Authors: Michael Pryor
He peered around the corner of the coat stand to see
the burglars advancing on their position, making their
way through crates, boxes and piles of horsehair packing.
In the quick glance, he saw that they were blinking,
wiping streaming eyes, and furiously unhappy.
He withdrew his head and cursed his luck. Not only
had he stumbled on antiquity-loving burglars in the
middle of a job, but they were hard-bitten villains, not
easily scared, and looking as if they were more interested
in settling scores than getting on with good,
honest thievery.
Or they don't want witnesses
, he thought and his stomach
turned to stone. The game had suddenly become much
more serious.
He pushed his mother toward the door. She didn't stop
to argue, for which he was grateful.
Outside, Aubrey skidded on the parquetry floor.
'Which way?'
'Which way to where?' Calm, a little puzzled, Lady
Rose made sure she closed the door behind them.
Softly.
'To somewhere away from here. They're after us.'
'Ah. This way, then. Through the Oriental Hall.'
They'd only made it halfway to the arched entrance
to the Oriental Hall when a shout went up, then a shot.
Aubrey ducked, instinctively, and flung an arm around
his mother.
She shook it off. 'You can run better without such
niceties,' she snapped and ducked past the pillar at the
entrance.
A few lights were on in the Oriental Hall, enough
for Aubrey to make out that it was a long, uninterrupted
stretch of display cabinets in two long
columns, all as tall as he was, with an aisle in the middle
and space between the cabinets and the walls on either
side.
Aubrey summed it up in an instant. Fortunately. If
they wove in and out of the cabinets, no-one could
stand and shoot at them from the entrance with any
likelihood of success.
Of course, someone could simply run down the
middle of the hall and tackle them.
Therefore, make pursuit more difficult
, he thought. Time
was important. The nightwatchmen must have heard the
gunshot. They'd be converging at any instant.
'Light the lantern,' his mother ordered.
'What?'
'Now,' she said calmly. She held it up in front of his
face. 'Light the lantern.'
A simple ignition spell jumped into his mind and the
lantern was alight.
'Now,' she said, 'let's see if this helps.'
She swept the beam of the lantern down the hall,
through the glass cases. Immediately, it bounced and
bent, and the room was full of dozens of shards of light,
flashing across walls and ceiling. Some cases were full of
brightness, but lost it when the beam moved on. Other
cases sent the light in unexpected directions as it reflected
off curved surfaces, gold and silver.
'
Sow confusion where you may
,' Lady Rose said. 'Or so
the Scholar Tan says, apparently.'
The evening had turned into a session of complete
gob-smackery for Aubrey, so his mother's quoting the
Scholar Tan was only mildly flabbergasting.
He grinned. She smiled. Then they were off.
They darted down the middle aisle, then flitted left at
a cabinet holding a beautiful, globular water jug, Lady
Rose keeping the lantern beam moving in jerky, erratic
sweeps. They paused for a moment, then they ran along
the wall, before slipping right across to the other wall and
racing for the far-off exit.
Aubrey took out the bottle of bicycle oil just as a
voice called out from the entrance to the hall. 'Stop
right there!'
Aubrey had momentary visions of aeronautical pigs,
then he uncorked the bottle and splashed it on the
ground as they ran, the sunflower seed rattling inside the
bottle. They crossed to the other side of the hall, sprinting
past cabinets of ewers and silver plate which reflected
the lantern light beautifully.
Aubrey dribbled oil as they ran.
Starting to pant, he chanted a spell, doing his best to
make it as clear as possible. The sunflower seed had been
in the bottle of oil for months now, preparing for a use
such as this. The Law of Proximity. In the time that
the oil and the seed had been close to each other, they
had absorbed some of the characteristics of each other –
helped by some judicious spells, of course. Now, the seed
had a special oiliness about it, while the oil had taken on
some of the qualities of the seed. With a little magical
nudging, the oil had the desire to grow, just like a seed.
Aubrey pushed out the last of the spell, a dimension-limiting
element, giving a rough idea of width and
breadth. He added his signature and immediately staggered.
It hadn't been a difficult spell but on top of his
exertions in the ruined shrine, it was taking a toll.
His mother grabbed his arm. 'Aubrey! Are you all right?'
The spell had drained him. The effort had struck him
like a punch to the stomach. 'Fine. Run.'
Behind him, he heard a thud, a crash, renewed cursing,
then a shot, but he was too tired to get worked up about
it. More thumps, curses, crashes, cursing. It sounded as if
a herd of bulls had taken it into their heads to do a spot
of china shopping.
'They're floundering on the floor, can't stand up at
all,' Lady Rose reported. Whistles sounded from nearby.
'Ah. Watchmen. The oil will disappear soon, I hope.'
'Ten minutes. Was all I could manage.'
'It is enough.'
They dashed out of the Oriental Hall. Lady Rose
shone the lantern both ways, then hurried Aubrey
toward a nearby doorway. 'The Arctic Display. It's being
redone. We won't be disturbed.'
Aubrey would have thought that the entire museum
in the middle of the night was a place not to be disturbed,
but events had convinced him otherwise. He
leaned against a lumpy, canvas-draped shape. The canvas
slipped and Aubrey was unsurprised to be staring at a
polar bear. He shrugged. 'Can you get us back to the
workshop?' he asked his mother. His pulse was loud in
his temples. He rubbed them, but it didn't help.
'I can. But I don't think that's wise. We shouldn't be
found here.'
'We won't be found here. If you can get us there
unseen.'
'Aubrey, you're not making sense.'
'If we can get there, I think we can still spirit the
Rashid Stone away.'
Lady Rose put both her hands together, as if she were
trying to hold a piece of paper between them, then put
them to her lips and studied him over the top. 'Exciting
though this has been, I really should get you away from
here. Enough is enough.'
'Mother, this could be a last chance to restore the stone
to the Sultan. If we don't do something now, Holmland
will have it forever.' He put a hand to his forehead.
'Or whoever those thieves are working for.'
And that's something I have to think about. When I have time.
Lady Rose dropped her hands. She looked at Aubrey
with exasperation. 'You're determined to do this, aren't
you? Despite the danger, you still want to do the right
thing?'
He straightened himself and stifled a groan. 'It's our
best chance. I think we have to.'
'You're just like your father.'
With that, Lady Rose set off, not looking back,
marching deeper into the shadowy maze of canvas
and scaffolding that was the Arctic Display under reconstruction.
A door near a fire hose opened onto a short corridor,
lit by a single electric light globe in a wire cage. 'I don't
think anyone knows this building in its entirety,' Lady
Rose said over her shoulder.
The corridor ended in a metal door. Aubrey added
his weight – ignoring the burning pain it sparked in his
shoulder – and the door screeched open. 'But you've
done some exploring,' he said.
His mother nodded. 'This is tricky. Hold my hand.'
Linked, they shuffled along a narrow, concrete corridor
that smelled of damp. Aubrey trailed his spare hand
along the wall and it came away wet.
'Careful,' Lady Rose said. 'Stairs. We're going down.'
The stairs were metal. Aubrey felt for each one and
clung to the handrail with strength that surprised him.
A watery light beckoned at the bottom of their descent.
'Cellar?' Aubrey looked around. The place was full of
trees. 'Forest?'
Lady Rose swept the lantern beam and it ran across
dozens of tree trunks. Some were slender, some were
broad and gnarled. Branches and leaves completed the
unexpected picture. 'These are props. We use them for
dioramas. You know: "The Animals of the African Plains"
and suchlike.'
Aubrey had seen some strange things underground
lately, but he'd never expected to see an underground
forest.
'Careful,' Lady Rose said as Aubrey turned away from
the trees.
Directly in front of him was a gap in the concrete
floor. It was a few feet across, and when his mother
pointed the lantern down he stared.
Tracks. Tiny train tracks a foot or two across. He
followed them and saw that they disappeared into
the wall.
'It's a parcel railway,' Lady Rose said. She pointed the
lantern up the tunnel, but the darkness ate the beam
before it made any real impression. 'Between the Art
Gallery, the Houses of Parliament and St Michael's
Hospital, for some reason. It's fallen out of use, but it once
had a regular, circular route.'
Aubrey felt as if he was learning about a hidden side of
an old friend. 'The underground life of this city astonishes
me.' He toed the rusty rails with his boot, then
frowned. Had the rail just shuddered?
He drew back his foot to try again, but his mother
tugged on his jacket. 'We should hurry.'
Reluctantly, Aubrey allowed himself to be led away
from the mysterious parcel tunnel.
Lady Rose took them through unlit corridors and
dusty, cobwebbed staircases. In some places, they had to
squeeze past forgotten crates, stacked high against the
walls. Other passages were empty and echoed to their
footsteps. It was as if they were in another world.
The workshop was quiet. From other parts of the
museum, however, Aubrey could hear the noises of pursuit
– whistles, shouts, ominous crashes. Further away again,
sirens and bells spiralled through the night, suggesting
that urgency was a useful attribute.
One side of the crate had been removed. With his
mother holding the lantern steady, Aubrey crouched and
peered inside.
Cloth had been torn aside. Nestled inside it was the
irregular black shape of the Rashid Stone.
'Can you leave the lantern, please, Mother? And listen
at the door? Let me know if we're likely to have visitors.'
'Very well.' She composed herself. 'I was working late,
became extremely worried by all the commotion, tried
to find out what was going on and ended up here.'
'Excellent. Who could doubt you?'
After she left, Aubrey spared himself a moment of awe.
This fragment was a time voyager. It had travelled four
thousand years – and several thousand miles – with its
mysteries intact. It had messages which had lasted longer
than kings and queens, longer than empires.
But underneath it all, the Rashid Stone was still a very
large, very heavy lump of granite.
And I want to walk out
of here with it
.
This, at least, was something he
had
prepared for. His
makeshift spell in Lutetia, which had levitated a whole
building, was one he'd spent some time refining since that
adventure. He felt confident about applying it to the
Rashid Stone to reduce its weight. He didn't want it
bobbing along like a balloon, though, as a slab of granite
drifting through the air was likely to attract attention.
He wanted to slip it in his pocket.
Weight-negating, then, was under control. But he
needed to compress the size of the stone to something
more manageable.
And this is where his pondering over the dimensionality
spell he'd seen in action on the submersible came
in handy. By combining aspects of his levitation spell
(the Law of Reversal) and the dimensionality spell he
could produce something which would shrink the stone to
an unnoticeable size, but not leave it in a state where its
weight would be unmanageable.
Of course, such a novel combination of spells, crossing
distinctly different principles, was something that needed
careful experimentation, in controlled laboratory conditions,
so that variables could be noted and countered,
the results could be tabulated and mused over, a paper
could be written on 'Some Aspects and Applications of
Combining Spells Derived from the Law of Inversion
and the Principle of Dimensionality', preferably with the
name of a respected professor attached, the one who
dropped into the lab looking for his tea cup.
With no time for that, Aubrey took a deep breath and
started.
The thrill he felt at embarking on a new magical
direction almost overcame his exhaustion. He'd done
much of the preparatory work on the way to the
museum, and he pulled out the scrap of paper he'd used
while in the cab. It was hard to read, even when he
angled it to catch the lantern light. He'd hammered out
the variables for duration (open-ended – he didn't want
to be held up on the way back to Maidstone and have
a suddenly massive chunk of stone tear a hole in his
pocket) and direction (heavier rather than lighter) but he
hadn't been able to do much more before seeing the
slab. He squinted and worked up some dimensional and
positional parameters, translating them into Demotic as
he went. He'd felt that using the ancient Aigyptian
language might be fitting in this circumstance; he'd had
some experience using it for spells that dealt with
physical variables.
He stood, knees popping alarmingly, fixed his gaze on
the stone in the crate, and began.
It was a long spell, of necessity. It had many elements
to control, and all had to roll out in the correct order.