of a furnace.
‘It’s going to get worse,’ he said to Sophie. ‘I think the magical artefacts that Dr Tremaine has been collecting are down there too.’
They set off. The pulling on his chest was faint, but it steered him sternwards, every step drawing closer to both Dr Tremaine and the intense magic that was – to his magical senses – fairly lighting up the stern of the ship.
Soon, after passing immense boilers and vast uptakes that disappeared to the funnels above, they reached a bulkhead that blocked their way. A single hatch, dogged and toggled, waited for them. Aubrey felt the steady stream of magic that poured straight through the bulkhead and confirmed that they’d reached the magical heart of the ship.
‘What is it, old man?’ George said. ‘Stop looking so cool and collected.’
‘Me? I was admiring your calm. All of you.’
‘I’m far from calm,’ Caroline said. She checked her revolver again. ‘My heart’s beating like a clockwork toy.’
Sophie’s eyes widened. ‘I was thinking how brave you all were. I promised myself I would be, too.’
‘Brave?’ George said. ‘Us? I’m a quivering jelly.’ He looked down. ‘Underneath, that is.’
Aubrey loved them all. ‘Let’s unite in abject terror, then, accepting our foibles, checking our weapons, and sallying forth.’
‘And leaving our pompousness behind,’ Caroline added with a quirk of her lip that Aubrey wanted to capture and hold forever.
