Year of the Griffin (12 page)

He carried the four little bags to his moonlab, feeling peevish. There he hunted out the old cage where he had kept the rats that he had sent to the moon and shook the assassins into it out of the bags, carefully turning each one rat size as he did it, so that they could not squeeze between the bars. He sealed the cage with Inescapable Net and left a note on it for his assistant, telling her to feed and water the creatures once a day while he considered what to do with them. Then he forgot about them. He went away to shave and find his tie. Cherry pink irises on it today, he decided.

I
N PLACES LIKE
the University word gets around. Though nobody precisely told anybody, by the end of breakfast everybody knew that Felim was being hunted by seven assassins—some versions said seventy—and that Corkoran had so far caught only four of them. Felim was surrounded by people offering sympathy and lucky amulets. He was also approached by a lofty third-year student who offered to sell Felim a set of eight essays, guaranteed to get top marks, for a mere eight gold pieces. For, as the lofty student pointed out, Felim was surely going to be far too busy dodging assassins to do any more work this term.

Felim, who by this time was very white, with large dark circles under his eyes, objected politely that he did not yet know what subjects Corkoran was going to ask him to write essays on.

“No problem,” said the lofty one. “Corkoran always sets the same essays. I bought the set from a girl who said Wermacht bought them, too, in his first year, and we all know what that did for Wermacht.”

At this Felim drew himself up very tall and straight. “No, thank you. I discover that it is my duty to force Corkoran to read something different.”

“It's your funeral,” said the lofty one, and went away.

About the same time, the kitchen staff heard about the assassins. They all threatened to go home unless a wizard was provided at once to put protection spells on the kitchen and the refectory. “We could,” claimed the cook, “be brained with our own frying pans while we work.”

“Let him leave,” growled Ruskin, “and the rest with him. All any of them do is to float food in grease.”

Though most students shared Ruskin's opinion, none of the wizards did. Corkoran sent Wermacht to put the spells on. Wermacht stamped importantly into the kitchens and spent a refreshing half hour striding about there, intimidating the staff and ordering the cook on no account to touch either the walls or the windows once the spells were set. He then strode off, only slightly late, to teach his first-year class on Elementary Astrology.

The first-year students meanwhile waited in the North Lab with their notebooks, rulers, star charts, and compasses. Everyone but Elda was shivering. It was still a bitterly frosty, cold day, but Wizard Dench, the Bursar, had decreed that the University could not afford fires, or any other form of heating, for another month. Students were huddled in coats and cloaks, and some even wore gloves. Many wistful glances were cast at the large empty fireplace in the north wall.

“Do you suppose,” someone suggested, “that we could collect rubbish and burn it there?”

“Everyone's bound to have wastepaper in their rooms,” said someone else. “Anyone good at conjuring?”

Nobody was, particularly. But Ruskin discovered a wastebasket in one corner of the lab and tipped the pile of torn-up notes it contained into the grate. He got them alight, and all the students gathered around for what little warmth there was. Someone had just said that simply looking at the flames made you
feel
warmer when the chimney above the flaming pile of paper began disgorging a landslide of soot. Soot poured down into the grate, where it put out the flames but left the paper smoldering. Smoke now came billowing forth. Everyone backed away, coughing.

“Typical of this place!” exclaimed the student who had suggested the fire. “There must be a birds' ne—”

“Hush!”
said everyone else.

Some of the coughing was coming from inside the chimney.

Everyone backed away in a rush, as two long black-clad legs appeared in the fireplace, groping for the ground. Melissa screamed.

And Wermacht strode into the lab just as a wildly coughing assassin ducked out from under the mantelpiece and advanced on the students with his dagger raised. There were screams from others besides Melissa. Elda, Olga, Claudia, Ruskin, and Lukin plunged amid the panic to the place where they had last seen Felim and relaxed in relief when they found him safely encased in the beehive of books again. Elda, unable to stop, charged on into the beehive and sent it reeling and blundering among the desks. A lot of desks were knocked over, some of them by Elda.

Behind Elda, the assassin reached out to take the nearest student hostage. With a certain inevitability, it was Melissa he grabbed at, and Melissa went into hysterics of terror.
“Save me! Save me!”
she screamed, and went on screaming it even though the assassin's black-gloved hand never reached her. Instead, the hand, followed by the arm, followed swiftly by the rest of the man, dissolved into little flakes of sooty ash. The flakes swirled about but hung together in a vague man shape that dithered against the mantelpiece, as if the assassin were wondering what in the world had happened to him.

The greenish blush swept across Claudia's face as she recognized her burned-grass spell. Melissa turned, still screaming, to see what everyone was staring at and saw what seemed to be a black ashy ghost reaching for her. Screaming even harder, she rushed for the door. Since Wermacht was standing just in front of the door, stock-still and staring, Melissa rushed into Wermacht and flung her arms around him. “
Save
me!” she shrieked.

As every male person in the University afterward agreed, and this included the cook, the janitor, the porter, and half the office staff, anyone else who was lucky enough to have Melissa fling her arms around him would have made the most of it. Not Wermacht. He unwrapped Melissa and shoved her aside. He said, “This is a ridiculous fuss over nothing. You with the secondhand jacket and you with the armor, pick up those desks. And you come out from inside those books, whoever you are.”

“He can't,” Olga explained. “They only go away when the danger's over.”

Wermacht stroked his beard smugly. “There is no danger,” he said.

At this everyone gasped and tried to explain that the ghostly figure made up of whirling ashes was a trained assassin and that the fact that Felim was still inside the beehive
showed
there was danger.

“There is no danger,” Wermacht repeated, against the chorus of agitated voices. “Go and sit at your desks, all of you. Corkoran will be here shortly. I have sent him a warn-spell. Wait quietly until he gets here. Let's have no more silly screaming and rushing about.”

“The man's mad!” Ruskin said as everyone moved nervously to sit down.

When Corkoran swept into the North Lab with his pink iris tie streaming over one shoulder, he was slightly surprised to find all the students sitting uneasily at a somewhat uneven row of desks—uneven because a large space had to be left for the beehive standing in the middle of the lab—while Wermacht stood with his arms proudly folded beside the peculiar whirling figure on the hearth.

“Ah, Corkoran,” Wermacht said in his smarmiest manner, “I've neutralized the assassin for you, as you see, but I didn't like to ash him completely without word from you, so I've kept him under my spell until you got here.”

There was a gasp of pure indignation from Claudia. Her face was almost olive-colored as she whispered to Olga, “It was
my
spell! It's almost the only one I've done that
worked
!”

Corkoran was saying at the same moment, “Thanks, Wermacht. Very good of you.” He had a bag of Inescapable Net ready for this one. He reached out and rather tentatively tweaked at the nearest twirling flake of ash in the creature's arm. To his relief, the assassin promptly became a two-inch-high pile of whirling dust. Corkoran blew it into his bag with a minor draft spell and no trouble at all. He stood up, smiled soothingly around at the students, and walked away.

A slight thumping made him turn in the doorway. Felim was now standing where the beehive had been. Felim's face was red, and his usually smooth black hair was sticking out in all directions, but he was grinning at Elda.

“Five down,” Corkoran heard someone say as he hurried away. “Two to go.” He hoped whoever said that was wrong. He had had enough alarms. And the rat cage was quite crowded when he tipped the little dust storm into it. He turned it back into a rat-size man to prevent it trying to squeeze through the bars or the net, and the cage seemed more crowded than ever. Yes, he thought, as he went back to the careful magics of the moonship, five assassins is quite enough.

An hour later the students boiled out of the North Lab into the courtyard, full of indignation. Every one of them was sufficiently attuned to magic to know that Wermacht had not cast a spell of any kind on the assassin. “Taking the credit just to suck up to Corkoran!” most of them were saying. “What a
creep
!” Even Melissa was saying it, and she was more indignant than anyone. “Did you see the way he treated me?” she kept asking. “I might have been a dog with mange!”

“I must say I am highly interested that everyone else has arrived at the same opinion of Wermacht as we have,” Felim remarked. “It suggests that our judgment was sound.”

“I'm just downright relieved that the protections came back around you,” said Olga. “My heart stood still when I saw those legs coming down the chimney. What's the matter, Claudia?”

“Nothing—or at least I have the most dreadful mixed feelings,” Claudia said. “You don't know how good it feels to do a spell that works for once! But then I think of the way it turned a person into ash and I feel dreadful! And I keep hoping Corkoran isn't going to do anything terrible to him.”

“Of course he isn't,” said Ruskin.

“He's probably simply going to release him into the wild or something,” Lukin said soothingly. “That's the obvious thing to do. And let's hope those protections go
on
working because there are still two more assassins somewhere.”

Everyone knew there were two more. The entire student population, not to speak of the kitchen staff and the janitor, spent the rest of the day jumping at sudden noises and looking nervously over their shoulders. Felim's friends arranged that he should never be alone. “But I am quite all right! The protection is better than armor,” Felim protested when Ruskin insisted on coming with him every time he went to the toilet.

“Yes, but do you know how long the spell will last?” Ruskin retorted.

The rest of Felim's friends insisted that he spend the day in Elda's room, where there was space for everyone.

“I don't pretend to be a fighter,” Lukin said, “but I can open a pit anytime, and Olga can fetch monsters. And if all else fails, Ruskin and Elda can take the assassins apart.”

“I notice you don't mention me,” Claudia said wryly, and Elda, who was couched on the floor amid the shriveling remains of the spells, carefully penning an extremely argumentative essay, looked up to say, “I don't
like
the idea of taking people apart. I never have. But I'll try.”

Felim shrugged. He had wanted to be alone in his room to write his essay because, in spite of a night spent standing bolt upright in a hard shell smelling of book, he was determined to prove that he had no need to buy essays from the lofty student. His honor required it. But since there was obviously no use in arguing, he borrowed a wad of Elda's fine handmade paper and set to work. The others set to work, too. Shortly they were all scribbling busily in various parts of the concert hall, Olga at the table with Felim, Claudia in a corner because her essay required scissors and a ruler, Ruskin kneeling in front of a chair, and Lukin sprawled out on Elda's huge bed. The concert hall became more littered than ever, what with cups of coffee fetched by Olga, the mugs of beer Ruskin brought in after lunch, and the crossed-out pages that Lukin kept throwing away.

Lukin always had more trouble writing things than the others did. It seemed to take him six crossed-out tries before he could get into his stride. But by the middle of the afternoon he, too, was going nicely. He was getting quite eloquent when he discovered, slightly to his surprise, that the one thing he needed to support his argument was something Wermacht had dictated to them back in the first week. He got out the jeweled notebook to check the exact words. And he was so surprised by what he found that he let out a sharp yelp.