Year of the Griffin (6 page)

“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 gray 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 upward at Elda, feeling slightly ashamed that she trusted him so devotedly.

But he met one of those grown-up orange twinkles that 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 around 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 favorite 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 around 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 around 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 around and trotted toward 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 backward 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 downward 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 flying 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 honor 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 upward 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?”

G
RIFFINS' 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 marvelous!” Olga stretched like a great blond cat. “Then we can get Wermacht sacked anytime we need to.”

“But
is
that marvelous?” 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 gray, 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 practiced 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 gray 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 fetid hellebore either.

“
That
was a relief!” said Claudia as they shot outside afterward, 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.