Midday was near by the time they found a dugout in the secondary line of trenches, one that showed signs of being temporarily unused. Wooden packing boxes were scattered about, and a wit had used one of the uprights that supported the ceiling to begin a list of fine restaurants in Trinovant.
While troops hurried past in both directions and the crackle of rifle fire sounded near and far, George and Sophie organised the packing boxes into instant seats while Aubrey wandered vaguely to the far end of the dugout and lit a lantern to illuminate the map that was spread on the wall, an old Gallian map of the region. He rocked back and forward, toe to heel, humming softly at the back of his throat while he studied it. He was aware that his friends were busying themselves, but if pressed, he probably couldn’t have nominated exactly what they were up to.
Aubrey took the map from the wall and spread it on a few packing boxes that George and Sophie had just dragged together. He sat and began tracing the various tracks that had been pencilled in.
Colonel Stanley approached, and Aubrey looked up. ‘Sir, I need your help in constructing a transference spell. Several transference spells.’
‘What sort of transference spells? Moving material? It’s easier and more reliable to do it the conventional way.’
‘I want to shift people.’
Stanley raised an eyebrow. ‘Snipers, eh? We tried shifting snipers about, early on, but you know the disorientation such a thing causes, even if you can find a magician who’s capable of such high-level magic. They wouldn’t be much use for anything after moving a single sniper any distance at all, either. Too costly.’
‘I’m aware of the Principle of Cost.’ He held up a hand, anticipating Stanley’s next objection. ‘Sir, I also understand the implications of the Law of Transference, where the further a magician proposes to move an object by magical means, the more complex the spell.’ Aubrey rested his elbows on his knees and leaned forward. ‘I’m not afraid of a little complexity.’
‘I’m glad of that, Fitzwilliam, but I understand that you’re not a transference specialist.’
‘I’m more of a magic generalist, I suppose.’
‘Quite. My experience is in this particular field and I can assure you that we’ve canvassed all the possibilities and costs of such magical action and we’ve ruled them all out.’ Stanley crossed his arms on his chest and glanced at Caroline, who was seated nearby, stripping down and cleaning one of her firearms. George and Sophie were also doing their best to appear as if they weren’t eavesdropping while they compared stories from their notebooks. ‘I must say that I’m disappointed. I’d been expecting something rather more innovative, if I can put it that way.’
Aubrey contemplated the rough boards that made up the floor. ‘I wasn’t thinking of snipers,’ he said softly.
‘Good.’
‘I’m thinking of transporting all the members of the Holmland War Cabinet and the generals of the Central Staff from their comfortable positions in Fisherberg to the middle of no-man’s-land.’
Again, Aubrey was immensely proud of his friends. They barely reacted, accustomed as they were to the outlandish. Caroline merely caught his eye and nodded, while George rubbed his hands together in anticipation. Sophie looked startled for an instant, but when George took her hand she bit her lower lip and looked determined.
Colonel Stanley, however, made up for their lack of surprise by a superabundance of his own. He half rose, then his knees gave way and he sagged onto his wooden box. His mouth opened and closed several times before anything emerged. He flapped a hand, once, then pointed at Aubrey before faltering. When a sentence finally made its way from his lips, it was broken, the essence of disbelief: ‘You… No… It’s impossible… That’s the most…’ He settled for shaking his head. ‘No. No. No.’
Before Aubrey could respond, Caroline cleared her throat and raised a finger, drawing Stanley’s attention. ‘Colonel? He’s quite capable of it.’
Slowly, his head swivelled, turret-like, until he was gazing at Aubrey. He swallowed, a mighty Adam’s apple moving up and down his throat. ‘How do you propose to do this?’ he croaked.
Aubrey sighed. ‘Well, it’s not easy…’
The limitations of long-distance transference were immense. Many recent experiments suggested that some sort of uncertainty was built into such shifting, with potentially disastrous results. The relative locations and determining them were crucial in hoping to achieve any satisfactory result. Such a thing was fiendishly difficult.
On top of that, Aubrey knew about costs to a spell caster. The more complex a spell, the more sapping the effect on the magic user. Transference spells were staggeringly complex, and the reaction was potentially enormous.
Approaching such a scheme in a conventional manner was fraught with danger and, most likely, doomed to failure. Which is why Aubrey was banking on another line of attack.
‘Colonel, bear with me, if you would. The source of magic is human consciousness, correct?’
‘That is the current accepted theory.’ Stanley hesitated. ‘You understand that I’m being cautious here. I have no reason to believe otherwise. Human consciousness intersecting with the universe itself spawns the magic field, for want of a better description. A talented and skilled magic user can shape this to their will through constraining and channelling the medium of language.’
‘I couldn’t have put it any better myself,’ Aubrey said. ‘It’s the shaping and wielding that cost the magic user. The more shaping, the more wielding, the higher the cost.’
‘So transference magic has traditionally been small scale and with less-than-bulky objects. Very rarely over distances and rarely on living objects.’ Stanley addressed the others, who had given up on their transparent pretence of not listening. ‘Living objects being more complex than inert ones, you see.’
‘I’m confident I can construct a spell that will take account of all the required elements – parameters, variables, constants – and bring these important Holmlanders to the front. What I want to build into the spell is a mechanism that will deflect reactive flow – the cost, if you will – back onto the collective humanity in this region.’
‘Good grief!’ Stanley straightened. ‘I’ve never heard of such a thing.’
George snorted. ‘Welcome to working with Aubrey Fitzwilliam, sir.’
‘Is such a thing possible?’ Stanley asked, and he stroked his chin. ‘I mean, I can imagine it -’
‘“If it can be imagined, a magician can do it,”’ Aubrey quoted. ‘Baron Verulam.’
‘Of course, of course.’ Stanley’s voice shook with excitement. ‘With so many people in this area, the shared cost would be negligible. No-one would notice it.’
‘That’s what I was hoping.’
Stanley stood. He smacked a fist into a palm. ‘But this is remarkable. Extraordinary.’
‘Innovative?’ Sophie offered.
‘Well, naturally it’s innovative…’ The colonel trailed off. ‘This could change the course of magic studies for decades.’
Aubrey shrugged and added the codicil that was hanging unspoken in the dugout. ‘If it works.’ He shuffled in his satchel and pulled out the papers that von Stralick had supplied. He spread them on the map. ‘The Central Staff. The Cabinet.’
‘Ah.’ Colonel Stanley’s face fell. He sat, heavily. ‘For a spell like this to work, you’d have to know exactly where they are. Not to mention their height and weight, necessities like that. I don’t suppose you do.’
‘Not exactly,’ Aubrey said. ‘I was thinking of splicing some other sorts of spells into the usual transference spells.’
Stanley wrinkled his forehead. ‘Splicing?’
‘I’ve had some success in bringing spells together, to make the best of each. I know it’s not exactly the traditional way of going about things…’
Stanley literally chewed this over, working his jaw while he examined the photographs. Aubrey had to give the man his due – he was taking Aubrey’s wild suggestions seriously instead of dismissing them out of hand.
Or dismissing them any other way, Aubrey thought, dismissing being rather final, whether done manually or by some sort of mechanical device.
‘Exactly what are you suggesting?’ Stanley said finally.
Exactly? Aubrey thought. Good question. ‘I want to use aspects of an application derived from the Law of Seeming, the Law of Completeness and the Law of Intensification.’
Stanley’s jaw sagged again. ‘What? But you can’t just mix and mash like that. It’s magic we’re creating here, not some sort of goulash.’
‘I think we can take these photographs and use them, thanks to the Law of Seeming, as our locative element of the transference spell. We can use them to pinpoint our subjects, as it were.’
‘You can’t do that,’ Stanley said. ‘I mean, one wouldn’t ordinarily consider using that sort of magic in this application. Transference needs coordinates, densities, figured as precisely as possible.’
‘It has, true, but has this sort of thinking actually limited applications of transference magic? The failure of specialising, perhaps? If I can wrangle something out of the Law of Similarity, it will make the newspaper pictures more real, more like their subjects, and that’s what I’ll splice the aspect of the Completeness principle into so that the spell will be urgently seeking the original based on the Law of Familiarity -’
‘Wait. Stop. Please.’ Stanley put his hand to his forehead and actually swayed. ‘You want to juggle all of these spell elements on top of the mind-cracking difficulty that is a standard transference spell?’
‘In a nutshell, sir, that’s about it.’ Aubrey rubbed his hands together. ‘I wouldn’t be attempting this for a lark, sir, but in this situation I think something out of the ordinary is called for.’
‘Quite, quite,’ Stanley muttered, his head down. He looked up, sharply. ‘Off hand, I can think of a hundred different reasons why such a lunatic approach wouldn’t work, but you’ve also made me think of a few improbable ways in which it could.’
‘You’ll help me, sir?’
‘Help you? I’ll do what I can but you’re already well beyond my magical help. What do you need on a more mundane level?’
‘A lot of paper, some pencils, erasers, plenty of food, coffee, tea, water and some camp beds.’
‘Camp beds?’
‘For my friends here. They need it.’
‘Excellent, old man,’ George said from where Caroline, Sophie and he were sitting, watching the discussion. ‘I was beginning to think you’d forgotten about us.’
‘Never, George. Never.’