Year of the Griffin

She floated into the refectory, feeling utterly absent-minded, but terribly alert somewhere, as if her brain had been opened up like an umbrella – or rather, a whole stack of umbrellas, some of them inside out.

“What is the matter?” Felim asked, seeing the way Elda’s wings and crest kept spreading and her tail tossing.

“Nothing,” said Elda. “I’ve just been reading Policant.”

“Good, is he?” asked Lukin.

“Yes, but in a very queer way. I couldn’t stop reading,” Elda said.

Her friends eyed Elda’s arching neck and shining eyes with some awe. “May I read him after you?” Felim enquired politely.

“You all must!” Elda declared. “Even you,” she said to Ruskin, who looked up from Cyclina with his eyes unfocused and grunted.

Elda was so anxious to get back to Policant before Wermacht’s class that she only spared a minute to watch Corkoran racing to his moonlab, with his tie of peacock feathers floating out behind him. She stared briefly at his rushing figure and then galloped back to her concert hall. Corkoran did not notice her at all. He had problems. Surrounding a peach with a cannonball turned out to make it far too heavy. He knew he would hardly be able to walk in that much iron, even if, as his experiments suggested, he was going to feel lighter on the moon. He was thinking of magical ways to reduce the weight of iron, or maybe pare down a cannonball, and he was simply irritated when he found the neat little stick-it spell the librarian had left on his desk. So his first-year students had taken out fifty-four books? Why not? He had chosen them to teach because they might turn out to be exceptional. He forgot the matter, and spent the next two days carefully dunking balls of iron into different magical solutions.

In those two days, Policant went the rounds of all Elda’s friends, followed by The Red Book of Costamaret, followed by Cyclina and the rest. None of them found The Red Book quite as marvellous as Ruskin had, but Policant grabbed them all, and Felim became so absorbed in the wonders of Tangential Magic, vast as it was, that he forgot about assassins and almost forgot to go to Wermacht’s classes. Olga only got him there by marching up to Felim’s room and snapping her fingers between Felim’s eyes and the book, almost as if she were breaking a spell. And once there in the class, Felim gazed broodingly at Wermacht and shook his head from time to time.

But Wermacht struck them all that way now they had read those books. As Olga put it, when they gathered round the statue of Wizard Policant after classes, listening to Wermacht now was like trying to hear one raindrop in a thunderstorm. There was just so much more of magic. “But please don’t keep shaking your head at Wermacht like that, Felim,” she added. “The beastly man’s coming right back into form.”

This was true. For half a day after Corkoran’s threat, Wermacht had been almost subdued. He plugged away, dictating his big headings and drawing his diagrams, and hardly looked at the students at all. Then he started stroking his beard again. The following morning, he called Ruskin “You with the voice” – luckily Ruskin was thinking of a really difficult idea in Thought Theorem and hardly noticed – and began to address Lukin as “You with the—” before he stopped and said “golden notebook”. By that afternoon, it seemed to have occurred to him that if he pretended Elda was not there, towering and golden at the back of the North Lab, Corkoran would have no grounds for firing him. He stalked up to the front of the class in quite his usual manner, planted his hour-glass, and swung round, stroking his beard.

“This afternoon,” he announced, “we were supposed to be doing conjuring flame. But someone seems to have taken all the candles. Anyone have a confession to make?” His eyes travelled over the class, so accusingly that half the students cowered and appeared to be searching their souls. Olga’s lovely face remained frigidly innocent.

“Right,” said Wermacht, after nearly five minutes’ worth of sand had poured into the lower bulb of the hour-glass. “It seems we have a hardened criminal in our midst. So we are going to do something far more difficult. All of you write down ‘Raising Magefire’. Underline it. Keep your notebooks open and all of you stand up.” Seats scraped on stone as everyone rose to his or her feet. “Now hold out both hands cupped in front of you.” When Elda hastily rose to her haunches, sending her desk scraping too, in order to do this, Wermacht stroked his beard and ignored her. “Now sit down again and write a description of the precise position you were in.” Seats scraped again. Everyone scribbled. “That’s it. Now stand up and adopt the position again.” Wermacht stuck his thumbs into the armholes of his robe and stalked back and forth as everyone once more stood up. “Good. Higher, you with the second-hand jacket. Nearer your chin. Better. Now concentrate and find your centre. You’ll find that under the tenth big heading in your notes from last week. Sit down and turn back to the place. You’ll find you have written – even you with the voice, look at your notes – that your centre – you with the second-hand jacket, I said consult your notes – your centre is a small, multidimensional, sun-like body, situated just below the breastbone in men and around the navel in women. Now stand up and locate it in yourself.”

Everyone rather wearily stood up again, cupping hands and talons. But this was only the third time. Wermacht, smugly marching back and forth, had them up and down like yo-yos, until even Elda had lost count.

Finally he said, “That’s better. Now, keeping the position and concentrating on your centres, smoothly transfer some of the energy from your centre to between your hands.”

There was a long, straining silence, while everyone tried to do this.

“Think,” Wermacht said, with contemptuous patience. “Think of flame between your hands.”

“Then why didn’t you say so?” Ruskin rumbled.

“Did you say something, you with the voice?” Wermacht asked nastily.

Ruskin said nothing. He simply stood there with his face lit from beneath by the pile of purple flame cupped in his large hands. Wermacht scowled.

At that moment, several students near the front gave cries of pleasure and held out little blue blobs of flame.

“Very good,” Wermacht said patronisingly.

After that, as if it were catching, blue flames burst out all over the North Lab.

“Like wildfire,” Olga said, grinding her teeth, and summoned suddenly a tall green twirling fire which forked at the top. The forks twisted together almost to the ceiling.

“Oh dear!” said Lukin. He had managed to do it too, but his blue fire was, for some reason, dancing in a little pit in the middle of his desk.

Wermacht exclaimed angrily and came striding up the lab. “Trust you lot to make a mess of it! You with the second-hand jacket, pick that flame up. Cherish it. Go on, it won’t burn you. And you, girl with the long nose, pull your flame in. Think of it as smaller at once, before you make a mess of the ceiling.”

Olga shot a furious look at Wermacht and managed to reduce her forked green flame to about a foot high. Lukin leaned forward and gingerly coaxed his blue flame to climb into his hands. Wermacht made an angry, spread-fingered gesture over the desk, whereupon the small pit vanished.

“What is it with you?” he said to Lukin. “Do you have an affinity for deep pits, or something?” Before Lukin could reply, Wermacht turned to where Felim was nonchalantly balancing a bright sky-blue spire of light on one palm. “Both hands, I said!”

“Is there a reason for using two hands?” Felim asked politely.

“Yes. We do moving the fire about next week,” Wermacht told him.

Elda, all this while, had her eyes shut, hunting inside herself for her centre. She had never yet been able to discover it. It made her anxious and unhappy. Nobody else seemed to have any difficulty finding the place. But now, after reading Policant, she began to ask herself Why? And the answer was easy. Griffins were a different shape from human people. Her centre was going to be in another place. She gave up hunting for it up and down her stomach and looked into herself all over. And there it was. A lovely, bright, spinning essence-of-Elda was whirling inside her big griffin ribs, in her chest, where she had always unconsciously known it was.

There was a tingling around her front talons.

Elda opened her eyes and gazed admiringly at the large transparent pear-shape of golden-white fire trembling between her claws. “Oh!” she said. “How beautiful!”

This left only Claudia without magefire in the entire class. Wermacht turned from Felim to find Claudia with her eyes shut and her cheeks wrinkled with effort. “No, no!” he said. “Eyes open and see the flame in your mind.”

Claudia’s eyes popped open and slid sideways towards Wermacht. “I shut my eyes because you were distracting me,” she said. “I have a jinx, you know, and I’m finding this very difficult.”

“There is no such thing as a jinx,” Wermacht pronounced. “You’re just misdirecting your power. Look at your cupped hands and concentrate.”

“I am,” said Claudia. “Please move away.”

But Wermacht stood looming over Claudia, while everyone else stared at her until Elda expected her to scream. And just at the point when Elda herself would have screamed, Claudia said, “Oh – blah!” and took her aching hands down.

Almost everyone in the lab cried, “There!”

“What do you all mean – there?” Claudia asked irritably.

Wermacht took hold of Claudia’s skinny right arm and bent it up towards her face. “I can’t think what you did,” he said, “but it’s there. Look.”

Claudia craned round herself and stared, dumbfounded and gloomy, at the little turquoise flame hanging downwards from the back of her wrist. “I told you I had a jinx,” she said.

“Nonsense,” said Wermacht and strode away to the front of the class. “Withdraw the flame back to your centre now,” he said. This was surprisingly easy to do, even for Elda, whose heart ached at having to get rid of her lovely transparent teardrop. “Sit down,” said Wermacht. Seats obediently scraped. “Write in your own words – you too, you with the jinx. You can stop admiring your excrescence, dismiss it and sit down now.”

“But I can’t,” Claudia protested. “I don’t know what I did to get it.”

“Then you can stand there until you do, and write your notes up afterwards,” Wermacht told her. “The rest of you describe the process as exactly as you can.”

Everyone wrote, while Claudia stood there miserably, dangling her flame, until Elda remembered her own experience and hissed across at Claudia, “Ask yourself questions, like Policant.”

Claudia stared at Elda for a moment and then said, “Oh!” The flame vanished. Claudia sat down and scribbled angrily. “I can see I’m going to be ‘You with the jinx’ from now on,” she said to the others as they crowded out into the courtyard.

“Join the club,” said Lukin. “Why doesn’t somebody assassinate that man?”

Felim flinched and went grey.

“It’s all right, Felim,” Elda said. “You’ve got protections like nobody ever had before.”

Elda proved to be right.

Around midnight that night, Corkoran locked his lab and thought about going to bed. His rooms were in the Spellman Building on the same floor as the Library, along with Finn’s and Dench the Bursar’s, who were the only other wizards who actually lived in the University. All the rest of the staff lived in the town. Corkoran strolled across the courtyard in a chilly fine mist that raised goose bumps below the sleeves of his T-shirt and found the University looking its most romantic. It was utterly quiet – which, considering the usual habits of students, was quite surprising – with just a few golden lights showing in the turreted black buildings around him. These stood like cut-outs against a dark blue sky, only faintly picked out in places by misty lamps from the town beyond the walls. Better still, the moon was riding above the mist, just beside the tower of the Observatory. She was only about half there, a sort of peachy slice above a faint, bluish puff of cloud, and Corkoran was ravished by the sight. He stood leaning against the statue of Wizard Policant, gazing up at the place where he so longed to be. So very far away, so very difficult to get to. But his moonship was about half built now. It would only take another few years.

“I’m going to do it,” he said to the statue of Wizard Policant, and slapped it on its stone legs.

As if that was a signal, a monstrous noise broke out. If you were to beat forty gongs and a hundred tin tea trays with spades and axes, while ringing ten temples-full of bells and throwing a thousand cartloads of bricks and a similar number of saucepans down from the Observatory tower, you might have some notion of the noise. Mixed in among this sound, and almost drowned by the din, a great voice seemed to be shouting. DANGER, it bellowed. INVASION.

Corkoran clutched the statue in shock for a second. The noise seemed to turn his head inside out. He was aware of distant howlings from the main gate, where the janitor, who was a werewolf, had reacted to the shock by shifting shape, and he realised that the man was not likely to be any help. But Corkoran was, after all, a wizard. He knew he must do something. Although the bonging and clattering and crashing seemed to be coming from all directions, the huge muffled voice definitely came from the Spellman Building. Corkoran clapped a noise-reduction spell over his ears and sprinted for the building’s main door.

CHAPTER FIVE

“This has to be a student joke,” Corkoran muttered. He threw wide the doors of the Spellman Building and turned on all the lights without bothering with the switches. He was so astonished at what he saw that he let the doors crash shut behind him and seal themselves by magic, while he stood and stared.

The grand stairway was buried under a mountain of sand. And went on being buried. Whitish-yellow sand poured and pattered and cascaded and increased in volume, doubled in volume while Corkoran stared, as if it were being tipped from a giant invisible hopper. Odder still, someone seemed to be trying to climb the stairs in spite of the sand. Corkoran could see a half-buried figure floundering and struggling about a third of the way up. As far as he could tell, it was a man in tight-fitting black clothes. Corkoran saw a black-hooded head emerge from the mighty dune, then a flailing arm with a black glove on its hand, before both were covered by the inexorably pouring sand. A moment later, black-clad legs appeared, frantically kicking. Those were swallowed up almost instantly. A turmoil in the sand showed Corkoran where to look next, and he saw a tight black torso briefly, rather lower down. By this time, the sand was piled halfway across the stone floor of the foyer.

Corkoran wondered what to do. The older wizards had warned him before they retired that he should expect all sorts of magical pranks from the students, but so far nothing of this nature had occurred. Most students had seemed uninventive, or docile, or both. Corkoran had had absolutely no experience of this kind of thing. He watched the seething sand pile ever higher and the struggling black-clad fellow appear, lower down each time, and dithered.

While he dithered, the onrushing sand swept the black-clad man down to floor level, where he staggered to his feet, tall, thin and somehow unexpectedly menacing. Corkoran had just a glimpse of a grim, expressionless face and a black moustache, before a large pit opened under the fellow’s staggering black boots and the man vanished down into it with a yelp.

That, thought Corkoran, was surely not one of our students. He went to the edge of the pit and peered down. It was fairly deep, breathing out a curious fruity darkness. He could just see the pale oval of the man’s face at the bottom, and the dark bar of the fellow’s moustache. “You’re not a student here, are you?” he called down, just to be sure.

“No,” said the man. “Help. Get me out.”

Sand was already pattering into the pit. At this rate, it would fill up enough in five minutes for the man to climb out. Corkoran could not help thinking that this was a bad idea. “Sorry,” he said. “You’re trespassing on University property.” He stepped back and covered the pit with the Inescapable Net he used to stop air leaking from his moonboat.

Then he turned his attention to the sand.

This proved to be far more of a problem. It took Corkoran three tries just to stop more of it arriving. The spell was decidedly peculiar, some kind of adaptation of a little-known deadfall spell, with a timer to it that had to be removed before the main spell could be cancelled. But eventually the sand stopped coming and Corkoran was merely faced with the small mountain of it that was there already. He raised his arms and tried to dismiss it back to the desert it had presumably come from.

It would not budge.

Feeling rather irritated by now, Corkoran performed divinatory magic. All this told him was that the sand had to be returned to the place it had come from – which he knew already. He was forced to go and pick up a handful of the grey dusty granules, in order to perform a more difficult hands-on spell of enquiry.

“Help me!” commanded a voice from near his feet.

Corkoran whirled round and saw black-gloved fingers clinging to the underside of the Inescapable Net. The fellow had magic, and he was probably unbelievably strong, too, to have climbed right to the top of the pit. This was bad news. “No,” he said. “You stay there.”

“But this pit is filling with poisoned water!” the intruder panted.

Corkoran leaned over and saw the man crouched at the head of the pit, with his black boots against the rough side of it and his hands clutching the Net. Below him, quite near and obviously rising, was dark glinting liquid. The smell of it puzzled Corkoran. Some kind of fruit, he thought. The smell brought back memories of the Holy City, when he was there as a Wizard Guide during the tours, and of a priest of Anscher passing him a bright, round, pimply fruit. Then he had it. “It’s only orange juice,” he said. “Tell me who you are, and what you think you’re doing here, and I’ll let you out.”

“No,” said the intruder. “My lips are sealed by oath. But you can’t let me drown in orange juice. It is not a manly death.”

Corkoran considered this. The man did have a point. He sighed and cast away his handful of sand. “Bother you. You are an infernal nuisance.” He levitated the Inescapable Net from the top of the pit, bringing the man upwards with it. The man promptly let go of the Net with one hand and grabbed Corkoran by his flowing peacock-feather tie. And twisted it. This was not simple panic. Corkoran quite clearly saw a knife glitter in the man’s other hand, the one still clinging to the Net.

Corkoran panicked. He was suddenly in a fierce struggle, brute strength against magic, killer-training against panic. Being throttled with your own tie, Corkoran found himself thinking in the midst of his terror, was quite as disgraceful as being drowned in orange juice. At that stage, he was trying to throw the murderer back into the pit. But the fellow was far too strong. He hauled on the tie until Corkoran could hardly breathe and the glittering knife crept up towards Corkoran’s right eye. The only thing that saved Corkoran was the Net, which was still in the way between them. Corkoran pushed back at the fellow and at the knife with every spell he could think of, and for some reason it was only the strange spells he could think of. And the struggle ended with the murderer two inches long and imprisoned in the Inescapable Net, which had turned itself into a bag around him.

Corkoran held the bag up and looked at it, quite as surprised as his attacker must have been. He loosened his tie. Relief. He was shaking. “Let that be a lesson to you,” he told the bag hoarsely. Then, because he could not think what else to do with it, he levitated the bag to hang on the massive light fitment that dangled from the vaulted stone ceiling, where it was at least out of the way, and turned back to the mountain of sand.

He took up a handful, murmured the spell, and then let it patter to the floor as he asked it, “What are you? Where are you from?”

A soft, spattering answer came. “We are dust from the moon.”

“Moondust?” Corkoran turned to the stairway and looked at the enormous pile of fine grey-white sand with astonished admiration. Moondust. This had to be an omen. He had half a mind to let it stay there to encourage him in his work. But he realised that it would be very inconvenient. And he was the person best qualified to send it back to the moon. Yes, definitely an omen. From being shaken and sore-throated and angry, he found he had become light-hearted and almost benevolent towards whichever student had done this. It was a silly prank, but it had given him an omen.

He told the sand to go back to the moon. It vanished at once, every grain of it. Corkoran had a vision of the spell working – which was not something that often happened with him – and the sand sailing up past the Observatory tower, through the clouds, and siphoning onward in a spiral to that half-moon up there. Smiling, he turned to the pit and told that to go too. It closed up, sploshily, with a clap and a sharp smell of oranges.

Here he became aware that the monstrous din out in the courtyard had gone away as well. Thank the gods! This must mean that the prank spell had finished now. Corkoran took the noise-abatement spell off his ears and thankfully climbed the stairs – which had a clean, sand-blasted look to them – on his way to bed.

At the top, he encountered Wizard Dench the Bursar. Dench came shuffling across the landing wearing old slippers and a moth-eaten grey dressing gown. “Oh, there you are, Corkoran,” he said. “I’d been to your rooms to look for you.” For some reason, Dench was carrying a black cockerel upside down by its legs.

Corkoran stared at it, wondering if Dench was taking up black magic and if he ought to sack Dench on the spot. “Dench,” he said, “why are you carrying a black chicken by its legs?”

“On the farm when I was a boy,” Dench replied, “we always carried them this way. It’s the best way to capture them. That’s why I was coming to look for you. I don’t know if I was dreaming or not – I was certainly asleep – but while it was climbing through my window, I got the idea it was a man. But when I woke up and looked, it was a cockerel. Running everywhere, making a dreadful noise. What do you think I should do with it?”

“Wring its neck, I should think,” said Corkoran. “It’s only another student joke. The kitchen might be glad of it.”

“Er – well – in that case,” said Dench. “That’s why I came away from the farm. I can’t bear to wring necks. Could you – er—?”

He held the hapless cock out to Corkoran. As Corkoran sighed and reached out to take it, the bird began twisting about, flapping its wings and screaming. Almost as if it understood, Corkoran thought.

“Hang on,” he said. He seized a flailing wing and murmured the spell of enquiry again. “What are you?” he asked.

“An assassin of Ampersand,” the bird replied. “And my curse on you for causing me to break my oath! A thousand, thousand curses—”

“Shut up,” said Corkoran. “It’s another one of them, Dench. I caught one just now on the stairs. They must be partners. I think someone knew they were coming and set up traps for them. Not to worry. I know how to deal with them now.” He rapidly shrank the cockerel to the size of a bumble-bee, caught it as it whirred free from Dench’s fingers, and stuffed it into a bag made of Inescapable Net, which he sent to join the other one hanging from the light fitment. “There. Now we can both go to bed.”