Year of the Griffin

by Diana Wynne Jones

  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.

  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 stabilizing 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 labeled 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 labeled. 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 around the Inventory grew more agitated. Several of the students glanced toward 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 recommends 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 center 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 inquiring mind. I want to know the other part, the thusness of how, the color 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 onto the wooden surface in front of his face. They smelled divine to Ruskin, of dust and old gloves. “Thank you,” he rumbled. He sneaked a look toward 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 once.”

  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 around 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 small 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 color 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 says purple.”

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

  “Candles,” said Lukin. “That’s constant, too.” 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 three books again and added, “None of them says what color the pentagram around 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 three 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 outward 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 three 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 three. 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 around to look at him properly, Felim looked quite normal, but when she turned the corner of her other eye toward 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 colored 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 of 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 the 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 burned with Ruskin’s lighter before going to the door again and blowing the ash away.