The Laws of Magic 6: Hour of Need by Michael Pryor Read Free Book Online

on the uprights, they floated along the row of doors, opening and leaning in. Cables led into all of them.
    ‘This is magic?’ von Stralick asked.
    ‘Of a kind. Blended with electrical engineering.’
    ‘For what purpose?’
    ‘I’m still thinking about that.’ And I don’t like what I’m coming up with.
    Von Stralick sighed. ‘Mysterious is all well and good, but I’d prefer the mystery were on our side rather than the other.’
    ‘I’m sure there are people in Holmland saying the same. All Dr Tremaine’s cards are unlikely to be on the table.’
    It never hurt Aubrey to remind himself that Dr Tremaine’s goal was to perform the Ritual of the Way to achieve immortality for himself and his sister. To that end, he was fostering bloodshed, which he needed on a huge scale to implement the spell. Bringing the world to war was the first step, but he needed a titanic battle, one that would unleash death on a hitherto unimaginable scale. Since the beginning of the war, forces had been massing on the eastern front with Muscovia and on two western fronts: one through the Low Countries and on the border with Gallia, and one on Gallia’s north-east border near Stalsfrieden and Divodorum.
    In the long, worrying days watching over a delirious von Stralick, Aubrey had time to wonder about the disposition of the Holmland armies. Having two fronts on the Gallian border a hundred miles apart puzzled him, but his brooding had thrown up an awful possibility. Could Dr Tremaine be planning to link the two fronts? It would make a battlefront of staggering proportions, just the thing he would need to achieve his ends.
    The prospect was horrifying. Such a battlefront would commit huge quantities of war matériel, directing the entire output of whole nations to destruction. It would throw thousands, tens of thousands, of soldiers against each other. It was a possibility that any sane person would recoil from. No-one with any semblance of humanity would plan such a thing.
    This, of course, meant it was entirely within Dr Tremaine’s scope of imagining, which left Aubrey grappling not with what but with how.
    Aubrey found that he had drifted up toward the ceiling. He reached up and steadied himself, then turned to his magical awareness. Immediately, he bared his teeth as the basement became a chaos of magical splatters, cast-off residue from the intense magic that had taken place. Through the pseudo-sight that came with being magically endowed, it was like being in the studio of an extremely careless and extremely prolific artist, one who specialised in subjects malignant, festering and brooding.
    Aubrey didn’t want to get close to the residue smears. They throbbed, which suggested that they still contained some magical power – the nature of which he couldn’t divine. Something unhealthy, something to do with channelling and amplifying was the best guess he could make.
    ‘Hugo.’ Aubrey pushed against the ceiling, moving himself until he was directly over one of the desks in the middle of the basement. With a few syllables, he adjusted his elevation until he could nudge a pile of sodden papers with a toe. ‘If you were in charge of the Holmland forces, how would you go about uniting the division that is currently bogged down in the Low Countries with the one that’s dug in around Divodorum?’
    Von Stralick was peering at where a thick electrical conduit entered the room, high up on the wall near the stairs. Hand over hand, he lowered himself, then cocked an eyebrow at Aubrey. ‘Ah, the hypothetical! You Albionites love your games to fill in time. Charades, Donkey Tail Pinning, Hypotheticals.’
    ‘It’s not a game. You have some knowledge of the Holmland military mind. You should be able to put yourself in the shoes of the Supreme Army Command.’
    ‘That is not so difficult. More difficult, of course, is to predict what Dr Tremaine will do.’
    ‘Imagining yourself a Holmland general will be enough for now.’
    ‘There