Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

About the Author

Titles by Diana Wynne Jones

Copyright

About the Publisher

CHAPTER ONE

Nothing was going right with the Wizards’ University. When High Chancellor Querida decided that she could not change the world and run the University as well, she took herself and her three cats off to a cottage beside the Waste, leaving the older wizards in charge. The older wizards seized the opportunity to retire. Now, eight years after the tours had ended, the University was run by a committee of rather younger wizards and it was steadily losing money.

“We need to make the place pay somehow,” the Chairman, Wizard Corkoran, said anxiously at the beginning-of-term meeting. “We’ve raised the student fees – again—”

“And got fewer students than ever,” Wizard Finn pointed out, although to hear the shouts and the bang and scrape of luggage from the courtyard outside, you would have thought most of the world was currently arriving there.

“Fewer, yes,” Corkoran said, looking at the list by his elbow, “but the ones we have got must all come from very rich families, or they couldn’t afford the fees. It stands to reason. I propose we ask these families for money – we could put up a plaque with their names on. People like that.”

Wizard Finn shot a look at the lovely Wizard Myrna, who turned down the corners of her shapely mouth. The rest of the committee simply stared at Corkoran with different sorts of blankness. Corkoran was always having ideas, and none of them worked. The students thought Corkoran was wonderful. Many of them imitated his style of wearing an offworld necktie over an offworld T-shirt – both with pictures on – and did their hair like Corkoran, in a wavy blond puff brushed back from the forehead. Quite a few of the girl students were in love with him. But then they were only taught by him, Finn thought gloomily. They didn’t have to wrestle with his ideas of how to run a University.

“We can’t afford a plaque,” said Wizard Dench, the Bursar. “Even with all the fees paid, we can only just afford to pay the staff and buy food. We can’t afford to mend the roofs.”

Wizard Corkoran was used to Dench saying they couldn’t afford things. He waved this away. “Then I’ll float a commemorating spell,” he said. “We can have it circling the Spellman Building or the Observatory tower – transparently, of course, so it won’t get in the way.” When nobody said anything to this, he added, “I can maintain it in my spare time.”

Nobody said anything to this either. They all knew Corkoran never had any spare time. All the time he could spare from teaching – and much that he couldn’t spare too – went to his research on how to get to the moon. The moon was his passion. He wanted to be the first man to walk on it.

“That’s settled then,” said Corkoran. “Money’s bound to pour in. If you just take my first-year tutorial group, you can see the possibilities. Look.” He ran a finger down the list beside him. “There’s King Luther’s eldest son – he’s Crown Prince of Luteria and he’ll own all sorts of land – Prince Lukin. And the next one’s the sister of the Emperor Titus. At least, I believe she’s his half-sister, but I’m sure we can prevail on the Empire to make a large donation. Then there’s a dwarf. We’ve never had a dwarf before, but they all come from fastnesses stuffed with treasure. And there’s this girl Elda. She’s the daughter of Wizard Derk who—”

“Er—” began Finn, who knew Elda quite well.

“Wizard Derk is a wealthy and important man,” Corkoran continued. “Did you say something, Finn?”

“Only that Derk doesn’t approve of the University,” Finn said. It was not what he had been going to say.

“Obviously he changed his mind when he found his daughter had talent,” Corkoran said, “or he wouldn’t be paying for her to come here. All right. That’s agreed then. Myrna, you’re married to a bard. You know how to use Powers of Persuasion. You’re in charge of sending a letter to the parents of all students who—”

“I – er – have another idea,” Wizard Umberto put in from the end of the conference table. Everyone turned to him hopefully. Umberto was quite young, rather fat, and almost never said anything. The general belief was that Umberto was a brilliant astrologer, except that he never said anything about his work. He went pink, seeing them all looking at him, and stammered. “Oh. Er. I think we should, well, you know, be able to set up a scheme to let people pay for magical information. You know, come from miles away to be told secrets.”

“Oh don’t be silly, Umberto,” said Wizard Wermacht. Wermacht was the youngest wizard there, and very proud of the fact. “You’re describing just what we do anyway.”

“But only for students, Wermacht,” Umberto stammered shyly. “I thought we could – er – sell everyone horoscopes and so forth.”

“But then they wouldn’t be secrets!” Wermacht said scornfully. “Your usual muddled thinking. I suggest—”

“Umberto and Wermacht,” Corkoran said, “you are interrupting the Chair.”

At this Umberto went pinker still and Wermacht said, “I’m so sorry, Corkoran. Please do go on.”

“I’d nearly finished,” Corkoran said. “Myrna is going to send out a letter to the parents of all students, asking for the largest possible donation and telling them their names will go up in a spell, with the ones who give most in big letters at the top. We’re bound to get a good response. That’s it. Now forgive me if I rush away. My latest moon studies are very delicate and need watching all the time.” He gathered up his lists and stormed out of the Council Chamber, with his tie flapping over his shoulder.

“I hate these meetings,” Finn said to Myrna as they walked out into the stone foyer together, where the shouts and rumbles from the arriving students echoed louder than ever.

“So do I,” Myrna said dourly. “Why do I always end up doing the work for Corkoran?”

Finn found Myrna the most ravishing woman he knew. She had brains and beauty. He was always hoping she might be persuaded to give up her bardic husband and turn to him instead. “It’s too bad,” he said. “Umberto just sits there like Humpty Dumpty and Wermacht throws his weight about and then crawls to Corkoran. Dench is useless. It’s no wonder Corkoran’s relying on you.”

“Of course he does,” said Myrna. “His head’s in the moon. And I didn’t notice you offering to do anything.”

“Well,” said Finn. “My schedule—”

“As if I hadn’t enough to do!” Myrna went on. “I’ve seen to all the students’ rooms, and the college staff, and the kitchens, and the bedding – and there’s probably going to be an outcry when someone realises that I had to give Derk’s daughter the concert hall to sleep in. She’s too big for anywhere else. How is it, anyway, that Corkoran’s teaching her? Why does he always grab the most interesting students?”

“That’s just what I was going to say!” Finn cried out, seeing his chance to be truly sympathetic to Myrna. “I’ve met most of those students. I knew them as kids when I was Wizard Guide on the tours and I tell you, it’s going to serve Corkoran right for hogging the ones he thinks are best, or richest, or whatever he thinks they are.”

“They probably are the best,” Myrna said, barely listening. “I did the admissions too. The University secretaries nearly went mad over that, and they’ll go mad again now they have to get this letter out. And on top of it all, I’ve just discovered I’m pregnant!”

“Oh,” said Finn. There, he thought, went his hopes of Myrna leaving her bard. All he could think of was to say lamely, “Well, anyway, Corkoran’s in for a shock when he sees one of his new students.”

Finn was right. Next morning, Corkoran hurried into the tall stone tutorial chamber and only just managed not to stand stock still, gaping. He bit his teeth together. He knew better than anyone that his fine, fair good looks caused most students to hang adoringly on his words. He thought of his face as his best teaching aid and was well aware that letting his jaw hang spoilt the effect. So he plastered a smile across it. But he still stood rooted to the spot.

Blazing out of the decidedly motley set of young people in the room – like a sunburst, Corkoran thought dazedly – was a huge golden griffin. He was not sure he was safe. Not exactly a huge griffin, he told himself hastily. He had heard that some griffins were about twice the size of an elephant. This one was only as large as an extra big plough-horse. But she – he could somehow tell it was a she: there was an enormous, emphatic sheness to this griffin – she was so brightly golden in fur and crest and feathers, so sharply curved of beak and so fiercely alert in her round orange eyes, that at first sight she seemed to fill the room. He noticed a dwarf somewhere down by her great front talons – and noticed with irritation that the fellow was in full war-gear – but that was all. He very nearly turned and ran away.

Still, he had come to teach these students and also to find out, if possible, how wealthy their parents were, so he pasted the smile wider on his face and began his usual speech of welcome to the University.

The students gazed at him with interest, particularly at his tie, which this morning had two intertwined pink and yellow dragons on it, and at the words on his T-shirt under the tie.

“What’s MOON SOON mean?” rumbled the dwarf. Probably he thought he was whispering. It gave a peculiarly grating, surly boom to his voice.

“Hush!” said the griffin, probably whispering too. It sounded like a very small scream. “It may mean something magical.”

The dwarf leaned forward with a rattle of mail and peered. “There’s another word under his tie,” he grated. “SHOT. It’s SHOT. Why should anyone shoot the moon?”

“It must be a spell,” small-screamed the griffin.

Corkoran realised that between the two of them he was being drowned out. “Well that’s enough about the University,” he said. “Now I want to know about you. I suggest each of you speaks in turn. Tell the rest of us your name, who your parents are, and what made you want to come and study here, while the rest of you listen quietly. Why don’t you start?” he said, pointing at the large, shabby young man on the other side of the griffin. “No, no, you don’t have to stand up!” Corkoran added hastily as the young man’s morose-looking face reddened and the young man tried to scramble to his feet. “Just sit comfortably and tell us about yourself. Everyone can be quite relaxed about this.”

The young man sank back, looking far from relaxed. He seemed worried. He pulled nervously at the frayed edges of his thick woollen jacket and then planted a large hand on each knee so that they covered the patches there. “My name is Lukin,” he said. “My father is King of Luteria – in the north, you know – and I’m, er, his eldest son. My father, well, how do I put this? My father isn’t paying my fees. I don’t think he could afford to, anyway. He doesn’t approve of me doing magic and he, er, doesn’t want me here. He likes his family at home with him.”

Corkoran’s heart sank at this, and sank further as Lukin went on, “Our kingdom’s very poor, you know, because it was always being devastated by Mr Chesney’s tours. But my grandmother, my mother’s mother, that is, was a wizard – Melusine; you may have heard of her – and I’ve inherited her talent. Sort of. From the time I was ten, I was always having magical accidents, and my grandmother said the only way to stop having them was to train properly as a wizard. So she left me her money for the fees when she died, but of course the fees have gone up since her day and I’ve had to save and economise in order to be here. But I do intend to learn and I will stop having accidents. A king shouldn’t spend his time making holes in things.” He was almost crying with earnestness as he finished.

Corkoran could have cried too. He made a secret mark on his list to tell Myrna not to waste time asking King Luther for money and asked, “What kinds of accidents do you have?”

Lukin sighed. “Most kinds. But I’m worst when there’s anything to do with pits and holes.”

Corkoran had no notion how you put a stop to that kind of trouble. Perhaps Myrna did. He added another scribble to remind himself to ask Myrna. He said encouragingly, “Well, you’ve come to the right place, Lukin. Thank you. Now you.” He pointed to the large young woman sitting behind the dwarf. She was very elegantly dressed in dark suede, and the elegance extended to her long, fine, fair hair, which was drawn stylishly back inside an expensive-looking scarf to set off her decidedly beautiful hawk-like face. From the look of command on that face and the hugely expensive fur cloak thrown casually over the chair behind her, Corkoran had no doubt that she was the Emperor’s sister.

She gave him a piercing blue-eyed look. “I am Olga,” she said.

“And?” invited Corkoran.

“I do not wish to say,” she replied. “Here, I wish to be accepted as I am, purely for magical ability. I have been raising winds and monsters since I was quite a small child.” She sat back, clearly intending to say no more.

So the Emperor’s sister wishes to remain incognita, Corkoran thought. Fair enough. It could be awkward with the other students. He nodded knowingly and pointed to the tall, narrow, brown-faced fellow half hidden behind Olga and the griffin’s left wing. “And you?”

“Felim ben Felim,” the young man replied, bowing in the manner of the eastern countries. “I too wish to say little about myself. If the Emir were to discover I am here studying, he would very likely dispatch assassins to terminate me. He has promised that he would, at least.”

“Oh,” said Corkoran. “Er, is the Emir likely to discover you?”

“I trust not,” Felim replied calmly. “My tutor, the Wizard Fatima, has cast many spells to prevent the Emir noticing my absence, and she furthermore assures me that the wards of the University will be considerable protection to me also. But our lives are in the laps of the gods.”

“True,” Corkoran said, making a particularly black and emphatic scribble beside Felim’s name. He did not know Wizard Fatima and certainly did not share the woman’s faith that the University could protect anyone from assassins. Myrna must definitely not send a letter to Felim’s parents. If the answer came in assassins, they could all be in trouble. A pity. People were rich in the Emirates. He sighed and pointed with his pen at the other young woman in the group, sitting quietly behind Lukin. Corkoran had her placed in his mind, almost from the start, as the daughter of Wizard Derk. He had met Derk more than once and had been struck by his unassuming look. Quite extraordinary, Corkoran always thought, that the man whom the gods had trusted with the job of setting the world to rights after what Mr Chesney had done to it should look so modest. The young woman had a similar humble, almost harassed look. She was rather brown and very skinny, and sat huddled in a shawl of some kind, over which her hair fell in dark, wet-looking coils on her shoulders. She twisted her long fingers in the shawl as she spoke. Corkoran could have sworn her dark ringlets of hair twisted about too. She gave him a worried stare from huge greenish eyes.

“I’m Claudia,” she said huskily, “and the Emperor of the South is my half-brother. Titus is in a very difficult position over me, because my mother is a Marshwoman and the Senate doesn’t want to acknowledge me as a citizen of the Empire. My mother was so unhappy there in the Empire, you see, that she went back to the Marshes. The Senate thinks I should renounce my citizenship like Mother did, but Titus doesn’t want me to do that at all. And the trouble over me got worse when it turned out that the gift for magic that all Marshpeople have didn’t mix at all with Empire magic. I’m afraid I have a jinx. In the end, Titus sent me here secretly for safety, hoping I could learn enough to cure the jinx.”

Corkoran tried not to look as amazed as he felt. His eyes shot to Olga. Was she Derk’s daughter then? He switched his eyes back to Claudia with an effort. He could see she had Marsh blood now. That olive skin and the thinness, which always made him think of frogs. His sympathy was with the Senate there. Perhaps they would pay the University to keep the girl. “What kind of jinx?” he said.

A slightly greenish blush swept over Claudia’s thin face. “It goes through everything,” she sighed. “It made it rather difficult to get here.”

This was exasperating, Corkoran thought. Something that serious was almost certainly incurable. It was frustrating. So far, he had a king’s son with no money, an obviously wealthy girl who would not say who she was, a young man threatened with assassins if the University admitted he was here, and now the Emperor’s jinxed sister that the Empire didn’t want. He turned with some relief to the dwarf. Dwarfs always had treasure – and tribes, too, who were prepared to back them up. “You now,” he said.

The dwarf stared at him. Or rather, he stared at Corkoran’s tie, frowning a little. Corkoran never minded this. He preferred it to meeting students’ eyes. His ties were designed to deflect the melting glances of girl students and to enable him to watch all students without them watching him. But the dwarf went on staring and frowning until Corkoran was almost uncomfortable. In the manner of dwarfs, he had his reddish hair and beard in numbers of skinny pigtails, each one with clacking bones and tufts of red cloth plaited into it. The braids of his beard were noticeably thin and short, and the face that frowned from under the steel war-helm was pink and rounded and young.

“Ruskin,” the dwarf said at last in his peculiar blaring voice. The voice must be caused by resonance in the dwarf’s huge square chest, Corkoran decided. “Dwarf, artisan tribe, from Central Peaks fastness, come by the virtual manumission of apostolic strength to train on behalf of the lower orders.”

“How do you mean?” Corkoran asked.

The dwarf’s bushy red eyebrows went up. “How do I mean? Obvious, isn’t it?”

“Not to me,” Corkoran said frankly. “I understood ‘dwarf’ and ‘Central Peaks’ and that was all. Start again, and say it in words that people who are not dwarfs can understand.”

The dwarf sighed, boomingly. “I thought wizards were supposed to divine things,” he grumbled. “All right. I’m from one of the lowest tribes in our fastness, see. Artisans. Got that? Third lowest. Drudges and whetters are lower. Six tribes above us, miners, artists, designers, jewellers and so on. Forgemasters at the top. All ordering us about and lording it over us and making out we can’t acquire the skills that give us the privileges they have. And around this time last year we got proof that this was nonsense. That was when Storn and Becula, both artisans and one a girl, forged a magic ring better than anything the forgemasters ever did. But the ring was turned down for treasure because they were only artisans. See? So we got angry, us artisans, and brought in drudges and whetters – and it turned out they’d made good things too but hadn’t even submitted them as treasure because they knew they’d be turned down. Oppression, that’s what it was, black oppression—”

“All right. Don’t get carried away,” Corkoran said. “Just explain how you come into it.”

“Chosen, wasn’t I?” Ruskin said. A slight, proud smile flitted above his plaited beard. “It had to be someone young enough not to be noticed missing, and good enough to benefit here. They picked me. Then each one of them, young and old, man and woman, from all three tribes, put down a piece of gold for the fees and a piece of their magic into me. That’s the apostolic part. Then I came away secretly. That’s what we call virtual manumission. And I’m to learn to be a proper wizard, so that when I am I go back and smash those forgemasters and all the rest of them. Overthrow the injustice of the old corrupt order, see?”

And now a dwarf revolutionary! Corkoran thought. Bother! He saw that if Myrna sent out her letter to Central Peaks fastness, it would almost certainly bring an enraged party of forgemasters (and so forth) here to remove Ruskin and his fees with him. He made another note by Ruskin’s name, while he asked, “Is that why you’re in full armour?”

“No,” Ruskin answered. “I have to come before my tutor properly dressed, don’t I?” He eyed Corkoran’s tie and T-shirt again, and frowned.

“I advise you to leave it off in future,” Corkoran told him. “Iron interferes with magic and you won’t know enough to counteract it until your second year. You’re going to have trouble anyway, if you’re working with bits and pieces of other people’s magic.”

“Don’t think so,” Ruskin blared. “We dwarfs are used to that. Do it all the time. And we work with iron.”

Corkoran gave him up and turned, finally, to the griffin. “You.”

All this while, the griffin had sat, brightly swivelling an eye on each student who spoke, and quivering with eagerness for her turn. Now she fairly burst forth, both wings rising and tufted tail lashing so that Felim and Olga had to move out of their way. “I’m Elda,” she said happily. “Wizard Derk’s daughter. I used to be his youngest child, but now I’ve got two younger than me – Angelo and Florence. Flo’s wings are pink. She’s the baby. She’s beautiful. Angelo’s wings are brown, a bit like Callette’s without the stripes, and he’s a magic-user already. Mum says—”

“Hang on,” said Corkoran. “Wizard Derk is human. You’re a griffin. How come—?”

“Everyone asks about that,” Elda said sunnily. “Dad made us, you know. He put some of himself and Mum and eagle and lion – and cat for me – into an egg and we hatched. At least, we had an egg each. There’s me and Lydda and Don and Callette and Kit who are all griffins. Shona and Blade are my human brother and sister, like Angelo and Flo, except that Shona and Blade don’t have wings. Shona’s married. She’s gone to run that new Bardic College out on the east coast. She’s got three girls and two boys and I’m an aunt. And all the others except Mum and Dad and the babies have gone over to the West Continent in two ships, because there’s a war there – only Lydda’s flying, because she’s a long-distance flier and she can do a hundred and fifty miles without coming down to rest, but Dad made her promise to keep in sight of the ships just in case, because Kit and Blade are the ones who can do magic. Callette—”

“But what about yourself?” Corkoran asked, managing to break in on this spate of family history.

“What about me?” Elda said, tipping her bright bird head to look at him out of one large orange eye. “You mean, why did Mum send me here to keep me out of mischief?”

“More or less,” Corkoran said, wincing at that piercing eye. “I take it you have magic.”

“Oh yes,” Elda agreed blithely. “I’m ever so magical. It keeps coming on in spurts. First of all I could only undo stasis spells, but after we saw the gods I could do more and more. Mum and Dad have been teaching me, but they were so busy looking after the babies and the world that Mum says I got rather out of hand. When the others all went off on the ships I got so cross and jealous that I went into the Waste and pushed a mountain out of shape. Then Mum said, ‘That’s enough, Elda. You’re going to the University, whatever your father says.’ Dad still doesn’t know I’m here. Mum’s going to break it to him today. I expect there’ll be rather a row. Dad doesn’t approve of the University, you know.” Elda turned her head to fix her other eye on Corkoran, firmly, as if he might try to send her home.

The thought of doing anything to a griffin who could push a mountain out of shape turned Corkoran cold and clammy. This bird – lion – female – thing – made him feel weak. He pulled his tie straight and coughed. “Thank you, Elda,” he said, when his voice had come back. “I’m sure we can turn you into an excellent wizard.” And bother again! He made yet another note on his list for Myrna. If Derk was angry about Elda’s being here, he had certainly better not receive a demand for money. Derk had the gods behind him. Oh dear. That made five out of six. “Right,” he said. “Now we have to sort out your timetable of classes and lectures and give you all a title for the essay you’re going to write for me this coming week.”

He managed to do this. Then he fled, thankfully, back to his moonlab.

“He didn’t say anything about the moon,” Ruskin grumbled, as the six new students came out into the courtyard, into golden, early autumn sunlight, which gave the old, turreted buildings a most pleasing mellow look.

“But he surely will,” said Felim, and added thoughtfully, “I do not think assassins could reach me on the moon.”

“Don’t be too sure of that,” said Lukin, who knew what kings and Emirs could do when they set their minds on a thing. “Why is the Emir—?”

Olga, who knew what it felt like to have secrets, interrupted majestically. “What have we got next? Wasn’t there a lecture or something?”

“I’ll see,” said Elda. She hooked a talon into the bag round her neck and whisked out a timetable, then reared on her hind quarters to consult it. It already had clawholes in all four corners. “A class,” she said. “Foundation Spellcasting with Wizard Wermacht in the North Lab.”

“Where’s that?” Claudia enquired shyly.

“And have we time for coffee first?” Olga asked.

“No, it’s now,” said Elda. “Over there, on the other side of this courtyard.” She stowed the timetable carefully back in her bag. It was a bag she had made herself and covered with golden feathers from her last moult. You could hardly see she was wearing it. The five others gave it admiring looks as they trooped across the courtyard, past the statue of Wizard Policant, founder of the University, and most of them decided they must get a bag like that too. Olga had been using the pockets of her fur cloak to keep papers in – everyone handed out papers to new students, all the time – and Ruskin had stuffed everything down the front of his chain mail. Claudia and Felim had left all the papers behind in their rooms, not realising they might need any of them, and Lukin had simply lost all his.

“I can see I’ll have to be a bit better organised,” he said ruefully. “I got used to servants.”

They trooped into the stony and resounding vault of the North Lab to find most of the other first-year students already there, sparsely scattered about the rows of desks with notebooks busily spread in front of them.

“Oh dear,” said Lukin. “Do we need notebooks as well?”

“Of course,” said Olga. “What made you think we wouldn’t?”

“My teacher made me learn everything by heart,” Lukin explained.

“No wonder you have accidents then,” Ruskin boomed. “What a way to learn!”

“It’s the old way,” Elda said. “When my brothers Kit and Blade were learning magic, Deucalion wouldn’t let them write anything down. They had to recite what they’d been told in the last lesson absolutely right before he’d teach them anything new. Mind you, they used to come back seething, specially Kit.”

“It is not so the old way!” Ruskin blared. “Dwarfs make notes and plans, and careful drawings, before they work any magic at all.”

While he was speaking, the lab resounded to heavy, regular footsteps, as if a giant was walking through it, and Wizard Wermacht came striding in, with his impeccably ironed robes swirling around him. Wermacht was a tall wizard, though not a giant, who kept his hair and the little pointed beard at the end of his long, fresh face beautifully trimmed. He walked heavily because that was impressive. He halted impressively behind the lectern, brought out an hour-glass, and impressively turned it sand-side upwards. Then he waited impressively for silence.

Unfortunately Ruskin was used to heavy, rhythmic noises. He had lived among people beating anvils all his life. He failed to notice Wermacht and went on talking. “The dwarfs’ way is the old way. It goes back to before the dawn of history.”

“Shut up, you,” ordered Wermacht.

Ruskin’s round blue eyes flicked to Wermacht. He was used to overbearing people too. “We’d been writing notes for centuries before we wrote down any history,” he told Elda.

“I said shut up!” Wermacht snapped. He hit the lectern with a crack that made everyone jump and followed that up with a sizzle of magefire. “Didn’t you hear me, you horrible little creature?”

Ruskin flinched along with everyone else at the noise and the flash, but at the words ‘horrible little creature’ his face went a brighter pink and his large chest swelled. He bowed with sarcastic politeness. “Yes, but I hadn’t quite finished what I was saying,” he growled. His voice was now so deep that the windows buzzed.

“We’re not here to listen to you,” Wermacht retorted. “You’re only a student – you and the creature that’s encouraging you – unless, of course, both of you strayed in here by mistake. I don’t normally teach animals, or runts in armour. Why are you dressed for battle?”

Elda’s beak opened and clapped shut again. Ruskin growled, “This is what dwarfs wear.”

“Not in my classes, you don’t,” Wermacht snapped, and took an uneasy glance at the vibrating windows. “And can’t you control your voice?”

Ruskin’s face flushed beyond pink, into beetroot. “No. I can’t. I’m thirty-five years old and my voice is breaking.”

“Dwarfs,” said Elda, “are different.”

“Although only in some things,” Felim put in, leaning forward as smooth and sharp as a knife edge. “Wizard Wermacht, no one should be singled out for personal remarks at this stage. We are all new here. We will all be making mistakes.”

Felim seemed to have said the right thing. Wermacht contented himself with putting his eyebrows up and staring at Felim. And Felim stared back until, as Claudia remarked to Olga afterwards, one could almost hear knives clashing. Finally, Wermacht shrugged and turned to the rest of the class. “We are going to start this course by establishing the first ten laws of magic. Will you all get out your notebooks and write. Your first big heading is ‘The Laws of Magic’.”

There was a scramble for paper and pens. Olga dived for her cloak pockets, Elda for her feathered bag and Ruskin for the front of his armour. Felim looked bemused for a moment, then fumbled inside his wide sash until he found what seemed to be a letter. Ruskin passed him a stick of charcoal and was rewarded with a flashing smile of gratitude. It made Ruskin stare. Felim’s narrow, rather stern face seemed to light up. Meanwhile, Elda saw Claudia sitting looking lost and hastily tore her a page out of her own notebook. Claudia smiled almost as shiningly as Felim, a smile that first put two long creases in her thin cheeks and then turned the left-hand crease into a dimple, but she waved away the pen Elda tried to lend her. The words ‘Laws of Magic’ had already appeared at the top of the torn page. Elda blinked a little.

Lukin just sat there.

“Smaller headings under that, numbered,” proclaimed Wermacht. “Law One, the Law of Contagion or Part for Whole. Law Two— You back there, is your memory particularly good or something? Yes, you with the second-hand jacket.”

“Me?” said Lukin. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realise I’d need a notebook.”

Wermacht frowned at him, dreadfully. “That was extremely stupid of you. This is basic stuff. If you don’t have this written down, you’re going to be lost for the rest of the time you’re here. How did you expect to manage?”

“I – er – I wasn’t sure. I mean—” Lukin seemed completely lost. His good-looking but sulky face grew even redder than Ruskin’s had been.

“Precisely.” Wermacht stroked his little pointed beard smugly. “So?”

“I was trying to conjure a notebook while you were talking,” Lukin explained. “From my room.”

“Oh, you think you can work advanced magic, do you?” Wermacht asked. “Then by all means, go ahead and conjure.” He looked meaningly at his hour-glass. “We shall wait.”

At Wermacht’s sarcastic tone, Lukin’s red face went white – white as a candle, Elda thought, sliding an eye round at him. Her brother Blade went white when he was angry too. She scrabbled hastily to tear another page out of her notebook for him. Before she had her talons properly into the paper, however, Lukin stood up and made a jerky gesture with both hands.

Half of Wermacht’s lectern vanished away downwards into a deep pit that opened just in front of it. Wermacht snatched his hour-glass off the splintered remains of it and watched grimly as most of his papers slid away downwards too. Deep, distant echoings came up from the pit, along with cold, earthy air.

“Is this your idea of conjuring?” he demanded.

“I was trying,” Lukin answered. Evidently he had his teeth clenched. “I was trying for a paper off your desk. To write on. Those were nearest.”

“Then try again,” Wermacht commanded him. “Fetch them back at once.”

Lukin took a deep breath and shut his eyes. Sweat shone at the sides of his white face. Beside him, Olga began scrabbling in her cloak pockets, watching Lukin anxiously sideways while she did so. Nothing happened. Wermacht sighed, angrily and theatrically. Olga’s hawk-like face took on a fierce, determined look. She whispered something.

A little winged monkey appeared in the air, bobbing and chittering over the remains of the lectern, almost in Wermacht’s face. Wermacht recoiled, looking disgusted. All the students cried out, once with astonishment, and then again when the wind fanned by the monkey’s wings reached them. It smelt like a piggery. The monkey meanwhile tumbled over itself in the air and dived down into the pit.

“Is this your idea of a joke?” Wermacht snapped at Lukin. “You with the second-hand jacket! Open your eyes!”

Lukin’s eyes popped open. “What do—?”

He stopped as the monkey reappeared from the pit, wings beating furiously, hauling the missing part of the lectern in one hand and the papers in the other. The smell was awful.

“That’s nothing to do with me,” Lukin protested. “I only make holes.”

The monkey tossed the piece of lectern against the rest of it. This instantly became whole again, and it tossed the papers in a heap on top. With a long, circular movement of its tail, a rumbling and a crash and a deep growling thunk, like a dungeon door shutting, it closed the hole, leaving the stone floor just as it had been before Lukin tried to conjure. Then the monkey winked out of existence, gone like a soap bubble. The smell, if possible, was worse.

Olga, who had gone as white as Lukin, silently passed him a small, shining notebook. Lukin stared at it as it lay across his large hand. “I can’t take this! It looks really valuable!” The book seemed to have a cover of beaten gold inlaid with jewels.

“Yes, you can,” Olga murmured. “You need it. It’s a present.”

“Thanks,” Lukin said, and his face flooded red again.

Wermacht hit the newly restored lectern sharply. “Well?” he said. “Is anyone going to admit to the monkey?”

Evidently nobody was. There was a long, smelly silence.

“Tchah!” said Wermacht. He gestured, and all the windows sprang open. He piled his papers neatly in front of him on the lectern. “Let’s start again, shall we? Everybody write ‘The Second Law of Magic’. Come along, you in the second-hand jacket. This means you too.”

Lukin slowly sat down and gingerly pulled out the little gold pen slotted into the back of the jewelled notebook. He opened the book and its hinges sang a sweet golden note which made Wermacht frown. Carefully, Lukin began to write neat black letters on the first small, crisp page.

The class went on, and finished without further incident, except that everyone was shivering in the blasts of cold air from the open windows. When it was done, Wermacht picked up his hour-glass and his papers and stalked out. Everyone relaxed.

“Who did that monkey?” was what everyone wanted to know as they streamed out into the courtyard.

“Coffee,” Olga said plaintively from the midst of the milling students. “Surely we’ve got time for coffee now?”

“Yes,” Elda said, checking. “I need a straw to drink mine.”

They had coffee sitting on the steps of the refectory, out of the wind, all six together. Somehow they had become a group after that morning.

“Do you know,” Felim said reflectively, “I do not find Wizard Wermacht at all likeable. I most earnestly hope we see him no more than once a week.”

“No such luck,” said Olga, who had her crumpled timetable out on her knee. “We’ve got him again straight after lunch. He does Herbal Studies too.”

“And Elementary Ritual tomorrow,” Elda discovered, pinning down her timetable with her right talons while she managed her straw and her coffee with her left. “That’s three times a week.”

Ruskin hauled his timetable out from under his mail and examined it glumly. “More than that. He does Demonology and Dragonlore too. Man’s all over the place. Two sessions a week on Basic Magic.”

“He’s not likely to forget us, is he?” Lukin remarked, running his fingers over the smooth humps of the jewels in the golden notebook.

“Maybe he’s not vindictive,” Claudia suggested. “Just no sense of humour.”

“Want to bet?” grunted Ruskin. “Lukin, can I see that notebook a moment?”

“Sure,” said Lukin, handing it over. “I suppose, from his point of view, I was quite a trial to him, although he did seem to pick on people. Funny though. When I first saw Wizard Corkoran, I thought he was the one I was going to hate. Stupid lightweight in silly clothes.”

“Oh, I do agree!” said Olga. “Such a poser!”

“But he fades to nothing beside Wizard Wermacht,” Felim agreed. “Necktie and all.”

“Oh how can you talk like that about Wizard Corkoran!” Elda cried out. Her tail lashed the steps. “He’s sweet! I love him!”

They all stared at her. So did everyone else nearby. Elda’s voice was strong. Claudia said cautiously, “Are you sure, Elda?”

“Of course I’m sure! I’m in love!” Elda said vehemently. “I want to pick him up and carry him about!”

They looked at Elda. They thought about Wizard Corkoran grasped in Elda’s brawny feathered arms, with his legs kicking and his tie trailing. Olga bit her lip. Lukin choked on his coffee and Felim looked hard at the sky. Claudia, whose upbringing had forced her to think cautiously, remembered that Corkoran was a wizard and said, “Please don’t pick him up, Elda.”

“I wouldn’t dare,” Elda said regretfully. “It’s just he does so remind me of my old teddy bear that Flo plays with now. But I’ll be good. I’ll sigh about him and look at him. I just don’t want any of you criticising him.”

“Fair enough,” Ruskin agreed. “You languish if you want. Thought is free. Here.” He passed the little notebook back to Lukin. “Take care of this. It’s dwarf work. Old, too. Some kind of virtue in it that I don’t know about. Treasure standard.”

“Then I’d better give it back,” Lukin said guiltily to Olga.

She looked extremely haughty. “Not at all. It was a gift.”

CHAPTER TWO

A week passed, which seemed like a month to Corkoran’s new students. They learnt and did so much. They went to lectures delivered by Myrna, Finn and other wizards. They wandered bewildered in the Library, looking for the books Corkoran had told them to read, and even found some of them. They rushed from place to place taking volumes of notes during the day, and in the evenings tried to write essays. The days seemed to stretch enormously, so that they even had spare time, in which they discovered various activities. Ruskin took up table tennis, quite fiendishly. Olga joined the Rowing Club, and got up at dawn every day to jog to the lake, from which she returned at breakfast time, ravenously hungry, looking more than ever like a hawk-faced queen, and so violently healthy that Claudia shuddered. Claudia was not good in the mornings. Her idea of a proper leisure activity was to join the University Choir, which met in the afternoons. Felim joined the fencing team. Lukin and Elda, who both looked athletic but were not, became members of the Chess Club and sat poring over little tables, facing one another for hours, when they should have been learning herbiaries or lists of dragons. Both were very good at chess and each was determined to beat the other.

In that week, it became increasingly evident that Lukin and Olga were a pair. They wandered about together hand in hand and sat murmuring together in corners. Except when she went rowing, Olga gave up wrapping her hair back in a scarf. Her friends at first thought that she had simply discovered she liked running her hands through its fine fair length, or tossing it about, until they noticed that Lukin, at odd moments, would put out a hand and lovingly stroke it. And when Lukin was not looking, Olga would stare admiringly at Lukin’s sombre profile and broad shoulders. Possibly she lent him money too. At any rate, Lukin soon appeared in a nearly-new jacket and unpatched trousers – though this did not stop Wermacht calling him “You in the second-hand jacket”.

Wermacht, they discovered, made a point of never remembering students’ names. Ruskin was always either “You with the voice” or more often “You in the armour”, despite the fact that after the first day Ruskin had given up wearing armour. He now wore a tunic that, in Elda’s opinion, would have been too big even for Lukin, which stretched tight round his huge dwarfish chest, and trousers that seemed too small for Elda’s little brother Angelo. To make up for not wearing armour, Ruskin plaited twice the number of bones into his hair. As Claudia said, you knew he was near by the clacking.

None of the others exactly paired up at the time, though Ruskin was known to be sneaking off to the nearby Healer’s Hall to drink tea with a great tall novice healer-girl whom he had met in Herbal Studies – taught by Wizard Wermacht – for which the first-year healers came over from their hall. Ruskin admired this young lady greatly, although he hardly came up to her waist. And for two days, Felim took up with an amazingly beautiful first-year student called Melissa whom he had met in Basic Magic – taught by Wermacht again – until the outcry from the others became extreme.

“I mean to say, Felim, she is just totally dumb!” Olga exclaimed.

Lukin agreed. “Wizard Policant’s statue has more sense.”

“She just stands and smiles,” Elda said vigorously. “She must have some brain, I suppose, or she wouldn’t be here, but I’ve yet to see it. What do you say, Claudia?”

“I’d say she smiled at whoever admitted her,” Claudia answered, thinking about it. “Wizard Finn, probably. He’s a pushover for that kind of thing.”

“Truly?” Felim asked Claudia. “You think she is stupid?”

“Horribly,” said Claudia. “Hopelessly.”

Everyone tended to follow Claudia’s advice. Felim nodded sadly and saw less of Melissa.

Everyone learnt the gossip around the University too. Very soon it was no secret to them that Wizard Corkoran was obsessed with getting to the moon. Elda took to stationing herself where she could see Corkoran rushing to his moonlab with the latest lurid tie flapping over his shoulder. “Oh, I wish I could help him!” she said repeatedly, standing upright to wring her golden front talons together. “I want to help him get to the moon! He’s so sweet!”

“You need a griffin your own age,” Olga told her.

“There aren’t any,” said Elda. “Besides, I couldn’t pick a griffin up.”

For a while, they all called Corkoran “Elda’s teddy bear”.

As for Corkoran himself, that week went past at the usual pace, or maybe faster than usual. There were so many crucial experimental spells going forward in his lab, and the construction of his moonship was going so slowly, that he grudged every minute of the four hours he spent teaching. Just getting to the moon was problem enough. He had still not worked out what you did for air there, either. But certain experiments had started suggesting that, in airless space, soft things like human bodies were liable to collapse. Peaches certainly did. Corkoran that week imploded more peaches than he cared to think about. And peaches were beginning to be expensive now that autumn was coming on. The new load he had ordered cost more than twice as much. Suppose, he wondered as he rushed along the corridors to teach his first-year group, suppose I were to give up using spells and just put an iron jacket round them? That would mean an iron jacket for me too. I’d land on the moon looking like that dwarf, Ruskin.

Here he ran full tilt into Wizard Myrna rushing the other way. Only a deft buffer spell from Myrna prevented either of them from getting hurt. Corkoran reeled against the wall, dropping books and papers. “So sorry!” he gasped. “My head was away beyond the clouds.” He bent to pick up his papers. One of them was a list of his students that he had scribbled on for some reason. Oh yes. He remembered now. And luckily Myrna was there, though looking a little shaken. “Oh, Myrna,” he said. “About those letters I asked you to send to the parents of new students—”

Myrna closed her eyes against Corkoran’s tie. It had shining green palm trees on it, somehow interlaced with scarlet bathing beauties. She had been suffering from morning sickness all that week and she did not feel up to that tie. “Asking for money for the University,” she said. “Not to worry. I sent them all off the day after our meeting.”

“What? Every single one?” Corkoran said.

“Yes,” said Myrna. “We’d just had a big delivery of Wizard Derk’s brainy carrier pigeons, so there was no problem.” She opened her eyes. “Why are you looking so worried? Those birds always get where you tell them to go.”

“I know they do,” Corkoran said morbidly. “No, no. I’m not worried. It’s nothing. Really. Just a bit shaken. Are you all right? Good.” He went on his way feeling quite anxious. But there was so obviously nothing he could do to recall those letters that the feeling did not last. Before he had reached the end of that corridor, Corkoran was telling himself that blood was thicker than water and that more than half of those families were going to be so grateful to the University for telling them where their missing children were that they would probably send money anyway. By the time he reached the tutorial room, he was back with the problem of the imploding peaches.

He could have given that tutorial standing on his head, he had done it so often. He collected the usual six essays on What is Wizards’ magic? and went on to talk about the underlying theory of magic, almost without thinking. He did notice, however, that his students seemed to have come on quite a bit, even after a mere week. They all joined in the discussion almost intelligently, except the griffin, who simply stared at him. Never mind. There was always one quiet one – though he would have expected that one to be the skinny girl, Claudia, and not the griffin. The piercing orange stare was unnerving. Nor did he understand, when he happened to mention a teddy bear as an example of inert protective magic, why all the students, even the griffin, fell about laughing. Still, it showed they were melding into a proper group. They accepted it, without difficulty, when he gave them the same essay to write all over again. He always did this. It saved having to think of another title, and it made them all think again. He was quite pleased as he hastened back to his lab to put peaches inside cannonballs.

His students, meanwhile, streamed off with the rest of the first-years to the North Lab, where they were shortly listening to Wizard Wermacht’s important footsteps and watching Wizard Wermacht stroke the little beard at the end of his long pink face while he gazed contemptuously around them all, ending with Lukin and Ruskin.

“No more deep holes, roaring or monkeys today, I hope,” Wermacht said. He had said this at each class, sometimes twice a day, for the last week. Felim glowered, Olga made a small impatient sound, Ruskin and Lukin ground their teeth, and Elda’s beak gave out a loud, grating crack. Claudia merely sighed. The rest of the students, as usual, shifted and muttered. It seemed to everyone as if Wermacht had been saying this for several years. “Notebooks out,” said Wermacht. “You’ll need rulers for diagrams under your first big heading.”

Nobody had a ruler. They used pencils and the edges of desks rather than have another scene. So far, they had got by without one by keeping as quiet as they could. But Lukin’s face was blanched with rage. Ruskin’s was deep pink and he was muttering “Oppression!” even before the top of the hourglass emptied and Wermacht’s heavy feet went striding away.

“Plain damn rudeness, I call it!” Lukin snarled as they pushed their way out into the courtyard. “I’m so busy keeping my temper that I haven’t time to learn anything!” Olga took his arm and patted it while she led the way across the courtyard for coffee. Olga drank coffee by the quart. She said she needed it to run in her veins. “And we’ve got the beastly man again this afternoon!” Lukin complained. He was soothed by Olga’s patting, but not much.

“And in between comes lunch,” said Claudia, “which may even be worse than Wermacht.”

The rest groaned. Of all of them, Claudia probably suffered most from the truly horrible food provided by the refectory. She was used to the food that the Emperor ate and the exquisite, spicy waterweeds of the Marshes. But dwarfs ate delicately too, Ruskin said, even the lower tribes; and, Felim added, so did the Emirates. Elda craved fresh fruit, Olga yearned for fresh fish. Lukin did not mind much. The poverty of Luteria made the food there very little better than the stuff from the refectory.

“But,” Lukin said, as they forced a way up the crowded refectory steps, “I would give my father’s kingdom for a properly baked oatcake.”

“Oatcake!” Claudia cried out, quite disgusted.

“Why not?” Olga asked. “There’s little to beat it, if it’s made right.” Her northern accent came out very strongly as she said this. It always did on the few occasions when she spoke of anything to do with her home. “Find me a fire and a griddle, Claudia, and I’ll make you one.”

“Yes, please!” said Lukin.

It was one of those muggily warm autumn days. Every student in the place seemed to be outside, sitting on the refectory steps. Olga put their six cups of coffee on a tray and carried it over to the statue of Wizard Policant instead, where they all sat on his plinth, except Elda, who spread herself out at their feet, alternately bending down to sip at her straw and raising her big golden beak to sniff the mushroom and wheatstraw scent of autumn, carried in from beyond the town by the faint, muggy wind. Something in those scents excited her; she was not sure what, but it made her tail lash a little.

“A fire and a griddle,” Claudia said. “If I could do it unjinxed, I’d fetch you both, Olga. Why, with all this magical ability there is in this University, doesn’t anybody make the food at least taste better?”

“That’s an idea,” Ruskin grunted, banging his dangling heels against the plinth. “I’ll do it as soon as I learn how. Promise. Charcoal roast and mussels with garlic. How about that?”

“Newly-caught trout with parsley butter,” Olga added yearningly.

“I’ve never had mussels,” said Elda. “Would I like them?”

“You’re bound to. Your beak looks made for opening shellfish,” said Felim.

“And chicken pie to follow,” said Claudia. “What pudding, do you think?”

“Claudia,” said Lukin, “stop encouraging everyone to think of food and tell me how to deal with Wermacht. If he calls me ‘You with the second-hand jacket’ once more, I may find I’ve opened a mile-deep hole underneath him. I won’t be able to help myself.”

“And I might savage him,” Elda agreed, “next time he calls me an animal.”

“Let’s think.” Claudia leant forward, with both bony hands clasped round one of her sharp knees. Her eyes took on a green glow of thought. In some queer Marshperson way, her hair seemed to develop a life of its own, each dark lock coiling and uncoiling on her shoulders. Everyone turned to her respectfully. They had learnt that when Claudia looked like this, she was going to say something valuable. “I’ve heard,” she said, “that Wizard Wermacht is the youngest tutor on the faculty, and I suspect he’s very proud of that. I think he’s rather sad.”

“Sad!” exclaimed Ruskin. His voice rose to such a hoot that students on the refectory steps jumped round to look. “I may cry!”

“Pitiful, I mean,” Claudia explained. “He swanks about with those heavy feet, thinking he’s so smart and clever, and he’s never even noticed that those other wizards make him teach all the classes. Why do you think we’re so sick of being taught by Wermacht? Because all the older ones know it’s hard, boring work hammering basics into first-years and they let Wizard Wermacht do it because he’s too stupid to see it isn’t an honour. That’s what I mean by sad.”

“Hm,” said Lukin. “You’ve got a point. But I don’t think it’ll hold me off for ever.” A grin lit his heavy face and he flung an arm round Olga. “If I get angry enough, I may tell him he’s being exploited.”

Olga leaned her face against Lukin’s shoulder. “Good idea.”

The rest watched with friendly interest, as they had done all week. Olga was extremely beautiful. Lukin was almost handsome. Both of them were from the north. It fitted. On the other hand, Lukin was a Crown Prince. All of them, even Ruskin, who was still having trouble grasping human customs, felt anxious for Olga from time to time. Elda had her beak open to ask, as tactfully as possible, what King Luther would think about Olga, when they heard, quite mystifyingly, the sound of a horse’s hooves, clopping echoingly through the courtyard. There was a great, admiring “O-o-oh!” from the refectory steps.

“Riding in here is illegal, isn’t it?” asked Felim.

Well-known smells filled Elda’s open beak. She clapped her beak shut and plunged round the statue, screaming. In the empty part of the courtyard beyond, a superb chestnut colt was just trotting to a halt and folding his great shining carroty wings as he did so. His rider waited for the huge pinions to be laid in order before slinging both legs across one wing and sliding to the ground. He was a tall man with a wide, shambling sort of look. “Dad!” screamed Elda, and flung herself upon him. Derk steadied himself with several often-used bracing spells and only reeled back slightly as he was engulfed in long golden feathers, with Elda’s talons gripping his shoulders and Elda’s smooth, cool beak rubbing his face.

“Lords!” said the horse. “Suppose I was to do that!”

“None of your cheek, Filbert,” Elda said over Derk’s shoulder. “I haven’t seen Dad for a week now. You’ve seen him every day. Dad, what are you doing here?”

“Coming to see how you were, of course,” Derk replied. “I thought I’d give you a week to settle down first. How are things?”

“Wonderful!” Elda said rapturously. “I’m learning so many things! I mean, the food’s awful and one of the main teachers is vile, but they gave me a whole concert hall to sleep in because the other rooms are too small and I’ve got friends, Dad! Come and meet my friends.”

She disentangled herself from Derk and dragged him by one arm across to the statue of Wizard Policant. Derk smiled and let himself be dragged. Filbert, who was a colt of boundless curiosity, clopped across after them and peered round the plinth as Elda introduced the others.

Derk shook hands with Olga, and then with Lukin, whom he knew well. “Hallo, Your Highness. Does this mean your father’s allowed you to leave home after all?”

“No, not really,” Lukin admitted, rather flushed. “I’m financing myself, though. How are your flying pigs these days, sir?”

“Making a great nuisance of themselves,” said Derk, “as always.” He shook hands with Felim. “How do you do? Haven’t I met you before somewhere?”

“No, sir,” Felim said, with great firmness.

“Then you must look like someone else I’ve met,” Derk apologised. He turned to Claudia. “Claudia? Good gods! You were a little shrimp of a girl when I saw you last! Living in the Marshes with your mother. Do you remember me at all?”

Claudia’s face lit with her happiest and most deeply dimpled smile. “I do indeed. You landed outside our dwelling on a beautiful black horse with wings.”

“Beauty. My grandmother,” Filbert put in, with his chin on Wizard Policant’s pointed shoes.

“I hope she’s still alive,” said Claudia.

“Fine, for a twelve-year-old,” Filbert told her. “She doesn’t speak as well as me. Mara mostly rides her these days.”

“No, I remember I could hardly understand her,” said Claudia. “She looked tired. So did you,” she said to Derk. “Tired and worried.”

“Well, I was trying to be Dark Lord in those days,” Derk said, “and your mother’s people weren’t being very helpful.” He turned to Ruskin. “A dwarf, eh? Training to be a wizard. That has to be a first. I don’t think there’s been a dwarf wizard ever.”

Ruskin gave a little bow from where he sat. “That is correct. I intend to be the first one. Nothing less than a wizard’s powers will break the stranglehold the forgemasters have on Central Peaks society.”

Derk looked thoughtful. “I’ve been trying to do something about that. The way things are run there now is a shocking waste of dwarf talents. But those forgemasters of yours are some of the most stiff-necked, flinty-hearted, obstinate fellows I know. I tell you what – you come to me when you’re qualified and we’ll try to work something out.”

“Really?” Ruskin’s round face beamed. “You mean that?”

“Of course, or I wouldn’t have said it,” said Derk. “One thing Querida taught me is that revolutions need a bit of planning. And that reminds me—”

Elda had been towering behind her father, delighted to see him getting on so well with her friends. Now she flung both feathered forelegs round his shoulders, causing him to sag a bit. “You really don’t mind me being here? You’re going to let me stay?”

“Well.” Derk disengaged himself and sat on the plinth beside Filbert’s interested nose. “Well, I can’t deny that Mara and I had a bit of a set-to over it, Elda. It went on some days, in fact. Your mother pointed out that you had the talent and were at an age when everyone needs a life of their own. She also said you were big enough to toss me over a barn if you wanted.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t do that!” Elda cried out. She thought about it. “Or not if you let me stay here. You will, won’t you?”

“That’s mostly why I’m here,” said Derk. “If you’re happy and if you’re sure you’re learning something of value, then of course you have to stay. But I want to talk to you seriously about what you’ll be learning. You should all listen to this too,” he said to the other five. “It’s important.” They nodded and watched Derk attentively as he went on. “For many, many years,” he said, “forty years, in fact, this University was run almost entirely to turn out Wizard Guides for Mr Chesney’s tour parties. The men among the teachers were very pressed for time, too, because they had to go and be Guides themselves every autumn when the tours began. So they pared down what they taught. After a few years, they were teaching almost nothing but what was needed to get a party of non-magic-users round dangerous bits of country, and these were all the fast, simple things that worked. They left out half the theory and some of the laws, and they left out all the slower, more thorough, more permanent or more artistic ways of doing things. Above all, they discouraged students from having new ideas. You can see their point in that. It doesn’t do for a Wizard Guide with twenty people to keep safe in the Waste to stand rooted to the spot when a monster’s charging at them, because he’s thought of a new way to make diamonds. They’d all be dead quite quickly. Mr Chesney didn’t allow that kind of thing. You can see the old wizards’ point. But the fact remains that for forty years they were not teaching properly.”

“I believe those old wizards have retired now, sir,” Felim said.

“Oh, they have,” Derk agreed. “They were worn out. But you haven’t grasped my point. Six smart students like you ought to see it at once.”

“I have,” Filbert said, chomping his bit in a pleased way. “The ones teaching now were taught by the old ones.”

“Exactly,” said Derk, while the others cried out, “Oh I see!” and “That’s it!” and Olga said, “Then that’s what’s wrong with Wermacht.”

“All that about ‘your next big heading’. So schooly,” said Claudia. “Because that’s all he knows. Like I said, pitiful.”

“Running in blinkers,” Filbert suggested brightly.

“Then it’s all no use!” Elda said tragically. “I might just as well come home.”

From the look of them, the others were thinking the same. “Here now. There’s no need to be so extreme,” Derk said. “Who’s your tutor?”

“Corkoran,” said Elda. The others noticed, with considerable interest, that she did not go on and tell Derk that Corkoran reminded her of a teddy bear.

“He’s the fellow who’s trying to get to the moon, isn’t he?” Derk asked. “That could well force him to widen his ideas a little – though he may not tell them to you, of course. You should all remember that for every one way of doing things that he tells you, there are usually ten more that he doesn’t, because half of them are ways he’s never heard of. The same goes for laws and theory. Remember, there are more kinds of magic than there are birds in the air, and that each branch of it leads off in a hundred directions. Examine everything you’re taught. Turn it upside down and sideways, then try to follow up new ways of doing it. The really old books in the Library should help you, if you can find them – Policant’s Philosophy of Magic is a good start – and then ask questions. Make your teachers think too. It’ll do them good.”

“Wow!” murmured Olga.

Elda said, “I wish you’d come and said this before I’d given in my essay. I’d have done it quite differently.”

“I also,” said Felim.

Lukin and Ruskin were writing down “Policant, Phil. of Mag.” in their notebooks. Ruskin looked up under his tufty red brows. “What other old books?”

Derk told them a few. All the others fetched out paper and scribbled, looking up expectantly after each title for more. Derk concealed a smile as he met Ruskin’s fierce blue glare and then Felim’s glowing black one, and then found Claudia’s green eyes raised to his, like deep living lamps. You could see she was half Marshfolk, he thought, looking on into Olga’s long, keen grey eyes, and then Lukin’s, rather similar, and both pairs gleaming with excitement. He seemed, he thought quite unrepentantly, to have started something. Then he looked upwards at Elda, feeling slightly ashamed that Elda trusted him so devotedly.

But he met one of those grown-up orange twinkles which Elda had been surprising him with lately. “Aren’t you being rather naughty?” Elda asked.

“Subversive is the word, Elda,” Derk said. “Oh yes. Your mother reminded me how beastly the food used to be here. We didn’t think it could have changed. Filbert!”

Filbert obediently moved his hind legs round in a half-circle, until he was facing the statue and sideways on to Derk. There was a large hamper standing on his saddle. Derk heaved it down and opened it in a gush of piercing, fruity scent.

“Oranges!” squawked Elda as the lid came creaking back. “My favourite fruit!”

Everyone else but Claudia was asking, “What are they?”

“Offworld fruit,” Derk said, heaving down a second hamper. “Don’t give them away too freely, Elda. I’ve only got one grove so far. This one’s lunch. Mara seems to have put in everything Lydda cooked and left in stasis for this last year. She reckoned the food might even be worse now the University’s so short of money. Help yourselves.”

The smells from the second hamper were so delicious that five hands and a taloned paw plunged in immediately. Murmurs of joy arose. Filbert fidgeted and made plaintive noises, until Derk thoughtfully turned over buns, pies, pasties, flans and found Filbert some carrot cake, then a pork pie for himself. For a while, everyone ate peacefully.

“Is the University short of money?” Olga asked as they munched.

“Badly so, to judge by the plaintive but stately begging letter they’ve just sent me,” Derk said. “They tell me they’re forced to ask for donations from the parents of all students.”

He was a little perplexed at the consternation this produced. Claudia choked on an éclair. Lukin went deep red, Olga white. Ruskin glared round the courtyard as if he expected to be attacked, while Felim, looking ready to faint, asked, “All students?”

“I believe so,” Derk said. But before he could ask what was worrying them all so, the courtyard echoed to heavy, striding feet. A peremptory voice called out, “You there! You with the horse!”

“Wermacht,” said Olga. “This was all we needed!”

They turned round from the hamper. The refectory steps were now empty, since it was lunchtime. Wermacht was standing alone, with all the folds of his robe ruler-straight, halfway between the steps and the statue, outrage all over him. “It is illegal to bring a horse inside this University courtyard,” he said. “Take it to the stables at once!”

Derk stood up. “If you insist.”

“I do insist!” Wermacht said. “As a member of the Governing Body of this University, I demand you get that filthy brute out of here!”

“I am not a filthy brute!” Filbert wheeled round and trotted towards Wermacht, quite as outraged as the wizard was. “I’m not even exactly a horse. Look.” He spread his great auburn wings with a clap.

To everyone’s surprise, Wermacht cringed away backwards with one arm over his head. “Get it out of here!”

“Oh gods! He’s scared of horses!” Elda said, jigging about. “He’s probably scared of me too. Somebody else do something before he puts a spell on Filbert!”

Lukin had his legs braced ready to charge over there. Ruskin was already down from the plinth and running. Derk forestalled both of them by swiftly translocating himself to Filbert’s flank and taking hold of the bridle. “I’m extremely sorry,” he said to Wermacht. “I wasn’t aware that horses were illegal here. It wasn’t a rule in my day.”

“Ignorance is no excuse!” Wermacht raged. He was mauve with fear and anger. “You should have thought of the disruption it would cause, bringing a monster like this into a place of study!”

“He’s still calling me names!” Filbert objected.

Derk pulled downwards hard on Filbert’s bit. “Shut up. I can only repeat that I’m sorry, Wizard. And I don’t think there’s been any disruption—”

“What do you know about it?” Wermacht interrupted. “I don’t know who you are, but I can see from the look of you that you haven’t a clue about the dignity of education. Just go. Take your monster and go, before I start using magic.” He shot an unloving look at Elda. “We’ve one monster too many here already!”

At this, Derk’s shoulders humped and his head bowed in a way Elda knew meant trouble.

But here, Corkoran came rushing across the courtyard from the Spellman Building with his palm-tree tie streaming over his left shoulder. One of his senior students had seen trouble brewing from the refectory windows and sent him a warn spell. “Oh, Wizard Derk,” Corkoran panted cordially. “I am so very pleased to meet you again. You may not remember me. Corkoran. We met during the last tour.” He held out a hand that quivered with his hurry.

Wermacht’s reaction would have been comic if, as Olga said, it had not been so disgusting. He bowed and more or less wrung his hands with servile welcome. “Wizard Derk!” he said. “The famous Wizard Derk, doing us the honour to come here! Corkoran, we were just discussing, Wizard Derk and I—”

Derk shook hands with Corkoran. “Thank you for intervening,” he said. “I remember you had the tour after Finn’s. I was just leaving, I’m afraid. I had been thinking of discussing a donation with you – though my funds are always rather tied up in pigs and oranges and things – but as things turn out, I don’t feel like it today. Perhaps later. Unless, of course,” he added, putting his foot into Filbert’s stirrup, ready to mount, “my daughter has any further reason to complain of being treated as a monster. In that case, I shall remove her at once.”

He swung himself into the saddle. Filbert’s great wings spread and clapped. Wermacht ducked as horse and rider plunged up into the air, leaving Corkoran staring upwards in consternation.

“Wermacht,” Corkoran said with his teeth clenched, and too quietly, he hoped, for the students around the statue to hear, “Wermacht, you have just lost us at least a thousand gold pieces. I don’t know how you did it, but if you do anything like that again, you lose your job. Is that clear?”

CHAPTER THREE

Griffins’ ears are exceptionally keen. Elda’s had picked up what Corkoran said to Wermacht. Ruskin had heard too. His large, hair-filled ears had evolved to guide dwarfs underground in pitch dark by picking up the movement of air in differently shaped spaces, and they were as keen as Elda’s. He and Elda told the others.

“How marvellous!” Olga stretched like a great blonde cat. “Then we can get Wermacht sacked any time we need to.”

“But is that marvellous?” Elda asked, worried. “I think I ought to stand on my own four feet – I think we all ought to – and deal with Wermacht ourselves.”

This struck the others as being far too scrupulous. They attempted to talk Elda out of it. But by the time they had carried the hamper of oranges and the half-empty hamper of lunch to Elda’s concert hall, their attention was on Felim instead. Something was wrong with him. He quivered all over. His face was grey, with a shine of sweat on it, and he had stopped speaking to anyone.

Elda picked him up and dumped him on the concert platform, which now served as her bed. “What’s the matter? Are you ill?”

“Something in the hamper disagreed with him,” Ruskin suggested. “Those prawn slices. They’re still making me burp.”

Felim shook his wan face. “No. Nothing like that.” His teeth started to chatter and he bit them closed again.

“Then tell us,” coaxed Claudia. “Maybe we can help.”

“It does quite often help to tell someone,” Lukin said. “When I’ve had a really bad row with my father, I nearly always tell my sister Isodel, and you can’t believe how much better that makes me feel.”

Felim shook his head again. He unfastened his mouth just long enough to say, “A man should keep his trouble locked in his breast,” and clamped it closed again.

“Oh, don’t be so stupid!” Olga cried out. “People are always saying that kind of thing where I come from too, and it never did anyone a bit of good. One man I knew had a fiend after him and he never even told the magic-user in our – in our – anyhow, the magic-user could have helped him.”

“Besides, you aren’t only a man, you’re our friend,” said Elda. “Is it a fiend?”

“No,” gasped Felim. “Assassins. If the University has sent a demand for money to all families, then the Emir will learn that I am here and assassins will come.”

“But didn’t you tell Corkoran that the wards of the University would protect you?” Ruskin demanded.

“So I may have. But how do I know? I have not enough wizardry yet to know if the wards are strong enough,” Felim said desperately. “Assassins are magic-users. They are also deadly with weapons. I have practised all week with the rapier, but I know this is not enough. They may break the wards and enter here. I am promised horrible magical tortures so that I die by inches. What do I do?”

Ruskin’s face was, by this time, almost as grey as Felim’s. “Forgemasters are magic-users too,” he growled. “How strong are these wards?”

Everyone looked at Claudia. She came and put her hands calmingly on Felim’s shaking shoulders. “Steady. Does anyone know any divination spells?”

There was a long silence and then Lukin said, “I think we do those next term.”

“A bit late. Right,” said Claudia. “So we can’t find out if the wards here will protect him—”

“And tell no one else, tell no one else!” Felim almost screamed. “This is a shame I can hardly bear!”

“All right,” said Claudia. “But we can quite easily put protection spells on you ourselves, you know. It’s just a matter of finding out how to. There must be books in the Library about it. Let’s go and look.”

“Er – I hate to say this,” Lukin said, “but we have to go and take notes about herbs from Wermacht. Five minutes ago, actually.”

“Library straight after that then,” said Elda. “Stick in our midst, Felim, and if any assassins turn up, we’ll defend you. I can be quite dangerous if I try.”

“I – I am sure you can,” Felim agreed, with a quivering sort of smile.

When they tiptoed hurriedly into the North Lab, Wermacht was already dictating notes to students and healers about the virtues of black hellebore, but his manner was decidedly subdued. Seeing the six belated students, he did nothing but pull his beard and mutter something that might have been “Better late than never!” Even when Elda knocked over a desk, trying to be unobtrusive, all he did was raise a sarcastic eyebrow. He did not seem to notice that Felim just sat there, unable to concentrate on black hellebore, or on foetid hellebore either.

“That was a relief!” said Claudia as they shot outside afterwards, dragging Felim with them. “Now. Library.”

They hastened across the courtyard to the grand and lofty Spellman Building. The Spellman Building, so one of the innumerable pieces of paper they had been given when they first arrived informed them, was the oldest part of the University, designed by that Wizard Policant whose statue stood in the courtyard. Once it had contained the entire University. Now its lower floor contained the Council Chamber, the main lecture hall and the University office, all ancient stone rooms where generations of student wizards had once sat learning spells. The upper floor now held bachelor quarters for the wizards who lived in the University, and the Library. Elda led the rush up the great stone stairway, hardly sparing a thought for the fact that her claws were scraping stone steps that had been climbed by a thousand famous wizards. Up to now, this had awed her considerably, but she was in too much of a hurry just then.

The librarian on duty winced a bit as Elda shoved through the swing doors, followed by a gaggle of humans and a dwarf, and hurriedly strengthened the stabilising spells. The Library was spacious enough for humans, with its high ribbed ceiling and shapely clerestory windows, but the gaps between the mighty oak bookcases had only been made wide enough for two wizards in robes to pass comfortably. Elda filled the gaps, and her wingtips tended to brush the marble busts of former wizards on the ends of each bookcase. The librarian watched nervously as the group made for the Inventory.

The Inventory was a magical marvel. It looked like a desk with a set of little drawers above it. You picked the special quill pen out of the inkwell on the desk, which activated the magic, and then wrote on the parchment slotted into the sloping surface. You could write the author of a book, or its title, or just the general subject you wanted, and when you had, the Inventory hummed a tune to itself and, after a second or so, slid open one or more of its little drawers. Each drawer was labelled on the outside with the name of one of the wizards whose marble busts stood on the ends of the shelves. Inside, you would find a card with the name of the book or books you needed on it, its author and its shelf number. The snag was that the busts of the wizards were not labelled. You had to know which statue was Eudorus, or Kline, or Slapfort and so forth, before you could begin to find the book.

The librarian watched more and more uneasily as heads bent over the desk and drawers slid in and out. Unfortunately, it was the griffin who knew the names of the busts. She seized card after card, hooked it to a talon and set off on three legs to plunge between bookcases and back out again carrying a book. Sometimes she got the wrong side of a bookcase and backed out without a book, to plunge into the next gap along, but in either case, the bust on top lurched and wobbled.

Meanwhile, the whispers round the Inventory grew more agitated. Several of the students glanced towards the librarian. Eventually the dwarf announced, in a loud, buzzing whisper, “Well, I’m going to ask about it,” and came marching up to the librarian’s desk. He put his chin on top of it and asked, quite politely, “Don’t you have Policant’s Philosophy of Magic? I can’t seem to find it in the Inventory.”

“Well, no, you wouldn’t,” the librarian explained. “That’s an old book. We don’t keep those on the shelves.”

“And—” the dwarf propped a large hand on the desk to consult a crumpled list “—I can’t find The Red Book of Costamaret, Cyclina on Tropism, or Tangential Magic either. Are those not on the shelves too?”

“That’s right,” agreed the librarian. “We don’t bother with any of those these days because none of the tutors recommend them to students. The courses nowadays don’t go in for theory so much.”

“But that’s ridiculous!” Ruskin boomed.

“Hush,” said the librarian. “People are trying to work here.”

Most of the students sitting at the tables down the centre of the Library were looking up indignantly. Ruskin glanced at them and scowled. But he was here to distract the librarian, not to cause a disturbance, so he continued in a hoarse, growling whisper, “Why don’t the courses go in for theory? Does that mean you won’t let me have these books then?”

“You’ve no need for them,” the librarian said patiently. “You’re a first-year student. You’ll have enough to do simply learning the practical things.”

“That is not true.” Ruskin began beating the hand with the list in it on the desk. The librarian watched the desk tremble, apprehensively. “I am a dwarf. Dwarfs know the practical stuff. And I have an enquiring mind. I want to know the other part, the thusness of how, the colour and shape of the ethos, the smell of the beyond. Without knowing this, I am setting up my anvil on sliding shale. By denying me these books, you are asking me to found my forge on a quaking bog!”

“I am not denying you those books,” the librarian said hastily. “I’m simply explaining why they’re not on the open shelves. Just tell me which one you want and I’ll call it up for you. Policant’s Philosophy, you said?”

Ruskin nodded, the bones in his beard plaits rattling on the desk. “And The Red Book of Costamaret,” he added, thinking he might as well make this distraction worthwhile.

“Very well.” Disapprovingly, the librarian activated an obscure spell.

Ruskin, watching keenly, saw that the spell was something very advanced that he would never be able to operate himself. There were codes and signatures in it and arcane unbindings. Regretfully, he gave up the idea of sneaking in here at night and having a good rummage through the secrets of the University. He watched the air quiver between the librarian’s hands, and the quiver become a pulsing. Eventually, two large leather books slid out of nowhere on to the wooden surface in front of his face. They smelt divinely to Ruskin of dust and old gloves. “Thank you,” he rumbled. He sneaked a look towards the Inventory. The others had by no means finished there. Elda was just dashing off with three more cards skewered to her right front talons. He raised his list. “And Cyclina on Tropism, Tangential Magic, Paraphysics Applied, Thought Theorem, Dysfunctions of Reality, Universa Qualitava and – er – The Manifold of Changes,” he read in a long throaty grumble.

“All of them?” the librarian exclaimed.

“Every single one, please,” Ruskin husked. “And if you have any others on the same lines—”

“Your student limit is nine books,” the librarian snapped, and began making gestures again.

By the time the steep pile of books arrived – Tangential Magic was enormous and some of the rest almost as mighty – the others were making their way to the librarian’s desk, each with a pile of slimmer volumes, to have them checked out. The librarian eyed the advancing forty-five books and said, “I shall have to report this to your tutor.”

They tried not to exchange uneasy looks. Eyes front, Claudia asked, “Why is that?”

“Because it’s not normal,” said the librarian.

“Oh no, of course it isn’t,” Olga said resourcefully. “Corkoran wondered if you’d worry, but he wants us to get into the habit of consulting more than just one book at a time.”

She did not need to nudge Elda for Elda to chime in with “He’s such a lovely tutor. Even his ideas are interesting.”

Elda was so obviously sincere that the librarian shrugged, grumbled, “Oh very well,” and stamped all fifty-four books, with some sighing but no more threats.

They hurried with their volumes to Elda’s concert hall, Ruskin almost invisible under his. Once there, they spread the books out on the floor and got to work examining them for usefulness. Lukin was particularly good at this. He could pick up a book, flip through it and know at once what was in it. Felim did nothing much but sit quivering in a ring of books, as if the books themselves gave him protection. Ruskin was even less useful. He settled himself cross-legged on Elda’s bed with The Red Book of Costamaret open across his knees and turned its pages greedily. He would keep interrupting everyone by reading out things like “To become a wizard, it is needful to think deeper than other men on all things, possible and impossible.”

“Very true. Now shut up,” said Olga. “This one looks very helpful. It’s got lots of diagrams.”

“Put it on this pile then,” said Lukin.

Eventually they had three piles of books. One, a small pile of three, turned out to be almost entirely about raising demons, which they all agreed was not helpful. “My dad raised one once when he was a student,” Elda told them, “and he couldn’t get it to leave. It could be a worse menace than an assassin.”

The other two piles were what Lukin called the offensive and the defensive parts of the campaign, six books on spells of personal protection and thirty-six on magical alarms, traps, deadfalls and trip spells. Claudia knelt between the two piles with her wet-looking curls disordered and her face smudged with dust. “We’ve got roughly three hours until supper,” she said. “I reckon we should get all the protections round him first and then do as many traps as we’ve got time for. How do we start, Lukin?”

“Behold,” boomed Ruskin as Lukin took up the top book from the middle pile, “Behold the paths to the realms beyond. They are all around you and myriad.”

By this time everyone was ignoring Ruskin. “Nearly all of them start with the subject inside a pentagram,” Lukin said, doing his rapid page-flipping. “Some of them have pentagrams chalked on the subject’s forehead, feet and hands too.”

“We’ll do them all,” said Claudia. “Take your shoes off, Felim.”

“What colour pentagrams?” Elda asked, swooping on Felim with a box of chalks.

Lukin turned pages furiously, with Olga leaning over his shoulder. “It varies,” Lukin said. “Green, blue, black, red. Here’s one that says purple.”

“Do one of each colour, Elda,” Claudia instructed.

“Candles,” said Lukin. “That’s constant too. Maximum of twelve candles.” While Olga got up and raced off to the nearest lab for a supply of candles and Elda busily chalked a purple five-sided star on Felim’s forehead, Lukin leafed through all six books again and added, “None of them say what colour the pentagram round the subject should be – just that it must be drawn on the floor.”

“The floor’s all covered with carpet,” Elda objected, drawing a green star on the sole of Felim’s right foot. “Keep still, Felim.”

“You’re tickling!” Felim said.

“Use the top of his foot instead,” Claudia suggested. “Can’t one draw on a carpet with chalk?”

“Yes, but I like my carpet,” said Elda.

“The method of a spell,” Ruskin intoned from the platform, “is not fixed as a law is of nature, but varies as a spirit varies. Consider and think, o mage, and do not do a thing only for the reason it was always done before.”

“Some useful advice for a change,” Elda remarked. She finished drawing on Felim, put the chalks away and arranged the thirty-six books from Lukin’s “offensive” pile into a pentagram around Felim, working with such strong concentration that her narrow golden tongue stuck out from the end of her beak. “There. That saves my nice carpet.”

“The matter of nature,” Ruskin proclaimed, “treated with respect, responds most readily to spells of the body.”

“Oh gods! Is he still at it?” Olga said, returning with a sack of candles from Wermacht’s store cupboard. “Do shut up, Ruskin.”

“Yes, come on down here, Ruskin,” Lukin said, climbing to his feet. “Time to get to work. There are five points to this pattern and five of us apart from Felim, so it stands to reason we’re going to need you.”

Ruskin sighed and pushed The Red Book of Costamaret carefully off his knees. “It’s blissful,” he said. “It’s what I always imagined a book of magic was – until I came here and found Wermacht, I mean. What do we do?”

“Everything out of these six books, I think,” Lukin said. “It ought to be pretty well unbreakable if we do it all, eh, Felim?”

“One would hope,” Felim agreed wanly.

They started with a ring of ninety-nine candles around the pentagram of books, this being all the candles in the sack. Because no one knew how to conjure fire to light them yet, Ruskin lit them all with his flint lighter. Then they stood, one at each point of the pentagram, passing books from hand to hand to talon, reciting rhymes, shouting words of power and attempting to make the gestures in the illustrations. One spell required Elda to hunt out her hand mirror and pass that around too, carefully facing the glass outwards to reflect enemy attacks away from Felim. In between spellings, they all looked anxiously at Felim, but he sat there stoically upright and did not seem to be coming to any harm.

“You will yell if it hurts or anything, won’t you?” each of them said more than once.

“It does not – although I feel rather warm at times,” Felim replied.

So they went doggedly on through all six books. It took slightly less than an hour, because a number of the spells were in more than one book and some, like the mirror spell, were in all six. Nevertheless, by the end they all suddenly found they were exhausted. Elda said the last incantation and sank down on her haunches. The rest simply folded where they stood and sat panting on the carpet.

Here a truly odd thing occurred. All ninety-nine candles burned down at once, sank into puddles of wax on the carpet and flickered out. While Elda was looking sadly at the mess, she saw, out of the end of her left eye, that Felim seemed to be shining. When she whipped her head round to look at him properly, Felim looked quite normal, but when she turned the corner of her other eye towards him, he was shining again, like a young man-shaped lantern, glowing from within. His red sash looked particularly remarkable, and so did his eyes.

Around the pentagram, the others were discovering the same thing. Everyone thought they might be imagining it and no one liked to mention it, until Olga said cautiously, “Does anyone see what I see?”

“Yes,” said Claudia. “My guess is that we’ve discovered witch-sight. Felim, can you see yourself glowing?”

“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 coloured 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 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 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 burnt 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. Nobody let that bother them. If they did enough spells, they were sure some would work. They just went on to a new one. Between 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.”

CHAPTER FOUR

Ruskin 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 when 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, skipping 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 realised – 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. Before long 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 which 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 like 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 absent-minded, 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 enquired 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 stick-it 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 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 marvellous 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. And 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 round 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 hour-glass, and swung round, 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 travelled 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 hour-glass. “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 second-hand jacket. Nearer your chin. Better. Now concentrate and find your centre. 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 centre – you with the second-hand jacket, I said consult your notes – your centre is a small, multidimensional, sun-like body, situated just below the breastbone in men and around the navel in women. Now stand up and locate it in yourself.”

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 centres, smoothly transfer some of the energy from your centre 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 patronisingly.

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 which 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 second-hand 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 centre. 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 centre 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 towards 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 towards her face. “I can’t think what you did,” he said, “but it’s there. Look.”

Claudia craned round herself and stared, dumbfounded and gloomy, at the little turquoise flame hanging downwards 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 centre 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 afterwards,” 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 grey.

“It’s all right, Felim,” Elda said. “You’ve got protections like nobody ever had 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 cut-outs 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 was 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 temples-full 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 realised 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.

CHAPTER FIVE

“This 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 moustache, 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 moustache. “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 moonboat.

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 cancelled. 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 grey dusty granules, in order to perform a more difficult hands-on spell of enquiry.

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

Corkoran whirled round 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.”

“But this pit is filling with poisoned water!” the intruder panted.

Corkoran leaned over and saw the man crouched at the head of the pit, with his black boots against the rough side of it and his hands clutching the Net. Below him, quite near and obviously rising, was dark glinting liquid. The smell of it puzzled Corkoran. Some kind of fruit, he thought. The smell brought back memories of the Holy City, when he was there as a Wizard Guide during the tours, and of a priest of Anscher passing him a bright, round, pimply fruit. Then he had it. “It’s only orange juice,” he said. “Tell me who you are, and what you think you’re doing here, and I’ll let you out.”

“No,” said the intruder. “My lips are sealed by oath. But you can’t let me drown in orange juice. It is not a manly death.”

Corkoran considered this. The man did have a point. He sighed and cast away his handful of sand. “Bother you. You are an infernal nuisance.” He levitated the Inescapable Net from the top of the pit, bringing the man upwards with it. The man promptly let go of the Net with one hand and grabbed Corkoran by his flowing peacock-feather tie. And twisted it. This was not simple panic. Corkoran quite clearly saw a knife glitter in the man’s other hand, the one still clinging to the Net.

Corkoran panicked. He was suddenly in a fierce struggle, brute strength against magic, killer-training against panic. Being throttled with your own tie, Corkoran found himself thinking in the midst of his terror, was quite as disgraceful as being drowned in orange juice. At that stage, he was trying to throw the murderer back into the pit. But the fellow was far too strong. He hauled on the tie until Corkoran could hardly breathe and the glittering knife crept up towards Corkoran’s right eye. The only thing that saved Corkoran was the Net, which was still in the way between them. Corkoran pushed back at the fellow and at the knife with every spell he could think of, and for some reason it was only the strange spells he could think of. And the struggle ended with the murderer two inches long and imprisoned in the Inescapable Net, which had turned itself into a bag around him.

Corkoran held the bag up and looked at it, quite as surprised as his attacker must have been. He loosened his tie. Relief. He was shaking. “Let that be a lesson to you,” he told the bag hoarsely. Then, because he could not think what else to do with it, he levitated the bag to hang on the massive light fitment that dangled from the vaulted stone ceiling, where it was at least out of the way, and turned back to the mountain of sand.

He took up a handful, murmured the spell, and then let it patter to the floor as he asked it, “What are you? Where are you from?”

A soft, spattering answer came. “We are dust from the moon.”

“Moondust?” Corkoran turned to the stairway and looked at the enormous pile of fine grey-white sand with astonished admiration. Moondust. This had to be an omen. He had half a mind to let it stay there to encourage him in his work. But he realised that it would be very inconvenient. And he was the person best qualified to send it back to the moon. Yes, definitely an omen. From being shaken and sore-throated and angry, he found he had become light-hearted and almost benevolent towards whichever student had done this. It was a silly prank, but it had given him an omen.

He told the sand to go back to the moon. It vanished at once, every grain of it. Corkoran had a vision of the spell working – which was not something that often happened with him – and the sand sailing up past the Observatory tower, through the clouds, and siphoning onward in a spiral to that half-moon up there. Smiling, he turned to the pit and told that to go too. It closed up, sploshily, with a clap and a sharp smell of oranges.

Here he became aware that the monstrous din out in the courtyard had gone away as well. Thank the gods! This must mean that the prank spell had finished now. Corkoran took the noise-abatement spell off his ears and thankfully climbed the stairs – which had a clean, sand-blasted look to them – on his way to bed.

At the top, he encountered Wizard Dench the Bursar. Dench came shuffling across the landing wearing old slippers and a moth-eaten grey dressing gown. “Oh, there you are, Corkoran,” he said. “I’d been to your rooms to look for you.” For some reason, Dench was carrying a black cockerel upside down by its legs.

Corkoran stared at it, wondering if Dench was taking up black magic and if he ought to sack Dench on the spot. “Dench,” he said, “why are you carrying a black chicken by its legs?”

“On the farm when I was a boy,” Dench replied, “we always carried them this way. It’s the best way to capture them. That’s why I was coming to look for you. I don’t know if I was dreaming or not – I was certainly asleep – but while it was climbing through my window, I got the idea it was a man. But when I woke up and looked, it was a cockerel. Running everywhere, making a dreadful noise. What do you think I should do with it?”

“Wring its neck, I should think,” said Corkoran. “It’s only another student joke. The kitchen might be glad of it.”

“Er – well – in that case,” said Dench. “That’s why I came away from the farm. I can’t bear to wring necks. Could you – er—?”

He held the hapless cock out to Corkoran. As Corkoran sighed and reached out to take it, the bird began twisting about, flapping its wings and screaming. Almost as if it understood, Corkoran thought.

“Hang on,” he said. He seized a flailing wing and murmured the spell of enquiry again. “What are you?” he asked.

“An assassin of Ampersand,” the bird replied. “And my curse on you for causing me to break my oath! A thousand, thousand curses—”

“Shut up,” said Corkoran. “It’s another one of them, Dench. I caught one just now on the stairs. They must be partners. I think someone knew they were coming and set up traps for them. Not to worry. I know how to deal with them now.” He rapidly shrank the cockerel to the size of a bumble-bee, caught it as it whirred free from Dench’s fingers, and stuffed it into a bag made of Inescapable Net, which he sent to join the other one hanging from the light fitment. “There. Now we can both go to bed.”

“But, Corkoran!” Dench exclaimed. “We could be dead in our beds!”

As Dench spoke, there was a thunderous banging on the main doors below. Dench clutched at Corkoran’s arm, and Corkoran said, “Oh, what now?”

“Corkoran! Dench!” It was Finn’s voice, amplified by magic. “Are you all right in there?”

Corkoran remembered that the doors had locked behind him. He went galloping down the stairs, with Dench in his slippers flip-flopping after. When he reached the place where the pit had been, there was such a stench of oranges that Corkoran automatically detoured in case the pit opened again. It had seemed to close, but he was taking no chances. Dench, however, flip-flopped safely straight through the spot and clasped Corkoran’s arm again.

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