TWELVE

ELDA FILLED HER lungs joyfully and screamed again. “Your grandfathers were all rats, and they were educated by jackals!”

But Jessak and his friends were no longer listening. They were looking at Blade and drawing together into a huddle in what looked very like dismay. “You again!” said Jessak.

Blade folded his arms and tapped with one booted foot. “Yes. Me again. I warned you when they exiled you that if you came over here, I’d make you sorry. And I will. I give you a count of ten to get out of this place. One. Two.”

Elda looked fondly down at Blade as he stood and counted. Blade these days was tall and rather thin, with straight, fairish hair and a straight, fairish face that usually held the same mild, friendly look that his father, Derk’s, did. You would not think to look at him that he was one of the four most powerful wizards in the world. Elda just wished she could learn to be anything like so good.

“Five. Six,” said Blade. “Seven.”

Elda noticed that Blade was keeping half an eye on the evening sky above the Spellman Building as he counted. She kept half an eye there, too. Blade and Kit usually worked as a pair. Sure enough, there was a dark bird-shaped speck against the sunset there, and it grew very rapidly larger and darker. Kit was flying flat out.

“Eight,” said Blade. “Nine.”

“You can’t frighten us. We’re immune to magic,” the off-white griffin said unconvincingly.

Blade raised his eyebrows. “Ten,” he said.

And Kit came hurtling down past the Observatory tower and over the parapet like a diving black demon, shouting thunderously. “GET AWAY FROM MY SISTER, YOU GODFORSAKEN REJECTS!” Fire blasted up from the courtyard where the invading griffins stood. Blade grinned and added his magic to Kit’s. The result was that all four griffins were shot into the air as if a bomb were under them. Kit flung a further sheet of fire beneath them as they rose, causing them to scream as one griffin and flap their singeing wings desperately. Blade sped them on their way with another blast of magic. They clapped their tails between their legs and flew madly to get away.

“BLASTED RIFFRAFF!” Kit thundered over his shoulder at them as he landed.

That was neat, Elda thought. You don’t magic them, because it doesn’t take, so you magic the air underneath them. Then she had a moment when she thought, Only four griffins? And what message? But she forgot those questions in her total delight at seeing her brothers again. She raised both wings, letting a rather overheated-looking Ruskin tumble out, and wrapped Blade in her pinions. “Love you, Blade!”

“Me, too,” Blade said, butting her with his head, griffin fashion. He slapped her flank. “You had a good shout, didn’t you? Those gangsters were looking almost respectful when I got here.”

Elda chuckled as she galloped over to Kit. Kit was so glad to see her that he actually twined his neck with Elda’s, which was a thing he very rarely did. Elda rejoiced in the well-known clean smell of his feathers and the sleek shine of his pantherlike sides. The only pale part of Kit was his great buff-colored beak. And his yellow eyes, of course, which were just now returning from angry black to ordinary gold. But she had forgotten how huge he was, bigger than Callette, bigger than Jessak by some way. He made her feel as small as Ruskin.

“Are all the griffins on the other continent as nasty as those ones?” she asked Kit, with a worried thought about Lydda.

“Lords, no!” Kit paced toward Blade, looking rather satisfied, and Elda trotted beside him, wondering why Kit did not seem to notice that there was still one foreign griffin left, the plain brown one, crouched in the opposite corner of the courtyard in the shadow of the refectory steps. “Most of the griffins there are nice people,” Kit said. “Those lot were the dregs. Outlaws. But don’t worry. I don’t think they’ll come back in a hurry.”

“What did they get outlawed for?” Elda asked, flicking an anxious glance at the motionless brown griffin in the corner.

“Not just for stalking Callette, I can tell you!” Kit said as they reached Blade. “They enjoy tearing humans and griffins apart. They had themselves real fun during the war.”

“And everyone over there is far too civilized to get rid of them properly,” Blade told Elda. She could see he was disgusted about it. “Jessak’s family got lawyers, and the lawyers argued that they were throwbacks to primitive griffins and couldn’t help themselves. So they exiled them instead. We ran into them just before that, when Jessak got a thing about Callette.”

“Lawyers!” snorted Kit. “Where is Callette, anyway? She said she—”

Kit said this at the precise moment that he walked into the invisible Callette. Callette surged and squawked. Kit reared up and back, hugely astonished.

“What the—”

“You trod on me!” Callette said out of nowhere. “Clumsy oaf!”

Elda and Ruskin became helpless with laughter. So did Claudia. She had been getting up, clutching the cloakrack for support for her very shaky legs. Now she clung to it and giggled.

“Where are you?” Kit demanded of the air.

“How do I know? I can’t see myself to tell you!” Callette retorted.

“She asked us to make her invisible because she didn’t want Jessak to see her,” Claudia explained, as well as she could for laughing.

“Fair enough,” said Blade. He was grinning, too.

Kit was not amused. “Trust you to do something really stupid, Callette! Where are you, for goodness’ sake?” He scythed at the air with both front sets of talons, walking cautiously forward on two legs like somebody playing blindman’s buff. “How can I turn you back if I don’t know where you are?”

“But I don’t know—Now you trod on my tail!” Callette howled. There was an invisible turmoil. Kit canted sideways, carried by an unseen body almost as big as he was, and tried to save himself falling by wrapping his talons around the statue of Wizard Policant. There was a sharp crack. Wizard Policant swayed, broke off at the ankles, and fell, first with a padded whump—“OUCH!” cried Callette. “Now look what you’ve done, you fool!”—and then with a stony crash, when he rolled on the ground by Kit’s feet. Kit, like a giant-size startled cat, skittered away sideways and stood in an affronted arch.

Claudia whooped and pointed.

“What’s the matter?” Blade asked her anxiously.

“His.” Claudia swallowed. “His.” She managed to get the rest out between laughs in a hurried, chesty drone. “His feet. In pointy shoes. Oh!” She gave a whine of laughter and slid down the cloakrack, shaking.

Blade looked at Wizard Policant’s feet standing all by themselves on the plinth and collapsed, too. The lights around the courtyard came on just then, showing the wide space full of people again. Everyone who had run away from Jessak and his friends was now outside once more, very curious to see two of the world’s strongest wizards, and most of them were laughing at Wizard Policant’s feet, too. After a moment even Kit saw the funny side of it.

“Hey, look!” someone called out. “You can see Callette’s shadow!”

This was true. The shadow was large and ruffled and spread in several directions. Its heads swung about as Callette realized she could see it as well and then raised blurred multiple wings and waved a forefoot or so.

“She seems to be all right,” said Blade. “Come on. Let’s get her visible.” Everyone at once backed away considerately. “Oh, no,” Blade told them. “Whoever made her this way has to help, or it’ll take us all night. Who did do it?”

Everyone there exchanged looks and realized that they had all done it. They all stepped forward again. Claudia hauled herself up the cloakrack and tried to stop laughing.

“Look,” Blade said to her kindly, “do you really need that thing? Can I put it over by the wall for you?”

“I, er, I’m not sure it’ll stretch that far,” Claudia confessed.

Lukin hastened over. “It won’t go more than ten yards away from her,” he explained. “She’s tied to it magically somehow.”

Blade reached up and felt the wooden hooks around the top of the cloakrack. “So she is! Kit, come and have a look at this! I’ve never met anything like it.”

Kit, who was attempting to arrange the students in a circle around Callette’s multiple shadow, left off for the moment and came over to plant a massive taloned, handlike forefoot on the top of the cloakrack. “What is this? This is the most cockeyed spell I ever met! It’s all back to front and sideways. Who did it?”

“Wermacht,” said Lukin.

“Who?” said Blade.

“Whoever he is, he’s a fool,” said Kit. “This is going to take some unraveling.” He and Blade began prowling around Claudia and the cloakrack, muttering technicalities, while Claudia stood there like someone holding the pole in a maypole dance, looking self-conscious.

Elda saw that they were going to be some time. She left her place in the circle and began tiptoeing away toward the dark corner by the refectory steps. “We’ll need your name,” she heard Kit saying behind her, and Claudia replying that she was Claudia Antonina. At which Blade exclaimed, “Then you must be Emperor Titus’s sister! I thought I’d seen you before!”

“Only once.” Claudia’s voice came distantly to Elda. “When I was fourteen.”

The dull brown griffin had not moved. He was sitting the way cats do, with his forelegs tucked under him and his back hunched, and his wings in a brown glittery swath above that. He seemed much smaller in this position. His face was level with Elda’s, very dull and meek. His heavy-lidded eyes were half shut. Elda would have thought he was asleep, except that she could see his eyes shine as they turned to look at her. She was surprised to find that his smell was quite clean, or only as sweaty as you might expect from a griffin who had just flown here from the coast.

“Who are you?” she demanded. “Why are you still here?”

“Me?” he said, sounding rather surprised. “I’m Flury. I’m very inoffensive really. You mustn’t be alarmed. I stayed because I thought it was interesting here.”

“Why hasn’t anyone else noticed you?” Elda said.

“I hoped nobody would,” Flury answered modestly. “I’m good at lying low.”

He was certainly quite a contrast with Jessak, but he was so dull and meek that Elda found him rather exasperating. “You mean you’re lying low because you’re an outlaw?” she asked with a bit of a snap.

“No,” Flury said. “At least nobody told me I was an outlaw.”

“Then why were you with Jessak?” Elda asked suspiciously.

“He’s a sort of distant relative,” Flury explained. “The family wanted me to look after him.”

“Look after him!” Elda could think of nothing more unlikely.

Flury hunched himself a little tighter, apologetically. “It does seem senseless, doesn’t it? What could I do to stop him getting into trouble? But they’re a very influential family, you know. Jessak should have been executed, really, for war crimes, but they got him exiled instead and then employed me to go with him.”

“Are you a fighting griffin then?” Elda asked.

“Not really,” said Flury.

“A lawyer then?” said Elda.

“Not particularly,” said Flury.

“But,” said Elda, exasperated by now, “if you’re being paid to be with them, why have you let them fly off without you?”

“I couldn’t stop them, could I?” Flury pointed out meekly. “They seemed rather set on leaving in a hurry. Do you think the people in charge here would let me be a student if I asked?”

“Probably not,” said Elda. “You have to train to be a wizard in order to study here. Do you want to do that?”

“Not enormously,” Flury said. “No.”

“Well then,” said Elda, more exasperated than ever, “you’d better fly after Jessak and his friends. They’re bound to be causing trouble by now.”

“Not at night,” said Flury. “Besides, my contract ended when I brought them here. You’d better go back to your friends. They’ll be needing you any moment.”

This appeared to be true. Kit and Blade were now asking everyone where Wermacht was. They seemed to have decided they could only raise the spell on the cloakrack with Wermacht there to help. “He’s not here,” various people said. “He’ll have gone home by now. He lives in town.”

“Where does he live? I can fly there and fetch him—by the scruff of his neck if necessary,” Kit said.

But nobody knew. As several students pointed out, apologetically. Wermacht was not one of those tutors you wanted much to do with outside classes. If it had been Finn, now, or Myrna.

“Bother this!” said Kit. “Blade, we really do have to get home.”

“I know.” Blade turned to Claudia. “Look, I’m awfully sorry about this. Do you mind waiting a day or so until we’ve got my parents safely on their way? We’ll come back then, during teaching hours, so that this Wermacht’s bound to be here, and make sure he untangles you properly, I promise. Will you be all right until then?”

“Perfectly,” Claudia said bravely. The cloakrack after all was the least of her worries. If the Senate wanted her dead before she became enough of a wizard to protect herself, then what was a cloakrack here or there? When Blade came back, she thought she might summon courage to ask him to protect her, but privately, not out in the courtyard in front of everyone like this. Meanwhile she intended to stick to Elda like a burr.

“Right.” Blade smiled at her, and as Elda slid back to her place between Olga and Felim, he turned to the matter of making Callette visible again.

“And about time, too!” Callette said from somewhere near the fallen statue.

“It won’t take a moment,” Kit said, huge and glistening like tar beyond the ring of students. “This is simple—just strong because so many people did it. All join hands. That’s right. Now concentrate on Callette as you last saw her.”

Everyone did so, while Kit and Blade raced in a clockwise circle outside the ring of concentrating students. And it was almost as if they turned Callette on like a light. She reappeared, large and ruffled and cross, in a momentary blaze of evening sunlight, as everyone had last seen her, her barred wings rosily gleaming and her big brown eyes catching nonexistent orange sunset. By the time she had lifted each foot and turned her head to inspect both wings, the glow had faded to the normal dimness from the courtyard lights.

“Thanks,” she said gruffly. Her tail lashed. “Blaze of glory.”

“And now we really must go,” Blade said. “See you soon, Elda, Claudia.” He translocated away, vanishing with a whistle of inrushing air.

Kit and Callette had to travel in a less wizardly way. Both spread their great wings, braced their legs, and leaped upward in a windy tolling of wing feathers and a downdraft that tossed everyone’s hair. “Bye!” Callette called downward. Everyone clustered around the ruined statue to wave good-bye. Ruskin jumped onto the empty plinth to get a last sight of the huge dark bodies wheeling around to gain height against the blue-black sky. Olga and Lukin stood on the fallen statue. Elda gazed upward and sighed. She had not realized how much she had been missing her family until they were gone again.

“You know,” Ruskin boomed thoughtfully, “it must be possible to make a wing-spell.”

Lukin laughed. “Get your food-spells right first.”

A strong, sour voice spoke from under his feet. “Would you be so good as to lift me back to my pedestal now? It feels most uncomfortable lying here without my feet.”

Olga and Lukin hastily jumped off the statue. Ruskin knelt on the plinth and stared down at it. Everyone else backed away. “That was Wizard Policant speaking, was it?” someone asked, Melissa probably.

“Of course it was, you silly minx,” said the statue.

There was no question of it this time. Everyone near saw the stone lips move. “Then we had better put him back,” said Felim.

This was not easy. As Felim said later in the buttery bar, Wizard Policant probably weighed nearly a ton, and without Elda’s strength and Ruskin’s knowledge of how to move stone, they might never have done it. It took ten people using the cloakrack as a lever to raise Wizard Policant enough for Elda and Ruskin to grasp him near his stony middle and haul him up—while everyone else dropped the cloakrack and pushed—until he was lying across his plinth. At this stage several people tried casting weight-reducing spells, but Wizard Policant seemed as immune to magic as Jessak had been. They had to use brute strength to get him upright. Then as many of the strongest people who could crowd onto the plinth had the difficult task of guiding Wizard Policant’s broken legs into the shattered ends of his ankles, while Elda hovered strenuously above, with Wizard Policant’s pointed hat grasped in all four feet.

Stone rasped. People panted, Elda loudest of all. Everyone’s sweat plopped down onto the plinth like rain. And Wizard Policant himself intoned, “To your right … A fraction backward … Now half an inch left … Forward, and right an eighth of an inch … Rotate me a very small amount clockwise … No, too far … The other way … Hold it there … Now down.”

They dumped him with a crash. Elda shot upward, wondering if she would ever be able to walk again. Everyone on the plinth balanced upright, trembling. “Is that it?” Claudia asked from the ground.

“Yes,” said Wizard Policant. “Thank you.” Upon that he became completely a statue again. Though a number of people asked him anxiously if he was all right now, he did not reply.

As Elda sank shakily to the ground, Ruskin crouched and ran his big hands around the statue’s legs where the break had been. “Seamless,” he said. “Not a sign of any join.”

“He must have been a very powerful wizard,” Felim said soberly. “I cannot, frankly, see any of our present teachers being able to do this.”

Everyone murmured agreement as they climbed off the plinth. Lukin wiped his sweating forehead with the back of his hand. “Phew!” he said. “Quite a day! I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’ve just remembered I’ve got some money now, and I’m going to the buttery for a drink.”

They all went. They forgot supper and ate sandwiches from the buttery, after which they spent the rest of the evening there. Elda couched against the wall where the now extremely battered cloakrack was propped, sipping beer through a straw and wondering what humans saw in it, while Claudia leaned against Elda, feeling safe at least for the moment, and Ruskin, perched on a bar stool to bring him level with everyone else, told Felim more and more loudly how it might be possible to make wings and enchant them so that a dwarf might fly. Lukin simply grinned and wrapped his arm around Olga.

Much later, when the students had dispersed with much happy shouting and quite a lot of discordant singing, Finn walked purposefully through the courtyard—disturbing as he went a crowd of mice gathered around a dropped sandwich—and down to the main gate, where he let himself out by the small postern. He would try the White Lion first, he thought, and then the Golden Eagle and the Mage. If he drew blanks there, it would have to be the Red Wizard, the Blue Boar, the Green Dwarf, and the Griffin, followed by the Dragon, the Pumphouse, and Tilley’s Wines, and after that some of the lower taverns. The city had a great many inns and several big hotels, such as the Imperial Arms and the Harping Bard, where the senators and the dwarfs had probably stayed. It promised to be a long night.

But Finn was lucky. Corkoran was in the White Lion, sitting at a table filled with carefully lined-up wine bottles and a half-full one in front of him. In the rest of the room all the chairs had been put on top of the tables and the landlord was leaning on the bar, looking tired and impatient.

“Come on, Corkoran,” Finn said. “Time to go home.”

“Got no home,” said Corkoran. “Not anymore. Turned out to starve when I was fifteen. Tours sacked the place. Walked all the way to the University.”

“The University,” Finn said, “is your home now. You’re head of it. Remember?”

“Not. That’s Querida,” said Corkoran. “I’m only Chairman of the Board.”

“That’s the same thing these days,” Finn pointed out. “Come along, Corkoran, we need you. We had a plague of griffins this afternoon, and there was no one in authority to deal with them. One of them knocked down the statue of Policant.”

“Mice,” said Corkoran. “You must be drunk, Finn. Mice is what we’ve got a plague of. Mice don’t knock down statues. They eat moonships.”

Finn sighed. “You were probably on your tenth bottle at that stage. Come along back now. You’ve drunk quite enough, and the landlord wants to close.”

“Can’t,” said Corkoran. “Won’t. Got no reason to do anything anymore, Finn. My moonshot’s over. Finished. Everything eaten and cut to pieces.”

“I know,” Finn said sympathetically. “I went to your lab to look for you. It was those assassins, wasn’t it?”

“You should have let me dump them on the moon!” Corkoran cried out. “It’s all your fault, Finn!”

“I should have taken them off you and sent them back to Ampersand,” Finn said. “I’m sorry now that I didn’t. But it’s no use crying over spilled milk, Corkoran—”

“I’m not crying,” Corkoran explained. “I’m drowning my sorrows.”

“You certainly are!” Finn agreed, looking at the rows of bottles. “For the last time, Corkoran, are you coming back with me or not? You’re giving a lecture tomorrow, and I’m not going to give it for you.”

“Myrna will,” Corkoran said. “Nice obliging woman. Ask her if you don’t want to do it.”

“Oh!” said Finn. “Bother you then!” He activated the transport spell he had brought with him, with the result that Corkoran woke up in his own bed the next day, fully dressed and feeling like death and without the slightest idea how he got there.