Year of the Griffin

by Diana Wynne Jones

  Hearing him speak, the dangling man raised his face, which was bright red and encased in a black hood, from the region of the lower windows. “Let me up, for pity’s sake! I’m going to die like this!”

  “Poor fellow!” said Finn.

  “No, he isn’t. I heard that sort of talk last night,” said Corkoran. “But we’d better haul him up, anyway. I want an explanation. But go very carefully.”

  Neither of them could budge the orange rope. It defied both spells of levitation and spells of release, and after that it defied plain pulling. It was not until Ruskin came over to wrap his large hands around the rope and heave with his powerful shoulders that the hanging man began to inch up the outside wall.

  “Thought so,” Ruskin grunted rather proudly. “This trap’s one of mine.”

  Corkoran got his shrinking spell ready. As soon as the black boot came up level with the windowsill, he grasped the toe of it and clapped the spell on. Then he whipped forth a bag of Inescapable Net and crammed the tiny, struggling man inside it. Even so, the assassin contrived to stab Corkoran in the thumb with his tiny dagger. “Ouch!” cried Corkoran.

  A clatter from the middle of the room made them all whirl around.

  The beehive had vanished. Felim was standing there, sweating and rather white, with the knife on the floor at his feet. He was waving his arms, warning them all to keep clear of it.

  “Are you all right?” everyone cried out.

  “More or less. It was a little hot and stuffy but very safe,” Felim said. “But no one must come near this knife. Assassins always poison their weapons.”

  “What?” Corkoran looked at the little red blob on his thumb. He put it to his mouth to suck the blood off and then rather quickly took it away.

  “I fear,” Felim said apologetically, “that the knife should be destroyed and the whole floor cleansed. The poison they use is lethal.”

  Corkoran felt ready to faint.

  “In that case,” said Finn, “you get over to Healers Hall at once, Corkoran, and I’ll see to the cleansing. You students all go outside. Quickly.”

  Corkoran vanished in a clap of inrushing air. The five students clattered down the stairs and into the courtyard, where Elda bounded up to them. “Oh, Felim, I’m so glad! Are you safe now? Did we get them all?”

  “I am not sure,” Felim said cautiously. “Assassins always work in bands of seven.”

  His friends looked at one another anxiously. “Corkoran must have caught at least one more of them last night,” Lukin pointed out. “How many of the spells were sprung, Elda?”

  “Dozens,” said Elda. “My carpet looks as if someone emptied a bag of rubbish over it.”

  “So we might have caught them all?” Lukin said.

  “In that case,” Ruskin growled, “where are they?”

  This caused more anxious looks, which deepened to real worry when Claudia said, “The big question is, If we haven’t caught them all, does the protection go back on Felim when the next one has a go at him, or is that spell used up?”

  “I think,” said Olga, “we maybe ought to ask Corkoran.”

  “Dare we?” asked Elda. “He looked awfully annoyed. And he wasn’t wearing his tie.”

  Ruskin, who was still annoyed with Elda, demanded, “What’s his tie got to do with anything? He’s still a wizard, even without a tie.”

  “That wasn’t what I meant!” squawked Elda. “You—”

  “Please,” said Claudia. “I’ve got to go and get dressed. I’m freezing. The rest of you try to catch Corkoran on his way back from the healers.” She went. Lukin, yawning and shivering, wrapped himself into Olga’s fur cloak and went to get dressed, too. The remaining four hung about near the statue of Wizard Policant until Finn came and found them there.

  Finn was angry by then. He had been deprived of Melissa and half a night’s sleep, and now he had missed Rowing Club, too. He always felt out of sorts, anyway, if he missed his morning workout on the lake. Instead, he had been landed with the tricky and dangerous magic of getting rid of the assassin’s knife and then cleansing Felim’s floor. The fumes that came off the black, spear-shaped mark on the floorboards had made him cough and feel more than ever out of sorts. When the poison was finally banished and he clumped down the stairs to see Elda looming in the middle of the courtyard above Ruskin, Olga, and Felim, all of them in clouds of their own steamy breaths, Finn was suddenly furious. It was all their fault. He strode toward them.

  “Haven’t you people done enough now?” he demanded in a hoarse shout.

  Corkoran meanwhile was returning from Healers Hall, feeling rather queasy from the thick green liquid the duty healer had made him drink. The duty healer had assured him that he was in no danger whatsoever. The tiny dagger had not had enough poison on its point to poison a gnat, and most of that had come out with the blood. The healer wiped away the blood and burned the cloth she used. Then she made him drink the green liquid as a precaution. But Corkoran was not convinced. Like most people who are hardly ever ill, he was quite unable to tell which were dangerous symptoms and which were not. Did his head ache, he wondered as he walked, merely because he was short of sleep? Or was it the deep working of venom? Why was his heart racing so? He refused to believe it was just with terror. And what caused his knees to tremble slightly as he walked? It was certainly not with relief. And was the sick, heavy feeling in his stomach only caused by the horrible green drink? Or was he about to die and waste all his moon research? He swung the little bag with the assassin in it and thought vengeful thoughts at it.

  He came around the corner of the North Lab to find Finn with his legs astride and his arms folded, standing near the statue of Policant, bawling at Elda and her friends. It was so exactly what Corkoran wanted to do himself that he approached, feeling deeply appreciative.

  “No, it wasn’t, it was plain idiocy!” Finn was yelling. “You should have come to one of us, and we could have put proper protections around him. We know the correct spells. You don’t. But oh, no! You had to go and be clever! And what happens? Everyone in this University loses a night’s sleep, Corkoran gets poisoned, and I nearly choke. And Felim could have suffocated, of course.”

  “I beg your pardon,” Felim objected quietly as Corkoran drew closer. “I must contradict you there, Wizard Finn. The protections put around me by my friends were far more effective than the wards of the University, and I could breathe with perfect ease.”

  “What do you know about the wards?” yelled Finn. “You never gave the damned things a chance! You rushed in and fooled about with books and orange peel instead. It was the merest luck the stupid things kept you safe. You must learn that magic is dangerous stuff! You have to go cautiously, step by little step, and follow the rules, or you could end up dead, or turned into a fish! I always tell my students they should never, ever do anything they haven’t been taught to do!”

  “Hear, hear!” said Corkoran.

  Elda, who had her beak open to suggest that someone must have done something he hadn’t been taught, or there would never have been any magic to start with, shut her beak and gazed at Corkoran sorrowfully. Ruskin’s eyebrows bunched, but the way he looked out at Corkoran from under his scowl seemed almost pitying. Olga and Felim stared straight and unconvinced. Corkoran wondered what had got into them all, but he went on firmly, “I agree with every word that Wizard Finn has said.”

  “I beg your—” Felim began in his usual polite way. But he stopped because the paving stones of the courtyard began to bulge upward in front of Corkoran.

  Corkoran leaped backward from the bulge. “Oh, what now?” he said. As he spoke, the hillock of stonework split apart, grinding a little, to make a slimy-seeming hole. Out of it came the familiar and piercing smell of oranges, mixed with what was certainly the smell of sewers. A creature about the size of a lion squeezed out of the reeking space. It was a creature like no one there had seen before. Its skin was orange, shiny, and pimply, its head was too big for its body, and it shone with slim
e. In the enormous jaws of its great head it held a long, heavy bundle. This bundle it proceeded to lay lovingly at Corkoran’s feet, wagging its skinny orange tail as it did so. Then it paused to gaze expectantly up into Corkoran’s face. When Corkoran did nothing but look disgusted, the creature faded into nothingness, a little sadly. The stones of the courtyard closed with a thump, although the smell remained, sharp in the frosty air.

  “Ugh!” said Finn. “I suppose that’s another of them who tried to get in through the sewers.”

  Elda was jigging up and down. “That’s one of mine!” she told Felim delightedly.

  Corkoran looked unlovingly from Elda to the assassin lying by his toes. The man was dripping with slime and orange juice and half stunned, but he was already struggling to reach the dagger in his boot. Corkoran hastily put his foot on the man’s reaching fingers and shrank him before he could do any more. As he summoned another bag of Inescapable Net, he said, “If you people have any more spells set up, go and dismantle them. Now.” He scooped the assassin into the bag and strode away toward the Spellman Building.

  Finn, who wanted to change out of his Rowing Club clothes, glowered at the students and followed Corkoran. By the time Finn reached the foyer of the Spellman Building, Corkoran was summoning the first two bags down from the light fitment. “You’ve got four of them!” Finn exclaimed. “What are you going to do with them?”

  Corkoran still felt ill. He held the four little bags up at eye level so that they could both see the three tiny men and the one extremely small cockerel struggling about inside. “I think I might send them to the moon,” he said vengefully. “I need to know for certain that there isn’t any air up there.”

  “You can’t do that!” Finn said, horrified. “That’s a dreadful death!”

  Corkoran was taken aback and rather hurt at this reaction of Finn’s. He would have thought that after the bad time these people had given them all, Finn would be entirely in favor of the idea. “Why not? They’re assassins. Two of them nearly killed me.”

  “Yes, but they’re human beings, not experimental animals,” Finn protested.

  “That’s why it’s such a good idea,” Corkoran explained. “I’ll put them in several different designs of metal suits, so that if they don’t suffocate or explode, I’ll know which one’s safe for me to wear.”

  Finn felt sick. The assassins might be professional murderers, but he was sure they did not deserve this. He knew assassins were dedicated men, who trained for years and had the same kinds of professional standards that wizards did. In their way they were honorable people. And they had surely only been doing their job in coming here. The trouble was, he thought, Corkoran was far too obsessed with the idea of getting to the moon. He wondered, not for the first time, if Corkoran might not be a little unbalanced in his mind. If he was, Finn could perfectly understand it. Working as a Wizard Guide to Mr. Chesney’s tour parties tended to make you unbalanced. It had been hard, feverish work, in which none of the events had been real, except that the dangers were very real and sometimes utterly terrifying. Finn remembered the way he had felt when the tours had been stopped: almost bewildered and still expecting that he was going to have to kill someone. He had been so used to people being killed then that he had worried at the way he seemed to have become flinty-hearted about death. It looked as if Corkoran was still feeling like this. In which case, what could one say to stop him sending these unfortunate men to the moon? The trouble was, Corkoran did not think of experiments as murder. They were just stepping-stones on his way to be the first man on the moon.

  Finn discovered that he knew the perfect thing to say. “Corkoran, these are men. If you send them to the moon, you won’t be the first man to walk there.”

  Corkoran thought about this irritably. He realized Finn was right. “I could send the cockerel,” he suggested.

  “But that’s really a man, too,” Finn argued. “People like Querida or Derk would say you were cheating.”

  Corkoran sighed. Derk he thought he could deal with, but Querida was another matter. She was still the most powerful wizard in the world and still officially High Chancellor of the University. You did not do anything Querida might disapprove of. “All right,” he said. “I’ll think of something else.” Blast Finn. These creatures had given him a bad fright and probably poisoned him. He wanted them to suffer.

  He carried the four little bags to his moonlab, feeling peevish. There he hunted out the old cage where he had kept the rats that he had sent to the moon and shook the assassins into it out of the bags, carefully turning each one rat size as he did it, so that they could not squeeze between the bars. He sealed the cage with Inescapable Net and left a note on it for his assistant, telling her to feed and water the creatures once a day while he considered what to do with them. Then he forgot about them. He went away to shave and find his tie. Cherry pink irises on it today, he decided.

  SIX

  IN PLACES LIKE the University word gets around. Though nobody precisely told anybody, by the end of breakfast everybody knew that Felim was being hunted by seven assassins—some versions said seventy—and that Corkoran had so far caught only four of them. Felim was surrounded by people offering sympathy and lucky amulets. He was also approached by a lofty third-year student who offered to sell Felim a set of eight essays, guaranteed to get top marks, for a mere eight gold pieces. For, as the lofty student pointed out, Felim was surely going to be far too busy dodging assassins to do any more work this term.

  Felim, who by this time was very white, with large dark circles under his eyes, objected politely that he did not yet know what subjects Corkoran was going to ask him to write essays on.

  “No problem,” said the lofty one. “Corkoran always sets the same essays. I bought the set from a girl who said Wermacht bought them, too, in his first year, and we all know what that did for Wermacht.”

  At this Felim drew himself up very tall and straight. “No, thank you. I discover that it is my duty to force Corkoran to read something different.”

  “It’s your funeral,” said the lofty one, and went away.

  About the same time, the kitchen staff heard about the assassins. They all threatened to go home unless a wizard was provided at once to put protection spells on the kitchen and the refectory. “We could,” claimed the cook, “be brained with our own frying pans while we work.”

  “Let him leave,” growled Ruskin, “and the rest with him. All any of them do is to float food in grease.”

  Though most students shared Ruskin’s opinion, none of the wizards did. Corkoran sent Wermacht to put the spells on. Wermacht stamped importantly into the kitchens and spent a refreshing half hour striding about there, intimidating the staff and ordering the cook on no account to touch either the walls or the windows once the spells were set. He then strode off, only slightly late, to teach his first-year class on Elementary Astrology.

  The first-year students meanwhile waited in the North Lab with their notebooks, rulers, star charts, and compasses. Everyone but Elda was shivering. It was still a bitterly frosty, cold day, but Wizard Dench, the Bursar, had decreed that the University could not afford fires, or any other form of heating, for another month. Students were huddled in coats and cloaks, and some even wore gloves. Many wistful glances were cast at the large empty fireplace in the north wall.

  “Do you suppose,” someone suggested, “that we could collect rubbish and burn it there?”

  “Everyone’s bound to have wastepaper in their rooms,” said someone else. “Anyone good at conjuring?”

  Nobody was, particularly. But Ruskin discovered a wastebasket in one corner of the lab and tipped the pile of torn-up notes it contained into the grate. He got them alight, and all the students gathered around for what little warmth there was. Someone had just said that simply looking at the flames made you feel warmer when the chimney above the flaming pile of paper began disgorging a landslide of soot. Soot poured down into the grate, where it put out the flames but left the paper smo
ldering. Smoke now came billowing forth. Everyone backed away, coughing.

  “Typical of this place!” exclaimed the student who had suggested the fire. “There must be a birds’ ne—”

  “Hush!” said everyone else.

  Some of the coughing was coming from inside the chimney.

  Everyone backed away in a rush, as two long black-clad legs appeared in the fireplace, groping for the ground. Melissa screamed.

  And Wermacht strode into the lab just as a wildly coughing assassin ducked out from under the mantelpiece and advanced on the students with his dagger raised. There were screams from others besides Melissa. Elda, Olga, Claudia, Ruskin, and Lukin plunged amid the panic to the place where they had last seen Felim and relaxed in relief when they found him safely encased in the beehive of books again. Elda, unable to stop, charged on into the beehive and sent it reeling and blundering among the desks. A lot of desks were knocked over, some of them by Elda.

  Behind Elda, the assassin reached out to take the nearest student hostage. With a certain inevitability, it was Melissa he grabbed at, and Melissa went into hysterics of terror. “Save me! Save me!” she screamed, and went on screaming it even though the assassin’s black-gloved hand never reached her. Instead, the hand, followed by the arm, followed swiftly by the rest of the man, dissolved into little flakes of sooty ash. The flakes swirled about but hung together in a vague man shape that dithered against the mantelpiece, as if the assassin were wondering what in the world had happened to him.

  The greenish blush swept across Claudia’s face as she recognized her burned-grass spell. Melissa turned, still screaming, to see what everyone was staring at and saw what seemed to be a black ashy ghost reaching for her. Screaming even harder, she rushed for the door. Since Wermacht was standing just in front of the door, stock-still and staring, Melissa rushed into Wermacht and flung her arms around him. “Save me!” she shrieked.