Heart of Gold (36 page)

'But all that's been thrown out of the window now,'
George said.

'Yes. But taken away from where it belongs, its magic
is disruptive, not binding.'

'Ach. Those closest turn into wild animals,' von
Stralick said, his eyes widening.

'Yes. And once that happens, a new custodian is
needed.'

'Who would take that role, knowing their fate?'
Caroline asked.

Von Stralick stared into the distance. 'Volunteers
convinced of the rightness of their cause. Those willing
to give their lives for their country.'

'Or unwitting dupes. If they're not told their fate, they
won't refuse,' Aubrey pointed out. 'Either way, Muller and
Schnagel were taken by surprise by the change in their
chosen custodian. Perhaps the process is accelerating.'

'The Holmlander who was holding the Heart of Gold
turned into a bear,' George said, frowning. 'The bear
attacked, and Muller was shot after dispatching the bear.'

'And the lucky assassin took the Heart of Gold,'
Aubrey said. 'Which is what he was after, no doubt.'

'But he would start to change, too,' Caroline said.

'True. If he knew what was going on, he'd quickly pass
it onto a volunteer, or dupe, as the Holmlanders did.'

'So it's gone, with persons unknown, to an unspecified
location,' Caroline said.

'So it seems,' Aubrey said.

'So we're no better off.'

Aubrey sighed. 'No, not really. Worse, in most ways.
Unless von Stralick can help here.'

The Holmlander shrugged. 'I'm at a loss, I'm afraid. I'll
have to consult my network. And my superiors.'

The ground underfoot trembled. 'I think you'd best do
that,' Aubrey said. 'Quickly, too.'

Caroline frowned. 'This, of course, explains the
presence of the other bear at the airfield last Friday. The
Heart of Gold was there with Muller and Schnagel and
their foot soldiers.'

Von Stralick tugged at his earlobe. Then he rubbed his
chin and grimaced. 'Yes. Well. That may be true.'

'You saw it there, didn't you?' George said.

'Why didn't you take it from them?' Caroline asked.

Von Stralick straightened his cuffs. 'I was not in a good
position. I was endeavouring to prove my trustworthiness
to them. They were very suspicious.'

'So you helped them blow up the Gallian airship?'
Aubrey said. 'It's a dangerous role you undertook, von
Stralick.'

'Very much so. My orders were to get close to them
then stop them. They were dangerous rogues and my
superiors wanted things put right.' He glanced at Aubrey.
'I refused to fire upon you in the hangar, you know.
That's when they turned on me. I barely escaped.'

Aubrey couldn't decide how much of this to believe.
Von Stralick appeared to be sincere.
But he wouldn't be
much of a spy if he couldn't pretend sincerity
, he thought. 'So
Gallia's enemy is helping Gallia?'

'Trust me. I deeply desire to restore the Heart of Gold.'

V
ON
S
TRALICK LEFT, HEADING NORTH ON AN ERRAND HE
wouldn't divulge. Aubrey, Caroline and George began
to walk back toward the city. Aubrey had his head
bowed deep in thought, ignoring the frequent, minor
earth tremors, while George and Caroline batted about
possibilities.

'What about a bear trap?' George suggested.

'We want the Heart of Gold,' Aubrey said, 'not the
transformed foot soldiers.'

'Some sort of magical sniffer?' George tried again.

'Good idea. Work on the details and get back to me.'

'The brick dust,' Caroline asked. 'Is it as depleted as the
fragments?'

'Even more so, I'm afraid.'

'There is no way of recharging it? Giving it more
power?'

'Not in any practical sense, especially since Maurice
won't let us harm his building.'

Something niggled at Aubrey, like an itch between the
shoulder blades. He tried to bring it to light but it slipped
away.

'Let me see if I have this right,' Caroline said. 'The
tower is impregnated with magic, so much so that it is
attuned to great sources of magic.'

'Correct.' Aubrey almost had it again, but it still eluded
him.

'So you noted the way the tower leaned and then
cross-referenced it against the yearning of the brick
fragments.'

'Yes.' Aubrey stopped dead. 'That's it.'

'I knew you'd think of something, old man,' George
said. 'He always does,' he added to Caroline.

'If we can't use the bricks to find the Heart of Gold,
we'll use the tower.'

'Oh,' George said. 'We tried that.'

'We found
direction
via the tower, but I think we can
find the actual
location
using the tower.' He appealed to
them. 'I'm sure it will work.'

George and Caroline shared a rueful glance. George
shrugged. 'He's full of ideas, you know.'

'So I've noticed,' Caroline said. 'Let's hope this is a
good one.'

M
AURICE STARED
. 'Y
OU WANT TO FLOAT THE
F
ACULTY
of Magic into the air and let it drift across the
city like a balloon?'

'Don't worry,' Aubrey said with his best attempt at an
encouraging smile, 'it'll be perfectly safe.'

They were standing in the tiny room that served as the
caretaker's office. Aubrey was impressed, for Maurice's
office was immaculate, from the small desk with invoices
arranged in baskets, to the hooks on the walls with a
variety of dustcoats.

'You are crazy.' Maurice looked at Caroline and
George. 'He is crazy, isn't he?' he said in Albionish.

'He may seem like that,' George agreed. 'At times.
Often. But he isn't really, despite appearances.'

'That's true, Maurice,' said Caroline. 'His schemes may
sound bizarre, but he's not mad, as such.'

Aubrey glanced at his friends, who both seemed to be
stifling smiles, then he turned back to Maurice. 'I'm sure
you've heard of more outlandish plans than this, in your
time as caretaker of the faculty.'

Maurice scratched his chin. 'There's madness and then
there's madness, I suppose.'

'Come now, Maurice,' Caroline said. 'You were worried
that the faculty had been forgotten. This is a grand opportunity
to make it renowned again. Doesn't the old
faculty deserve such a thing instead of mouldering away
forgotten? Imagine the fame if the Faculty of Magic is
responsible for finding the missing Heart of Gold.'

'The university will be grateful,' George said. 'It might
put some funds into the old place.'

Maurice was hopeful. 'The tower. It won't be
damaged?'

Aubrey clapped the caretaker on the shoulder. 'Trust
me.'

O
NE BENEFIT OF CONSTRUCTING A SPELL TO LEVITATE A
building that had once contained a Faculty of Magic was
that there was no shortage of precedent. While Aubrey
walked around the interior, circling the great iron staircase,
Maurice regaled him with previous experiments in
the area of weight negation.

'Monsieur Pascal, he was a wag,' the caretaker cackled.
'Made the bust of the Dean float around the professor's
quadrangle for an hour before it fell into the fountain.
And then there was Madame Carillon. She came up with
a way to cause anything made of antimony to shoot
straight up in the air, like a skyrocket.'

'Must have been useful,' George chipped in and
Aubrey was grateful. He needed to concentrate and
Maurice's happy reminiscing was hard to ignore.

George and Caroline took Maurice aside and gave
him an audience for his stories. Aubrey continued to
circle the staircase, hands behind his back, humming
tunelessly as he tried to piece together a spell to lift the
whole tower.

His idea was simple. The tower was yearning for the
Heart of Gold. If it could be unmoored, set free of the
earth, it would be able to achieve its goal.

All I have to do is wrench a thousand-year-old tower out of
the ground and set it drifting across the city
, he thought.
Shouldn't be too hard.

At first he considered the Law of Opposites. Perhaps
magically linking the tower with a pile of lead and then
circumscribing a weight inversion would produce the
desired effect. He shook his head. It would be too hard
to get the control he needed to vary the lift. Besides, he
didn't have a large pile of lead nearby.

He stopped pacing and looked up at the light filtering
down from the turret. In some ways, it was similar to the
problems that dirigible engineers and captains had to
face. Too much helium in the gasbags and an airship
would rocket to the stratosphere. Too little and it would
never leave the ground. Balance was the essential principle,
so that the airship would be just a little lighter than
the air around it. Then it would rise like a soap bubble,
not like a rock hurled from a volcano.

Balance. He rubbed his hands together, hard. It was all
a matter of balance. He needed a spell that would not
only cancel the weight of the tower, but also be adaptable
enough to handle the changing density of the air
they would travel through.

He kneaded his forehead with a knuckle, trying to
think.

He remembered reading about ancient sorcerers in the
east and their attempts to construct bamboo aircraft for
warfare. These fantastic constructions in the shapes of
dragons were equipped with gunpowder bombs, but were
never able to lift far from the ground, despite the sorcerers'
best efforts. The most successful only rose to head
height before flipping over and crashing to the ground.

Flipping.
His face cleared. Perhaps he'd been thinking
about the problem in entirely the wrong way. The great
seventeenth-century scientist-magician Sir Isaac
Ayscough declared that weight was indistinguishable
from falling. In effect, the weight of the tower was as if
the tower was trying to fall toward the centre of the
earth. If Aubrey could reverse the direction of that
falling, the building would – in effect – fall upwards. The
challenge would be to control the rate of that falling, so
that the tower would float easily and safely.

A reversal spell was what he needed. He chewed his
lip. He would have to be very careful. It wouldn't do to
reverse aspects or qualities such as height, or permanence,
or age, although it may be interesting to see how the
tower looked when it was first built. Reversing such
qualities would require an enormous application of
magic. The resulting state would be very unstable, even
with tightly circumscribed variables of location, intensity
and duration.

The Law of Reversal had many, many derivatives.
It was used to lower temperatures in crucial chemical
reactions. It had numerous safety applications, dampening
sounds, light intensities and velocities in wide-ranging
circumstances. But Aubrey knew it was a notoriously
delicate area to work in. Some magicians chose to
specialise in reversal spells, making it their life work and
gaining well-paid positions adjusting spells for industry
and the military.

I could get in touch with the Magisterium. I'm sure they
have some reversal specialists on staff.
He grinned.
Or I could
improvise.

He started humming happily.
It'd probably take too long
to contact the Magisterium, anyway
.

In a reversal spell, as for most serious magic, one of the
most important aspects was the magician's choice of
language – or combination of languages. Aubrey decided
that using Chaldean may be useful, as that ancient civilisation's
taut and structured syntax was well suited to
grappling with the sometimes tortured inversions that a
reversal spell dealt with.

He glanced at the open door to Maurice's office. He
caught George's eye and gestured. George nodded, then
steered Maurice away, giving Aubrey a chance to dart
into the tiny room.

Ten minutes later, he surveyed the blotter in front
of him, satisfied. He'd scratched out a spell that he was
sure would be able to lift the magical tower from its
foundations.

He folded the coarse paper and left the office. Behind
Maurice's back, Caroline rolled her eyes at him. Aubrey
was happy to come to the rescue. 'Maurice,' he said, interrupting
a story about floating crockery, 'would you like
to come flying with us?'

Maurice started, then shook his head. 'I'm not one for
adventures. I'm the one who stays behind and cleans up
the mess.'

'And a fine job you do, I'm sure,' George said.

'You're sure about this?' Maurice said to Aubrey.

'As sure as a magician can be.'

Caroline patted Maurice's arm. 'I think that was meant
to be reassuring.'

'It was? I don't mean any disrespect, but I've seen many
magicians in my time.'

'Ah,' George said, 'so that means you've seen plenty of
things go wrong.'

'True enough.'

'Well, Maurice, I'm offering this place a chance.'
Aubrey put a hand on the brickwork. 'It can stay as it is,
falling into disrepair until someone feels it'd be a good
idea to pull it down and put up an office block. Or we
can go ahead with my plan and give it a great and noble
chance. It might be its last adventure, but it'd go out with
a blaze of glory.'

Maurice cracked a grin. 'Aye, it would be that. The old
place deserves a chance to live again.'

Aubrey bowed to Caroline. 'Care to come for a spin in
my building-mobile?'

'I'd be delighted.'

Maurice hobbled toward the door and paused just
before exiting. 'Just do your best to bring it back in one
piece.' He closed the door softly behind him.

'What now?' Caroline asked, and Aubrey realised she
hadn't been present for a major incantation.

'It's simple, really. Just move to the wall and stay quiet.
Don't distract me or interrupt.'

'Unless he's in some sort of life-threatening situation,'
George said.

'What do you mean?'

'Never mind.' Aubrey shot a dark look at his friend.
George chuckled and put his hands in his jacket pockets.

Aubrey stood as close to the centre of the building as
he could, his back against the curving balustrade of the
stairs. He settled his feet, feeling that a solid grounding
may be important in this undertaking. He took the
blotting paper out of his pocket and studied the scratchy
Chaldean script as his pulse began to beat faster. All
seemed in order. He closed his eyes and cleared his mind.
Tiny misgivings nipped at him, but he shook them off.
I can do this
, he thought.
I will do this.

He opened his eyes. He took a deep breath, let it out,
and took in another. Then he began.

The Chaldean syllables were dense and agglutinative.
They felt like blocks of stone as he growled his way
through them, but he kept an even, unhurried rhythm,
never allowing one syllable to slur into the next. He was
careful with the variables for capacity and area of effect.
He made certain that the connection between the earth
and the tower was established and controllable. He didn't
want the tower fizzing off into the heavens. He felt sweat
on his brow as he moved on to limit the rate of reversal,
inserting a constant to maintain a steady increase in the
rate, one that he could monitor and adjust as necessary.

The final syllable was his signature, a cobbled-together
Chaldean version. It was subdued, without the flourish
that Aubrey often embellished his work with. When it
left his lips, he threw back his head and flung out his
arms. The syllables echoed around the open space of the
tower. He hoped he presented a dramatic picture, or an
impressive one, at least.

The floor beneath his feet trembled. A fine rain of dust
fell from somewhere above, accompanied by a patter of
dry pigeon droppings.

Aubrey let his arms drop to his side. The walls
trembled, vibrating with magical power and a groan went
up from underneath the floor. It was an old sound, but it
wasn't a sad one. It was as if a giant were stretching and
greeting a new day.

The tower lifted a few inches, then dropped back with
a crash.

'Aubrey?' Caroline said. She and George were still
standing with their backs to the wall.

'This first part may be a little rough.' He waved a hand
and did his best to appear as if he'd had enormous experience
with levitating buildings.

George looked sceptically at him, but they eased themselves
to the floor. George sat, splay-legged, Caroline
rather more elegantly.

The tower lifted again, then shuddered, and Aubrey
hastily joined his friends on the floor.

The walls flexed and strained, creaking mightily. The
tower seemed eager to be off, but through the window
by the door Aubrey could see they hadn't moved. He
stretched out his magical awareness and found that the
building was pulsing with power. The reversal spell had
worked, but the building still hadn't taken flight.

Puzzled, Aubrey went over the spell in his mind,
looking for any errors he may have made, but found
nothing. The groaning in the walls grew louder and from
beneath the floor came a grinding, snapping sound.

He stiffened and realised that he'd overlooked something
very important. His spell had encompassed the
whole building – but from ground level up. He'd forgotten
about the cellars.

He started to climb to his feet, ready to begin
constructing a cancellation spell, but at that moment the
floor shook; then with the sound of splitting timber and
the screech of metal being torn apart, the tower
wrenched upward and Aubrey was thrown to the floor.

He landed awkwardly on his back. All the air was
driven from his lungs and, for a moment, his body
refused to drag in any replacement. All he could think
about was breathing again, but his body remained uncooperative.
Eventually, after what seemed like hours, he
gasped and managed to drag in a sweet and precious
breath, then another. He sat up, dazed and shaking.
Through the windows, he could see the Library wall
opposite. It was sinking.