Year of the Griffin Read online

  Something seemed to drain out of Lukin. He slumped. “When I was ten,” he said. “I’d been looking after everyone before that: Mother, the younger ones, even Isodel a lot of the time. Isodel and I did the cooking and cleaned the cottage because Mother didn’t know how to. Then we went home, and I got treated as if I were five years old!”

  Blade caught the whatever it was that drained out of Lukin and posted it quickly through the ice-covered wall, in among the peering pebble-eyed faces. “There,” he said. “Thanks. Don’t get too upset, Lukin. I don’t know why it always has to hurt to get things straight, but it always does.” He gave a look of apology to Claudia, who sat with her head pensively hanging, on the other side of Lukin.

  She saw the look through her coiling hair. She giggled. “You sound just like Flury!”

  “I always want to wring Flury’s neck when he looks like that,” Elda agreed. “It really irritates me!”

  “Especially when you know that not one cringe of it is real,” Claudia said. “You did what you had to do, Blade. Don’t crawl to us about it.”

  “How come you know Flury?” Kit asked in considerable astonishment.

  “Later,” said Blade. “I want to try and get us back now. All of you concentrate hard on home, please. If we miss again, we’ll probably be dead.”

  The ringing of the bell on the pigeon loft made Callette growl sleepily and crawl out of her majestic shed. She had promised Derk that she would see to any messages that came while he was away, even though she had known they would come the moment she fell asleep. She prowled around the stable buildings to the loft ladder, muttering grumpily. She was far too big to get up the ladder, had been for years. She solved this the way she always did, by standing on her hind legs with her front talons clutching the top rung of the ladder, while she pushed her head inside the loft.

  “Which of you just came in?” she said to the dimness in there.

  Two pigeons promptly presented themselves. Both looked exceedingly cheerful at being home. Both had beakfuls of grain. They swallowed hastily as Callette glowered at them.

  “The Emperor of the South has arrested his Senate and gone to the University with his horse soldiers,” crooned the pigeon on the left.

  “The Emir of Ampersand has gone to the University with his army,” croodled the pigeon to Callette’s right. “He says he will take it all apart.”

  “Hmm,” said Callette. “Thanks. I suppose I’d better fly over there and warn them. You two go back to your lunch.” She got herself down to the ground by climbing her front talons down the ladder, puzzling about this news. She found it hard to believe. There was no reason that she knew for anyone to make war on the University. Even during the tours no one had attacked the place. But the pigeons always told the truth, though they did sometimes get hold of the wrong end of the stick. “Fly over there and check,” she told herself as she reached the ground. “Bother!”

  “Oh, there you are!” Don’s voice rang out behind her. “Where’s everybody else?”

  Callette whirled around. The stable yard was packed with griffins, with Don in front of them, huge and glad and golden. Callette gaped. Derk always said that Callette’s mind worked like nobody else’s. She supposed that was true, for she discovered that her way of being quite intensely delighted to see her brother again was to decide to make a big golden model of him. Now. At once. A model of the perfect griffin, enormous and shapely and bright, like a huge male version of Elda, except that Don was so—so uncomplicated somehow. Callette’s talons twitched to get modeling. Don completely outshone the gaggle of smaller griffins behind him. Most of those were girls, anyway.

  “Huh!” said Callette. “Did you bring your whole fan club with you? Or are some of them Kit’s?”

  Don laughed. “They all wanted to see what it’s like over here.”

  Callette slowly took in the sheer number of griffins packed in behind Don. Or wanted to found a colony, she thought. “How did you get on the boat?”

  “Took turns flying and resting on the deck, of course,” Don told her happily. “One of the fan club’s yours.”

  “What!” Callette watched a griffin who was only three-quarters of Don’s size come sliding out from behind Don. He was gray and white and brown, with barred wings like her own, and a very sleek, self-possessed person whose large black eyes seemed brighter and more perceptive than those of the other griffins. “Oh, no,” said Callette. “Not Cazak again. Don, that’s not fair!” And like an offended cat, she turned her back on the whole crowd and sat staring at the ladder with her tail angrily beating.

  Cazak was perhaps not quite as confident as he looked. He hesitated. “Go on,” Don said to him. “I know she’s just being stupid about you. She’d fly away if she really meant it.”

  Cazak advanced. Callette heard his talons clicking on the ground and said, “Go away. You’re too small.”

  Cazak, with some caution, poked his head over Callette’s winged shoulder so that he could look her in one eye. She turned her head away. “Come on, Callette,” Cazak said. “You know most males are my size. We never let that bother us. Why should you?”

  “Because!” snapped Callette.

  The griffins crowded behind Don exchanged looks, knowing perfectly well that Callette could have put out one of Cazak’s eyes if she had wanted to, but none of them dared speak. Griffins were used to being far more public about these things than humans were.

  “Promise at least to let me paint that picture of you,” Cazak said.

  Callette bent and nibbled absently at one of the rungs of the ladder. She had, she knew, felt acutely out of sorts ever since she came home, downright crotchety, in fact. Now she suddenly felt fine—peaceful inside, happy really. Cazak must be why. How stupid! The wooden rung snapped. “Bother!” she said. “Now you made me break the ladder. All right, paint your picture. Then we’ll see. I may hate you.”

  Cazak laughed. “No, you won’t. Callette, I love you even more when you’re being grumpy!”

  “You can’t start painting yet,” said Callette. “I really and truly have to go to the University and warn them. There may be an emergency there. That’s where Blade and Kit are,” she told Don over her shoulder, “visiting Elda.”

  “Then we’ll go with you,” Don said. “There are enough of us here to deal with most emergencies.”

  SEVENTEEN

  AT THE UNIVERSITY there were now fourteen dead mice laid out under the council table and most of the teaching staff were gathered around Querida. There was as yet no sign of any new emergency. Querida, taking the very reasonable line that no one could do anything about the missed moonshot, was dealing with other matters instead. The wards were proving very hard to restore. They seemed to resist anything that Querida did. Consequently, she was in a very sharp temper as she leafed through piles of essays and exam papers.

  “Why is it that nobody ever gives any mark higher than a B?” she demanded. “Why are they nearly all given a B, for that matter? Half of these deserve to fail, to my mind. Finn?”

  Finn, who was having a miserable afternoon, replied as he had replied many times before, “Corkoran had this policy, you see, that we should turn out as many working wizards as—”

  He broke off in some relief as Sabrina came trotting in with the fifteenth mouse. “Good cat!” said Querida. “By ‘working wizards,’ Corkoran meant half-trained magic users, I gather. He means to clutter the world with incompetent warlocks who can’t tell a spell from a shopping list, does he? I think it’s getting a little stuffy and mouseish in here. All of you come outside for a breath of fresh air.”

  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 preg
nant, 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 Corko
ran, 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.