Year of the Griffin (29 page)

“Villainous swine!” howled the Emir. “Order me my guard, my camels, and my weapons! I must go at once to raze that infamous University to the ground!”

“In person, gracious lord?” the vizier ventured to inquire.

“In person, of
course
!” snarled the Emir. “Those wizards have stained my honor twice now. This time those sons of dubious ancestry have also dishonored seven of my best assassins. I shall not let this pass!”

“But would it not be better, gracious lord,” pleaded the vizier, thinking of heart attacks, chaos, and crisis and, most of all, of twenty-two sons of the Emir, none of whom had yet been designated as heir to Ampersand and who were all increasingly annoyed about it, “would it not be more convenient to set off at dawn tomorrow? Your guard would be better prepared and your gracious self much fresher.” You might even have thought better of it, he thought, but did not of course dare say.

The Emir pulled his lower lip, scowling, and considered. The vizier made sense. In a hasty departure, someone always forgot something, and he was determined that his vengeance on the University should be meticulously complete. He intended to take the University apart, stone by stone, and its wizards limb from limb. “You are right,” he conceded. “We will start an hour before dawn tomorrow.” But he wanted to take something apart
now
. He looked around and saw valued servitors staring at him earnestly under lights that trembled slightly. Taking them apart would be a waste. New ones would have to be trained. Then his eye fell on the pigeon. “Take that bird out of my sight and wring its neck!” he commanded before he turned on his heel and strode back indoors. The peace of the garden was ruined now.

The servitor obediently carried the pigeon away through the garden. One did not wring the necks of birds in the Emir's private quarters. The pigeon had the sense not to show that it had understood everything that had been said. It was, after all, one of Derk's clever pigeons, and most of its round body was brain. It continued to nestle trustingly in the man's hands, until they reached the stable yard, where the servitor shifted his grip, preparing to take hold of the pigeon's neck and twist it. As soon as it felt the man's hands move, the pigeon clapped its wings mightily, struggled, pecked, clawed with its feet, and finally burst upward from between the servitor's palms, to swoop—in the greatest relief—to the very top of the stable minaret. The man watched it go philosophically. Perhaps he had in mind the fact that the pigeon was the hired-out property of a very famous wizard. Perhaps he felt that the Emir had been unjust. At any rate he made no attempt to recapture the bird. It was able to roost undisturbed on the minaret all night, and when dawn was only a suggestion at the bottom of the sky and the stable yard began to bustle with men running and shouting orders, clashing weapons, protesting camels, and bundles of supplies, the pigeon took to its wings and flapped briskly westward toward Derkholm.

H
IGH
C
HANCELLOR
Q
UERIDA
, who was very small, very wrinkled, and so old that she looked greenish, had been enjoying herself hugely until the moment she looked up and saw Derk approaching on Filbert. She had found a cottage on the edge of the Waste, all by itself among swelling hills, which was the cottage of her dreams. Alone there, except for her three large tabby cats, she spent most of her days working to reduce the Waste to proper farming country again. It was utterly satisfying. She caused pools of unspeakable slime to dry up, she anchored the roving carnivorous trees into clumps of woodland and made them change their diet, and she turned the savagely mutated beasts back to what they should have been. It amused her extremely when creatures with crocodile teeth and wings suddenly found they were really rabbits. The looks on their faces were quite comical.

These activities of course released quantities of unpleasant magic. Querida spent pleasurable weeks setting up spells in her cottage attics that caught this magic, converted it to neutrality, and sent it out into the world again. Some part of the magic she made proactively good, and each time this was sent out it changed the world, just a little, into what it might have been had not Mr. Chesney come along with his tours. It was the kind of learned but practical magic that Querida most enjoyed. And it confirmed her in her opinion that she was still the strongest wizard in the world. Kit and Blade, though probably as strong, were too young, in Querida's opinion, to influence the very earth that they lived on.

By now almost a third of the Waste had been returned to woods, meadows, and unpolluted streams. Querida was looking forward to tackling the mountains in the middle, where there were some very knotty and interesting nasty things. Some of these had been disturbed by Elda. Querida had not been pleased about that. She had taken swift steps to get Elda packed off somewhere where she could do no harm. In the meantime, before she took on the mountains, Querida allowed herself the leisure to spend her evenings gardening. She was at work planning and planting a flower bed for spring in front of her cottage, with her cats rather crossly curled up in the grass nearby, when she looked up to see Derk descending toward her in the sunset.

It ought to have been a pretty sight. Filbert's wings shone red in the red light, with fringes of golden light caught in their edges, but Querida took one look and straightened up crossly. “Here comes trouble!” she said. She did not like Derk any more than he liked her. Her cats, as one cat, stood up and mewed. “Yes, yes, I'll feed you when he's gone,” Querida told them, and watched Filbert slant down to land beyond her. Deep hoofprints all over my lawn! she thought. “Well?” she said to Derk.

“I can't stay long,” Derk said. This was important to both of them. Derk felt happier, saying it. Querida relaxed a little, hearing it. Derk explained about Lydda's sudden marriage and Mara's deep, worried need to take ship at once to find out if the marriage would work.

“The young are always thoughtless,” Querida said. “How is my friend Callette?”

“Grumpy,” said Derk. “She got stalked by some sort of well-born griffin hoodlums, and she says she's glad to be back. But I really came here about the University.” He told her about the wounded pigeons and what they had said. “So I was hoping you could find time to translocate over there and see what's going on,” he concluded.

Querida was exasperated. She had
known
Derk would do something like this to her. He always did. It was this way he had of jogging her almost nonexistent conscience that made her dislike him so. “I can't possibly go until tomorrow,” she snapped.

“Can't you manage just one quick trip now?” Derk pleaded.

Querida was forced to find reasons for delaying, and once she had uttered them, she found they were very good reasons, anyway. “No,” she said. “This needs careful thinking about. All the years I was at the University, when you were a student there yourself, even at the height of Mr. Chesney's activities, something like this simply
could not
have happened there. The ambient magics that act as wards for the University would have prevented it. When I left these younger wizards in charge, I assumed they would maintain the wards in the usual way. But they obviously haven't. I need to think how to handle that before I go rushing over there.”

“Then you'll translocate there first thing tomorrow?” Derk asked her anxiously.

“No again,” Querida snapped. “I shall travel there by pony trap, as I came.” Seeing Derk's expression and realizing he was probably worrying about Elda, she explained, “The obvious answer to these ferocious mice is a set of competent cats. My three cats are excellent mousers, but they hate translocating. Either they escape on the way, or they arrive so put out that they're useless for days. They have to travel with dignity or not at all.”

“But you
will
go tomorrow,” Derk said.

“I will go tomorrow,” Querida promised. With irritated relief she watched Filbert take off again.

She spent the rest of the evening considering what to do about the University. A place like the University was essential to the world, or the whole globe would be full of untrained wizards heaving mountains about like Elda, or worse, raising demons and getting those demons to teach them further shocking things to do. And such a place, full of strong but untaught magics, needed to have strong wizards at the head of it. “I think I made a mistake when I organized that Governing Board,” Querida admitted; she could admit to a mistake privately, at least. “The place really needs a powerful Chancellor.” But she could think of no one suitable to be Chancellor except herself. And she had had her fill of running the University. She wanted to get on with her work in the Waste. “Perhaps I'd better bring some of those older wizards out of retirement,” she mused. “They won't be happy about it, but they can do the job.”

Very early next morning she prudently harnessed Hobnob, the pony, to the trap first, before the unavoidable and spirited hour necessary to get her cats into baskets. Like all cats, Querida's three were largely immune to magic. They took one look at the baskets and dived under furniture, and the only way to fetch them out was to haul them out by hand. Then they fought like fiends when they were anywhere near the baskets.

But it was done at last. Querida shook the reins and clucked to Hobnob, and the trap set off bumping down the grassy track southward, with the three cats fulminating in baskets behind Querida. At the rate the pony traveled, it would have taken nearly three weeks to get within sight of the University. Querida intended to cheat a bit, naturally. She meant to phase in a small translocation every few miles and cut the journey down by half. As long as the cats, and the pony, too,
thought
they were traveling in the normal way, she could get away with quite a bit of cheating. The question was, How much?

She began testing the air as she drove for the rumors it brought. Rumors came to her in the form of long, silky bands that wrapped themselves around her, whispering. For all her power and all her learning, Querida did not recognize them as air elementals. She simply thought of them as rumors. They whispered to her of griffins, pirates, assassins, worry, sabotage, bloodshed, more bloodshed, armed men from the north, more armed men to the east and the south, and of magic misused.

“Good gracious!” said Querida. “This sounds like the bad old days again!”

She encouraged Hobnob to trot and took them all forward several times further than she had intended—so far forward, in fact, that they were already on the edge of the peaceful farming lands. The track was almost a road here, wide and dry and rutted, running between meadows that swelled up on either side.

Almost instantly the pony tossed his head and tried to stop. The cats threw themselves around in their baskets, growling. Querida assumed that in her sudden alarm at the rumors, she had not phased in their translocation smoothly enough and pushed Hobnob onward with a sharp little spell. They swept around a curve in the track, and here the pony did stop, shivering. Another meadow swelled above them, and this one was littered with dead cows. And not just littered, Querida thought, shivering, too. Strewn with bleeding pieces of cow was a better description. Someone or something had pulled heads off cows, torn cows open and spread them about, and, in one or two places, apparently dropped cows on rocks and smashed them to pulpy meat. The smell of fresh blood filled the air, and the meadow was loud with buzzing flies, hordes of crows and ravens, and the screams of a few vulturelike scavengers that had clearly been fetched from the Waste by the scent.

“Is this a rogue dragon, I wonder?” Querida murmured. As she had no doubts about her ability to handle a dragon, or even several dragons, she began sending forth a peremptory summoning spell for the one who had done this to come and explain itself at once.

She had not completed the spell when the cow killers arrived. Shrieking to one another that here was more fun now, they soared from the opposite hillside and planed in over Querida's head, pinions whistling, to land with aggressive thumps in the road all around the pony trap. They towered over it, squawking with laughter when the pony squealed and tried to rear and the cats went mad in their baskets.

Querida quieted Hobnob and did her best to calm the cats, while she looked around at four unpleasant stranger griffins. They smelled disgusting. She hardly needed to see the blood on their beaks and the shreds of meat caught on their talons to know what had killed those cows.