Heart of Gold

They trudged on. Aubrey's hands and feet felt as if they enormous weights attached to them, and he had to shake his head, often, to keep his eyes open. Blood seeped through his bandaged hand, and the unhealed wound throbbed.

Magic use was accelerating his decline. It drained him, much faster than mere physical effort did. Not that there was much alternative, he thought.

With gloomy fascination, Aubrey probed his teeth with his tongue and found that several at the back were loose. His gums were tender, as well.

'Where to, old man?' George asked.

'The university. Now.'

Twelve

THEY SKIRTED THE UNIVERSITY, KEEPING TO THE Boulevard of Wisdom and its busy cafés, before entering the campus via the medieval gate that led to the Faculty of Magic.

The doors to the tower were locked. George pounded on them and they were eventually greeted by the bemused face of Maurice, the porter.

'Maurice,' Aubrey said after he'd introduced George, 'has anyone come for Monsieur Bernard's things?'

Maurice ushered them inside and closed the door behind them. 'No, sir. I've packed them up, but the boxes are waiting in his workshop.' He wrung his hands. 'Dreadful times, sir. Dreadful times.'

'Yes,' Aubrey said, while George sauntered around the space, inspecting the staircase. 'Terrible.' Then he paused. 'What sort of dreadful times, Maurice?'

The porter patted the nearest wall. 'It's this building, sir. It's moving.'

'Moving?'

'It leans, it does – questing, like a hound sniffing the breeze.'

Maurice's simile was unexpectedly vivid, and Aubrey looked upward toward the turret. He could see how a building like this must have absorbed some magic, after having been exposed to centuries of it. With magic embedded in its brickwork, strange things could happen. 'How can you tell?'

'It tilts, straining in one direction for a while, then another. Tiny, it is, but I notice.' Maurice scratched his head. 'What it's after, though, that's the question.'

'It would have to be something of great magical power.' The theft of the Heart of Gold had been noticed by the Magisterium magicians in Albion. Aubrey wondered if it mightn't be sensed by a questing tower. 'Do you mind if I examine Monsieur Bernard's workshop? I'm interested in his work.'

Maurice shrugged, his face downcast. 'I'm glad someone is. A good man was Monsieur Bernard.'

Maurice had been thorough in his cleaning up. The benches of Bernard's workshop were empty, the floor scrubbed, the bookshelves cleared. It could have been a vacant studio waiting for a tenant.

George strolled to the window. 'Good view of the Library wall from here. Fine-looking bricks.'

'I'm sure Monsieur Bernard appreciated them.' Aubrey went to the entry vestibule and examined the tea chests and boxes that Maurice had stacked there. 'Lend a hand, would you, George?'

Together, they wrestled a number of boxes into the workshop. While George opened them with a pry bar he begged from Maurice, Aubrey took Bernard's notebook from his jacket pocket and flipped through the pages, looking for something relevant. Anything describing the time Bernard had experimented with death magic . . . Not weather magic, not the Law of Transformations, not post-Babylonian syllabic utterances . . . He paused, as something odd caught his eye. There.

Opposite a page of notes on limiting diagrams, Bernard had written a page in a peculiar black ink. It had a double line border around it and the number 7 in the bottom left-hand corner.

It was a shopping list – eggs, milk, bread and wine – and so out of place that Aubrey's curiosity ran around in circles, with bells on. A shopping list had no place in the middle of a magician's notebook. It had to be a code.

He ran his finger over the words and felt the texture of magic.

A speck of light danced over the page, and he looked up. The glass in the light fitting glinted back at him. He stared at its brass base, where it joined the ceiling. He moved to one side, then climbed on top of the workbench to get a better view, despite his aching knees.

'What are you doing?' George asked.

'The light fitting is on a ratchet.'

George peered upward. 'I'll take your word for it. But why would anyone do that?'

'To turn it.' Aubrey frowned. 'Can you see a rod? Something long enough to reach? It'll have a fitting on the end to slot into the base.'

George crossed to the window. 'Like this?'

George held up a long pole with a metal hook on the end, obviously meant to open the topmost windows of the workshop, but quite easily having another use. Aubrey took the pole and stood directly underneath the light fitting. 'Let's assume that the door is twelve o'clock.'

'By all means.' George put his hands in the pockets of his jacket. 'I assume you'll clarify that cryptic statement when you're ready.'

'I'm glad you used the word "cryptic".' Aubrey grimaced. He needed to fit the hook into the hole at the base of the light fitting. The pole wobbled, the hook slid, but finally he fitted it home. 'Because I suspect we're dealing with steganography here.'

'I'm sure we are. Go on.'

'Codes and ciphers are close cousins, ways to encrypt messages in an effort to make sure no-one else reads them. Unless you know the encryption key.' Aubrey's arms were aching from holding them up for so long. He gritted his teeth, flexed his forearms and the light fitting shifted. A click at a time, it ratcheted until he'd moved the slot to the seven o'clock position. 'Here.' He gave George the pole and he climbed down from the bench. Even that small physical exertion had him panting. 'Steganography,' George prompted.

Aubrey looked up. If he placed the notebook in the middle of the workbench it should be right underneath that slightly grey-coloured mirror. He arranged it carefully, open at the page with the shopping list. 'Can you turn on the light, please, George?'

'In the middle of the day?' George protested, but he was already on the way to the switch by the door. 'There.'

And there, Aubrey thought. The mysterious list on the page vanished. In its place were lines of minute, but perfectly readable, writing.

'Steganography is the science of hidden writing,' Aubrey said. 'If an enemy doesn't know that a message is there, it can slip past undetected. In ancient times it was said that a king shaved the head of a slave and tattooed a message on it. When the hair grew back he sent the slave across the border, where the recipient of the message shaved the slave's head again and read the message.'

'Not much fun being a slave.' George examined the journal. 'Bernard used steganography to hide his notes?'

'His notes on death magic.'

George grunted. 'Death magic? You're not going to mess around with that again, are you?'

Aubrey sighed. 'Anything else is simply fiddling at the edges.'