Year of the Griffin (16 page)

Corkoran left off reading and gave Ruskin a C. Then, after some thought, he made that C minus for bossiness. It was as if the wretched dwarf was teaching
him
instead of the other way around. He wanted, even more than he had with Elda or Olga, to give the essay an F for failed, but some of Ruskin's arguments were so persuasive that Corkoran actually caught himself wondering if perhaps, maybe, he should rethink his moonshot methods.

He shoved the forty pages angrily away and snatched up Claudia's offering, which he had left until last because it looked peculiar. A glance at the light showed him that he was not going to get any of his own work done now before refectory supper, so he supposed he had better give his full attention to
this
now. It seemed to be a mass of fluttering paper slips held together by adhesion spells.

It was very peculiar. Claudia evidently held the same opinion as Felim and Elda, but she had set out to prove her opinion practically, by starting with a fairly common spell and showing how it could be made to do two different things. The first page gave the spell and then was divided into two columns, showing the two new spells. These in turn led to four—no, five—more derived spells in four columns and an attached slip of paper. And so on. Ten columns led to twenty-five.... Help! thought Corkoran, leafing on to find pages with up to fifty columns, done in tinier and tinier writing and only readable because Claudia had fitted them with an expander spell that Corkoran himself had never learned to cast. And as if this was not difficult enough—though it seemed to be meant to be helpful—the last page folded out into a huge family tree of all the spells, their branches color-coded red, green, and blue, with extra notes about how to apply them all.

“And I have to check all this?” Corkoran said aloud. Yes. Obviously he did. Claudia could be fooling him by writing complete nonsense. It took him well over an hour. When he was done, he could not help feeling an irritated sort of admiration. Some of those fifty new spells were good, new, useful things, and deriving them all from just two simple ordinary spells took a perverse sort of genius. But it was all as unheard of as Ruskin's ideas.
And
it was not a proper essay. Corkoran turned the fluttering mass over and wrote “C–. Answer the question.” Genius or not, Claudia had wasted her time and his, and besides, even a genius can always do better. Perhaps he would give Claudia an A if she did this again in two years' time. Or perhaps not. He did not want any of his students going out into the world thinking they could work marvels.

It was sad, really, Corkoran thought as he stacked the steep stack of papers together. Young people came to the University full of such bright hopes, feeling the whole world was open before them. And by the end of three years most of them were simply competent magic users, scraping around to find employment that made them some money. He remembered being like this himself even. Right at the start of his first year he had thought that magic offered great things—though he could not remember now what things—and by the end he had felt he was lucky to get a job on Mr. Chesney's tours. He had come on a lot in those three years, he knew. He was sorry for his six students. But they would learn, just as he had. Meanwhile it was time to drop into the refectory for supper, where he would almost certainly be able to catch one of his young geniuses in the act of messing with the food. He would, he thought, make Wermacht come with him for moral support. Yes, that was an
excellent idea
. He set off, tie flying.

Claudia was also on her way to the refectory after choir practice. As Elda was occupying the concert hall, choir was usually held in the North Lab—Claudia was beginning to think she
lived
in that lab—from which it was only a short crosswise sprint through the rain to the refectory. Claudia ran through the freckled light from the globes of wizard light fixed to the buildings with her wrap over her head and did not look around until she was at the top of the refectory steps, where her friends were waiting. There she happened to glance across the courtyard. And there was the wretched cloakrack from the North Lab out in the rain between the refectory steps and the statue of Wizard Policant.

Lukin had seen it, too. He had watched it come out of the lab and trundle jerkily after Claudia. “Someone's having a joke with that thing,” he said, in a loud, much too hearty voice. He and Olga took a friendly grip on Claudia's arms and pulled her indoors.

Corkoran was in the refectory by then, and Wermacht, looking rather moody, with him. He spotted his first-year students as they joined the line for food in the large space being kept for them by Elda. Elda's beak switched toward Corkoran in surprise and then switched away. Her feelings about him were in utter confusion. Two days ago she would have been delighted to see Corkoran here. Now her main feeling was embarrassment. He was slumming. Why?

Corkoran left Wermacht to keep them places at a table and demurely joined the end of the food queue. He was instantly surrounded by students complaining that the rain had come through into their rooms.

“Don't tell me. Tell Wizard Dench,” he told them. It was always like this, he thought. The moment he showed his face in public, people tried to keep him from his work. Another student accosted him with each step he took toward the food. The roofs were evidently in a bad way this year. But there was nothing wrong with the food when he reached it—or nothing that was not quite usual, he thought, wincing at the choice between iron-hard meat pie and vegetable cakes floating in grease. None of the wizards ever ate in the refectory if they could help it. Corkoran himself always sent out to the town's one good restaurant. A man in a crisp white apron brought him the chef's special every evening to eat in his rooms. Tonight he bravely loaded two trays with one of each choice and levitated them over to the table where Wermacht was sitting.

That table was still empty apart from Wermacht. It was like a no-go area. Students took chairs away from that table and crammed them in anywhere else rather than join Wermacht. Corkoran found this quite a relief. And Wermacht did not seem to notice. But he noticed the food. He winced. “I thought I'd got away from all this,” he said. “What do we do now?”

“We eat it,” Corkoran replied. “The spell's probably triggered by that.”

They gloomily unwrapped cutlery and began. Nothing changed. Corkoran, as he forced his teeth through the crust of the pie, kept a wary magical eye on his six students. Felim had not joined them to eat. He had been swept away to a table full of girls, all of whom seemed very interested in him. It looked as if Felim's recent troubles had made him very popular. The rest were together, however, with Elda occupying most of one side of a table and the others leaning conspiratorially toward her. Corkoran enhanced his hearing with a spell and tried to listen to what they said, although the general din of voices and the clatter of eating were enough to defeat almost any spell. All he caught was a wisp of a remark from Lukin: “… just as well, Ruskin.”

He was beginning to realize that he was enduring this purgatory for nothing when all the noise abruptly died away. The refectory door barged open, and a cloakrack sidled in. It was just a tall three-legged wooden thing with a ring of big wooden hooks around the top, and you would not think it capable of expressing feeling, but it nevertheless gave out an air of timid apology that was almost human. Claudia blanched greenish white and could not seem to take her eyes off the thing. Wermacht jumped a little at the sight of it, too.

Neither of them seemed to notice that the cloakrack had been followed by a number of tall, purposeful, brightly dressed men and that what had really caused the sudden silence was the row of similar men marching in from the kitchens. These were taking off their white aprons as they came and spreading out to stand around all the walls. Under the aprons every one of them carried either a loaded crossbow or a large pistol.

T
HE FOREMOST OF
the men who followed the cloakrack through the door was tall and wide-shouldered. Although he was not young—nearer fifty than forty—he was still exceedingly handsome in a thin, hawk-faced way, and he clearly knew it. His mass of still-golden hair was flaunted by being tied back with a black silk scarf, and his slender waist was similarly flaunted with a wide black sash over his scarlet coat that emphasized its slenderness. His pistol was decorated with gold inlay, and he held it very steady in a hand that was decorated with a fine ring on each finger. The men who clustered around him were not nearly so pretty, but they all had steady pistols, too.

Corkoran's stomach did strange things. He looked from the steady pistols by the door to the dozen or so crossbows and pistols around the walls and felt betrayed. “I thought,” he murmured to Wermacht, “you were supposed to have put protections on the kitchens at least.”

“Nobody move, nobody try to cast a spell,” the handsome man said loudly, “and nobody need get hurt.” Wermacht, at this, made faces at Corkoran, expressing complete bewilderment that his protections had not seemed to work. Unfortunately his grimaces caught the clear blue eyes of the handsome man. “Cover those two,” he said. “Those are real wizards.”

Several pistols and two crossbows swung toward the table where Corkoran and Wermacht sat. Corkoran swallowed. Wermacht was in robes, of course, so it was obvious he was a wizard. Corkoran would have liked to think that it was his air of magical authority that caused the handsome man to know him for a wizard as well, but he feared that it was more likely that the man had recognized him from somewhere. Damn it, he knew he had seen the fellow before, if only he could place him! “Who are you?” he said. “What do you want?” His voice came out a little high, but he was relieved to hear that it was almost steady.

“Don't tell me you've forgotten me!” the handsome man said, with what Corkoran found to be a rather hideous mock sympathy. “The years must be getting to you, Corkoran. I've not forgotten
you
. Surely you remember. You and I had a little set-to over money during Chesney's last tour. You tossed me in the sea. Olaf Gunnarsson. Remember?”

Olaf Gunnarsson. Of course! That evening on the docks nearly nine years ago that Corkoran had done his best to forget ever since, came back to him now like yesterday: the fishy smell of the Inland Sea, the screams of the circling gulls, the salt staining the wharf, everything. Everything, including the beat-up wooden ship towering against the sunset and Olaf towering in front of the ship on the wharf, aiming that very gold-inlaid pistol at the anxious tourists clustered behind Corkoran on the dock. Olaf had not been nearly so well groomed in those days. In fact, he had looked almost as beat up and ragged as that ship of his. He had terrified Corkoran. It was not
his
fault that someone had egged Olaf on to demand twice as much money for pretending to kidnap the tourists. But Olaf had assumed Corkoran was party to the deal. He had insisted that Corkoran was trying to pocket the extra money. Corkoran could even remember the exact insults Olaf had shouted at him and the way that Olaf's crew, from the one-legged mate to the small cabin boy, stood in a row above them on the ship and shouted insults, too. Then Olaf had said he would shoot the tourists one by one until Corkoran paid up. Corkoran had been so terrified of what Mr. Chesney might do about that that he had hurled Olaf away with the very strongest spell he could muster and gasped at the tourists to run for their lives. It was not exactly Corkoran's fault that the strength of his terror had caused him to overcook the spell. Olaf had gone whirling up over his ship, to land with a mighty splash in the water beyond, followed by all his crew. Corkoran could still hear the shouts and the splashes, like yesterday. And now the man seemed to have tracked him down.

“So you're still a pirate,” he said shakily.

Olaf shook his handsome head. “Not any longer. When Chesney went, there was no profit in piracy. I'm respectable now. These days I run merchants' protection around the Inland Sea.”

“You mean you're a gangster now?” Corkoran said.

Wermacht stirred beside him, genuinely horrified. “Corkoran, don't
speak
to him like that! Everyone knows Gunnarsson's a very rich man.”

“Shut up,” said Olaf. “Both of you shut up. I'm not here to speak to either of you. I'm here to collect my two-timing witch of a daughter. Come on, Olga. Out of there.”

Corkoran slumped with relief. If
that
was all! Everyone else's eyes turned to Olga, half hidden behind Elda's right wing. Olga's face had gone so white that, what with the fairness of her hair, she looked as if there were a spotlight shining on her. Corkoran remembered that cabin boy. So he had thrown Olga into the water, too, along with her father.