Year of the Griffin (23 page)

“Think that'll work?” the janitor asked dubiously. “These looked to be brainy mice.”

“They'll work when I've put spells on them,” Corkoran said grimly. “Killer-spells.”

“Right.” The janitor collected the three corpses for disposal and clumped away down the ladder.

Corkoran got to work putting protection around the remaining pigeons. He enhanced it upon his chosen pigeon and then, since the bird did look very battered, added a strong speed-spell as well. The ink for writing messages had been spilled in the affray, and all the little slips of paper had been torn up. The assassins had been making darned sure no one could send for help. Too bad. Corkoran conjured more ink and paper. Then he wrote a careful and accurate account of his conversation with the two senators, their hints and their offer of money, and dwelt particularly on their final threat, citing the dwarfs as witnesses to the whole interview. He addressed it to Emperor Titus. He did not ask the Emperor for money or for help from any assassins the senators planned to send. That would have been crude. He was sure he could rely on the Emperor's gratitude for both.

“Now,” he said as he fixed the flimsy paper into the tube on the bird's leg, “you are to take this to Condita in the Empire and deliver it to Emperor Titus. The Emperor in
person
and no one else. Have you got that?”

“I'll try,” croodled the bird. “I've heard they bag you in butterfly nets and take you to the Senate down there.”

“Avoid that,” said Corkoran. “Find the Emperor.” He took the pigeon's warm, light bulk in both hands and carried it to the open pigeon doors. “Don't let anyone lay hands on you until you find the Emperor.” He let the bird climb to the small doorstep and watched it wing rather wearily away.

The janitor arrived back then with an armload of mousetraps. Corkoran spent quite a time setting them up with some distinctly vicious spells, while the four remaining pigeons craned down from their beam to watch. When Corkoran finally climbed away down the ladder, the birds exchanged looks, crooned at one another, and fluttered down to the doors. Corkoran had hardly reached the bottom of the ladder before the pigeons were gone, too, winging painfully away to Derkholm.

The sun was setting by the time Corkoran reached his lab. He turned on the lights with a sigh of relief. And stood with his hand on the switches, appalled. The assassins and their mouse allies had been here, too. His notes and calculations had been gnawed into confetti-sized scraps and tossed about in heaps. His experiments for the moonsuit had been broken and spilled and emptied all over the floor. But worst and most heartbreaking of all, his precious moonship, his carefully designed and cherished moonship, which had taken him three years and untold amounts of money to build—and had been two-thirds finished by now—had been hacked to bits. Shining shards of it lay in a heap by the window. Corkoran could see hundreds of very small gleaming sword cuts on each shard. Those assassins must have sat in their cage, day by day, learning exactly what things were most important to him.

Corkoran stared at it all numbly.

L
UKIN HELD THE
door of Elda's concert hall open for Olga, then shut it and leaned against it while Olga slowly shed her cloak. He felt weak. The others, scattered around the room, watched him anxiously.

“Phew!” he said. “You hit the bull's-eye, Elda. Ruskin, you are legally my slave, and I've got a bill of sale to prove it.” He flourished his signed and sealed parchment. “Regard yourself as a citizen of Luteria from now on.”

“
Wey
-HAY!” Ruskin bounded to his small legs, pigtails flying, and did a clacking dance of triumph with Felim. In the course of it the cloakrack got knocked over. Claudia let it lie. Her position was nothing like so certain as Ruskin's. The fact that no legionaries had come to arrest her was small comfort. The senators could be starting extradition proceedings in the city at this moment. She huddled among the cushions on the stage, wondering what to do about it.

“You stick close to me,” Elda told her, picking up the cloakrack. “Fetch your things, and sleep in here from now on. I can handle those soldiers.”

Olga was not joining in the rejoicing any more than Claudia was. She was standing near the door beside the dropped furry heap of her cloak, staring into nowhere. “I think,” Lukin said to her, “that I handled those dwarfs rather well.”

“Do you?” Olga said.

“Yes, I
do
,” Lukin said, hurt by her lack of enthusiasm. “Dwarfs are such tricksy beggars. You have to pin them down in all directions. I was afraid they were going to sheer off even before the bargaining started, when you were telling them how you got the notebook. You sounded so wooden, as if you were reciting a lesson you'd learned or something.”

Olga whirled around on him in a swirl of hair. “Oh, did I? Mr. Crown Prince Lukin! And how
was
I supposed to behave when you were lording around telling lies about dowries and brides-to-be? Was I supposed to simper? Was I supposed to say, ‘Oh, yes, Lukin's father's just dying to have a pirate in the family. And a
mouse
'?”

Lukin was perplexed. Olga looked so angry. He could not understand why her eyes were brimming with tears when everything had gone so well. “You know I had to say something like that to give the book a proper provenance. They wouldn't have accepted that it was mine to sell if I hadn't. You
know
I didn't mean a word of it.”

“All right, don't rub it in!” Olga screamed at him.

“I'm not,” Lukin said, trying to be reasonable. “I thought we were friends enough and understood one another enough that you could accept what I had to say and back me up. I'm sorry if it annoyed you, but we had to rescue Ruskin.”

“I'm not
talking
about Ruskin!” Olga yelled. “You might at least have
warned
me!”

“Then I'm sure I don't know what you
are
talking about!” Lukin snapped. “You're being as bat-headed as Melissa. You must have realized, when I asked you to come with me, that I was going to have to spin a yarn of some kind.”

“Oh!” Olga gasped. “That
does
it! I never want to speak to you again, ever in my life! Never!” She burst into tears. Crying so hard that she could barely see what she was doing, she fumbled the door open, flung it wide, and ran away. She was crying such volumes of tears that Lukin could see drops whirling out on either side of her flying hair, shining like rainbows for an instant, before the door swung back and slammed in his face.

“What's got into her?” he asked his friends slightly irritably.

They stared solemnly back. Claudia, realizing this was a time to forget her own troubles, climbed off the stage and went to join Elda. The cloakrack jiggled across the carpet after her. Everyone ignored it. “Don't you really know?” Claudia asked Lukin.

“No,” said Lukin, and it seemed to him he was being entirely honest. “I haven't a clue.”

“Then we can't tell you. Think about it,” Claudia said.

Everyone waited while Lukin thought. His first thought was that his friends were being as unreasonable as Olga had been. Here he was, having behaved like a prince for once and rescued Ruskin, and instead of telling him how clever he had been, they were asking him to
think
. It made no sense. But while he thought that, his immense satisfaction at rescuing Ruskin began to melt and crack a little. Uncomfortable feelings began to wriggle out from under it. Perhaps he had ridden roughshod over Olga a little. But behaving like a prince
made
you do that. He found he needed to move about, so he went and handed Ruskin the signed and sealed parchment. “There,” he said, and then, before he could stop himself, “Did she really mean that, about never speaking to me again?”

Everyone knew Olga, her pride and her straightforwardness, and they answered, “Yes!” in chorus, and continued to watch him.

“Don't all
stare
at me like that!” Lukin said irritably. He wondered whether to go away like Olga and be alone for a while. But as soon as he thought of being alone, by himself entirely, he began to see that there was a great yawning pit inside him, of
hurt
that Olga did not want him anymore. Olga had become the person he relied on. She understood him. She knew when he was making a joke and when he was being serious; that was why it was so
astounding
that she had not seemed to know he was lying to the dwarfs when she had been his staunch ally in all the other troubles. She had lent—no,
given
—him money for clothes. She had handed him a priceless notebook without hesitation in Wermacht's first class, and she had conjured up a smelly monkey to help him, though—as she had confessed to him later—she truly hated calling up monsters; it made her feel unclean. So why, why had she run off now? He had not known she could be so feckless. “Do you think perhaps I should go after her and talk to her?” he asked.

“That depends on what you want to say to her,” Claudia answered.

Then I won't bother, Lukin thought. She'd just shout at me again. And for himself, he suspected that he would whine and complain to Olga that he
needed
her, which would annoy Olga and make Lukin ashamed of himself. But then, when he started to think of needing Olga, he discovered that the need was really there, much deeper and much stronger and likely to go on for much longer than he had ever believed such a need could. And he began, dimly, to see why Olga had been so upset. She had after all been born to a very different family from Lukin's. But I don't care two hoots about her beastly father! he told himself angrily. In fact, I'd quite happily set an enormous infallible mousetrap for him personally. But he knew this was not really what this was all about. He sighed. “But I've no idea where she's gone,” he said.

“Aren't you training to be a wizard then?” Ruskin asked him.

Lukin frowned at him.

“Ruskin means,” said Elda, “that if you're linked to Olga in any way, then you can
know
where she's gone.”

Lukin thought about this, too, while everyone again watched him expectantly. At length the heavy look cleared off Lukin's face, and he smiled. “On the roof of the Spellman Building,” he said. “More or less where Elda was.”

Olga was indeed on the roof. Climbing up the narrow wooden staircase to the trapdoor beside the chimney, tears whisking off her chin and soaking her hair as she went, felt just like the many, many times she had climbed to the masthead after Olaf had beaten her. Just the same, she thought. I'm alone again. As usual. She coiled up by the chimney, which gave her some small shelter from the cold breeze up there, and she cried. She cried for herself, for her father, and for Lukin—Lukin, who she had thought had such great kindness and depths and affection under that rather sulky face of his and who obviously had not. Or not for Olga. She had seen that, fully and truly, while Lukin was putting on his crown prince face for the dwarfs. Aristocratic, haughty, and
so
polite. Considerate to people lower than he was—and most people
were
lower, of course. Olga was lower than most. Waterfront riffraff she would have been, had Olaf not stolen that ship after Olga's mother died.

And she cried. Oblivious of the cold breeze, which kept wrapping itself around her in strands and plastering her hair into her mouth, she cried and cried.

Oh, what is the matter?
the breeze cried back.
Speak to us! Please speak to us again!

Olga opened her wet and swollen eyes and stared at the air elementals wrapping themselves around her. They were long, silky, scarflike beings, and quite transparent, with anxious birdlike eyes. Elda's eyes remind me of theirs, Olga thought. That must be why I like her so much. “What's happened? I can see you!” she said. Her voice sounded thick and awful. “I can
hear
you again! Why haven't you talked to me all this time?”

But we did!
they cried back. Their voices were like the delicate moan of wind in wires.
We talked, but you never seemed to hear us. You never cried.

Nor had she, Olga realized. That first time when Olaf had beaten her half to death, she had refused to make a noise or shed a tear. Somehow it had been important not to. And after that it was as if the tears had gone underground in her and got lost in a place she could never find. “I think I got too proud to cry,” she told the elementals. “I wasn't going to let him know he hurt me.”