WITH THE CARE THEY’D LEARNED IN THEIR CROSS-COUNTRY ordeal, Aubrey and von Stralick eased themselves out of the cave and down the rock face. As they approached the estate in the darkness, soft noises came from the multitudinous and unknowable doings of a forest at night time, overlaid with the settlings from the conflagration site – creaking timber and ashes hissing where dew was falling on coals. Occasionally a guard would call out to his comrades and once, as they neared, Aubrey could swear he heard a bottle clinking on glass. He decided that they must be confident that Dr Tremaine wasn’t coming back for some time, which was vastly reassuring.

The wall of the estate was built of stone, deliberately rough cast to give it a rustic appearance. The barbed wire on top of the twelve-foot wall, however, was definitely a new addition, quite out of keeping. The barbs glinted in the lights of the main house.

‘Someone has been busy.’ Von Stralick pointed at several tree stumps close to the wall to their left.

‘Clearing overhangs, I’d say.’ Aubrey was disappointed. It would have been handy to find a tree near the wall. ‘It suggests that whatever is going on inside is worth protecting.’

‘Or was worth protecting, before it was blown up. Time for some of your magic?’

‘Unless you have a very large stepladder hidden in your jacket. Ah.’

‘Ah?’

‘I’m rethinking, Hugo, as we speak, because I’ve just spotted the magic detectors on the wall.’

On the top of the wall, just beneath the lowest strand of barbed wire, was a series of featureless black boxes. Aubrey could see two between their position and the gates, the nearest only a few yards away. Turning to his left, he could make out another a stone’s throw away. He imagined the field of detection was limited to the fenceline to avoid unnecessary alarms from stray magic inside the estate.

Von Stralick scratched his chin. ‘This will make things more difficult, I assume.’

‘Definitely. Any magic strong enough to spirit us over the wall will set off the alarms. Even these guards wouldn’t ignore that sort of thing.’

‘I’ll go back to the cave and fetch my very large stepladder, will I?’

‘If you could, it would be handy.’ Aubrey stared at the nearest magic detector. Significantly, it didn’t stare back. It simply sat there smugly, daring him to try something.

Apart from an overactive imagination, he thought, perhaps I’m going about this the wrong way.

Instead of trying to avoid detection, why couldn’t he simply prevent the machines from alerting the dozy guards? After all, a magical alarm that couldn’t do any actual alarming was, essentially, a box – and a box wasn’t going to stop Aubrey Fitzwilliam from getting over a wall.

While von Stralick leaned against the wall with remarkable patience, Aubrey juggled the possibilities. Typically, magic detectors blared a warning, siren-like, when magic intruded into their area of scrutiny.

Sound travels through air. If I can remove the air from the vicinity of the detectors they’d be doing their best to alarm, but their efforts will be pointless.

Aubrey rubbed his hands together. Aware that he was letting a problem get slightly personal, he was looking forward to seeing how smug the magic detectors would be in a vacuum.

Aubrey had dabbled with air evacuation spells – an application of the Law of Transference – to render miscreants unconscious, so he had a foundation to work with. The range of effect and the dimensions of the spell were the crucial elements. He wished he could run a tape measure over one of the detectors, but he had become reasonably good at estimating by eye. A dome-shaped coverage would be best, he decided, and he opted for a volume that was – naturally – half of a sphere. Calculating πr³ in his head gave him a few forehead wrinkles, but in the end he had it. The spell would have to come into being and produce its effect with little time lag, so he concentrated on making it as condensed as possible. He added an operator that controlled copies of the spell, to account for the detectors either side of the stretch of wall they were going to breach, then he pronounced the spell crisply.

He tensed a little when he felt the domes pop into being – a tickle of saltiness on the skin of his face – and then nothing, and he grinned. He had rarely been so pleased to see nothing happening. Instead of announcing spell failure, in this particular case nothing happening meant success.

Von Stralick had fallen asleep. He was leaning against the wall, eyes closed, his chin sagging nearly to his chest. Aubrey shook him gently. ‘We’re ready.’

Von Stralick was alert immediately. He withdrew his revolver. Aubrey blinked, but it made sense – of a brutal kind. He could get them over the wall, but Hugo was going to make sure that they could deal with any unfriendly reception on the other side.

The levitation spell rolled off his tongue. He felt his feet leave the ground and reached out to steady von Stralick, whose eyes went wide as they rose. They drifted easily up the rough stone face of the wall but when they reached the barbed wire Aubrey felt horribly exposed. If one of the guards looked in their direction, they were in trouble, but he was trusting that the darkness of the night and the unexpectedness of this mode of entry would make it unlikely that they’d be noticed.

He increased their ascent and once they topped the last strand of barbed wire he reached down with a foot and gently pushed against the nearest of the metal poles embedded in the wall to hold the wire. It gave them some forward momentum, enough to send them drifting a few yards inside the perimeter.

Aubrey was telling himself not to feel satisfied when he looked over his shoulder at the wall. With a cunning sort of timing and from surfaces that were previously featureless, the two nearest detectors chose that moment to jet forth dozens of blinding white beams that rotated, sweeping back and forth like miniature searchlights, lighting up the sky, the rocky crag, the main house – and two floating intruders.

Von Stralick swore. Aubrey inverted the levitation spell and they dropped to the ground, fetching up behind a large rhododendron. Shouts came from the main house, and more from the darkened gardens.

Von Stralick grinned fiercely as they crouched in the darkness. ‘Not quite the outcome you were hoping for?’

‘I didn’t think Holmland magical engineering would be that imaginative,’ Aubrey said. ‘Sound and light alarms? That’s like wearing belt and braces at the same time.’

‘What do we do? Back over the wall?’

Aubrey was tempted, but also reluctant to leave. They’d made it this far, after all. ‘Can we deal with four guards?’

‘Four would normally be no trouble, but they are armed.’

The lights from the magic detectors made shadows flit across the gardens, turning the vegetation, garden furniture and scattering of statues that had survived the blast into an eerie wonderland. Aubrey scanned the surroundings, his mouth dry, his heart thumping. A hundred things he’d learned in his Directorate training jostled for attention in his mind. The darkness would be an advantage, for one thing. Secondly, von Stralick and he knew how many guards were on patrol, while the guards wouldn’t know how many intruders were in the vicinity, which had to be an advantage.

The sort of advantage that could become a weapon.

‘Don’t move,’ he whispered to von Stralick.

Von Stralick nodded, then squinted, whipped out his pistol and snapped off three quick shots at guards who had appeared.

Aubrey groaned, but he hastily grabbed at aspects of the Law of Seeming, the Law of Amplification, the Law of Affinity and the Law of Patterns, holding their many constants and variables in his head. While trying to concentrate, he couldn’t help hearing shouts, or half-glimpsing figures moving from shadow to shadow. The guards were making use of their familiarity with the estate, working their way around the still smoking ruins and the bulk of the main house.

Forget them, he told himself. Focus!

On all fours, Aubrey scrabbled until he found a patch of bare ground at the base of an oleander bush. With a twig, he sketched a rough stick figure and rushed through the first spell. Immediately, the stick figure popped out of the ground and stood upright. It was a tiny, shaky creation, only as tall as a wine bottle, two dimensional and barely tangible. While it shivered and swayed, it was joined by twenty identical, spindly shapes as Aubrey repeated the spell. Then he swung his arm wide, as if sowing seeds, and they vanished.

Immediately, he was gratified to hear a Holmlandish voice cry, ‘What was that?’

Von Stralick scurried to his side. He held his revolver at the ready and peered into the night. ‘Something dramatic would be useful, Fitzwilliam. Soon, too, by preference.’

‘One moment.’

Aubrey ran through another spell, then cupped a hand over his mouth. He rehearsed his Holmlandish and whispered ‘Over here’ into his hand. Then, as if he were throwing a stone, he whipped his arm in a long arc. Instantly, his voice cried out from the far edge of the estate: ‘Over here!’

‘I have them,’ he growled into his hand and after he flung it a shout boomed from the parterre, the formal geometric garden directly in front of the main house: ‘I have them!’ Quickly, he followed these outbursts with more, distributing them about the estate: near the cliff top, by the gates, past a dimly seen collection of outbuildings that were still standing near the fountain.

The Holmland guards were clearly startled by this assault. They shouted warnings, adding to the tumult as Aubrey continued to send his voice to all corners of the estate. Within minutes, the Holmlanders were convinced they were set upon by an army, outflanked, possibly surrounded.

The guards’ level of jumpiness was heightened by the stick figures Aubrey had sent scurrying about the estate. They crept from bush to bush, darting between trees and rushing along paths before diving into garden beds. Their insubstantial nature made them hard to see, but the suggestion was enough to make the guards extremely panicky.

Of course, armed guards being armed guards, panic led to shooting. Aubrey and von Stralick flattened themselves against the ground as bullets whipped overhead, accompanied by more shouts from guards who warned their colleagues they were being shot at. The fact it was their colleagues who were doing the shooting was a possibility that none of them countenanced. They were more concerned, naturally, with the clear danger coming from the intruders, who they were sure numbered in the hundreds.

The stick figures continued to scamper about, man-sized now and taking on more substance as Aubrey exerted himself. They shook vegetation, crunched along the gravel of the driveway, rattled through the debris of the explosion. One managed to break a window on the glasshouse – which was immediately rendered an unglasshouse when two guards sent a volley of shots in that direction.

Aubrey kept the phantom sounds and movements working, not giving the guards time to regroup or confer. He threw a line of confusion around them, shouting and shaking, flitting and threatening, pushing them in the direction of their remaining lorry, which stood near the gatehouse.

Once they were backed up against it, peering into the dark and firing away while shouting at the others not to waste bullets, Aubrey summoned his strength and drew on the smouldering coals of the nearest ruin.

A dozen of the stick figures scampered to the heat and dived in, combining and instantly becoming a stick figure giant – insubstantial, but terrifying in its flaming presence, towering at the height of the treetops, alive with fire and wrath. In careful Holmlandish it boomed, ‘WE HAVE THEM NOW!’

One of the guards screamed. The others began shooting at the gigantic fiery figure, which affected it not at all. Then, as Aubrey had hoped, fingers crossed so hard they hurt – one of the guards had the presence to leap into the lorry and start it.

Aubrey didn’t blame the guards. Even he was impressed by the angry flaming giant, stick figure or not.

The sound of the engine was better than any order to embark. The other Holmlanders flung themselves into the lorry, still firing wildly at the stick giant – which hadn’t moved – and then the lorry roared out of the gates.

Von Stralick stood and dusted himself off. He flipped the safety catch on his revolver. ‘I could have managed all of them.’

Aubrey ran a hand across his brow and let out a long, slow breath. The flaming giant collapsed. ‘I’m sure you could have, Hugo.’