Aubrey arrived back at their base just as George and Sophie rode up, laughing, but Aubrey was immediately alert when he opened the front door to find the place was empty.
‘Caroline!’ He ran to the stairs. ‘Caroline!’
‘Aubrey,’ Sophie said. George was propping their bicycles against the wall while she waited at the bench just inside the door. She lifted one of the many glue pots and extracted a sheet of paper. ‘I think this note is for you.’
I am asleep, Aubrey read with the growing knowledge that he’d leaped before he’d looked. Do not wake me. Aubrey: the orders are in the secure place.
He swallowed. ‘Was I too noisy?’
George shrugged. ‘Unless she was cocooned in about a mile of sound-deadening material, I’d say so.’
The secure place had been organised before they’d left the base for their Stalsfrieden expedition. George had managed to construct a false ventilator cowling from sheet metal, and Sophie – with Aubrey’s guidance – had used the Law of Similarity and the Law of Seeming to reinforce this camouflage. Inside were niches, shelves and boxes that were attuned via the Law of Affinity only to reveal themselves when Aubrey, George, Caroline or Sophie reached for them.
Aubrey quickly found the orders. Caroline had decoded all six pages. He hoped it hadn’t taken too long, but he knew her pride wouldn’t have let her rest until she’d completed the task.
He took the stairs to the roof and sat, cross-legged, in the late morning sun, his back to the brick-walled utilities shed, absorbed in the details of the orders, which were couched in roundabout military language but all the more startling for it.
The Directorate had been at an impasse in its plans for the Divodorum front, but now that Aubrey and his team were once again in place a vital delivery was on its way. A shipment of magic neutralisers would arrive in two days’ time, and Aubrey’s orders were to take them to the front before the Holmland assault began.
When he reached the end of the orders, he took to his feet and read them again while carefully pacing the length of the roof between the lines of antenna wire.
Some of his fears were confirmed. Magic neutralisers had no point unless magic was needing to be neutralised. The Directorate obviously was of the same mind as he was: when the Holmland assault came, it would be accompanied by magic.
Aubrey stopped, looked to the north-east from where the sound of artillery was a distant, constant punctuation, then scanned the orders again.
The Directorate’s intelligence and analysis agreed with the information Aubrey had sent. The Holmland assault would begin within a week.