79
Prepared as Aubrey was for anything – a useful operating standard whenever Dr Tremaine was concerned – the sight that met them on the other side of the hatch was simply outside the realm of rational anticipation. It was like a fish trying to imagine what a dust storm would be like.
Aubrey had to remind himself that they were inside the belly of a battleship – albeit a magical one made of cloudstuff – because as soon as they stepped through the hatch they could have been in the Museum of Albion.
Silence had replaced the head-aching drone of the warship’s turbines. A cathedral-like space spread in front of them, with light coming from expanses of glass, skylights in any rational building but impossibilities this deep in the heart of a warship.
It’s Dr Tremaine’s work, Aubrey found himself repeating. It’s Dr Tremaine’s work.
The ex-Sorcerer Royal’s name was almost a spell in its own right. Using it, perversely, reassured Aubrey that he hadn’t gone insane.
The museumness of the space was created not just by the hush that filled it, the air of respectful studiousness, but by the rich blue carpet, the rows of tall glass cabinets and the slightly dusty smell that is essential in every serious collection. Where the chamber ended was difficult to determine; the far wall was so distant as to be misty, but the perspective was unsettling enough to make Aubrey suspicious.
The place was so much like the Hall of Antiquities at the Museum of Albion that Aubrey’s sense of deja vu thought it was looking at itself in a mirror, backwards.
Swamping all this, Aubrey felt a swell of potent magic from all around, clashing with his ordinary senses and making him grit his teeth to maintain a grasp on his surroundings. Sophie gasped at the surge, a flood of fickle magic. It was volatile, shifting in nature, but blazing with immense power. Aubrey had encountered something like this last year, but the magical blaze that Dr Tremaine had summoned beneath the streets of Trinovant was a much diminished version of what he was experiencing now. That magic inferno had been a torrent of chaotic, unformed magic still being shaped by Dr Tremaine’s will. What he was now sensing had some of the same flavour, but the presence of Dr Tremaine – although bright and central to this outpouring of magic – wasn’t the sole shaping consciousness involved. Aubrey had the impression of dozens of others working with the magic, and he vaulted over uneasiness and moved directly to being distinctly alarmed.
‘Can you tolerate it, Sophie?’ he asked.
‘I am well,’ she said with more determination than conviction. ‘I was taken by surprise, but it’s easing now.’
Aubrey told himself to keep an eye out, to make sure that the chaotic sensory impressions didn’t overwhelm her.
He studied the nearest cabinet, then the others. They stood well away from each other, a hundred feet or more separating each one. The arrangement struck him as odd, so isolated were the cabinets. Either some arcane configuration was satisfied by the array, or having them nearer each other was a bad idea – and this notion only served to heighten the disquiet that had been a permanent inner lodger, ever since he’d set foot on the Sylvia.
He approached the nearest cabinet, then stopped, suddenly, and counted.
Nine rows of three. Twenty-seven. The number of magical artefacts that the remote sensers detected at Fremont, just before Aubrey’s great spell caused them to scatter.
Except he could feel no magic coming from these cabinets.
Caroline pointed, unwilling to disturb the silence, at the wrist-thick cable that entered the top of each cabinet. They each snaked away to join a bundle of cables that ran along the ceiling – another clue that this wasn’t an ordinary museum. Magical power throbbed in the nearest cable, pulsing until it joined the bundles overhead, which were thick with magical potency.
George came close, scanning the heights, shading his eyes. ‘We could have a hundred snipers up there.’
‘This doesn’t seem like the sort of place to have snipers,’ Sophie said quietly. She touched her forehead with a finger, lightly, and winced.
‘Can you feel any illusions here, Sophie?’ Aubrey asked.
‘I cannot tell. This place… I am drowning in magic.’
George put a hand on her shoulder. He had his revolver in the other and while he comforted Sophie, his gaze didn’t stop roaming about.
On closer inspection of the cabinets, Aubrey decided that the place was less like a Museum of Antiquities than a Collection of Curiosities. The first displays would have been at home in any respectable institution – a bronze platter the size of hat, a small golden brooch, a carved totem – but mingled with these were peculiar items that any serious curator would have laughed at: a cracked glass marble, a stuffed gerenuk, a battered tin bath with a hole in the side.
The cabinets themselves were intriguing. While they had the four stubby legs and the solid, dark wood frames that would have seen them at home in any well-endowed collection, the glass was embedded with fine silver wires, creating a meshwork, each square the size of Aubrey’s thumb tip.
He stood back for a moment. What were the properties of silver? Apart from being valuable, it had some useful physical attributes that he had trouble, for the moment, recalling. All that came to mind was how dentists used silver for fillings in teeth.
He narrowed his eyes. Craddock’s cryptic query about thefts from dentists – had this been an indication that Dr Tremaine had been accumulating silver on such a scale as to need thievery from the guardians of oral hygiene?
He let his mind work while he bent and peered into the nearest cabinet. Despite his being unable to find any light source, the cabinet glowed, displaying its contents to fullest effects: a vase of some classical origin or other. The next cabinet had a leather shield embossed with a faded green horse, rearing.
Carefully, inspecting the carpet before each step, Caroline had eased her way around to the back of the cabinet. Aubrey joined her to find that she was studying the cable arrangement that emerged from the top of the display.
The cable was as thick as Aubrey’s wrist and sheathed in black rubber. He stood on tiptoe. ‘It’s attached to the silver mesh,’ he said after careful scrutiny, shifting his rifle from one shoulder to the other so he could reach for the junction. ‘And I’d suggest that if we sawed through the covering, the cable would be silver all the way through.’
‘To what purpose?’ Caroline said. She ran a finger along the wooden frame and then, to Aubrey’s alarm, she tapped on the glass with a fingernail.
‘I’m considering propounding a number of new laws. Not laws of magic, but Laws that Could Prove Useful in Staying Alive. The First Law of Dealing with Dr Tremaine would go something like this: “With Dr Mordecai Tremaine, anything, no matter how disconnected and outlandish, is likely to be part of a scheme of his.”’
‘Very droll, Aubrey. I take it that silver cables fit into this?’
‘Remember the loss of the Gallian silver plate? And the dentists?’
‘Aubrey, I know that your brain is probably fizzing at the moment, but slow down. The dentists aren’t lost.’
‘I know that.’ Aubrey rubbed his hands together. Things were falling into place. ‘Do you recall how Dr Tremaine has used copper in some of his magic?’
‘The thing that attacked you in that Holmlander cafe, its body was made of copper wire.’
‘All the better to mesh with the copper wire of the telephone line.’
‘And the golems in the Stalsfrieden factory, they had copper components.’
‘Again, a combination of magic and electricity – with some biological elements in this case.’ Aubrey chewed his lip for a moment and a hum started to rise in his throat. He clamped down on it. ‘Copper is a wonderful metal if you want to work with electricity, but it has its limitations. Dr Tremaine needs more.’
‘More?’
‘More of everything. In order to achieve his goal, he needs more power, more effort, more magic. He’s
