Year of the Griffin

“But didn’t you tell Corkoran that the wards of the University would protect you?” Ruskin demanded.

“So I may have. But how do I know? I have not enough wizardry yet to know if the wards are strong enough,” Felim said desperately. “Assassins are magic-users. They are also deadly with weapons. I have practised all week with the rapier, but I know this is not enough. They may break the wards and enter here. I am promised horrible magical tortures so that I die by inches. What do I do?”

Ruskin’s face was, by this time, almost as grey as Felim’s. “Forgemasters are magic-users too,” he growled. “How strong are these wards?”

Everyone looked at Claudia. She came and put her hands calmingly on Felim’s shaking shoulders. “Steady. Does anyone know any divination spells?”

There was a long silence and then Lukin said, “I think we do those next term.”

“A bit late. Right,” said Claudia. “So we can’t find out if the wards here will protect him—”

“And tell no one else, tell no one else!” Felim almost screamed. “This is a shame I can hardly bear!”

“All right,” said Claudia. “But we can quite easily put protection spells on you ourselves, you know. It’s just a matter of finding out how to. There must be books in the Library about it. Let’s go and look.”

“Er – I hate to say this,” Lukin said, “but we have to go and take notes about herbs from Wermacht. Five minutes ago, actually.”

“Library straight after that then,” said Elda. “Stick in our midst, Felim, and if any assassins turn up, we’ll defend you. I can be quite dangerous if I try.”

“I – I am sure you can,” Felim agreed, with a quivering sort of smile.

When they tiptoed hurriedly into the North Lab, Wermacht was already dictating notes to students and healers about the virtues of black hellebore, but his manner was decidedly subdued. Seeing the six belated students, he did nothing but pull his beard and mutter something that might have been “Better late than never!” Even when Elda knocked over a desk, trying to be unobtrusive, all he did was raise a sarcastic eyebrow. He did not seem to notice that Felim just sat there, unable to concentrate on black hellebore, or on foetid hellebore either.

“That was a relief!” said Claudia as they shot outside afterwards, dragging Felim with them. “Now. Library.”

They hastened across the courtyard to the grand and lofty Spellman Building. The Spellman Building, so one of the innumerable pieces of paper they had been given when they first arrived informed them, was the oldest part of the University, designed by that Wizard Policant whose statue stood in the courtyard. Once it had contained the entire University. Now its lower floor contained the Council Chamber, the main lecture hall and the University office, all ancient stone rooms where generations of student wizards had once sat learning spells. The upper floor now held bachelor quarters for the wizards who lived in the University, and the Library. Elda led the rush up the great stone stairway, hardly sparing a thought for the fact that her claws were scraping stone steps that had been climbed by a thousand famous wizards. Up to now, this had awed her considerably, but she was in too much of a hurry just then.

The librarian on duty winced a bit as Elda shoved through the swing doors, followed by a gaggle of humans and a dwarf, and hurriedly strengthened the stabilising spells. The Library was spacious enough for humans, with its high ribbed ceiling and shapely clerestory windows, but the gaps between the mighty oak bookcases had only been made wide enough for two wizards in robes to pass comfortably. Elda filled the gaps, and her wingtips tended to brush the marble busts of former wizards on the ends of each bookcase. The librarian watched nervously as the group made for the Inventory.

The Inventory was a magical marvel. It looked like a desk with a set of little drawers above it. You picked the special quill pen out of the inkwell on the desk, which activated the magic, and then wrote on the parchment slotted into the sloping surface. You could write the author of a book, or its title, or just the general subject you wanted, and when you had, the Inventory hummed a tune to itself and, after a second or so, slid open one or more of its little drawers. Each drawer was labelled on the outside with the name of one of the wizards whose marble busts stood on the ends of the shelves. Inside, you would find a card with the name of the book or books you needed on it, its author and its shelf number. The snag was that the busts of the wizards were not labelled. You had to know which statue was Eudorus, or Kline, or Slapfort and so forth, before you could begin to find the book.

The librarian watched more and more uneasily as heads bent over the desk and drawers slid in and out. Unfortunately, it was the griffin who knew the names of the busts. She seized card after card, hooked it to a talon and set off on three legs to plunge between bookcases and back out again carrying a book. Sometimes she got the wrong side of a bookcase and backed out without a book, to plunge into the next gap along, but in either case, the bust on top lurched and wobbled.

Meanwhile, the whispers round the Inventory grew more agitated. Several of the students glanced towards the librarian. Eventually the dwarf announced, in a loud, buzzing whisper, “Well, I’m going to ask about it,” and came marching up to the librarian’s desk. He put his chin on top of it and asked, quite politely, “Don’t you have Policant’s Philosophy of Magic? I can’t seem to find it in the Inventory.”

“Well, no, you wouldn’t,” the librarian explained. “That’s an old book. We don’t keep those on the shelves.”

“And—” the dwarf propped a large hand on the desk to consult a crumpled list “—I can’t find The Red Book of Costamaret, Cyclina on Tropism, or Tangential Magic either. Are those not on the shelves too?”

“That’s right,” agreed the librarian. “We don’t bother with any of those these days because none of the tutors recommend them to students. The courses nowadays don’t go in for theory so much.”

“But that’s ridiculous!” Ruskin boomed.

“Hush,” said the librarian. “People are trying to work here.”

Most of the students sitting at the tables down the centre of the Library were looking up indignantly. Ruskin glanced at them and scowled. But he was here to distract the librarian, not to cause a disturbance, so he continued in a hoarse, growling whisper, “Why don’t the courses go in for theory? Does that mean you won’t let me have these books then?”

“You’ve no need for them,” the librarian said patiently. “You’re a first-year student. You’ll have enough to do simply learning the practical things.”

“That is not true.” Ruskin began beating the hand with the list in it on the desk. The librarian watched the desk tremble, apprehensively. “I am a dwarf. Dwarfs know the practical stuff. And I have an enquiring mind. I want to know the other part, the thusness of how, the colour and shape of the ethos, the smell of the beyond. Without knowing this, I am setting up my anvil on sliding shale. By denying me these books, you are asking me to found my forge on a quaking bog!”

“I am not denying you those books,” the librarian said hastily. “I’m simply explaining why they’re not on the open shelves. Just tell me which one you want and I’ll call it up for you. Policant’s Philosophy, you said?”

Ruskin nodded, the bones in his beard plaits rattling on the desk. “And The Red Book of Costamaret,” he added, thinking he might as well make this distraction worthwhile.

“Very well.” Disapprovingly, the librarian activated an obscure spell.

Ruskin, watching keenly, saw that the spell was something very advanced that he would never be able to operate himself. There were codes and signatures in it and arcane unbindings. Regretfully, he gave up the idea of sneaking in here at night and having a good rummage through the secrets of the University. He watched the air quiver between the librarian’s hands, and the quiver become a pulsing. Eventually, two large leather books slid out of nowhere on to the wooden surface in front of his face. They smelt divinely to Ruskin of dust and old gloves. “Thank you,” he rumbled. He sneaked a look towards the Inventory. The others had by no means finished there. Elda was just dashing off with three more cards skewered to her right front talons. He raised his list. “And Cyclina on Tropism, Tangential Magic, Paraphysics Applied, Thought Theorem, Dysfunctions of Reality, Universa Qualitava and – er – The Manifold of Changes,” he read in a long throaty grumble.

“All of them?” the librarian exclaimed.

“Every single one, please,” Ruskin husked. “And if you have any others on the same lines—”

“Your student limit is nine books,” the librarian snapped, and began making gestures again.

By the time the steep pile of books arrived – Tangential Magic was enormous and some of the rest almost as mighty – the others were making their way to the librarian’s desk, each with a pile of slimmer volumes, to have them checked out. The librarian eyed the advancing forty-five books and said, “I shall have to report this to your tutor.”

They tried not to exchange uneasy looks. Eyes front, Claudia asked, “Why is that?”

“Because it’s not normal,” said the librarian.

“Oh no, of course it isn’t,” Olga said resourcefully. “Corkoran wondered if you’d worry, but he wants us to get into the habit of consulting more than just one book at a time.”

She did not need to nudge Elda for Elda to chime in with “He’s such a lovely tutor. Even his ideas are interesting.”

Elda was so obviously sincere that the librarian shrugged, grumbled, “Oh very well,” and stamped all fifty-four books, with some sighing but no more threats.

They hurried with their volumes to Elda’s concert hall, Ruskin almost invisible under his. Once there, they spread the books out on the floor and got to work examining them for usefulness. Lukin was particularly good at this. He could pick up a book, flip through it and know at once what was in it. Felim did nothing much but sit quivering in a ring of books, as if the books themselves gave him protection. Ruskin was even less useful. He settled himself cross-legged on Elda’s bed with The Red Book of Costamaret open across his knees and turned its pages greedily. He would keep interrupting everyone by reading out things like “To become a wizard, it is needful to think deeper than other men on all things, possible and impossible.”

“Very true. Now shut up,” said Olga. “This one looks very helpful. It’s got lots of diagrams.”

“Put it on this pile then,” said Lukin.

Eventually they had three piles of books. One, a small pile of three, turned out to be almost entirely about raising demons, which they all agreed was not helpful. “My dad raised one once when he was a student,” Elda told them, “and he couldn’t get it to leave. It could be a worse menace than an assassin.”

The other two piles were what Lukin called the offensive and the defensive parts of the campaign, six books on spells of personal protection and thirty-six on magical alarms, traps, deadfalls and trip spells. Claudia knelt between the two piles with her wet-looking curls disordered and her face smudged with dust. “We’ve got roughly three hours until supper,” she said. “I reckon we should get all the protections round him first and then do as many traps as we’ve got time for. How do we start, Lukin?”

“Behold,” boomed Ruskin as Lukin took up the top book from the middle pile, “Behold the paths to the realms beyond. They are all around you and myriad.”

By this time everyone was ignoring Ruskin. “Nearly all of them start with the subject inside a pentagram,” Lukin said, doing his rapid page-flipping. “Some of them have pentagrams chalked on the subject’s forehead, feet and hands too.”

“We’ll do them all,” said Claudia. “Take your shoes off, Felim.”

“What colour pentagrams?” Elda asked, swooping on Felim with a box of chalks.

Lukin turned pages furiously, with Olga leaning over his shoulder. “It varies,” Lukin said. “Green, blue, black, red. Here’s one that says purple.”

“Do one of each colour, Elda,” Claudia instructed.

“Candles,” said Lukin. “That’s constant too. Maximum of twelve candles.” While Olga got up and raced off to the nearest lab for a supply of candles and Elda busily chalked a purple five-sided star on Felim’s forehead, Lukin leafed through all six books again and added, “None of them say what colour the pentagram round the subject should be – just that it must be drawn on the floor.”

“The floor’s all covered with carpet,” Elda objected, drawing a green star on the sole of Felim’s right foot. “Keep still, Felim.”

“You’re tickling!” Felim said.

“Use the top of his foot instead,” Claudia suggested. “Can’t one draw on a carpet with chalk?”

“Yes, but I like my carpet,” said Elda.

“The method of a spell,” Ruskin intoned from the platform, “is not fixed as a law is of nature, but varies as a spirit varies. Consider and think, o mage, and do not do a thing only for the reason it was always done before.”

“Some useful advice for a change,” Elda remarked. She finished drawing on Felim, put the chalks away and arranged the thirty-six books from Lukin’s “offensive” pile into a pentagram around Felim, working with such strong concentration that her narrow golden tongue stuck out from the end of her beak. “There. That saves my nice carpet.”

“The matter of nature,” Ruskin proclaimed, “treated with respect, responds most readily to spells of the body.”

“Oh gods! Is he still at it?” Olga said, returning with a sack of candles from Wermacht’s store cupboard. “Do shut up, Ruskin.”

“Yes, come on down here, Ruskin,” Lukin said, climbing to his feet. “Time to get to work. There are five points to this pattern and five of us apart from Felim, so it stands to reason we’re going to need you.”

Ruskin sighed and pushed The Red Book of Costamaret carefully off his knees. “It’s blissful,” he said. “It’s what I always imagined a book of magic was – until I came here and found Wermacht, I mean. What do we do?”

“Everything out of these six books, I think,” Lukin said. “It ought to be pretty well unbreakable if we do it all, eh, Felim?”

“One would hope,” Felim agreed wanly.

They started with a ring of ninety-nine candles around the pentagram of books, this being all the candles in the sack. Because no one knew how to conjure fire to light them yet, Ruskin lit them all with his flint lighter. Then they stood, one at each point of the pentagram, passing books from hand to hand to talon, reciting rhymes, shouting words of power and attempting to make the gestures in the illustrations. One spell required Elda to hunt out her hand mirror and pass that around too, carefully facing the glass outwards to reflect enemy attacks away from Felim. In between spellings, they all looked anxiously at Felim, but he sat there stoically upright and did not seem to be coming to any harm.

“You will yell if it hurts or anything, won’t you?” each of them said more than once.

“It does not – although I feel rather warm at times,” Felim replied.

So they went doggedly on through all six books. It took slightly less than an hour, because a number of the spells were in more than one book and some, like the mirror spell, were in all six. Nevertheless, by the end they all suddenly found they were exhausted. Elda said the last incantation and sank down on her haunches. The rest simply folded where they stood and sat panting on the carpet.

Here a truly odd thing occurred. All ninety-nine candles burned down at once, sank into puddles of wax on the carpet and flickered out. While Elda was looking sadly at the mess, she saw, out of the end of her left eye, that Felim seemed to be shining. When she whipped her head round to look at him properly, Felim looked quite normal, but when she turned the corner of her other eye towards him, he was shining again, like a young man-shaped lantern, glowing from within. His red sash looked particularly remarkable, and so did his eyes.

Around the pentagram, the others were discovering the same thing. Everyone thought they might be imagining it and no one liked to mention it, until Olga said cautiously, “Does anyone see what I see?”

“Yes,” said Claudia. “My guess is that we’ve discovered witch-sight. Felim, can you see yourself glowing?”

“I have always had witch-sight,” Felim said, “but I hope this effect does not last. I feel like a beacon. May I wash the chalk off now?” But the coloured pentagrams had gone. Felim held out both hands to show everyone.

“It’s worked!” Lukin slapped his own leg in delight. “We did it. We make a good team.”

They were so pleased that much of their tiredness left them. Felim climbed rather stiffly from among the books and they celebrated by eating oranges and the last of the food in the other hamper. Then, still munching, they took up books from the pentagram to find out ways to trap the assassins before they got near Felim.

“My brother Kit would call this overkill,” Elda remarked.

“Overkill is what we’re going for,” said Lukin as he rapidly opened a whole row of books. “Doubled and redoubled safety. Oh-oh. Difficulty. About half these need to be set to particular times. We have to time them for when the assassins actually get here,”

“That’s all right,” Claudia said, peeling her sixth orange. “Oh, Elda, I do love oranges. Even Titus never has this many. We can work out when they’ll get here. Felim, how long did you take on the way?”

Felim smiled. The glow was fading from him, but his confidence seemed to grow as it faded. “Nearly three weeks. But I took a poor horse and devious ways to escape detection. The assassins will travel fast by main roads. Say a week?”

“A week from whenever the letter from the University arrived,” said Claudia. “Elda, when did your father get his?”

“He didn’t say. But,” said Elda, “if it went by one of his clever pigeons, it would take a day to Derkholm and three days to the Emirates.”

“Say the letter was sent the first day of term,” Olga calculated. “Ten days then, three for the pigeon and seven for the assassins. The day after tomorrow is the most likely. But we’ve enough spells here to set them for several nights, starting tomorrow and going on for the next three nights. Agreed?”

“Most for the day after tomorrow, I think,” said Claudia. “Yes.”

Ruskin sprang up. “Let’s get to work then.”

This was something Felim could do too. They took six books apiece and worked through them, each in his or her own way. Felim worked slowly, pausing to give a wide and possibly murderous grin from time to time, and the spells he set up made a lot of use of the knife and fork from Elda’s food hamper. Ruskin went methodically, with strips of orange peel and a good deal of muttering. Once or twice, he dragged The Red Book of Costamaret over and appeared to make use of something it said. Elda and Olga both spent time before they started, choosing the right spells, murmuring things like, “No, I hate slime!” and “Now, that’s clever!” and worked very quickly once they had decided what to do – very different things, to judge from Olga’s heaps of crumbled yellow chalk and Elda’s brisk patterns of orange peel. Lukin worked quickest of all, flipping through book after book, building patterns of crumbs or orange pips, or knotting frayed cloth from Elda’s curtains, or simply whispering words. Claudia was slowest. She seemed to choose what to do by shutting her eyes and then opening a book, after which she would think long and fiercely over the pages, and it would be many minutes before she slowly plucked out one of her own hairs or carefully scraped fluff off the carpet. Once she went outside for a blade of grass, which she burnt with Ruskin’s lighter, before going to the door again and blowing the ash away.

All of them met spells that they could tell were not working. There would be a sort of dragging heaviness, as if the whole universe were resisting what they were trying to do. Nobody let that bother them. If they did enough spells, they were sure some would work. They just went on to a new one. Between them, they set up at least sixty spells. When the refectory bell rang for supper, Elda’s concert hall was littered with peculiar patterns, mingled with books, and all six of them were exhausted.

“You’re going to have to walk carefully in here,” Lukin said to Elda.

“It’s only for a few days. I’ll put a note for the cleaners,” Elda said blithely. “If Felim’s safe, it’s worth it.”

“Thank you,” said Felim. “I am most truly grateful.”

CHAPTER FOUR

Ruskin spent most of the night reading The Red Book of Costamaret, first in the buttery bar with a mug of beer then, when they turned him out, in his own room. He fell asleep when he had finished it, but he was up at dawn, pounding on the door of Elda’s concert hall for the rest of the books.

“Oh good gods!” squawked Elda, when the pounding was reinforced by Ruskin’s voice at its loudest. “All right. I’m coming!” She flopped off her bed-platform, remembered just in time that the floor was covered with spells, and spread her wings, thinking it was lucky she was a griffin. She flew to the door, too sleepy to notice that the wind from her wings was fanning some of the spells out of shape. Meanwhile, the door was leaping about. “Ruskin,” said Elda, wrenching it open, “please remember I can tear you apart if I want to – and I almost want to.”

“I want Cyclina on Tropism,” Ruskin said. “I need it. It’s like a craving. And I’ll take the rest of my books too while I’m here.”

“Feel free,” Elda said irritably, moving away from the doorway.

Ruskin rushed inside, skipping dextrously between spells, and pounced on Cyclina. “Do you want to read The Red Book of Costamaret?” he asked as he collected the rest. “It’s full of the most valuable magical hints. You can have it now if you like, but I want to read it again before I have to take it back to the Library.”

Elda had not formed any great opinion of The Red Book – although it had indeed given her a hint, she realised – but she was too sleepy to refuse. “All right. Give it to me in Wermacht’s class this morning. Now go away and let me go back to sleep.”

Ruskin grinned and departed, looking like a rattling stack of folios balanced on two small bent legs. Elda shut her door and flew back to her bed. But she found he had woken her just enough to stop her getting back to sleep again. She lay couched on her stomach thinking crossly about the mess her room was in. Before long she was thinking what a long time it was until breakfast, and then how lucky it was that she still had some oranges. After that there was nothing for it but to get up and tread carefully about, eating an orange. After that she thought she would try to get at least some of the ninety-nine pools of wax out of the carpet. That, even with efficient griffin talons, took more than half an hour of scraping and scratching, but there was still a long time until breakfast. Elda began hopping between spells, collecting the other forty-odd books from the Library into piles. This was how she discovered Policant’s Philosophy of Magic. Ruskin had missed it because it looked very much like the other, more ordinary books.

“Oh well,” said Elda. “Dad did say to read it.”

She flew back to her bed with it and started to read.

It was not at all what she had expected, although she saw at once why it would appeal to her father. Policant had a way of putting together two ideas which ought not to have had anything to do with one another, and then giving them a slight twist so that they did after all go together – rather like Derk himself had done to eagle and lion to make griffin, Elda thought. To her mind, the way Policant did it was a bit forced. But Policant kept asking questions. They were all questions that made Elda say to herself, “I wouldn’t ask this like that!” or, “That’s not the right question – he should be asking this!” Before long, she was wondering if Policant might not be asking the wrong questions on purpose, to make you notice the right ones. After that, she was hooked. It dawned on her that she had chosen the most exciting subject in the world to study, and she read and read and read. In the end she was almost late for breakfast because she just had to finish Section Five.