Year of the Griffin (9 page)

Everyone rather wearily stood up again, cupping hands and talons. But this was only the third time. Wermacht, smugly marching back and forth, had them up and down like yo-yos, until even Elda had lost count.

Finally, he said, “That's better. Now, keeping the position and concentrating on your center, smoothly transfer some of the energy from your center to between your hands.”

There was a long, straining silence, while everyone tried to do this.

“Think,” Wermacht said, with contemptuous patience. “Think of flame between your hands.”

“Then why didn't you
say
so?” Ruskin rumbled.

“Did you say something, you with the voice?” Wermacht asked nastily.

Ruskin said nothing. He simply stood there with his face lit from beneath by the pile of purple flame cupped in his large hands. Wermacht scowled.

At that moment several students near the front gave cries of pleasure and held out little blue blobs of flame.

“
Very
good,” Wermacht said patronizingly.

After that, as if it were catching, blue flames burst out all over the North Lab.

“Like wildfire,” Olga said, grinding her teeth, and summoned suddenly a tall, green, twirling fire that forked at the top. The forks twisted together almost to the ceiling.

“Oh, dear!” said Lukin. He had managed to do it, too, but his blue fire was, for some reason, dancing in a little pit in the middle of his desk.

Wermacht exclaimed angrily and came striding up the lab. “Trust you lot to make a mess of it! You with the secondhand jacket, pick that flame up. Cherish it. Go on, it won't burn you. And you, girl with the long nose, pull your flame in. Think of it as smaller at once, before you make a mess of the ceiling.”

Olga shot a furious look at Wermacht and managed to reduce her forked green flame to about a foot high. Lukin leaned forward and gingerly coaxed his blue flame to climb into his hands. Wermacht made an angry spread-fingered gesture over the desk, whereupon the small pit vanished.

“What is it with you?” he said to Lukin. “Do you have an affinity for deep pits, or something?” Before Lukin could reply, Wermacht turned to where Felim was nonchalantly balancing a bright sky blue spire of light on one palm. “
Both
hands, I said!”

“Is there a reason for using two hands?” Felim asked politely.

“Yes. We do moving the fire about
next
week,” Wermacht told him.

Elda, all this while, had her eyes shut, hunting inside herself for her center. She had never yet been able to discover it. It made her anxious and unhappy. Nobody else seemed to have any difficulty finding the place. But now, after reading Policant, she began to ask herself, Why? And the answer was easy. Griffins were a different shape from human people.
Her
center was going to be in another place. She gave up hunting for it up and down her stomach and looked into herself all over. And there it was. A lovely, bright, spinning essence-of-Elda was whirling inside her big griffin ribs, in her chest, where she had always unconsciously known it was.

There was a tingling around her front talons.

Elda opened her eyes and gazed admiringly at the large, transparent pear shape of golden-white fire trembling between her claws. “Oh!” she said. “How beautiful!”

This left only Claudia without magefire in the entire class. Wermacht turned from Felim to find Claudia with her eyes shut and her cheeks wrinkled with effort. “No, no!” he said. “Eyes open and see the flame in your mind.”

Claudia's eyes popped open and slid sideways toward Wermacht. “I shut my eyes because you were distracting me,” she said. “I have a jinx, you know, and I'm finding this very difficult.”

“There is no such thing as a jinx,” Wermacht pronounced. “You're just misdirecting your power. Look at your cupped hands and concentrate.”

“I
am
,” said Claudia. “Please move away.”

But Wermacht stood looming over Claudia, while everyone else stared at her until Elda expected her to scream. And just at the point when Elda herself would have screamed, Claudia said, “Oh—blah!” and took her aching hands down.

Almost everyone in the lab cried,
“There!”

“What do you all mean, ‘there'?” Claudia asked irritably.

Wermacht took hold of Claudia's skinny right arm and bent it up toward her face. “I can't think what you did,” he said, “but it's there. Look.”

Claudia craned around herself and stared, dumbfounded and gloomy, at the little turquoise flame hanging downward from the back of her wrist. “I told you I had a jinx,” she said.

“Nonsense,” said Wermacht, and strode away to the front of the class. “Withdraw the flame back to your center now,” he said. This was surprisingly easy to do, even for Elda, whose heart ached at having to get rid of her lovely transparent teardrop. “Sit down,” said Wermacht. Seats obediently scraped. “Write in your own words—you, too, you with the jinx. You can stop admiring your excrescence; dismiss it and sit down now.”

“But I
can't
,” Claudia protested. “I don't know what I did to get it.”

“Then you can stand there until you do, and write your notes up afterward,” Wermacht told her. “The rest of you describe the process as exactly as you can.”

Everyone wrote, while Claudia stood there miserably dangling her flame, until Elda remembered her own experience and hissed across at Claudia, “Ask yourself questions, like Policant.”

Claudia stared at Elda for a moment and then said, “Oh!” The flame vanished. Claudia sat down and scribbled angrily.

“I can see I'm going to be ‘you with the jinx' from now on,” she said to the others as they crowded out into the courtyard.

“Join the club,” said Lukin. “Why doesn't somebody assassinate that man?”

Felim flinched and went gray.

“It's all right, Felim,” Elda said. “You've got protections like nobody ever before.”

Elda proved to be right.

Around midnight that night Corkoran locked his lab and thought about going to bed. His rooms were in the Spellman Building on the same floor as the library, along with Finn's and Dench the Bursar's, who were the only other wizards who actually lived in the University. All the rest of the staff lived in the town. Corkoran strolled across the courtyard in a chilly, fine mist that raised goose bumps below the sleeves of his T-shirt, and found the University looking its most romantic. It was utterly quiet—which, considering the usual habits of students, was quite surprising—with just a few golden lights showing in the turreted black buildings around him. These stood like cutouts against a dark blue sky, only faintly picked out in places by misty lamps from the town beyond the walls. Better still, the moon was riding above the mist, just beside the tower of the Observatory. She was only about half there, a sort of peachy slice above a faint bluish puff of cloud, and Corkoran was ravished by the sight. He stood leaning against the statue of Wizard Policant, gazing up at the place where he so longed to be. So very far away, so very difficult to get to. But his moonship was about half built now. It would only take another few years.

“I'm going to do it,” he said to the statue of Wizard Policant, and slapped it on its stone legs.

As if that were a signal, a monstrous noise broke out. If you were to beat forty gongs and a hundred tin tea trays with spades and axes, while ringing ten templefuls of bells and throwing a thousand cartloads of bricks and a similar number of saucepans down from the Observatory tower, you might have some notion of the noise. Mixed in among this sound, and almost drowned by the din, a great voice seemed to be shouting.
DANGER
, it bellowed.
INVASION
.

Corkoran clutched the statue in shock for a second. The noise seemed to turn his head inside out. He was aware of distant howlings from the main gate, where the janitor, who was a werewolf, had reacted to the shock by shifting shape, and he realized that the man was not likely to be any help. But Corkoran was after all a wizard. He knew he must do something. Although the bonging and clattering and crashing seemed to be coming from all directions, the huge, muffled voice definitely came from the Spellman Building. Corkoran clapped a noise reduction spell over his ears and sprinted for the building's main door.

T
HIS HAS TO
be a student joke,” Corkoran muttered. He threw wide the doors of the Spellman Building and turned on all the lights without bothering with the switches. He was so astonished at what he saw that he let the doors crash shut behind him and seal themselves by magic while he stood and stared.

The grand stairway was buried under a mountain of sand. And went on being buried. Whitish yellow sand poured and pattered and cascaded and increased in volume, doubled in volume while Corkoran stared, as if it were being tipped from a giant invisible hopper. Odder still, someone seemed to be trying to climb the stairs in spite of the sand. Corkoran could see a half-buried figure floundering and struggling about a third of the way up. As far as he could tell, it was a man in tight-fitting black clothes. Corkoran saw a black-hooded head emerge from the mighty dune, then a flailing arm with a black glove on its hand, before both were covered by the inexorably pouring sand. A moment later black-clad legs appeared, frantically kicking. Those were swallowed up almost instantly. A turmoil in the sand showed Corkoran where to look next, and he saw a tight black torso briefly, rather lower down. By this time the sand was piled halfway across the stone floor of the foyer.

Corkoran wondered what to do. The older wizards had warned him before they retired that he should expect all sorts of magical pranks from the students, but so far nothing of this nature had occurred. Most students had seemed uninventive or docile, or both. Corkoran had had absolutely no experience of this kind of thing. He watched the seething sand pile ever higher and the struggling black-clad fellow appear, lower down each time, and dithered.

While he dithered, the onrushing sand swept the black-clad man down to floor level, where he staggered to his feet, tall, thin, and somehow unexpectedly menacing. Corkoran had just a glimpse of a grim, expressionless face and a black mustache before a large pit opened under the fellow's staggering black boots and the man vanished down into it with a yelp.

That, thought Corkoran, was surely not one of our students. He went to the edge of the pit and peered down. It was fairly deep, breathing out a curious fruity darkness. He could just see the pale oval of the man's face at the bottom and the dark bar of the fellow's mustache. “You're not a student here, are you?” he called down, just to be sure.

“No,” said the man. “Help. Get me out.”

Sand was already pattering into the pit. At this rate it would fill up enough in five minutes for the man to climb out. Corkoran could not help thinking that this was a bad idea. “Sorry,” he said. “You're trespassing on University property.” He stepped back and covered the pit with the Inescapable Net he used to stop air leaking from his moonship.

Then he turned his attention to the sand.

This proved to be far more of a problem. It took Corkoran three tries just to stop more of it arriving. The spell was decidedly peculiar, some kind of adaptation of a little-known deadfall spell, with a timer to it that had to be removed before the main spell could be canceled. But eventually the sand stopped coming, and Corkoran was merely faced with the small mountain of it that was there already. He raised his arms and tried to dismiss it back to the desert it had presumably come from.

It would not budge.

Feeling rather irritated by now, Corkoran performed divinatory magic. All this told him was that the sand had to be returned to the place it had come from, which he knew already. He was forced to go and pick up a handful of the gray, dusty granules, in order to perform a more difficult hands-on spell of inquiry.

“Help me!” commanded a voice from near his feet.

Corkoran whirled around and saw black-gloved fingers clinging to the underside of the Inescapable Net. The fellow had magic, and he was probably unbelievably strong, too, to have climbed right to the top of the pit. This was bad news. “No,” he said. “You stay there.”