Year of the Griffin (25 page)

Elda stampeded with the rest and found herself, along with Ruskin, rushing hard into something huge and soft and warm, in the region of the statue of Wizard Policant. Realizing she had run into Callette, she backed hurriedly off, only to find that she and Ruskin were almost alone in the courtyard with the alien griffins. Claudia was the only other person out there. Claudia had tripped over the wretched cloakrack, realized when she picked herself up that there was no more time to run in, and was now on one knee with both hands wrapped around the central pole of the cloakrack and the hook-laden head of it aimed aggressively at the nearest griffin, in the manner of an Empire legionary pointing a spear. Though doorways and windows were full of anxious faces, the three of them were the only ones in the open, if you did not count Callette, and Callette was clearly lying low.

The griffins had landed here and there about the courtyard, apparently randomly, but somehow in positions where they cut Elda and her friends off from every doorway. Elda did not need to turn her head to see the ragged brown-and-white male behind her, looming in front of the door of her concert hall. Being able to see behind you was an advantage that griffins had over humans, but as Elda realized now, it was no advantage at all with other griffins. They were all so large, too, at least as big as Callette, and filled the air with raffish aggressiveness. Otherwise they were an ill-matched lot. The main one, who was now strutting toward Elda, jeeringly swinging his tail, was streaky chestnut with a shaggy dark brown crest and bold yellow eyes. Another was pigeon colors, but so unkempt that the pinks and greens on his gray neck barely showed at all. One was plain dull brown, and the fifth ought to have been white, but he was so dirty he looked yellowish. At any other time Elda would have been marveling that there should turn out to be so many kinds of griffin, but here and now she was plain scared.

“Where's Callette?” the strutting griffin demanded. “I know she came this way. She doesn't escape Jessak Atreck just by crossing the ocean.”

“You can see she's not here,” said Elda.

The griffin's yellow eyes flicked around the courtyard. “She's hiding. There are at least four doors here big enough for her to get through.”

“Want me to search the place, Jessak?” the off-white griffin asked.

Jessak looked at Elda with his scruffy head on one side and pretended to consider. “No. This little yellow cat can tell me. Can't you, runtlet?”

“No,” said Elda. “Even if I could, I wouldn't.”

Jessak's answer to this was to extend his neck, so that it became improbably long and scrawny, with chestnut feathers sticking out all around it, until his beak was pointing into the middle of Elda's forehead and his yellow eyes were glaring into hers. He raised a forefoot and pretended to scratch his beak, showing talons at least twice the size of Elda's and wickedly sharp. “Yes, you will, runtlet.”

Claudia tried to distract Jessak by calling out, rather shrilly, “What do you want with Callette, anyway?”

Jessak did not bother to move or answer, but the brown-and-white griffin said, “Jessak's sworn to marry Callette and teach her manners. She scratched his—”

“Shut up!” said Jessak, still glaring at Elda.

“It's a funny kind of human, anyway,” grumbled the brown-and-white griffin. “Greenish. Shall I tear it up?”

“When I've got Callette,” said Jessak. “You want to keep your eyes, yellow cat, you tell me where she is.”

Elda simply remained as still as a statue, as still as a cat at a mousehole, and did not answer. Her scalp and the line of her backbone ached, her hackles were up so high. She understood exactly why Callette had said this griffin made her feel soft and squeamish inside. The smell of him, the way he glared, and the great eagle-lion shape of him were making strong primitive demands that Elda had never met before. He made her, like a cat or a bird, or even like a lioness, want to lie down and give in. Her insides crawled with what seemed to be lust. But griffins were a higher order of being than cats or eagles, as Elda remembered Mum's firmly telling her once when she caught Elda chasing mice, and the way Jessak was deliberately making her feel was beginning to enrage her.

Behind the brown-and-white griffin, in the doorway of the concert hall, Felim, Olga, and Lukin rather frantically tried a third spell. They had tried to open one of Lukin's pits under each griffin, and then to turn the invaders into mice, and now they tried a simple banishment spell. This one had no effect on the invaders either. “I do not understand this,” Felim whispered. “They seem to have some kind of magical immunity.”

Ruskin, standing beside Elda, had discovered the same thing and then remembered that dwarflore stated that griffins in the old days could not be touched by magic. “These griffins are throwbacks,” he rumbled disgustedly. “
Cave
griffins! Why don't they just go away?”

Jessak's beak stabbed around at Ruskin with incredible speed. Ruskin sprang backward. Elda, beginning to be really angry, clapped her right wing over the dwarf and hauled him against her flank, glaring at Jessak while she did so. The other griffins snapped their beaks, clapped their wings, and screamed with amusement.

“Ho, ho, ho!” howled the pigeon-colored one. “
She's
ready to be a mother, isn't she? Can I have her, Jessak?”

That did it. Elda's building rage erupted and exploded at the full pitch of her lungs. She had a very powerful voice. As Derk had often ruefully pointed out, the youngest in a family of vociferous griffins had to be the loudest in order to get heard at all. “You disgusting crew of horrible little
birds
! You barge in here, you strut about, you do your best to bully and frighten everyone, and you haven't even the decency to wash! Or even preen. You
stink
! And then you have the cheek to think that my sister would have anything to do with you!
You
, when you're so filthy and so rude and haven't
three
brain cells among the lot of you, you think you can come in here and lord it over decent people....”

There was a lot more than this. Once Elda got going, she got going with a vengeance. Jessak, still with his neck stretched out, put his head on one side and pretended to admire her, which made Elda angrier than ever.

“Even your ancestral
pigeon
would be ashamed of you!” she screamed. “The half-breed vulture you have for a grandmother must be writhing in her muck heap. And your mother, who was obviously a street-walking baboon or an unusually stupid civet cat, probably died of humiliation long ago!”

There was a sound like a whip crack beside her. Air blasted Elda's wing feathers sideways. And, to Elda's enormous relief, her human brother Blade appeared beside her. “Carry on, Elda,” he said. “Keep their attention. You're doing wonderfully. We got your message. Kit'll be here in a moment.”

E
LDA FILLED HER
lungs joyfully and screamed again. “Your grandfathers were all
rats
, and
they
were educated by jackals!”

But Jessak and his friends were no longer listening. They were looking at Blade and drawing together into a huddle in what looked very like dismay. “You again!” said Jessak.

Blade folded his arms and tapped with one booted foot. “Yes. Me again. I warned you when they exiled you that if you came over here, I'd make you sorry. And I will. I give you a count of ten to get out of this place. One. Two.”

Elda looked fondly down at Blade as he stood and counted. Blade these days was tall and rather thin, with straight, fairish hair and a straight, fairish face that usually held the same mild, friendly look that his father, Derk's, did. You would not think to look at him that he was one of the four most powerful wizards in the world. Elda just wished she could learn to be anything like so good.

“Five. Six,” said Blade. “Seven.”

Elda noticed that Blade was keeping half an eye on the evening sky above the Spellman Building as he counted. She kept half an eye there, too. Blade and Kit usually worked as a pair. Sure enough, there was a dark bird-shaped speck against the sunset there, and it grew very rapidly larger and darker. Kit was flying flat out.

“Eight,” said Blade. “Nine.”

“You can't frighten us. We're immune to magic,” the off-white griffin said unconvincingly.

Blade raised his eyebrows. “Ten,” he said.

And Kit came hurtling down past the Observatory tower and over the parapet like a diving black demon, shouting thunderously. “GET AWAY FROM MY SISTER, YOU GODFORSAKEN REJECTS!” Fire blasted up from the courtyard where the invading griffins stood. Blade grinned and added his magic to Kit's. The result was that all four griffins were shot into the air as if a bomb were under them. Kit flung a further sheet of fire beneath them as they rose, causing them to scream as one griffin and flap their singeing wings desperately. Blade sped them on their way with another blast of magic. They clapped their tails between their legs and flew madly to get away.

“BLASTED RIFFRAFF!” Kit thundered over his shoulder at them as he landed.

That was neat, Elda thought. You don't magic
them
, because it doesn't take, so you magic the air underneath them. Then she had a moment when she thought, Only
four
griffins? And
what
message? But she forgot those questions in her total delight at seeing her brothers again. She raised both wings, letting a rather overheated-looking Ruskin tumble out, and wrapped Blade in her pinions. “Love you, Blade!”

“Me, too,” Blade said, butting her with his head, griffin fashion. He slapped her flank. “You had a good shout, didn't you? Those gangsters were looking almost respectful when I got here.”

Elda chuckled as she galloped over to Kit. Kit was so glad to see her that he actually twined his neck with Elda's, which was a thing he very rarely did. Elda rejoiced in the well-known clean smell of his feathers and the sleek shine of his pantherlike sides. The only pale part of Kit was his great buff-colored beak. And his yellow eyes, of course, which were just now returning from angry black to ordinary gold. But she had forgotten how huge he was, bigger than Callette, bigger than Jessak by some way. He made her feel as small as Ruskin.

“Are all the griffins on the other continent as nasty as those ones?” she asked Kit, with a worried thought about Lydda.

“Lords, no!” Kit paced toward Blade, looking rather satisfied, and Elda trotted beside him, wondering why Kit did not seem to notice that there was still one foreign griffin left, the plain brown one, crouched in the opposite corner of the courtyard in the shadow of the refectory steps. “Most of the griffins there are nice people,” Kit said. “Those lot were the dregs. Outlaws. But don't worry. I don't think they'll come back in a hurry.”

“What did they get outlawed for?” Elda asked, flicking an anxious glance at the motionless brown griffin in the corner.

“Not just for stalking Callette, I can tell you!” Kit said as they reached Blade. “They enjoy tearing humans and griffins apart. They had themselves real fun during the war.”

“And everyone over there is far too civilized to get rid of them properly,” Blade told Elda. She could see he was disgusted about it. “Jessak's family got lawyers, and the lawyers argued that they were throwbacks to primitive griffins and couldn't help themselves. So they exiled them instead. We ran into them just before that, when Jessak got a thing about Callette.”

“Lawyers!” snorted Kit. “Where
is
Callette, anyway? She said she—”

Kit said this at the precise moment that he walked into the invisible Callette. Callette surged and squawked. Kit reared up and back, hugely astonished.

“
What
the—”

“You
trod
on me!” Callette said out of nowhere. “Clumsy oaf!”

Elda and Ruskin became helpless with laughter. So did Claudia. She had been getting up, clutching the cloakrack for support for her very shaky legs. Now she clung to it and giggled.

“Where
are
you?” Kit demanded of the air.

“How do
I
know? I can't see myself to tell you!” Callette retorted.

“She asked us to make her invisible because she didn't want Jessak to see her,” Claudia explained, as well as she could for laughing.