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.
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.