Time of Trial (13 page)

‘Aubrey never does anything without a reason,' George said. He paused. ‘Well, he does sometimes but then it turns out that he had a reason after all. After the fact, if you know what I mean.'

Aubrey shook himself. The difference between his magical apprehension and what confronted them in the real world was so extraordinarily vast that he was having trouble coming to terms with it. They both reinforced each other – one was a magical barrier, the other an equally effective material barrier – but as he dealt with the overlapping double-sensed impressions he realised that it was what lay on the other side that was important.

Though the wall itself was highly charged with magic, he could feel even more forceful magic coming from the other side and it made him extremely nervous. It was like hearing a tiger behind a closed door and wondering how strong the timber was.

Despite this, there was only one way to go.

‘We have to get through,' he said. ‘What we're seeking is on the other side.'

He inched closer to the wall. He felt as if he were walking into a stiff breeze as the magical power pushed against him and he had to lean into it. He placed a hand on its surface and felt a prickling, a tingling. Drawing back, he sensed that the surface of the barrier wasn't as uniform as he had first thought. In his pseudo-sight, it actually rippled with power, shimmers of brighter colour streaking across it, forming patterns, a subtle, lace-like tracery. He took a step back and tried to take in the whole wall, tried to apprehend the delicate weaving and twisting of magic, but he found it difficult. The further away he was, the harder it was to make out as it merged and blurred into one fiery whole.

Then, just a pace or two away to his left, he noticed a fine silvery-orange line that was suspiciously straight and well-defined against the branching rivulets of magic that ran across the wall. He moved closer and, with some difficulty, was able to discern that the line turned at rightangles. He sighed with relief.

‘I think we have a door.' He touched the surface to make sure. He opened his eyes and rubbed his hands together. The tingling persisted, turning into a fading sense of pins and needles.

‘Where?' Caroline asked.

‘Here.' Aubrey stepped back when the stone wall swung inward.

George steadied him with a hand. ‘Good show, old man!'

‘Wait. Can you hear something?'

Von Stralick frowned. ‘Voices. Many.'

‘But they're whispering,' George said. ‘Whatever for?'

‘I have no idea,' Aubrey said, ‘but I think we need to find out.'

Aubrey waited for a moment, giving anything lethal a chance to lunge out at them. He was grateful when it didn't. Finding secret doors into areas of great magic only to have something ravenous and many-toothed swarm out wasn't one of his favourite pursuits.

He eased through the doorway, his blinding light spell on his lips and every nerve alert. Then he stopped, gaping, as the others entered. George and von Stralick stifled oaths, while Caroline's eyes were wide with astonishment.

The space was too grand to be called a room, and too outlandish. It was a white ovoid twenty yards or so in diameter, softly shimmering with the lustre of...

Pearl
, he thought, but it was more than that
.
The walls, the ceiling were curved and the sheen captured all the subtle iridescence of nacre and magnified it a thousandfold. It was the
heart
of the pearl.

The entire space was filled with ghosts – and all of them were Sylvia Tremaine. Murmuring, whispering, vacant-eyed replicas of their host.

Aubrey prided himself on being a rationalist. A modern magician couldn't be anything else, since contemporary magic insisted on empirical observation, measurable evidence and reproducible results.

He may have known that, but deep in his primitive self didn't. He backed against the gently curving wall, his skin feeling two sizes too small. His stomach knotted as fear took hold.

The ghosts ignored him. A score or more of them, transparent, insubstantial, drifted around the room whispering to themselves, their voices combining to fill the room with the sound of moth wings.

Aubrey's breathing slowed as he began to sort through what he was seeing. It wasn't a conscious decision, it was simply an extension of the way he saw the world. It was a place that could be made sense of – with enough thought, intelligence and insight.

The insubstantial figures were indeed replicas of Sylvia, and they didn't seem to notice him watching them. With interest, he saw how they disregarded each other even when their gliding, erratic paths brought them close to another ghost. His eyes widened as two of the insubstantial figures actually intersected, passing through each other as if neither was there.

Observation
, he thought shakily.
More data needed
. He signalled to the others, taking them from their silent amazement, and indicated that they were to be ready to act. He steeled himself and held out a hand, right in the path of one of the wanderers.

Blank-eyed, hands clutched at breast level, the transparent Sylvia replica didn't pause in her step. She simply passed straight through Aubrey's hand, leaving him wringing it and frowning.

It had felt as if he'd dipped his hand in ice water, but that was all. The Sylvia replica had drifted through him as if he wasn't there. Aubrey could make out her whisperings, but the words made no sense to him: ‘Lost, lonely, lost and lonely. Lost, lonely, lost and lonely.'

He trotted alongside, but the words didn't vary. Over and over again: ‘Lost, lonely, lost and lonely. Lost, lonely, lost and lonely.'

Curious, he turned and followed another only to hear a similar nonsense. ‘Far away, far away, far away.'

He shuddered when he listened into a third – ‘It hurts so, make it stop. It hurts so...' – delivered with what he could only call a deadpan expression, and he hoped Bertie would forgive him for that.

He'd only ever seen one thing that had any resemblance to these apparitions – and that was his own soul, once it had been disrupted from his body. These were similar. More insubstantial, less
real
– if that made any sense in this sort of thing – but there was definitely a similarity.

A hand fell on his shoulder and he yelped, the noise cutting through the echoing susurrus of whispers and echoing around the pearl chamber.

‘Steady on, old man,' George said. ‘We've got to get out of here.'

‘What? Why?'

‘Sylvia says so.' George pointed at the ghostly figures in their endless promenade around the pearl chamber. ‘They mustn't be let out.'

‘I am a larger piece than those poor things,' Sylvia said. ‘They are tiny splinters, hardly holding themselves together.'

Once again, they were in the sitting room. Outside, it appeared to be later afternoon, shadows creeping over the garden.

‘We are all made of many parts,' Aubrey said carefully, unsure what she meant.

‘So true. So true.' Sylvia pondered this for a time. She stared at the wall over Aubrey's left shoulder for so long that he turned to see what was so interesting.
Unless she's fascinated by flat, pale blue paint
, he thought,
then she's lost her train of thought.

‘Now then, Sylvia,' George said, taking advantage of what was proving to be a very large gap in the conversation, ‘d'you think you could help us get out of here? We'd like to go home, you see.'

‘Home.' Sylvia lingered over the word. ‘I had a home, once.'

‘Of course you did,' von Stralick said. ‘Now, about getting us out of here...'

‘They spoke like you, there.' She looked at him with a flicker of interest. ‘They sounded like you.'

‘Holmlanders?' Aubrey jumped in. He wanted to keep that flicker alive. ‘Did you once live in Holmland?'

‘I was born there,' she said simply. ‘And so was Mordecai. I seem to remember we were happy.'

Aubrey sat back in his chair. This was a remarkable piece of information: the first hint Aubrey had ever heard that the great Dr Tremaine was actually a Holmlander.

‘Now,' Sylvia said. ‘You must go back in your places. You have been so inventive, so elusive, that I'm sure I have much to learn from you.'

George coughed. ‘Look here, Sylvia. I think I'm speaking for everyone here when I say that's not what we'd prefer.'

‘I agree with Doyle,' von Stralick said, without a trace of irony. ‘We must leave. Now.'

‘I don't think so.' A touch of a frown wafted across Sylvia's brow. ‘You will stay here.'

Even though her voice was soft and wan, Aubrey could hear the surety in her voice – and it was the absolute certainty of her brother. To Dr Tremaine, the universe was simply how he saw it, nothing more complicated than that.

Occasionally, Aubrey found himself admiring such unswerving self-belief, but more often he found himself wondering what such an attitude
missed
. He felt it could lead to overlooking things, ignoring things that were only ever thought of if one bothered to reflect.

It doesn't seem to have stopped Dr Tremaine, though
.

His thoughts were interrupted by George standing up and pacing the room. His friend didn't look happy. ‘Sylvia, I don't mean to be rude, but we don't belong here. It was an accident that brought us inside your place.'

‘It doesn't matter.' Sylvia brushed the cushion of the settee with her hand, even though it looked perfectly clean. ‘You'll be happy here.'

‘That's not the point,' Caroline said. ‘We don't want to be here.'

‘That doesn't matter either.'

Aubrey tried another tack. ‘Sylvia. What were those things in the pearl chamber? Why shouldn't they be let out?'

‘The pearl chamber?' Sylvia tilted her head back and studied the ceiling. ‘I remember.'

‘Of course you do. You said we had to keep the door closed.'

‘Yes. Or else they'd find the open door and wander. It took so long to find them all last time.'

‘Last time?'

‘When we came here. After Mordecai's spell.'

‘Wait. You said you were a larger part than those things in the chamber.'

Sylvia nodded. ‘Mordecai. To save me from my sickness. He said he was manipulating the Law of Separation.'

Aubrey saw it immediately. ‘Oh.'

‘What is it, Aubrey?' Caroline asked.

He chose his words carefully. ‘The Law of Separation states that a whole can be divided and reunited again without any harm, as long as all the correct limitations are placed on the constituent parts.'

When Sylvia spoke again it was as if it was from a long way away. ‘He wanted to separate me. He said he would divide me into my constituent parts, thus separating my illness from the rest of me.' She paused. ‘After that, he said he would bring me back together without it.'

‘But that's not the way the Law of Separation works,' Aubrey said. ‘That'd be like disassembling a clock, putting it back together and then expecting it to work with a few gears and springs left out.'

‘Mordecai knew what he was doing. He told me so.'

The conclusion was inescapable. ‘The spell would have rebounded,' Aubrey said. ‘Horribly.'

Sylvia put a hand to her cheek. ‘Our soul shattered into fragments.'

An icy trickle ran down Aubrey's spine. His experience with the dissociation of his body and soul had led him to find out as much as he could about the condition. He'd learned much about disunification – and he'd heard hints of souls being shattered. The prospect wasn't a cheery one. ‘What happened?'

‘Our soul was shredded and all the pieces were on the verge of being scattered, irretrievably. But Mordecai managed a preservation spell. Our body was left behind, alive but not alive. Then he caught what soul fragments he could.'

‘And you ended up here?' Caroline asked. ‘Trapped in a pearl?'

‘He would have used what was close at hand,' Aubrey murmured. ‘Quick thinking.'

‘Preserved in a pearl,' Sylvia said. ‘Mordecai swept up the fragments of our soul that he could find and put them all here. I was the largest. Once inside, I searched until I found the others, and put them in the heart of the place. Safe.'

‘Very safe. He put a guardian spell in place, didn't he?'

‘To watch over us. To protect our sanctuary.'

‘By trapping any intruders,' Aubrey said absently. He was having his doubts about the thoroughness of Sylvia's account. What if Dr Tremaine actually wasn't aware of everything that had gone on? Complex preservation spells could have unexpected effects. It could explain why he was angry about losing the pearl, but not desperate to get it back. He may not have realised how much of his sister was actually trapped inside it.

He chewed his lip. Something Sylvia had said had snagged his curiosity. He couldn't let it pass – it was like a white piece of lint on a dark suit. ‘You said that when the spell went wrong, your brother swept up the fragments that he could find.'