Year of the Griffin (37 page)

Flury followed the procession as it trooped out into the courtyard. Because he was by now feeling sorry for Finn, and for Myrna and Umberto, though not so much for Dench and some of the others, he said, “While we're out here, ma'am, perhaps you'd like to take a look at Wizard Wermacht?”

“Oh, yes,” said Querida. “Thank you for the reminder, Flury. Myrna, run and fetch Wermacht—no, you're pregnant, aren't you? What a silly state to be in. Then Finn must—”

Flury galloped off before Finn was forced to take any more orders and returned on three legs, lugging the bar stool. He set it down in front of Querida with a clatter. She looked at it. Everyone else looked at it. It stood there.

“Wermacht!” Querida called sharply. “Come on out!” Nothing happened. Querida began to mutter and work on it. Finally she went so far as to lay her little, withered hands on the leather seat, saying as she did so, “Umberto, what are you staring at? Everyone, help me! This wizard was clearly an utter bungler, and I can't do this alone.”

“Er—” said Umberto.

“Who
is
this Wermacht, anyway?” Querida demanded. “
I
never met him.”

“He graduated two years ago with top marks,” Finn explained. “Never fell below a B, and—”

“Don't tell me!” Querida snapped. “Corkoran had this policy!”

“Er—” Umberto began again.

“Flury!” Querida said, exasperated. Bar stool or man, this Wermacht was going to have to be fired, along with Dench and six others almost equally incompetent. And Corkoran, before any of the others. It was a real nuisance having to find lecturers to take their places. Even if she called the old wizards out of retirement, she would still have to do some of the teaching herself, which was
maddening
when she wanted to be working on the Waste. “Flury, can you do anything about this Wermacht person?”

“I'm afraid not, ma'am,” Flury said glumly. “I've tried. I thought I ought to try because I encouraged him to get like this in the first place.”

“Will you
stop
apologizing!” Querida hissed.

“Er—Querida,” Umberto managed to say, while Querida was taking a breath before she told Flury just what she thought of griffins who made wizards turn themselves into bar stools and then
crawled
about it. Like Elda, she found Flury's humility highly irritating. “Querida, I think we're about to have an international crisis. King Luther and Emperor Titus—”

Querida spared an unbelieving look across the courtyard. There, sure enough, to the left stood Emperor Titus beside his unfurled banner of the golden griffin on the purple ground, surrounded by neat ranks of glistening soldiery. Titus had his arms folded and his legs astride in a thoroughly warlike posture. He was staring across at the rigid figure of King Luther on the right. King Luther only had six soldiers and Isodel to support him, but he had his arms folded, too, and the glare he was giving Titus more than made up for his lack of an army. It looked as though the only thing that was stopping an immediate small war was the crowd of interested students flocking into the courtyard to see what was going on.

“Why didn't you
tell
me?” Querida snarled at Umberto. Even she knew that this was unfair. But she always hated being taken by surprise. She picked up the bar stool and passed it to Dench. “Take him back to the buttery. If the man isn't wizard enough to get himself out of it, he'll just have to stay that way.” Then, well aware that King Luther and Emperor Titus had detested one another ever since the last battle of the last tour, she set off at a hasty but dignified walk to keep the two apart.

As she went, the man that each of the two angry rulers had sent to question the students came back and whispered to his monarch. Titus and Luther both spared an incredulous glance at the sky before they went back to glaring at one another. Evidently they had just been told that Claudia and Lukin had gone to the moon, and neither believed a word of it.

Querida looked at the sky, too, rather hopelessly. It was overcast, covered with matte gray clouds, and likely to rain before long. Querida sighed. The roofs would leak again, and she would be forced to invite the Emperor and the King into the Council Chamber, where they would encounter a row of dead mice—Oh, no, it just wouldn't do! “Can you hold the rain off?” she asked Flury, who was the only one daring enough to cross the court beside her.

“I'll try,” Flury said in the humble way that so annoyed her. His head cocked sideways. His manner changed. His head, his bright brown crest, and his wings came up. His tail lashed, and his feet braced. Somehow he seemed twice the size. “Don't move!” he said. “Don't take another step!”

He was so commanding that Querida actually obeyed. She stood still, and because Flury was staring at the sky, she looked up again, too. Her ears caught the sound that Flury had heard a few seconds ago. It was a distant, whining roar, rapidly growing louder. As Querida searched for the source of it, the clouds above the gate tower boiled into whiteness and parted to let a great flaming object through. The roar rose to screaming thunder as the burning sphere hurtled apparently straight toward Querida, lighting the tower, the courtyard, and everyone standing in it a lurid yellow-white like a small sun. Querida had scarcely time to think, It's going to hit me! before it was there, down on the courtyard in front of the statue of Wizard Policant, deafeningly but light as a feather. The blast of its coming made everyone stagger. Wizard Policant rocked on his pedestal, and Querida would have been thrown over backward if Flury had not hastily backed around behind her. Smoke belched up from the stones of the courtyard, covered the sphere so that it looked like the sun in a storm cloud, and then burned away, leaving a smell of hot lava.

In utter, deafening silence after that, Querida leaned into Flury's warm, stiff feathers and watched the outer part of the sphere turn from fiery orange to yellow and then to an almost frozen white. The whiteness steamed and twined away from it in spirals as all the air elementals from the Red Planet who had not been boiled away above the clouds set off eagerly to explore the blue world. The misty blue inner lining of the sphere fell away outward like orange peel then, to reveal two dank and gasping griffins, one sweating dwarf, and six humans, one of these clutching a clod of earth and all of them except Corkoran white and strained from the frantic magic-working they had had to do in order to survive reentry.

Kit was quivering all over, but he spared a flicker of strength to revive Corkoran before he sank down beside Elda on the nice, cool stone, which had melted to a marble smoothness and then been frozen solid again by the departure of the air elementals.

Corkoran staggered upright, looking anguished. His face was yellow and baggy with horror, and his eyes rolled. His usually spruce yellow hair was in tangles. His tie was gray. Seeing Querida gathering herself together and marching toward him, he moaned. He had hoped that he had just been having a bad dream and had now woken up. Now he knew he was still in it, and it was a nightmare.

Flury advanced, too. “Are you all right?”

Kit was so tired that his voice came out as a small squawk. “I'll live.”

Elda realized that Flury was really speaking to her. “Fine, now that I know we're not all dead,” she replied. Flury, she saw, was not looking humble at all. She wondered why. She thought it suited him much better to be about Kit's size, with his crest up and his eyes keenly open. This was much more how she had all along supposed—without knowing she supposed it—that Flury should really look. She so much approved of him this way that she added happily, “I'm so glad to be back! I love the whole world!”

“Isn't the world a little much to take on all at once?” Flury said rather wistfully.

Behind them Querida seized on the best chance she would ever have to get rid of Corkoran privately and quickly, without having to take the blame for him. As she had appointed Corkoran Chairman herself, she knew very well that quite a lot of people were likely to say this showed she was getting too old to be High Chancellor. So she had to get in first, before they did. “Corkoran, you don't look well,” she announced.

Corkoran was not surprised. He felt dreadful.

“I think you've been overworking,” Querida continued, much to his surprise. “Would you please me and translocate to Chell City for a long holiday? Tell Wizard Bettony that you're replacing her there for the moment and ask her to come here and talk to me.” Bettony had taught at the University for years, during the tours. She was not the ideal replacement for Corkoran, and she would hate having to leave Chell, but she was the best person Querida could think of. Seeing Corkoran staring at her, she added, “You'll like Chell. They make wine there. And the Duchess of Chell is very rich. If you talk to her nicely, she might set you up with a new moonlab there.”

Corkoran shuddered. Going to the moon meant floating in a nightmare of vertigo inside a tiny freezing bubble, with nothing but black emptiness outside pockmarked with huge, unmoving stars. He had gone off the moon. It had looked so small as they had hurtled past. You would have to stand with your feet close together, balanced on the very top of it, he knew now, or you would stick out sideways into emptiness. The idea made him want to scream again. On the other hand, he knew all about the wine they made in Chell. “You're right,” he said. “I do need a rest.” He could only translocate two miles at the most, which meant he would arrive in Chell in the middle of the night, so he thought he had better go now, before Querida changed her mind and made him deal with all these soldiers. “I'll give Bettony your message,” he said, and translocated in a mild draft of air. The sigh of relief that Querida gave then made more of a wind than Corkoran's going.

Titus had left his soldiers and was hurrying toward Claudia. Claudia was leaning on Wizard Policant's pedestal, thankful to have survived and even more thankful for the light, free feeling of being without her jinx. She saw Titus when he was halfway to her, exclaimed, and ran toward him. Brother and sister met with a clash of Titus's armor and hurled their arms around one another.

Lukin meanwhile took Olga's arm and nodded toward King Luther. Olga, seeing Isodel there, staring toward the other side of the courtyard, realized who this tall, gloomy man must be and squared her shoulders. She lodged the clod of earth carefully between Wizard Policant's pointed shoes and went over to King Luther with Lukin, trying to feel brave. Ruskin followed them. Behind them, quite unnoticed by anyone, Wizard Policant bent down and picked the clod up. He stood up, holding it in both hands, in silent, wondering conversation with it.

“Father,” said Lukin, “I would like you to meet Olga Olafsdaughter. We're going to be married when we've both qualified as wizards.” Olga looked at him with admiration. She had not thought Lukin would dare say this much.

King Luther gazed somewhere above Lukin's head. “Someone on the roof,” he said. “Student stupidity, I suppose. No, Lukin. Out of the question. I'm here to fetch you home.”

“Your Majesty,” boomed Ruskin, “Olga Olafsdaughter is a very rich woman. She owns an island with a pirate's hoard in it.”

“I suppose I do,” Olga said faintly.

King Luther bent his gloomy head to discover Ruskin's face somewhere about level with Lukin's waist. “Who,” he said, “are you?”

“Ruskin, Your Majesty, lately of Central Peaks fastness, now one of Your Majesty's subjects.” Ruskin bowed. His sweat-soaked braids rattled. “Lukin owns me. I'm his slave. He bought me from the forgemasters a couple of weeks ago.”

King Luther did look properly at Lukin then. He discovered his son to be damp-haired and tired, but looking back at him in a very straight and serious way. He also noticed that Olga was an extremely beautiful girl. His first notion of denouncing Olga as on the catch for a prince dissolved almost instantly as he saw the way her dreadfully muddy hand twined in Lukin's and the way she and Lukin looked at one another. So he simply ignored all that. “We don't have slaves in Luteria,” he said.

“I was going to ask you about that,” Lukin said. “I believe it takes a Pronuncial from the Throne to free a slave, doesn't it?”

“Yes, probably,” King Luther said coldly. “I brought a spare horse for you, Lukin—”

“I hope”—Ruskin interrupted in his most blaring voice—“that Your Majesty intends to keep me as a subject of Luteria. I must be one of the few people who knows where the gold deposits are there.”

“
What
gold deposits?” King Luther asked, distracted.

“Enormous ones,” Ruskin boomed airily, and then dropped his voice to the jarring whisper he had perfected for the library. “Majesty, when I was bringing the tribute from our fastness during the last tour, I met a dwarf at Derkholm called Dworkin, who was from that fastness just on the border of Luteria. Your Majesty may know him.” King Luther shook his head, resisting the need to block his ears as well. “Well, they aren't truly Your Majesty's subjects,” Ruskin conceded, still in the dreadful whisper. “Anyway, this Dworkin, who was a subchief and knew what he was talking about, said that Luteria was sitting on some of the biggest gold deposits in the world. It quite broke Dworkin's heart,” he added, seeing King Luther's six soldiers looking at him avidly, “because these deposits run
very deep
and very thick, and he couldn't get in to mine them without Your Majesty's getting to know—and he knew, of course, that these deposits really
belong to the crown
—and he couldn't see himself keeping it secret, not in the hundred years of mining it'd take to get all the gold out. But if Your Majesty gives me, as one of your loyal subjects, permission, I can find that gold. As a dwarf
and
a wizard I'd have no problem. And Lukin—when's he's a wizard, too—can make the mine shafts.”