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    Aubrey drifted over the lip of the cliff, where a stretch of lawn ran toward the house and the outbuildings. The grass was longish, which Aubrey attributed to the difficulty of finding volunteers to mow so close to the edge of such a precipitous drop.
    With solid ground underfoot and still pondering deeply, he hurried in the direction of the ruins, only to meet a wild-eyed von Stralick, who advanced on him, revolver at the ready.
    ‘Fitzwilliam!’ Von Stralick lowered the revolver. ‘Where did you go? What happened?’
    ‘Dr Tremaine left a nasty little spell behind. Clever, but nasty. I was shifted bodily off the edge of the cliff.’
    Von Stralick’s eyebrows shot up. ‘I’m glad you went first then.’
    The same thought had occurred to Aubrey. ‘Your revolver wouldn’t have been much use to you if you’d gone ahead.’
    Von Stralick squinted at it and thrust it into his belt. ‘Perhaps not.’ He laughed. ‘I am glad you yelled.’
    ‘I did?’
    ‘I heard you, so I ran out of the basement instead of following you into it.’
    On the way back to the basement, von Stralick found another lantern, and then picked up the rake he’d abandoned. He lit the lantern and hung it from the rake that he carried over his shoulder.
    ‘It is a light burden,’ he said carefully.
    Aubrey had to award him points for making a pun in a language that wasn’t his own, and he promised himself that he’d share it with Prince Albert, that most avid collector of puns.
    When Aubrey again found himself falling, wind whipping his hair, he was extremely impressed. Dr Tremaine had been careful in his warding, leaving two compressed spells to fling burglars off the cliff.
    After the third time, however, Aubrey began to fume.
    He found von Stralick sitting on the stairs leading to the basement. ‘Again?’ the Holmlander asked.
    ‘Again. But this time …’
    Aubrey held the doorframe and leaned inside while von Stralick poked the rake and lantern past him to provide illumination. What Aubrey saw made him rock back so quickly that von Stralick had to juggle the rake to avoid losing the lantern.
    Just inside the door, in a neat row flush with the wall, was a line of a dozen or more metal cylinders, smaller cousins of ones that Aubrey had seen only too recently in Baron von Grolman’s golem-making facility.
    Aubrey’s curiosity immediately ordered him to leap inside and inspect the cylinders, to pull them apart until their nature was ascertained to the last detail. Accustomed as it was to getting its own way, when Aubrey didn’t immediately comply his curiosity went off and sulked, allowing him to proceed with more rational care.
    ‘Don’t set foot in there, Hugo, until I can work out what’s going on.’
    ‘Fitzwilliam, you will find me patience incarnate.’
    Aubrey extended his magical awareness and hissed. Each one of the cylinders held an identical clutch of spells. Not just similar, as would normally be the case in casting the same spell a number of times, but absolutely, manifestly identical.
    His curiosity roused from its sulking. It was as if this one datum, this one piece of information, was a particularly juicy-looking rabbit lobbed in front of a dog. This time, Aubrey couldn’t help but let his curiosity loose to chase it and see where it led.
    Could it be that Dr Tremaine had made great strides in efficient spell reproduction? Had he perfected a method of copying spells quickly and accurately? It fitted with other data Aubrey had been assembling – the machine-golem hybrids, the spells to control wounded soldiers, the enhanced coal that powered the golems. All of this was too much magic for one person, even Dr Tremaine – but Aubrey had difficulty thinking of Dr Tremaine recruiting and training other magicians to take over this burden of replicating spells.
    Create a spell, then use a reproducing spell to make copies. Or was it the work of a magically constructed and potentialised engine, a spell-copying