The skyfleet was a daunting sight, clearly visible to all the inhabitants of the city. Having already experienced bombing from dirigibles, Aubrey knew the skyfleet would be bringing dread to the population as Dr Tremaine went about his magical preparation.
The thought gave him pause, and once again he wondered at the complexity of Dr Tremaine’s spellwork. Could the sense of dismay and fear that the skyfleet was imposing be useful in some way? If the consciousnesses he was harvesting were in a state of horror, could this also improve the efficacy of his bid for immortality? This could explain the outrageousness of the skyfleet, the size and the impressiveness of the assault. It was designed to daunt.
‘Time to put the altitude enhancer to work.’ He’d been conscious of the magical field emanated by the box to the rear of the aircraft, a node of magical brightness among many throughout the complex machine. It was quiescent, though, waiting for his spell to activate and control it.
He consulted the tech specs and tried to put aside the effects of casting his magic bullet projectile spell. It was a fourth generation carbon copy, blurry and difficult to read. Someone had scrawled out a series of suggestions but the more Aubrey looked at it, the more it looked like a list of hopeful ideas than a definitive guide to operation. The gist was that an amplification spell needed to be overlaid on the box, one that could be ratcheted up by degrees. Choice of language, duration and – apparently – chance of success was up to him.
Caroline glanced at him – a brief, flashing look that was enough to spur him on. He took out his notebook and pencil and he scrawled out a well-practised standby: a Mycenaean amplification spell he’d used many times before.
‘I’m not sure exactly how this is going to work,’ he said after he pencilled in a reminder to append his signature element, ‘so hold on.’
‘Forewarned is forearmed,’ she said and her hands danced across the control panel. ‘When you’re ready.’
Aubrey gave the spell his best and immediately the Merlin shot upward like a rocket. Feeling somewhat like an earwig caught in a hosepipe at the worst possible moment, Aubrey craned his neck and saw, miles away to the south, Dr Tremaine’s skyfleet.
‘Over there!’ Aubrey cried. ‘The flagship!’
Caroline leaned into the controls. George groaned as the ornithopter tilted, then righted itself, and suddenly they were screaming upward at an angle. Aubrey was pressed against the door and he hoped that the mechanic in charge of door latches had been in top form when putting this one together.
‘We’re close, Aubrey!’ Caroline cried.
The hulls of the skyfleet were growing larger and larger as they neared, flanked by the storm clouds that escorted the fleet like well-built bodyguards helping rich patrons on a night on the town. Around them, other ornithopters were shooting upward erratically, some immediately plunging back down again.
Aubrey hastened to cut off the spell before they rose too far and brought themselves into a direct line with the guns of the fleet.
Instantly, their upward surge halted. The gigantic shape of Tremaine’s flagship cut off the sun and they were plunged into shadow while they bobbed like a balloon a few hundred feet below it.
Satisfied, and unwilling to trust to the altitude enhancer again, Aubrey started the other spell he’d prepared as his part in getting them close to Dr Tremaine’s location without being seen, all of which made his initial plan of bringing magic suppressors to neutralise Dr Tremaine’s magic impossible.
Like most of his outlandish schemes, this one had seemed reasonable when it had first come to him. He’d prepared a spell derived from the Law of Sympathy (‘Like affects like’) to encourage a link between the hull of the warship and the steel of the ornithopter. An attractive link wouldn’t be difficult to propagate, he reasoned, since even though the hull was made of cloudstuff, it was aspiring to steelhood, no doubt aping the form and qualities of steel through an application of the Law of Propinquity. The Law of Attraction provided a backbone to the spell, made all the easier by this propensity of ferrous materials to attract each other.
Awfully exposed, bobbing in the air as they were solely due to the altitude-enhancing device, Aubrey hurried out the spell. They rose, quickly, and before he had time to make any adjustments, they struck the hull with a resounding clang.
They hung there, silently looking at each other, and the whole ornithopter vibrated as if it had decided, on a whim, to become a bell. The cabin shook, the frame vibrated, every single piece of steel or iron around them hummed.
Caroline turned to him, a needless question on her lips. Aubrey wanted to slap himself on the forehead, but decided that fixing the spell would be a better use of his time. He hadn’t anticipated that it would be making every iron-based component of the ornithopter want to embrace the overwhelming iron-like presence just above them. Hurriedly, before the ornithopter could shake itself apart in its eagerness, Aubrey eased back on the attraction spell. Not enough to disengage them, but enough to stop the ornithopter from disassembling itself.
When the quivering all about them diminished and then vanished, Aubrey relaxed the death grip he had on his pencil and notebook. ‘There,’ he said. ‘Just as planned.’
Sophie tapped him on the shoulder. ‘Aubrey, how are we going to get onto the ship?’
76
‘Don’t worry,’ Aubrey said, as reassuringly as someone could when he and his friends were hanging from the belly of an enemy battleship made from magically wrought cloudstuff. ‘I have this part under control.’
He paused and waited for a chorus of disbelief at this notion, but it was a measure of the situation that a serious-looking George merely nodded, while Caroline locked eyes with him. ‘Go on.’
‘I think it’s fair to say that you’ll have to trust me here.’
A brace of Albion ornithopters swooped along what would have been the waterline of the flagship, if the craft had been afloat. One of them was buffeted by a blast before it climbed rapidly and disappeared from view.
‘Aubrey,’ Caroline said, ‘none of us would be here if we didn’t trust you. At the moment, I’m sure we’d follow even if you asked us to step outside.’
‘I’m glad, because that’s just what I’m looking for.’
77
Aubrey had always appreciated silk. He liked its texture, the sheen, the touch of the exotic about it and the way that it was the only clothing fibre made by insects – locust leather, in his opinion, not being a legitimate garment material.
So the rope with which his friends and he were tied together being silk was a lovely touch, if unnecessarily luxurious. He would have settled for good old manila hemp, but silk was lighter and easier on the hands.
Leading the way, with his rifle slung across his back, Aubrey shuffled his hands along the hull of the Sylvia, propelling himself forward, and grimaced as he fumbled around a rivet. He uttered a small spell adjustment to ensure that his friends and he were constantly being buoyed upward, rising strongly enough that they had to hold their hands over their heads in order to avoid painful cranial-battleship collisions.
Their progress once they’d left the relative safety of the ornithopter had been a peculiar bobbing accompanied by what could be described as an inverted walking on hands. He’d been assisted by the surprisingly thick and warm air – part of Dr Tremaine’s magic, Aubrey assumed, enclosing the Sylvia in a bubble of comfort for whoever was on board – so moving air about was something he didn’t have to organise.
The experience was disorienting, with the massive bulk of the magically created warship directly overhead while Albion streamed by far, far below. Steadfastly, Aubrey didn’t look down after that initial, nervous glance, for the spiralling drop was only too easy to imagine – and imagination, in this instance, wouldn’t do him any good. He kept his attention doggedly on their destination: the point at which the hull curved upward to become the sides of the Sylvia. To their right, in the distance, the enormous propellers rotated, churning away at the air. To their left, the bow crested the non-existent waves. Pressing against their hands were rivets, bolts and seams.