Year of the Griffin (22 page)

So this was why the low-caste dwarfs sold themselves, Corkoran thought. Silly thing to do. But it clearly brought the University quite a profit. Wizard Policant must have been a smooth operator. “Do you still have the spells, or much trouble with demons?” he asked, wondering if he could offer to renew the spells in exchange for Ruskin.

Dobrey coughed. “Er-hem. Naturally we've still got the spells, but between you and me, Wizard, those demons were what you might call a legal figment. A lot of the dwarfs
thought
there were demons in the lower galleries, so it came to the same thing. And that doesn't alter the agreement one bit.”

“Of course not,” Corkoran agreed. So the only thing for it seemed to be to operate as smoothly as old Policant and ask for a ton of gold this time, too. Then give half of it back in exchange for a team of artisans to work on the moonship. Who might do the work much faster than Ruskin on his own, anyway. “Well, then …” Corkoran began.

The big doors of the Council Chamber swung open, and Lukin came in. Olga was with him, very stately in her fur cloak. Lukin had a stately air to him as well, even more than Olga did. Knowing how important this was, Lukin had struggled against his usual desire not to be prince or king of anywhere and had managed to pull over himself all the royal magnetism he usually left to Isodel. “Good day, forgemasters,” he said, every inch a prince.

“Oh, go away!” Corkoran said irritably. “Two of my students,” he explained to the interested dwarfs.

“My business,” Lukin stated firmly and majestically, “is with the forgemasters.” Before Corkoran could say any more, he said to the dwarfs, “I am the Crown Prince of Luteria, and I find myself in need of a servitor in this place. By an oversight, I left my man behind in Luteria. I've come to buy Ruskin from you as a replacement.”

The dwarfs all put back their braided and helmeted heads and bellowed with laughter. “And what, lad, do you think you could offer us that we don't have twice as much of, anyway?” Dobrey asked, with his face all creased up in amusement. “If you're talking gold, forget it. Precious jewels, fine work, the same goes.”

“I'm serious,” Lukin said. “I've come to make you an offer you can't refuse.”

Corkoran prudently decided to keep out of this. He could hardly lose. If Lukin won, he had Ruskin to work on the moonship and money from the Emperor Titus, anyway. If the forgemasters refused the bargain, whatever it was, there would be even more money and a team of artisans into the bargain. He sat back.

“You'd have to be offering something pretty valuable, lad,” Genno observed.

“I am,” Lukin said with his chin haughtily raised, and hoped mightily that this was true. It was a mad gamble that he and Olga were trying, from a plan hatched with difficulty while Ruskin was almost incoherent with terror, and Claudia just as bad and no help at all. It all depended on Elda's sudden conviction that the small golden notebook was very valuable indeed. Why else, Elda said, had it been among Olaf's hidden treasures? At which Felim had looked thoughtful and asked Olga why she had kept it instead of selling it with the rest of the treasure she had taken. Olga was not sure, except that she felt drawn to it somehow. At which Felim nodded to Elda and said it was quite probably some sort of magical virtue in the notebook that made Olga feel this way.

The plan they hurriedly hatched after that depended on the senators' leaving before the dwarfs. Because, as Felim pointed out, senators were rich people, too, and they didn't want the matter confused by a senator becoming covetous and wanting either Ruskin or the notebook for himself. So would the senators be likely to get their word in first? “Oh, they will, they will!” Claudia had cried out, with her teeth chattering. “They always do.” Felim had sped off to watch and returned with the welcome news that the senators were just leaving. Lukin and Olga had sprinted to the Council Chamber with only the sketchiest notion of what they were to say.

To Lukin's relief, the dwarfs were decidedly interested. All their round, shrewd eyes were fixed on him. “So what is it you're offering?” Genno said.

“This.” Lukin took a few steps forward and, in a careless, royal way, fetched the small golden notebook out of his pocket.

There was a long, penetrating silence, while all the dwarfs' eyes narrowed to focus on the book. “It looks,” Dobrey said at length with unconvincing casualness, “like dwarf work from here. Can I see it close, lad?”

“If it
is
dwarf work,” Genno said, clattering his ornaments as he shrugged to show how unconcerned he was, “
if
it is, and I don't say it
is
, mind, it'll have a virtue of some kind. What does it do, lad—if it does anything, that is?”

This really might be going to work. Lukin tried to keep calm. “I don't know. It's queer. All I know is that most of the things I write in it just disappear.”

A very slight tremble of excitement affected all the dwarfs. One of them actually licked his lips. Dobrey held out a large hand, blistered and discolored on its palm and lumpy along its fingers. Old and important he might be, but he evidently still worked at a forge. “Show, lad.”

Lukin took hold of the notebook by one delicately molded corner and held it out so that Olga could take hold of a corner, too. Together they went along behind the row of dwarfs—like assistants at an auction, Lukin thought—holding the book open so that each dwarf could turn the small, crisp pages. Most of them seemed particularly interested in the page containing the half sentence from Wermacht's first class, but others checked the gaps in the notes about herbs, and others leafed all through. Once or twice either Olga or Lukin had to let go for someone to examine the work on the cover and grunt enigmatically. When every dwarf had seen his fill, Dobrey leaned back in his chair.

“Just how did you come by this, lad?”

It was said as though Dobrey thought Lukin had stolen the book. But Ruskin, shaking with fear so that Lukin could hardly understand him, had assured Lukin that this manner of question would be the second part of the process. If there
was
a process, which Ruskin appeared to doubt miserably. Lukin looked Dobrey haughtily in the eye and replied, “It was given me as an engagement present by my bride-to-be, Olga Olafsdaughter here. It was part of her dowry. Please tell them, Olga.”

The shrewd, round eyes all turned to Olga then. Olga colored up and seemed very uncomfortable. “My father was a pirate,” she said, in a flat, wooden way. “Olaf Gunnarsson. This book was part of his private treasure. He took this book and a lot of other things from a dwarf ship that I saw him rob and sink on the Inland Sea.”

Genno turned and slapped Dobrey ringingly on his armored back. “It
is
! It
is
!”

The great chamber echoed with his voice and the huge delighted voices of the others. “It really
is
! It's the Book of Truth! We got it, and those fool Westerners have
lost
it!”

Dobrey looked up at Lukin. “It's the only book of its kind,” he said. “They made it, these Western dwarfs, a good thousand years back, to record only the truth. That's why your notes went missing. None of them were true. It's one of the Great Treasures, this book. You can have Ruskin and welcome for this, lad. You can have the whole tribe of artisans with him, for all I care.”

“Steady on!” said Hordo, whose elbows were still on the table. “Don't get carried away and sell off all our workers, Dobrey.”

“Just Ruskin then. Hand us the book,” said Dobrey, stretching out his hand again.

Corkoran realized that it would be prudent to intervene here, before he lost Ruskin
and
the money. “Er-hem!” he said. “Before you give it to him, Lukin, I think you should get the bargain down in writing and make sure they all sign it.”

Lukin's eyes, turning to Corkoran for an instant, seemed to say, “Why weren't you any help before this?” Corkoran was surprised to feel his face heating up. Well, he was quite hot in these wretched robes.

“Yes, of course. Get it in writing—I was forgetting. It's the excitement,” Dobrey said shamelessly. “Anyone thought to bring writing stuff? Sealing wax? What a pity. Never mind.”

Corkoran wordlessly conjured a sheet of parchment, pens, ink, a lighted candle, and a lump of sealing wax to the table in front of the dwarfs. Dobrey looked at it all regretfully. “Run out of excuses, haven't I? You'd better write it, lad. We'll sign and seal.”

Lukin grinned a bit. An important part of his education as a prince had been in how to draw up treaties and contracts that were properly binding. Dobrey was not going to get anything this way either. Lukin pulled the parchment over to the end of the table and wrote, quickly but very carefully, two copies and signed his name on both. He passed the parchments along to the dwarfs, who all read with narrowed eyes and signed without comment, except for Genno, who asked in a hurt way, “Now why did you go and put in all this about ‘and all magic he now commands,' lad?”

“I gathered that he borrowed a lot of magic from the rest of his tribe,” Lukin explained, as haughty and princelike as he could be. “He's of no use to me without that.”

“Oh, don't
haggle
, Genno!” Dobrey bellowed as he stamped hot red wax with the great ring on his forefinger. “We've got the best bargain we'll ever get in a thousand years,
and
you know it! Shake.” He offered his great, rough hand to Lukin again, who shook it with hearty relief. “If only you knew, lad,” Dobrey said, “just what you've signed away here! What a treasure!” He clutched the notebook lovingly to his breastplate as he climbed down from his chair. Genno snatched up one copy of the agreement and stuffed it inside his armor, before climbing down, too.

The dwarfs were all leaving at last. The rest of them, even Hordo, who had been looking like a fixture, were clattering down to their feet and marching in a cheerful body to the door. Corkoran sprang up, too. “Nice work, Lukin, Olga,” he said. Then he fairly pelted out by the back way to the pigeon loft. A clever pigeon could get to the Emperor long before those senators were near the Empire. On the other hand, the senators had almost certainly sent a pigeon of their own. You could hire them from several lofts in the city. Corkoran knew he had to get his version off to the Emperor as soon as possible. A lot of money hung on it.

The janitor met him at the base of the ladder, looking worried. “I was just coming to find you. Been a bit of a frackshaw up there, there has.”

“Oh, what
now
?” Corkoran started up the ladder, nearly fell off it when his robes tangled around his feet, and angrily conjured the robes away, back to his rooms. He arrived in the dim wooden loft with the janitor panting at his heels.

All the small, rounded pigeon doors at the end were open, letting in a chilly draft and enough light to show gray feathers and splashes of blood everywhere. Two pigeons lay on their backs with their pink claws uppermost, dead, right by Corkoran's feet. Beyond them was the corpse of a mouse that seemed to have been pecked to death.

“I ain't been drinking,” said the janitor.

“I'm sure you haven't,” Corkoran said, stunned.

“You got to believe what I saw,” the janitor asserted. “I heard this noise, see, as I was on my rounds, and I climbs up to investigate. And—you got to believe this—there was battle and mayhem going on, hordes of mice going for the pigeons and the pigeons flying every which way and some of them fighting back. So I jumps inside here and shouts, and the mice all run away down between the floorboards. Then—you
got
to believe this!—I see a lot of little tiny men at the end there. Climbing about opening the pigeon doors, some were, and some of them was pushing pigeons out through the doors and two of them were fixing a message to another pigeon. When they sees I see them, they push that pigeon out, too, and run for it. Wriggle down cracks in the floor, just like the mice. And I've not touched a drop of drink, I swear.”

“Tell me,” asked Corkoran, “were these little men dressed all over in black?”

“They were and all,” said the janitor. “That's why I didn't see them first off.”

“Then I believe you completely,” said Corkoran. He looked glumly around the shambles in the loft. The assassins had teamed up with the ex-pirates, by the look of things, and from what the janitor had seen, the assassins had just sent a pigeon for reinforcements, while making sure there were no pigeons that the University could send for help. Corkoran shivered. For a moment he was almost tempted to send Finn or Wermacht to ask Querida to come here quickly. But no. Querida was such a tyrant. She was almost certain, if she came, to reorganize the University around him, and she would start by canceling his moonshot, Corkoran knew it. Much better to manage by himself. He had dealt with assassins and pirates once. He could do it again. “Are there any pigeons left at all?” he asked the janitor.

There was a stirring in the rafters over his head. “Croo. Some of us. Up here,” a warbling voice replied.

Corkoran raised mage light in one hand and discovered five decidedly battered birds crouched along the highest beam. Some of his anxiety left him. “I'm going to put the strongest possible protections around you—particularly you,” he said, pointing to the one that seemed the least battered. “I need you to take a message for me.” The bird hunched a bit but obediently fluttered down to the rail beside the message desk. “You,” Corkoran said to the janitor, “go and get all the mousetraps you can find and set them up all around this loft.”