Year of the Griffin Read online

  There was a fraught pause. The door frame creaked. “I can’t,” Flury said. “I’m stuck.”

  “Oh, ye gods!” said Corkoran. They really shouldn’t trouble him with griffins when he felt like death and had just remembered he had a lecture to give. He needed help. And consideration. At this it occurred to him that Healers Hall had headache remedies. They had soft hands and soothing voices, too. That was what he needed. Hoping that if he took no notice and went away, Flury would prove to be a monstrous hallucination, Corkoran stood up and translocated to find a healer.

  Seeing the room suddenly empty, Flury shrugged, causing the door frame to jiggle. “Oh, well,” he said. “I tried.” He put his head sideways, listening in case Corkoran was on his way back with levers or spells to get him out of the doorway. When it was apparent that Corkoran had simply forgotten him, Flury shook himself loose from the door frame and advanced into the lab. He was now about the size of a small lion. This put his beak at an entirely convenient height for sniffing along benches at the ruins of the moonsuit experiments. These puzzled him extremely. So did the torn-up calculations on the floor. He picked quite a few up, held them together where they seemed to fit, and examined them. He shook his head, baffled. Then he found the rat cage, with the Inescapable Net still hanging off it and its bars bent. He put his beak right inside it and closed his eyes to analyze the smells he found there.

  “Ah,” he said. “That’s what I’ve been smelling. They were here for some time before they got out and started lurking. Can’t say that I blame them really.”

  He then padded across to the remains of the moonship and spent some time carefully inspecting what was left of it. He nodded sadly. “Waste of effort,” he said. “It would never have flown anywhere, anyway.”

  Then he padded away and carefully shut the door behind him.

  Elda was surprised to see Flury at Corkoran’s lecture, bulking huge and beach-leaf brown near the back. It was surprising also that no one else seemed to notice him and even more surprising that he fitted in. The lecture hall was crammed. By breakfast time every student in the University knew that Corkoran’s moonship was in ruins and Corkoran himself devastated.

  Breakfast had been a disaster because the mice had got into the kitchens. Aided by vigorous miniature assassins, they had got into all the cupboards and even into the cold store, where they sucked eggs, chewed bacon, squeezed fruit, poured out milk, and split open bags of cereal. Almost the only thing left to eat was bread—which had luckily been set to rise in a heavy iron oven—and there was only black coffee to drink.

  “Thank goodness for coffee!” said Olga. “My father never did like it.”

  Felim and Ruskin at once set about designing a foolproof mousetrap—nor were they the only ones; even Melissa was inventing one—and the rest were rather inclined to blame Elda for making the mice in the first place, which made Elda very uncomfortable and guilty. “Mice were just what came into my head!” she explained. “Someone had to do something!”

  “Leave her alone,” said Claudia, who had spent the night on the floor of Elda’s concert hall and felt she owed Elda protection in return. “Nobody else did anything.”

  “Lukin did,” said Olga.

  “But he makes deep holes all the time, anyway, so that hardly counts,” said Claudia.

  The news about the moonship was almost a welcome distraction. It caused a wave of sympathy for Corkoran. Even those who felt, like Lukin, that Corkoran was poor stuff (with an unfortunate taste in ties) were determined to show that they were sorry about the sabotage. Every student who could get there, and a few novice healers, crowded into the main lecture hall to show Corkoran moral support.

  Corkoran felt quite touched. He was usually lucky to get an audience of five, all female and all gazing adoringly. To find everyone cared this much cheered him considerably. Nevertheless, as he set about delivering the lecture he always delivered at this stage in the term, he knew he was doing it with much less than his usual verve.

  He does look devastated, Elda thought. Corkoran’s face was yellow-pale, and she could see his hands shaking. Even his tie was pallid, full of washed-out–looking white and yellow daisies. In a guilty, illogical way, Elda felt that this might be her fault for not finding Corkoran charming anymore. And though she knew this was probably nonsense, she found herself thinking urgently of some way to make it up to him. She heard very little of the lecture because as soon as she began thinking, she had her inspiration.

  It took her until after lunch (another disaster) to find courage to mention her idea to her friends. But as they were gathered around Wizard Policant, waiting to go into Wermacht’s class, she blurted it out. “Couldn’t we get him to the moon somehow?”

  They looked at her understandingly. They had all known that Elda would be more upset about Corkoran than anyone else. They had been worrying about her.

  “I don’t like to see him looking so miserable,” Elda explained.

  “I know what you mean,” Felim said kindly. “I wonder.” He fell into deep thought.

  Olga, for her part, tried to put the realities of life before Elda. “I know what you mean, too,” she said, “but I’ve seen my father with enough hangovers to know why he looked so bad.”

  “We can’t let him take to drink!” Elda pleaded.

  Lukin laughed. “You must be the most softhearted griffin in the world! Teddy bears and moons! Come on, Elda. Everyone else is going into the North Lab.” He politely helped Claudia reel in her cloakrack. Claudia had discovered that it was easier if she kept the cloakrack close to her. Since it was going to follow her, anyway, she reasoned that keeping one hand on it as she walked was pleasanter than getting jolted every time the cloakrack stuck on a doorstep.

  She parked it beside her desk in the North Lab. Elda sat protectively beside Claudia. Then she turned her head and saw Flury again. He was sitting behind a desk without a chair, just as Elda was herself, with his feathery forearms on the desktop and his talons clasped, staring around with keen interest. He looked very bright and keen and glossy and nothing like as big as he had looked in Corkoran’s lecture. Elda began to wonder why he was different every time she saw him. Then she wondered why it was that no one seemed to see him but herself. She was in such a guilty, perturbed mood that it began to seem to her that Flury might be some kind of hallucination that followed her around like Claudia’s cloakrack to punish her for not loving Corkoran anymore, or perhaps for turning the pirates into mice, or perhaps for both.

  Here Wermacht strode in and put a stop to thinking. “Write down your next big heading,” he commanded. “Moving Magefire About.” Elda saw Flury looking around anxiously at everyone else’s busy notebook. “Now,” said Wermacht. “All of you stand up and call up magefire as you learned to do last week.”

  Elda had been looking forward to holding her lovely teardrop of light again. She jumped up eagerly and cannoned into Claudia in her hurry. Claudia, who was not looking forward to this at all, was getting up rather slowly. She was off-balance when Elda bumped her and staggered sideways into the cloakrack, which fell with a clatter into the aisle beside the desks.

  Wermacht exclaimed with annoyance. He came striding up the aisle and picked the cloakrack up before Claudia could reach it. He banged it upright. “Are you still going around with this thing, you with a jinx?”

  “Yes, of course I am,” Claudia retorted. “You connected me to it. You should know.”

  “Nonsense,” said Wermacht. “It’s entirely your own doing. You attempted a spell beyond your powers, and you bungled it.” He leaned in a lordly attitude with one hand on the cloakrack and the other stroking his beard, smiling contemptuously down on Claudia. While Claudia was gasping at the injustice, he said, “It’s all in your mind, you know. Really deep down you want to be tied to this cloakrack.”

  “I do not!” Claudia asserted.

  “Oh, but you do.” Wermacht was smiling pityingly now. “Make an effort, girl. Free yourself from the shackles of your ow
n timidity. You only want this object around for a sense of security.”

  Claudia gaped at him. “I—I—I—”

  Flury came quietly up behind Wermacht and tapped him on one shoulder. No one had seen Flury move. No one, not even Elda, knew how he got where he was, but there he was, towering over Wermacht and wearing his usual apologetic look. There was quite a gasp from everyone, because this was the first time anyone but Elda had seen Flury at all. Wermacht whirled around, found himself staring into Flury’s chest feathers, and seemed wholly irate that he had to stare upward to see Flury’s face, somewhere near the ceiling. “Excuse me,” Flury said, “but what you just said can’t be right. As soon as you touched that hatrack, I could tell that it was your spell that did it.”

  “My spell!” Wermacht exclaimed.

  Flury nodded. “I’m afraid so. I’m sorry. Nobody likes to be caught out in a mistake, do they?”

  Wermacht drew himself up, looking surprisingly small under Flury’s beak. “I have made no mistake. I’ll show you. I’ll attempt to take this silly girl’s spell off and show you it’s not mine!”

  “Yes,” Flury said mildly. “Do that.”

  Wermacht glared at him and turned to put both hands on two of the cloakrack’s battered wooden hooks. He grasped them firmly, closed his eyes, and concentrated. The next instant, both Wermacht and the cloakrack were surrounded in a bluish lightning flash. There was a strong smell of ozone. The instant after that, Wermacht and the cloakrack appeared to melt into one another, folding downward as they melted. By the time everyone had blinked and exclaimed, the only thing left of Wermacht or the cloakrack was a large, leather-topped bar stool standing in the aisle on four chunky wooden legs.

  “Oh, dear,” Flury said, blinking with the rest of them. “I’d no idea that was going to happen.” Elda, all the same, had the feeling that he was not nearly as surprised as he claimed to be.

  Claudia’s immediate action was to retreat experimentally to the other side of the lab. To her enormous relief, the bar stool made no move to follow her. It just stood there, looking woebegone. The reaction of everyone else was almost as swift and entirely practical. Everyone except Elda put notebooks back into bags and pens into pockets, and while Elda was staring at Flury and realizing that he was no sort of hallucination at all, everyone else was cheerfully making for the door. They were almost there when Flury said, “Why are you all going? Don’t you want to learn magic?”

  “Yes, of course we do,” someone told him joyfully, “but no one can learn magic from a bar stool.”

  “I can teach you, though,” Flury said, looking hurt and injured.

  The students looked at one another. Somehow they all found that they did not like to hurt Flury’s feelings. They shrugged, turned around, and sat at the desks again, where they resignedly got out notebooks. Flury prowled to the front and sat on his haunches by the lectern, still big, but not quite as big as he had been when he towered over Wermacht. He looked at the students. They stared dubiously back.

  “What have you done so far?” Flury asked them. “Setting wards? Pattern magic? Power sharing? Conjuring? Numerology? Theurgy? Scrying? Raising lone power?” Heads were shaken at each question. “Conjuring fire then?” Flury asked as if this were a last resort. “Levitation then? Translocation? Crystallography? Bespelling objects?” Heads were shaken again. No one knew what half these things were. “May I look at one of your notebooks to see what you have done then?” Flury asked rather hopelessly.

  Melissa, who was as obliging as she was beautiful, handed him hers. Flury flicked over pages covered with Melissa’s round writing with little hearts for dots over the is and frowned. A frown on even a mild-faced griffin like Flury was a menacing thing. Everyone sat very still, except for Elda, who was used to Kit. Mara often said that when Kit frowned, the universe cracked. Elda simply twiddled her talons and wondered how, and why, Flury was never the same size for more than five minutes. He was about her own size, or a little larger, as he flicked pages and frowned. “Wermacht seems to take a lot of classes,” he murmured. “You should have got through more than this.” Eventually he handed the notebook back. “Well,” he said, “I’d better invent some way of making up for lost time. If you don’t mind pushing these desks back and standing in a ring holding hands, we’ll set wards by sharing power and kill two humans with one stone.”

  Notebooks were put away again, and everyone rather cautiously did as Flury suggested. The caution was reasonable, Elda thought. Flury was obviously a wizard as well as a griffin. But after that she and everyone else were so absorbed and busy that no one had time to feel nervous, and the rest of the hour passed before they were aware. They used their joined power to raise wards around the North Lab in six ways that Flury said were elementary and they should have known already. Then they used their joined power to scry. All of them saw, clear as clear, as if they were inside the various rooms, Corkoran sitting in his lab, the librarian resetting Inventory-spells, and the buttery bar with a few idle students in there drinking beer. Flury said the results would be better when they learned to use crystals. Then he had them conjure into the North Lab all the bar stools that no one was actually sitting on. After that the hour was suddenly over. The top of Wermacht’s hourglass was empty of every grain and the bottom full of sand.

  “Do you know, I actually learned something!” Melissa was heard proclaiming in surprised tones while everyone was leaving.

  Someone returned all the stools to the buttery bar, including Wermacht, although nobody liked to sit on Wermacht until the bar became crowded later that evening. He was easily distinguishable by being taller and gloomier than any of the other stools. Elda, who was couched comfortably against the wall with a straw in her beak and Claudia leaning on her beaming because she was free of that cloakrack at last, looked at that stool and wondered if Flury had intended this to happen to Wermacht. Flury was a total mystery, she thought. Around her everyone else talked of mousetraps or the moon. Ruskin had designed what he felt was the perfect mousetrap, until Olga pointed out, with what seemed to be family feeling, that these mice had human brains.

  “Hmm,” Ruskin grunted. “You have a point there. I’ll think again.” And he joined Felim in considering how to send Corkoran to the moon.

  Felim seemed to be becoming obsessed with the moonshot. Elda was embarrassed. “You don’t need to worry about it,” she protested.

  “But it is a superb intellectual problem,” Felim said. “The things we learned this afternoon, particularly the notion of several people combining powers, is, I think, the key to the problem.”

  “You mean, several people combining to do something like translocation?” Lukin asked.

  “It beats me why Corkoran didn’t plan to translocate there, anyway,” Ruskin growled. “It’s the obvious way.”

  “Do you think that maybe he can’t?” Claudia suggested. “Oh, no, we saw him translocate, didn’t we, Olga, the day Felim was inside the books?”

  “Yes, but he probably can’t go very far,” Elda said. “My dad can’t. He can only go five miles at his best. The moon’s further than that, isn’t it?”

  Felim laughed. “Many thousands of miles further. This is why a boost from several people is certainly necessary.”

  “But remember there’s no air there,” Olga put in. “You’d need to translocate him in an enclosed bubble of air and you’d have to be sure there was enough air for him. How would you do that?”

  “By compressing it?” Lukin suggested. “If you had the outside of your bubble made of squashed-up air that could be gradually released, that would hold the bubble firm, too, wouldn’t it?”

  “Darned good idea!’ Ruskin said. He and Claudia began calculations to find out how much air Corkoran would need, while Lukin worked out spells that might compress it, and Felim tried to calculate how many people it would take combining their powers to send the lot as far as the moon.

  They’re all doing it! Elda thought. And they’re only doing it because they thi
nk I’m still in love with Corkoran. She would have squirmed if Claudia had not been leaning on her. It seemed too late to explain that she was simply sorry for Corkoran. She spent the whole of the next day in a state of mingled guilt and embarrassment, while calculations and discussions went on obsessively around her, until she simply had to explain to someone.

  “You don’t need to send Corkoran to the moon just because I said so,” she said to Lukin as they sat facing one another across a chessboard at Chess Club that evening.

  Lukin moved a knight and took it back again quickly as he saw Elda would have his queen if he moved it. “It’s not on your orders, if that’s what you think. You just produced the right idea. It’s to show Corkoran that our adaptation of spells really does work. Felim simply couldn’t believe it when Corkoran gave him such a low mark for his essay, he said he filled it with the best stuff he knew and Corkoran simply spat in his face. He says it’s his honor at stake. And Ruskin was stunned. Did you see his face when he looked at his mark? Or Claudia’s? Claudia went grass green, and her eyes seemed to swallow up the rest of her face.”

  “What about you and Olga, though?” Elda slyly moved her queen one square.

  “Seen that!” said Lukin, moving up a high priest. “Olga was furious. Corkoran had the cheek to say there probably wasn’t such a thing as air elementals. It really upset her. And I’ve always thought Corkoran needs showing that he’s running in blinkers.”

  “Filbert hates blinkers,” Elda agreed. “I was a bit sad about my essay, too, but that wasn’t why I thought of sending Corkoran to the moon.”

  “I know,” Lukin said kindly. “You’re far too nice, Elda. And then Flury comes along and shows us how to combine power and that was that. Check.”

  “Mate,” replied Elda, moving her queen back to where it had been. While Lukin was cursing at having missed what she was doing, she wondered if Flury had intended to put this idea into their heads and just what Flury was up to.

  She kept encountering Flury all over the University after that. He was in the library when she went to take back most of Ruskin’s food-spell books in order to fetch Felim a stack of volumes on astronomy. When she backed out of the astronomy section, she saw Flury, looking very small and drab, humbly approaching the librarian’s desk. He was asking anxiously for a copy of Wermacht’s teaching timetable then, but when she came up to the desk herself with Felim’s books, he was saying, “Then I’ll ask in the office. Thank you. Can you give me any books on the founding of the University, or a biography of Wizard Policant at all?” The librarian seemed to accept that Flury was another griffin student and gave him two books without question. Elda had no idea what Flury wanted them for.