Year of the Griffin (8 page)

“I have always had witch sight,” Felim said, “but I hope this effect does not last. I feel like a beacon. May I wash the chalk off now?” But the colored pentagrams had gone. Felim held out both hands to show everyone.

“It's worked!” Lukin slapped his own leg in delight. “We did it. We make a good team.”

They were so pleased that much of their tiredness left them. Felim climbed rather stiffly from among the books, and they celebrated by eating oranges and the last of the food in the other hamper. Then, still munching, they took up books from the pentagram to find out ways to trap the assassins before they got near Felim.

“My brother Kit would call this overkill,” Elda remarked.

“Overkill is what we're going for,” said Lukin as he rapidly opened a whole row of books. “Doubled and redoubled safety. Oh-oh. Difficulty. About half of these need to be set to particular times. We have to time them for when the assassins actually get here.”

“That's all right,” Claudia said, peeling her sixth orange. “Oh, Elda, I do love oranges. Even Titus never has this many. We can work out when they'll get here. Felim, how long did you take on the way?”

Felim smiled. The glow was fading from him, but his confidence seemed to grow as it faded. “Nearly three weeks. But I took a poor horse and devious ways to escape detection. The assassins will travel fast by main roads. Say a week?”

“A week from whenever the letter from the University arrived,” said Claudia. “Elda, when did your father get his?”

“He didn't say. But,” said Elda, “if it went by one of his clever pigeons, it would take a day to Derkholm and three days to the Emirates.”

“Say the letter was sent the first day of the term,” Olga calculated. “Ten days then, three for the pigeon, and seven for the assassins. The day after tomorrow is the most likely. But we've enough spells here to set them for several nights, starting tomorrow and going on for the next three nights. Agreed?”

“Most for the day after tomorrow, I think,” said Claudia. “Yes.”

Ruskin sprang up. “Let's get to work then.”

This was something Felim could do, too. They took six books apiece and worked through them, each in his or her own way. Felim worked slowly, pausing to give a wide and possibly murderous grin from time to time, and the spells he set up made a lot of use of the knife and fork from Elda's food hamper. Ruskin went methodically, with strips of orange peel and a good deal of muttering. Once or twice he dragged
The Red Book of Costamaret
over and appeared to make use of something it said. Elda and Olga both spent time before they started, choosing the right spells, murmuring things like “No, I hate slime!” and “Now that's
clever
!” and worked very quickly once they had decided what to do—very different things, to judge from Olga's heaps of crumbled yellow chalk and Elda's brisk patterns of orange peel. Lukin worked quickest of all, flipping through book after book, building patterns of crumbs or orange pips, or knotting frayed cloth from Elda's curtains, or simply whispering words. Claudia was slowest. She seemed to choose what to do by shutting her eyes and then opening a book, after which she would think long and fiercely over the pages, and it would be many minutes before she slowly plucked out one of her own hairs or carefully scraped fluff off the carpet. Once she went outside for a blade of grass, which she burned with Ruskin's lighter before going to the door again and blowing the ash away.

All of them met spells that they could tell were not working. There would be a sort of dragging heaviness, as if the whole universe were resisting what they were trying to do. They didn't let that bother them. If they did enough spells, they were sure some would work. They just went on to a new one. Among them, they set up at least sixty spells. When the refectory bell rang for supper, Elda's concert hall was littered with peculiar patterns, mingled with books, and all six of them were exhausted.

“You're going to have to walk carefully in here,” Lukin said to Elda.

“It's only for a few days. I'll put a note for the cleaners,” Elda said blithely. “If Felim's safe, it's
worth
it.”

“Thank you,” said Felim. “I am most truly grateful.”

R
USKIN SPENT MOST
of the night reading
The Red Book of Costamaret
, first in the buttery bar with a mug of beer, then, when they turned him out, in his own room. He fell asleep after he had finished it, but he was up at dawn, pounding on the door of Elda's concert hall for the rest of the books.

“Oh, good
gods
!” squawked Elda when the pounding was reinforced by Ruskin's voice at its loudest. “All right. I'm coming!” She flopped off her bed platform, remembered just in time that the floor was covered with spells, and spread her wings, thinking it was lucky she was a griffin. She flew to the door, too sleepy to notice that the wind from her wings was fanning some of the spells out of shape. Meanwhile the door was leaping about. “Ruskin,” said Elda, wrenching it open, “please remember I can tear you apart if I want to—and I almost want to.”

“I want
Cyclina on Tropism
,” Ruskin said. “I need it. It's like a craving. And I'll take the rest of my books, too, while I'm here.”

“Feel free,” Elda said irritably, moving away from the doorway.

Ruskin rushed inside, skipped dextrously between spells, and pounced on
Cyclina
. “Do you want to read
The Red Book of Costamaret
?” he asked as he collected the rest. “It's full of the most valuable magical hints. You can have it now if you like, but I want to read it again before I have to take it back to the library.”

Elda had not formed any great opinion of
The Red Book
—although it had indeed given her a hint, she realized—but she was too sleepy to refuse. “All right. Give it to me in Wermacht's class this morning. Now go away and let me go back to sleep.”

Ruskin grinned and departed, looking like a rattling stack of folios balanced on two small bent legs. Elda shut her door and flew back to her bed. But she found he had woken her just enough to stop her getting back to sleep again. She lay couched on her stomach, thinking crossly about the mess her room was in. Soon she was thinking what a long time it was until breakfast and then how lucky it was that she still had some oranges. After that there was nothing for it but to get up and tread carefully about, eating an orange. After
that
she thought she would try to get at least some of the ninety-nine pools of wax out of the carpet. That, even with efficient griffin talons, took more than half an hour of scraping and scratching, but there was still a long time until breakfast. Elda began hopping between spells, collecting the other forty-odd books from the library into piles. This was how she discovered Policant's
Philosophy of Magic
. Ruskin had missed it because it looked very much like the other, more ordinary books.

“Oh, well,” said Elda. “Dad did say to read it.”

She flew back to her bed with it and started to read.

It was not at all what she had expected, although she saw at once why it would appeal to her father. Policant had a way of putting together two ideas that ought not to have had anything to do with one another, and then giving them a slight twist so that they did after all go together—rather as Derk himself had done to eagle and lion to make griffin, Elda thought. To her mind, the way Policant did it was a bit forced. But Policant kept asking questions. They were all questions that made Elda say to herself, “I wouldn't ask
this
like
that
!” or, “That's not the right question; he should be asking
this
!” Before long she was wondering if Policant might not be asking the wrong questions on purpose, to make you notice the right ones. After that she was hooked. It dawned on her that she had chosen the most exciting subject in the world to study, and she read and read and read. In the end she was almost late for breakfast because she just had to finish Section Five.

She floated into the refectory, feeling utterly absentminded, but terribly alert somewhere, as if her brain had been opened up like an umbrella—or rather, a whole stack of umbrellas, some of them inside out.

“What is the matter?” Felim asked, seeing the way Elda's wings and crest kept spreading and her tail tossing.

“Nothing,” said Elda. “I've just been reading Policant.”

“Good, is he?” asked Lukin.

“Yes, but in a very queer way. I couldn't stop reading,” Elda said.

Her friends eyed Elda's arching neck and shining eyes with some awe. “May I read him after you?” Felim inquired politely.

“You all
must
!” Elda declared. “Even you,” she said to Ruskin, who looked up from
Cyclina
with his eyes unfocused and grunted.

Elda was so anxious to get back to Policant before Wermacht's class that she only spared a minute to watch Corkoran racing to his moonlab with his tie of peacock feathers floating out behind him. She stared briefly at his rushing figure and then galloped back to her concert hall.

Corkoran did not notice her at all. He had problems. Surrounding a peach with a cannonball turned out to make it far too heavy. He knew he would hardly be able to walk in that much iron, even if, as his experiments suggested, he was going to feel lighter on the moon. He was thinking of magical ways to reduce the weight of iron, or maybe pare down a cannonball, and he was simply irritated when he found the neat little stickit-spell the librarian had left on his desk. So his first-year students had taken out fifty-four books? Why not? He had chosen them to teach because they might turn out to be exceptional. He forgot the matter and spent the next two days carefully dunking balls of iron into different magical solutions.

In those two days Policant went the rounds of all of Elda's friends, followed by
The Red Book of Costamaret
, followed by
Cyclina
and the rest. None of them found
The Red Book
quite as marvelous as Ruskin had, but Policant grabbed them all, and Felim became so absorbed in the wonders of
Tangential Magic
, vast as it was, that he forgot about assassins and almost forgot to go to Wermacht's classes. Olga only got him there by marching up to Felim's room and snapping her fingers between Felim's eyes and the book, almost as if she were breaking a spell. Once there in the class, Felim gazed broodingly at Wermacht and shook his head from time to time.

But Wermacht struck them all that way now they had read those books. As Olga put it, when they gathered around the statue of Wizard Policant after classes, listening to Wermacht now was like trying to hear one raindrop in a thunderstorm. There was just so much
more
of magic. “But please don't keep shaking your head at Wermacht like that, Felim,” she added. “The beastly man's coming right back into form.”

This was true. For half a day after Corkoran's threat Wermacht had been almost subdued. He plugged away dictating his big headings and drawing his diagrams and hardly looked at the students at all. Then he started stroking his beard again. The following morning he called Ruskin “you with the voice”—luckily Ruskin was thinking of a really difficult idea in
Thought Theorem
and hardly noticed—and began to address Lukin as “you with the—” before he stopped and said “golden notebook.” By that afternoon it seemed to have occurred to him that if he pretended Elda was not there, towering and golden at the back of the North Lab, Corkoran would have no grounds for firing him. He stalked up to the front of the class in quite his usual manner, planted his hourglass, and swung around, stroking his beard.

“This afternoon,” he announced, “we were supposed to be doing conjuring flame. But someone seems to have taken all the candles. Anyone have a confession to make?” His eyes traveled over the class so accusingly that half the students cowered and appeared to be searching their souls. Olga's lovely face remained frigidly innocent.

“Right,” said Wermacht, after nearly five minutes' worth of sand had poured into the lower bulb of the hourglass. “It seems we have a hardened criminal in our midst. So we are going to do something far more difficult. All of you write down ‘Raising Magefire.' Underline it. Keep your notebooks open, and all of you stand up.” Seats scraped on stone as everyone rose to his or her feet. “Now hold out both hands cupped in front of you.” When Elda hastily rose to her haunches, sending her desk scraping, too, in order to do this, Wermacht stroked his beard and ignored her. “Now sit down again, and write a description of the precise position you were in.” Seats scraped again. Everyone scribbled. “That's it. Now stand up and adopt the position again.” Wermacht stuck his thumbs into the armholes of his robe and stalked back and forth as everyone once more stood up. “Good. Higher, you with the secondhand jacket. Nearer your chin. Better. Now concentrate and find your center. You'll find that under the tenth big heading in your notes from last week. Sit down and turn back to the place. You'll find you have written—even you with the voice, look at your notes—that your center—you with the secondhand jacket, I said consult your notes—your center is a small multidimensional sunlike body, situated just below the breastbone in men and around the navel in women. Now stand up and locate it in yourself.”