SEVEN
THE DAY AFTER Corkoran crammed the last two assassins into a cage designed for two rats and then forgot about them was an almost uneventful one. Everyone went about normal University business in quiet relief. Practically the only event of note was that Melissa met the lofty student after breakfast and purchased eight essays off him for twenty gold pieces. The lofty student got very drunk that evening, but that was hardly unusual. Ruskin grumbled about the food all day, but that was hardly unusual either. Possibly more noteworthy was the way Ruskin collected the forty-odd library books lying on Elda’s floor and explained kindly to Elda (who was lying on her bed, aching rather but fiercely finishing her essay) that he would see to them for her. Then he took them back to the library.
“These have not been taken out in your name,” the librarian pointed out.
“My friends asked me to bring them back for them,” Ruskin rumbled. He had discovered by now that if he reduced his voice to a low, grinding rumble, people assumed he was trying to whisper and usually begged him not to. The sound made the library windows buzz and produced irritable looks from the students working at the tables. “Just give me the library slips, and I’ll get out the other books they need,” he grated.
“Hush. Very well. Hush,” the librarian agreed, anxious only to get rid of him.
Ruskin left the library with thirty-eight new books. Every single one of them was from the Gastronomic Magic section. This puzzled the librarian a little. Only a couple of Wizard Umberto’s students were doing the food magic option this term, and Corkoran never bothered with it. But there seemed no point in telling Corkoran. He had ignored the librarian’s last note utterly. The librarian shrugged and went back to casting Inventory-spells.
Ruskin retreated to his own room and got down to some serious reading. Sweet peace reigned.
The following day the frosty weather gave place to rain. Elda, who had really, truly, and honestly intended to go out flying before breakfast, got up to find rainwater spouting from every gargoyle on the Spellman Building and dripping from the end of Wizard Policant’s pointed nose. There was even a small waterfall sliding down one of the walls of her concert hall. She gave up and went back to bed, marveling at the way Olga still went out rowing in spite of the rain. Olga came back drenched and blue-white, but very cheerful and ravenous for breakfast.
The refectory smelled, very strongly, of fried onions. “Ooh!” said Olga. “My favorite!”
Most other people found the smell the exact opposite of what they needed first thing in the morning and contented themselves with toast, even though most oddly there were no onions being served at all. There were, however, some remarkably fine sausages and golden mounds of perfectly scrambled eggs. Olga and Elda, who needed to eat twice as much as a human, anyway, both heaped their plates high and sat down near Ruskin to enjoy eating for once.
Lukin was one of those who could only manage toast. “Great gods!” he said from the other side of Olga. “What’s wrong with this toast? It’s nice! Usually it’s too floppy to hold and too tough to bite. I’ve always wondered how they got it like that. But this is just right.”
Olga nudged Elda’s wing and jerked her head toward Ruskin. Ruskin’s plate was mounded even higher than theirs. He had six pieces of toast and a stack of pancakes dripping with syrup and butter lined up for later. He was eating with serious rapture. But his round pink face was just a little too innocent. “Shall I say anything?” Olga murmured.
Claudia had no doubts. “Ruskin,” she said, “most of it’s lovely. But what makes it all smell of fried onions?”
Ruskin’s pink forehead wrinkled. “I don’t know,” he confessed. “I’m working on it. I think I’ll have it sorted by lunchtime.”
“Please solve it soon,” Felim requested. “The smell gives me a headache. I was up far too early finishing my essay.”
Essays were traditionally to be handed in after breakfast on that day. There were shelves in the Spellman Building for that purpose, each marked with a tutor’s name. Tradition handed from student to student described the serious penalties for not getting an essay there in time. For the first offense you could be deprived of your voice for a week, and your hearing as well next time, and, it was claimed, repeated offenders had their magic powers removed. No one knew anyone to whom these things had actually happened largely because no one dared be late with an essay. Nobody wanted to lose the power of speech, let alone anything else. Even the most dissolute of students hurried to turn up with at least one scribbled sheet on time.
In consequence, there was quite a procession of students trotting through the rain toward the Spellman Building after breakfast, shielding wads of paper under umbrellas, cloaks, waterproof jackets, or damp shawls. Everyone who arrived in the North Lab for Wermacht’s class on Basic Alchemy immediately afterward was chilled and dripping and out of breath.
“Outer garments on the cloakrack,” ordered Wermacht. He was as spruce as ever, having been protected by some kind of rain-warding spell, and he tramped impatiently to and fro behind his lectern with the hourglass on it, while everyone obediently hung sopping garments on the tall, three-legged stand beside the door or hooked umbrellas to the lead-lined trough by the wall.
“Today,” proclaimed Wermacht as soon as this was more or less done, “we are going to examine the mystery of the Alchemical Marriage. Write that down. Your small heading under that is ‘The White with the Red.’”
People scrambled to chairs and snatched out notebooks, and then they were off, writing down the mystery as fast as they could with wet, chilly fingers, until the sand in the hourglass had trickled to the bottom, every grain of it. Lukin, in his hurry, tried to use the golden notebook, but everything he wrote apart from the big heading simply disappeared as fast as he wrote it. He gave up and got out the jaunty little calfbound notebook Claudia had given him instead. After that he was steadily behind with Wermacht’s dictation and still trying to finish when the others surged to their feet and collected their still-dripping garments from the cloakrack.
Amid the bustle he heard Wermacht say peremptorily, “You with the jinx, come here.”
Uh-oh, Lukin thought, and kept his ears open and his head down as he scribbled, in case Claudia was in trouble.
Claudia’s wrap was at the bottom of a heap of others on the same wooden hook, and she had to wait for other students to unhook their cloaks and jackets from on top of it. If it had only been on top, she thought, she would have snatched it and run and pretended not to hear Wermacht. She wondered whether just to run anyhow, but one odd result of her mixed parentage was that she hated rain. Claudia’s mother could never understand it. Marshpeople were supposed to revel in wetness. But the part that had come uppermost in Claudia here was the Empire half, and the Empire was hot and dry. Being wet made Claudia ache. Her wrap was specially charmed to keep her dry and had cost her brother, Titus, most of the taxes from a town. So she was forced to stand there waiting for it while Wermacht came striding up and seized her arm.
“Please,” Claudia said, pulling away.
“I’ve been thinking,” Wermacht said, holding on just as if she had not spoken or moved, “about this jinx of yours, and I can see now what’s causing it. I can lift it very easily. Would you like me to do that?”
“No, thank you,” Claudia said coldly and promptly.
Wermacht stared at her as if he could not believe his ears. “Do you mind telling me why?”
Claudia, having been brought up with the very good manners everyone had in the Empire, did not answer, “Because you told Corkoran my spell was yours, you creep!” although she was tempted to. The trouble was that not saying this threw her into confusion. This is often the case when someone is being too polite. Claudia did most desperately want to be rid of her jinx. It caused continual trouble when she went to the Marshes and worse trouble in the Empire. It had made the Senate declare her an Unwanted Person there, in spite of the Emperor’s coming to the Senate in person to intervene. But strongly though she yearned to be rid of it, Claudia knew that this meant someone—probably a wizard—tinkering with her magical powers. And of all the wizards who might tinker, she most passionately could not bear it to be Wermacht. She had almost no idea how to say this politely.
“Because,” she managed to say at length, “because, er, it’s only due to misdirected power, you know.”
Wermacht’s outraged glare did not abate. He did not let go of her arm. “Precisely,” he said. “It’s simply a matter of straightening the paths of power and reaming them out a bit. I can do that in seconds.”
“No,” said Claudia. “Thank you, Wizard Wermacht, of course. But my—my Empire code of morals means I have to do the straightening out for myself.” And in spite of Wermacht’s still hanging on to her arm, she reached haughtily for her wrap with the other hand. “Good morning, Wizard Wermacht.”
“You are being a silly little thing!” Wermacht said. He shook her arm.
Lukin snapped his notebook shut and got up to rescue Claudia. This had gone far enough.
At the precise moment he stood up, a brilliant blue flash exploded from Wermacht’s hand and into Claudia’s arm. For an instant it lit up Claudia herself, her wrap stranded between her other hand and the cloakrack, and even the cloakrack itself, which seemed just for that instant to be made of blue fire. It sizzled blue on the stone ceiling and flashed in the wet footprints leading to the door. But the light had gone before Lukin could get anywhere near.
“There,” Wermacht said smugly. “That didn’t hurt a bit, did it?”
Lukin came up and detached Claudia’s arm from Wermacht’s fingers. He turned to Wermacht in his most princely manner. It was not a manner he liked to use much, but he was good at it when he did, far better than Claudia was. “Wizard Wermacht,” he said regally, “that is enough. Claudia has already told you twice that she does not wish anyone to tamper with her magic. Why don’t you take her word for it and leave her alone?”
Wermacht gave Lukin a puzzled frown. “What’s the matter with you? I was simply lifting the jinx from her. She’ll be much more comfortable now.”
Lukin stared steadily back. “But she asked you not to.”
“Female vapors,” said Wermacht. “Female vapors.” And he stalked heavily away through the doorway.
“Are you all right?” Lukin asked Claudia anxiously.
She shivered a bit as she dragged her wrap down and slowly draped it around her. “Well, I didn’t feel anything particularly, if that’s what you mean. I don’t feel any different, I think—just a bit shaken.”
“I’m not surprised. Wermacht’s an overbearing donkey!” Lukin said vehemently. “Come on. You need looking after. Let me buy you a drink.”
A wisp of a giggle came from Claudia. “Thank you. But what with?”
“Oh—” A flush surged across Lukin’s face. “You’d better pay, and I’ll pay you back. I might be getting some money soon.”
“Not to worry,” said Claudia. “Myrna’s lecturing now, and I want to go. Myrna doesn’t make you feel brain-dead the way Wermacht does.”
“I’ll come with you then,” Lukin said gallantly. He was not much of a one for lectures that you didn’t have to go to, but it was clear to him that Claudia needed company.
They left the North Lab together, with Claudia saying as they went, “But I’m not going to faint or anything silly like that!” When they were most of the way across the courtyard toward the Spellman Building, the cloakrack swayed on its three legs and began to trundle after them. It staggered over the doorsill and trundled on, lurching, some way across the courtyard. About halfway between the Lab and Wizard Policant, it stopped and stood, looking forlorn and perhaps a trifle bewildered, with raindrops hanging in rows from its curly hooks. The janitor discovered it there just before lunch and put it back inside the lab, muttering, “Darn students! Another of their jokes.”
Lunch was—well—peculiar. In the refectory the smell of onions had gone, but it had been replaced by a potent scent of strawberries, which did not go well with the smell of the usual refectory stew. The stew itself, bubbling in the usual row of cauldrons, looked quite normal but, when ladled out onto plates, proved to be a strident bright green. It had strands in it, too, of darker green, along with khaki lumps and viridian morsels and a general, subtle air of sliminess. “Pond weed!” somebody shouted. “Look out for tadpoles!”
Most people declined to eat it and lunched instead off strawberry mousse and bread. Ruskin’s friends, knowing a little more than most, each took a plateful. Elda and Felim both had to give up and resort to strawberry mousse and bread, too. As Felim said, it was hard to taste anything but slime through the scent of strawberry, and Ruskin had done a good job on the mousse. Lukin ate most of his, because his mind was still on Claudia. And Claudia, recognizing the dish for Marsh chowder, told Ruskin it was delicious and went back for more. While she was away at the cauldrons, Lukin told the rest of them about Wermacht and the troubling blue flash.
“Do you think he did it?” Ruskin asked. “Took away her jinx, I mean. And let me tell you, this is the best Marsh chowder I ever ate. You don’t eat it that way, Olga. You sort of suck it in. Brings out the taste.”
“He could have taken it off,” Lukin said, while Olga seemed to be shuddering faintly. “But Cyclina and The Red Book both say a jinx is usually bound up with a magic user’s actual power, and what I’m afraid of is that he took away her magic power, too.”
“But then she’d have to leave, wouldn’t she?” Elda asked, appalled. Lukin nodded.
“That is a real worry.” Olga agreed, pushing her plate away. “What have we done to deserve Wermacht? Don’t answer that question—particularly you, Ruskin. Nice try with the stew, shame about the smell and the color. Is it meant to be this slimy? Don’t you think you’d better read up a bit more, or practice somewhere else, or something?”
Ruskin sighed. “I’ve been thinking that, too. I read the books, thought it was easy, but now I think there must be more to it than that. I’ll have another go when I’ve worked out what it is.”
When everyone left the refectory, there was almost as much green stew left piled on plates or bubbling in cauldrons as there had been to start with. A deputation of students and six angry warn-spells were sent to Corkoran about it.
Corkoran told the deputation he would see about it and went to find Finn. “Look, Finn, some student’s been mucking about with the food again …” he began.
“And I’ll give you six guesses which one,” said Finn. He saw well enough that Corkoran intended him to find the culprit, and he thought that for once Corkoran could do his own dirty work. “It’ll be one of your first years, Corkoran. My money’s on your dwarf, but I’d take a side bet on Claudia. Wermacht’s been telling me she’s got some kind of jinx.”
“Has she?” Corkoran had forgotten that Claudia had told him this herself. He flicked at the violet monkeys on his tie. “Look, Finn—”
“All you have to do,” Finn cut in, “is to eat in the refectory tonight and trace the spell. It’ll be something pretty crude. It always is.”
“But I haven’t—” Corkoran tried again.
“So that’s your course of action,” Finn said firmly. “Catch the dwarf red-handed.” Seeing Corkoran about to speak again, Finn changed the subject swiftly and enthusiastically. “You know that first year of mine—Melissa? The one everyone says has no brain. I’ve just had a really marvelous essay from her, clear, concise, to the point, well thought-out, truly brilliant! If it weren’t for your policy, I’d give it an A. I think we’ve all been misjudging—”
“Yes, yes,” Corkoran said irritably. This was some kind of sore point with him, Finn could see. Probably none of Corkoran’s precious, carefully chosen first-year students was anything like as good as expected. Too busy messing with food and assassins to do any work, Finn thought. He watched Corkoran turn peevishly away. “Then if you can’t help,” Corkoran said over his shoulder, “I suppose I’d better follow your advice and get indigestion in the refectory.” He rushed moodily away with the purple monkeys flapping, while Finn did his best not to laugh. It was seldom he got the better of Corkoran.
Back in his lab, Corkoran sat at his bench with his back to the assassin cage and his moonship bulking by the windows, crying out to be worked on, irritably surveying the monstrous pile of paper his first-year students had dumped on him. Why couldn’t young people remember someone had to read their eloquence? He would have to set a word limit. This was awful. Corkoran usually reckoned to whip through all the week’s essays in half an hour or so and then get comfortably back to his lab work. Indeed, he had already whipped through the offerings from the second and third years. Sensible, slim essays, those were, full of the usual facts, none of them trying to explain the universe or anything silly like that. And he could have sworn that those six first years had been far too busy lately to cover more than one sheet with writing. Yet here was Felim producing thirty pages, Elda twenty-nine, Claudia the same, Olga twenty-six, and Ruskin forty—count them, forty! Lukin was more moderate. He had only produced ten pages, but since those were written very close in tiny black writing, Corkoran feared the worst. What had got into them all?
For an ignoble five minutes or so Corkoran contemplated simply returning the essays unread. But that was just the kind of thing that Querida could be counted on to discover. The griffin almost certainly knew Querida quite well. And the last thing Corkoran wanted was Querida turning up at the University to ask questions. He sighed and, shudderingly, picked up Felim’s monster. Compromise. Skim through. Get the gist.
This was not easy. Felim kept quoting spells, nearly all of which Corkoran had never met before. He had to keep getting up to consult the enormous Almanac of Magics on the lectern beside his moonship, to make sure that Felim was not just inventing the spells. And Felim never was. All the spells seemed to be real, but Corkoran stopped consulting the Almanac and began skimming when he realized that with each spell Felim was pointing out that there were possibilities the maker of the spell had never thought of. Different uses for them and different sorts of magic branched off from them in a hundred directions, Felim said. He ended by saying that magic could explode into a hundred new forms no one had thought of yet—except this was hardly the end. Felim spent his last three pages suggesting the forms the new magic could take, astromagic, psychomagic, metaphysical magic, biomagy, theurgy, centromagic, anthropism, numerology, ritual magic, most of which were entirely beyond Corkoran’s understanding.
He shook his head sadly. This was not modern magic. Magic these days confined itself to strictly practical things, to known facts and proven procedures. Felim argued well and wrote elegantly, but it would not do. This was some relief to Corkoran. For a while, when he first started reading this monster, he had been afraid he was going to have to break with his policy and give Felim a high mark, if only for all the research into spells Felim had done. Corkoran’s policy, as Finn had reminded him, was that the University existed these days to turn out competent magic users with the skills that were needed to reorganize the world after the mess Mr. Chesney had made of it. There was no place for deep research or Felim’s kind of speculations. What the world needed was run-of-the-mill practical magic. For this reason Corkoran had decreed that only third-year students and then only those who showed supreme practical skills should ever get an A.
He scribbled a generous B minus on Felim’s monster and “Answer the question” beside it, and turned to Lukin’s essay next because it was the shortest. And here was Lukin talking about the different possibilities of magic, too, in a soaring, joyful way that quite shocked Corkoran. He had thought Lukin was going to be one of your stolid plodders. But not a bit of it. Lukin talked about the boundaries and limitations set on magic, and while he agreed that some were there for safety, he thought most of them unnecessary. He pointed out a few. Take these off, he said. Experiment. Have fun with magic.
Fun? Corkoran thought. What nonsense was this? Magic at University level was work. You were not supposed to have fun with it. Yet here was Lukin, expressing himself rather well in his tiny black writing, suggesting that magic was there to enjoy. Well, he was a prince, Corkoran thought, and had obviously been brought up to think that magic was what you relaxed with after a day’s ruling. Corkoran decided to allow for that, and awarded Lukin a C, instead of the C minus he had first intended.
He gave Olga a C, too, again quite generously, he thought. She had at least tried to answer the question “What Is Wizard’s Magic?” But her essay was full of opinions, which again would never do. Olga’s notion was that magic could not be standardized, for the gods’ sake! Everyone’s particular magic was influenced by that person’s particular character, she said, and differed from another person’s magic in the same way that handwriting differed. Furthermore, she said, a person’s magic could be spoiled or improved by the way they were taught or by their upbringing. She gave one or two examples. Corkoran was quite struck by her account of a teenager who was punished for playing with air elementals and gradually became unable to speak to any elementals at all.
“Can anyone speak to elementals?” he murmured, and wrote “accuracy?” in the margin there. On the whole, Olga’s offering irritated him even more than Lukin’s did. Of course magic was supposed to be standardized! Corkoran’s job at the University was to iron out all the differences in it.
He sighed and dragged Elda’s massive offering forward. Elda was on the same tracks as Felim. What had they all been reading? Elda, even more than Felim, was certain that there were great tracts of magic left unexplored, and she kept giving examples that were not even in the Almanac of magics, which she must have learned from Derk, her father. Half the time Corkoran had no idea what she was talking about. He had never heard of gene tailoring, or zygotes, or rhyzomes either. He was irritated to discover that Elda knew this and explained it all, in carefully numbered notes at the end of the huge essay. And before this Elda’s last pages went even further than Lukin had and became more or less a song of praise for magic, its excitements and its possibilities. That was enough. Corkoran scribbled a highly irritated C minus, and wondered, while he dragged Ruskin’s heap of pages in front of him, whether he ought not, in all honesty, to give this diatribe a straight D.
He was determined to skim Ruskin’s essay. But it was impossible. Ruskin was a dwarf, used to working with intricate things, and his argument was like chain mail, forged link by link. He put out a suggestion. He followed that with obvious things that led from it—things you were forced to agree to—and then he went one stage further and Wham! you were agreeing to something that was quite unheard of. Then Ruskin took the unheard-of idea and did the same to that. Wham. A new mad idea. Around and around the links Corkoran went, up and through and wham! through the first twenty pages. By this time he found he was humbly agreeing to a complete reorganization of the University syllabus, with theory and practical being taught together, to give more space for hugely advanced theory, and the first-year course beginning where the third year’s left off; and agreeing then that magic as used today was being handled entirely wrongly and should be rethought from the bottom upward....
Corkoran left off reading and gave Ruskin a C. Then, after some thought, he made that C minus for bossiness. It was as if the wretched dwarf was teaching him instead of the other way around. He wanted, even more than he had with Elda or Olga, to give the essay an F for failed, but some of Ruskin’s arguments were so persuasive that Corkoran actually caught himself wondering if perhaps, maybe, he should rethink his moonshot methods.
He shoved the forty pages angrily away and snatched up Claudia’s offering, which he had left until last because it looked peculiar. A glance at the light showed him that he was not going to get any of his own work done now before refectory supper, so he supposed he had better give his full attention to this now. It seemed to be a mass of fluttering paper slips held together by adhesion spells.
It was very peculiar. Claudia evidently held the same opinion as Felim and Elda, but she had set out to prove her opinion practically, by starting with a fairly common spell and showing how it could be made to do two different things. The first page gave the spell and then was divided into two columns, showing the two new spells. These in turn led to four—no, five—more derived spells in four columns and an attached slip of paper. And so on. Ten columns led to twenty-five.... Help! thought Corkoran, leafing on to find pages with up to fifty columns, done in tinier and tinier writing and only readable because Claudia had fitted them with an expander spell that Corkoran himself had never learned to cast. And as if this was not difficult enough—though it seemed to be meant to be helpful—the last page folded out into a huge family tree of all the spells, their branches color-coded red, green, and blue, with extra notes about how to apply them all.
“And I have to check all this?” Corkoran said aloud. Yes. Obviously he did. Claudia could be fooling him by writing complete nonsense. It took him well over an hour. When he was done, he could not help feeling an irritated sort of admiration. Some of those fifty new spells were good, new, useful things, and deriving them all from just two simple ordinary spells took a perverse sort of genius. But it was all as unheard of as Ruskin’s ideas. And it was not a proper essay. Corkoran turned the fluttering mass over and wrote “C–. Answer the question.” Genius or not, Claudia had wasted her time and his, and besides, even a genius can always do better. Perhaps he would give Claudia an A if she did this again in two years’ time. Or perhaps not. He did not want any of his students going out into the world thinking they could work marvels.
It was sad, really, Corkoran thought as he stacked the steep stack of papers together. Young people came to the University full of such bright hopes, feeling the whole world was open before them. And by the end of three years most of them were simply competent magic users, scraping around to find employment that made them some money. He remembered being like this himself even. Right at the start of his first year he had thought that magic offered great things—though he could not remember now what things—and by the end he had felt he was lucky to get a job on Mr. Chesney’s tours. He had come on a lot in those three years, he knew. He was sorry for his six students. But they would learn, just as he had. Meanwhile it was time to drop into the refectory for supper, where he would almost certainly be able to catch one of his young geniuses in the act of messing with the food. He would, he thought, make Wermacht come with him for moral support. Yes, that was an excellent idea. He set off, tie flying.
Claudia was also on her way to the refectory after choir practice. As Elda was occupying the concert hall, choir was usually held in the North Lab—Claudia was beginning to think she lived in that lab—from which it was only a short crosswise sprint through the rain to the refectory. Claudia ran through the freckled light from the globes of wizard light fixed to the buildings with her wrap over her head and did not look around until she was at the top of the refectory steps, where her friends were waiting. There she happened to glance across the courtyard. And there was the wretched cloakrack from the North Lab out in the rain between the refectory steps and the statue of Wizard Policant.
Lukin had seen it, too. He had watched it come out of the lab and trundle jerkily after Claudia. “Someone’s having a joke with that thing,” he said, in a loud, much too hearty voice. He and Olga took a friendly grip on Claudia’s arms and pulled her indoors.
Corkoran was in the refectory by then, and Wermacht, looking rather moody, with him. He spotted his first-year students as they joined the line for food in the large space being kept for them by Elda. Elda’s beak switched toward Corkoran in surprise and then switched away. Her feelings about him were in utter confusion. Two days ago she would have been delighted to see Corkoran here. Now her main feeling was embarrassment. He was slumming. Why?
Corkoran left Wermacht to keep them places at a table and demurely joined the end of the food queue. He was instantly surrounded by students complaining that the rain had come through into their rooms.
“Don’t tell me. Tell Wizard Dench,” he told them. It was always like this, he thought. The moment he showed his face in public, people tried to keep him from his work. Another student accosted him with each step he took toward the food. The roofs were evidently in a bad way this year. But there was nothing wrong with the food when he reached it—or nothing that was not quite usual, he thought, wincing at the choice between iron-hard meat pie and vegetable cakes floating in grease. None of the wizards ever ate in the refectory if they could help it. Corkoran himself always sent out to the town’s one good restaurant. A man in a crisp white apron brought him the chef’s special every evening to eat in his rooms. Tonight he bravely loaded two trays with one of each choice and levitated them over to the table where Wermacht was sitting.
That table was still empty apart from Wermacht. It was like a no-go area. Students took chairs away from that table and crammed them in anywhere else rather than join Wermacht. Corkoran found this quite a relief. And Wermacht did not seem to notice. But he noticed the food. He winced. “I thought I’d got away from all this,” he said. “What do we do now?”
“We eat it,” Corkoran replied. “The spell’s probably triggered by that.”
They gloomily unwrapped cutlery and began. Nothing changed. Corkoran, as he forced his teeth through the crust of the pie, kept a wary magical eye on his six students. Felim had not joined them to eat. He had been swept away to a table full of girls, all of whom seemed very interested in him. It looked as if Felim’s recent troubles had made him very popular. The rest were together, however, with Elda occupying most of one side of a table and the others leaning conspiratorially toward her. Corkoran enhanced his hearing with a spell and tried to listen to what they said, although the general din of voices and the clatter of eating were enough to defeat almost any spell. All he caught was a wisp of a remark from Lukin: “… just as well, Ruskin.”
He was beginning to realize that he was enduring this purgatory for nothing when all the noise abruptly died away. The refectory door barged open, and a cloakrack sidled in. It was just a tall three-legged wooden thing with a ring of big wooden hooks around the top, and you would not think it capable of expressing feeling, but it nevertheless gave out an air of timid apology that was almost human. Claudia blanched greenish white and could not seem to take her eyes off the thing. Wermacht jumped a little at the sight of it, too.
Neither of them seemed to notice that the cloakrack had been followed by a number of tall, purposeful, brightly dressed men and that what had really caused the sudden silence was the row of similar men marching in from the kitchens. These were taking off their white aprons as they came and spreading out to stand around all the walls. Under the aprons every one of them carried either a loaded crossbow or a large pistol.