Year of the Griffin

by Diana Wynne Jones

  Corkoran clutched the statue in shock for a second. The noise seemed to turn his head inside out. He was aware of distant howlings from the main gate, where the janitor, who was a werewolf, had reacted to the shock by shifting shape, and he realized that the man was not likely to be any help. But Corkoran was after all a wizard. He knew he must do something. Although the bonging and clattering and crashing seemed to be coming from all directions, the huge, muffled voice definitely came from the Spellman Building. Corkoran clapped a noise reduction spell over his ears and sprinted for the building’s main door.

  FIVE

  THIS HAS TO be a student joke,” Corkoran muttered. He threw wide the doors of the Spellman Building and turned on all the lights without bothering with the switches. He was so astonished at what he saw that he let the doors crash shut behind him and seal themselves by magic while he stood and stared.

  The grand stairway was buried under a mountain of sand. And went on being buried. Whitish yellow sand poured and pattered and cascaded and increased in volume, doubled in volume while Corkoran stared, as if it were being tipped from a giant invisible hopper. Odder still, someone seemed to be trying to climb the stairs in spite of the sand. Corkoran could see a half-buried figure floundering and struggling about a third of the way up. As far as he could tell, it was a man in tight-fitting black clothes. Corkoran saw a black-hooded head emerge from the mighty dune, then a flailing arm with a black glove on its hand, before both were covered by the inexorably pouring sand. A moment later black-clad legs appeared, frantically kicking. Those were swallowed up almost instantly. A turmoil in the sand showed Corkoran where to look next, and he saw a tight black torso briefly, rather lower down. By this time the sand was piled halfway across the stone floor of the foyer.

  Corkoran wondered what to do. The older wizards had warned him before they retired that he should expect all sorts of magical pranks from the students, but so far nothing of this nature had occurred. Most students had seemed uninventive or docile, or both. Corkoran had had absolutely no experience of this kind of thing. He watched the seething sand pile ever higher and the struggling black-clad fellow appear, lower down each time, and dithered.

  While he dithered, the onrushing sand swept the black-clad man down to floor level, where he staggered to his feet, tall, thin, and somehow unexpectedly menacing. Corkoran had just a glimpse of a grim, expressionless face and a black mustache before a large pit opened under the fellow’s staggering black boots and the man vanished down into it with a yelp.

  That, thought Corkoran, was surely not one of our students. He went to the edge of the pit and peered down. It was fairly deep, breathing out a curious fruity darkness. He could just see the pale oval of the man’s face at the bottom and the dark bar of the fellow’s mustache. “You’re not a student here, are you?” he called down, just to be sure.

  “No,” said the man. “Help. Get me out.”

  Sand was already pattering into the pit. At this rate it would fill up enough in five minutes for the man to climb out. Corkoran could not help thinking that this was a bad idea. “Sorry,” he said. “You’re trespassing on University property.” He stepped back and covered the pit with the Inescapable Net he used to stop air leaking from his moonship.

  Then he turned his attention to the sand.

  This proved to be far more of a problem. It took Corkoran three tries just to stop more of it arriving. The spell was decidedly peculiar, some kind of adaptation of a little-known deadfall spell, with a timer to it that had to be removed before the main spell could be canceled. But eventually the sand stopped coming, and Corkoran was merely faced with the small mountain of it that was there already. He raised his arms and tried to dismiss it back to the desert it had presumably come from.

  It would not budge.

  Feeling rather irritated by now, Corkoran performed divinatory magic. All this told him was that the sand had to be returned to the place it had come from, which he knew already. He was forced to go and pick up a handful of the gray, dusty granules, in order to perform a more difficult hands-on spell of inquiry.

  “Help me!” commanded a voice from near his feet.

  Corkoran whirled around and saw black-gloved fingers clinging to the underside of the Inescapable Net. The fellow had magic, and he was probably unbelievably strong, too, to have climbed right to the top of the pit. This was bad news. “No,” he said. “You stay there.”

  “But this pit is filling with poisoned water!” the intruder panted.

  Corkoran leaned over and saw the man crouched at the head of the pit, with his black boots against the rough side of it and his hands clutching the net. Below him, quite near and obviously rising, was dark, glinting liquid. The smell of it puzzled Corkoran. Some kind of fruit, he thought. The smell brought back memories of the Holy City when he was there as a Wizard Guide during the tours, and a priest of Anscher passing him a bright, round, pimply fruit. Then he had it. “It’s only orange juice,” he said. “Tell me who you are and what you think you’re doing here, and I’ll let you out.”

  “No,” said the intruder. “My lips are sealed by oath. But you can’t let me drown in orange juice. It is not a manly death.”

  Corkoran considered this. The man did have a point. He sighed and cast away his handful of sand. “Bother you. You are an infernal nuisance.” He levitated the Inescapable Net from the top of the pit, bringing the man upward with it. The man promptly let go of the net with one hand and grabbed Corkoran by his flowing peacock-feather tie. And twisted it. This was not simple panic. Corkoran saw a knife glitter in the man’s other hand, the one still clinging to the net.

  Corkoran panicked. He was suddenly in a fierce struggle, brute strength against magic, killer training against panic. Being throttled with your own tie, Corkoran found himself thinking in the midst of his terror, was quite as disgraceful as being drowned in orange juice. At that stage he was trying to throw this murderer back into the pit. But the fellow was far too strong. He hauled on the tie until Corkoran could hardly breathe, and the glittering knife crept up toward Corkoran’s right eye. The only thing that saved Corkoran was the net, which was still in the way between them. Corkoran pushed back at the fellow and at the knife with every spell he could think of, and for some reason it was only the strange spells he could think of. And the struggle ended, with the murderer two inches long and imprisoned in the Inescapable Net, which had turned itself into a bag around him.

  Corkoran held the bag up and looked at it, as surprised as his attacker must have been. He loosened his tie. Relief. He was shaking. “Let that be a lesson to you,” he told the bag hoarsely. Then, because he could not think what else to do with it, he levitated the bag to hang on the massive light fitment that dangled from the vaulted stone ceiling, where it was at least out of the way, and turned back to the mountain of sand.

  He took up a handful, murmured the spell, and then let it patter to the floor as he asked it, “What are you? Where are you from?”

  A soft, spattering answer came. “We are dust from the moon.”

  “Moon dust?” Corkoran turned to the stairway and looked at the enormous pile of fine gray-white sand with astonished admiration. Moon dust. This had to be an omen. He had half a mind to let it stay there to encourage him in his work. But he realized that it would be very inconvenient. And he was the person best qualified to send it back to the moon. Yes, definitely an omen. From being shaken and sore-throated and angry, he found he had become lighthearted and almost benevolent toward whichever student had done this. It was a silly prank, but it had given him an omen.

  He told the sand to go back to the moon. It vanished at once, every grain of it. Corkoran had a vision of the spell working—which was not something that often happened with him—and the sand sailing up past the Observatory tower, through the clouds, and siphoning onward in a spiral to that half-moon up there. Smiling, he turned to the pit and told that to go, too. It closed up, sploshily, with a clap and a sharp smell of oranges.

 
Here he became aware that the monstrous din out in the courtyard had gone away as well. Thank the gods! This must mean that the prank spell had finished now. Corkoran took the noise abatement spell off his ears and thankfully climbed the stairs, which had a clean sand-blasted look to them, on his way to bed.

  At the top he encountered Wizard Dench, the Bursar. Dench came shuffling across the landing, wearing old slippers and a moth-eaten gray dressing gown. “Oh, there you are, Corkoran,” he said. “I’ve been to your rooms to look for you.” For some reason Dench was carrying a black cockerel upside down by its legs.

  Corkoran stared at it, wondering if Dench was taking up black magic and if he ought to sack him on the spot. “Dench,” he said, “why are you carrying a black chicken by its legs?”

  “On the farm when I was a boy,” Dench replied, “we always carried them this way. It’s the best way to capture them. That’s why I was coming to look for you. I don’t know if I was dreaming or not—I was certainly asleep—but while it was climbing through my window, I got the idea it was a man. But when I woke up and looked, it was a cockerel. Running everywhere, making a dreadful noise. What do you think I should do with it?”

  “Wring its neck, I should think,” said Corkoran. “It’s only another student joke. The kitchen might be glad of it.”

  “Er, well, in that case,” said Dench. “That’s why I came away from the farm. I can’t bear to wring necks. Could you, er—”

  He held the hapless cock out to Corkoran. As Corkoran sighed and reached out to take it, the bird began twisting about, flapping its wings and screaming. Almost as if it understood, Corkoran thought.

  “Hang on,” he said. He seized a flailing wing and murmured the spell of inquiry again. “What are you?” he asked.

  “An assassin of Ampersand,” the bird replied. “And my curse on you for causing me to break my oath! A thousand, thousand curses—”

  “Shut up,” said Corkoran. “It’s another one of them, Dench. I caught one just now on the stairs. They must be partners. I think someone knew they were coming and set up traps for them. Not to worry. I know how to deal with them now.” He rapidly shrank the cockerel to the size of a bumblebee, caught it as it whirred free from Dench’s fingers, and stuffed it into a bag made of Inescapable Net, which he sent to join the other one hanging from the light fitment. “There. Now we can both go to bed.”

  “But, Corkoran!” Dench exclaimed. “We could be dead in our beds!”

  As Dench spoke, there was a thunderous banging on the main doors below. Dench clutched at Corkoran’s arm, and Corkoran said, “Oh, what now?”

  “Corkoran! Dench!” It was Finn’s voice, amplified by magic. “Are you all right in there?”

  Corkoran remembered that the doors had locked behind him. He went galloping down the stairs, with Dench in his slippers flip-flopping after. When he reached the place where the pit had been, there was such a stench of oranges that Corkoran automatically detoured in case the pit opened again. It had seemed to close, but he was taking no chances. Dench, however, flip-flopped safely straight through the spot and clasped Corkoran’s arm again.

  “Corkoran, what is Finn doing outside at this time of night?” he demanded as Corkoran wrenched the doors open. “And in pajamas?” he added.

  “Best not to ask,” Corkoran murmured.

  Finn’s pajamas were a wizardly purple flecked with little stars. He was shivering in the misty night air and obviously agitated. Behind him the courtyard was filled with almost every student in the place, wearing cloaks, gowns, coats, wraps, and sweaters over their nightclothes. They raised a cheer when they saw Corkoran and Dench unharmed in the doorway.

  “Thank the gods!” said Finn. “There was such a noise and such a strong sense of magic in here that we thought there must have been some sort of accident.”

  “There was a bit of trouble,” Corkoran admitted. He gestured Finn aside and addressed the students. “It’s all right, everyone. You can go back to bed now. Something tripped the alarms, that’s all. But Wizard Dench and I have made sure everything is quite safe now. Return to your rooms, please, before someone catches cold. There’s absolutely nothing to worry about.” He started to close the doors. “Are you coming in or staying out?” he asked Finn.

  “Er—” Finn’s eyes flicked to an extremely beautiful student girl standing shivering in a white silk gown. Melissa, Corkoran thought. No brain. “Oh, coming in, of course,” Finn said, with his teeth chattering. “I only went outside to see what was making all that noise. What was the trouble really?” he asked as he stepped inside.

  “Nothing much,” Corkoran answered airily. “Student prank. It’s all over now.”

  He went upstairs to bed with a strong, satisfied feeling of having been rather brave and behaved rather well. It was clear to him that he had all the intrepid qualities necessary for getting to the moon and dealing with what he found when he got there. And he had had an omen. The night had not been wasted. He fell asleep designing, as his custom was, a new flamboyant picture to put on his tie tomorrow.

  And it seemed to him that he jumped awake the next second.

  It was gray dawn: A warn-spell was dancing up and down his body on top of his blankets. “Urgent from Wizard Finn,” chanted the spell. “Urgent from Wizard Finn. Accident to one of your students. Staircase five, room three. Come quickly.”

  “Gods and little fishes!” groaned Corkoran. “Whatever next?” He surged up, swatted the spell, and climbed into jeans and a sweater. The morning was truly chilly. There was frost on Wizard Policant as Corkoran pelted crosswise through the courtyard. Staircase five was in the far corner near the main gate. The first thing Corkoran saw there was Elda. She was up on the roof, with all four sets of talons clamped on the gutter and her wings spread for balance, so that she could crane down with her head upside down through the window. Corkoran hated heights. It made him dizzy just to look at her. And he could see the gutter bending as he raced over there.

  “It was your fault as well,” she was saying into the window. “You would keep reading things out of The Red Book.”

  “It was not my fault so!” Ruskin’s voice rasped from inside.

  “Elda, get down!” Corkoran panted. “You’re breaking the gutter!”

  Elda’s head shot right way up in shock, and she lost her balance. Corkoran gasped. But Elda simply swirled a wing and flipped her tail and landed on her feet like a cat outside the entry to the staircase. She sat up and looked soulfully at Corkoran. “I’m too big to get inside the room, you see.”

  “Tough.” Corkoran shot past under her beak and pounded up the worn wooden stairs indoors. Room three was on the upper floor, with a second window that gave a pleasant view over the town. It was fairly bare, but full of people. Finn was there, and Olga, both of them in the blue tights and white jerkins of the Rowing Club. How does Finn find the energy? Corkoran wondered. Ruskin was there, standing on tiptoe to peer out the inner window at Elda. It was obvious, Corkoran thought, that Ruskin slept with all those bones in his pigtails. He could not have had time to plait them all in before he arrived here. Lukin and Claudia were there, too, red-eyed and sleepy, Lukin wrapped in Olga’s fur cloak and Claudia in one of those Empire garments that always reminded Corkoran of a very large bath towel. All of them except Ruskin were staring at the thing in the middle of the room.

  The thing—whatever it was—was a little taller than Lukin and quite smooth and rounded and domed. At first Corkoran thought it was made of strangely smooth tree bark, but as he went closer, he saw that the seeming bark was leather, leather in long, narrow strips with gold lettering on each strip. It reminded Corkoran of nothing so much as a beehive, but a beehive that seemed to be made of books. When he put out a finger with a magnifying spell on it to the nearest gold lettering, he found it read Advanced Protective Magic. Yes, definitely books. But quite the most alarming feature was the long, spear-shaped knife sticking out of one side of it.

  Corkoran’s touch seemed to disturb the
beehive. It waddled uncertainly in Ruskin’s direction. Dim cries and scrabbling came from deep inside it.

  “He’s not happy,” Ruskin stated.

  “Well, would you be?” Claudia asked. “He must have been in there for at least six hours.”

  “Who is it?” Corkoran demanded.

  “Felim,” said Lukin. “Assassins were after him, you see, and we tried to give the poor fellow some protections.” He gave an enormous yawn that reminded Corkoran irresistibly of last night’s pit.

  The yawn made Corkoran realize he was as sleepy as Lukin, but he began to understand the happenings of last night. “Why did you use library books?”

  “Those aren’t really library books,” Claudia explained. “Elda says the real books are still on the floor in her room.”

  “It just came out like this because stupid Elda built the pentagram out of books,” Ruskin growled. “And I don’t care what she says. It was not my fault!”

  “The important question is,” said Finn, “can you get it off him? I can’t. They can’t. They’re not even sure how they did it.”

  Corkoran rubbed his bristly chin. What a way to appear before students! And here was Finn all trim and clean-shaven, just as if he had never been outside half last night in purple pajamas. “Well, it’s going to take some divination then. Is the knife part of it? Whose is it?”

  “The knife’s nothing to do with it,” Olga said. “It belongs to the man hanging by one leg outside the window.”

  “What?” Finn looked at Corkoran, and Corkoran stared at Olga. She seemed utterly calm.

  Both wizards hurried to the window that looked out over the town.

  The man dangling outside was dressed in black like Corkoran’s attacker. The first part of him they saw was the sole of a black boot, which was gripped very tightly around the ankle by a thick orange rope that appeared to be welded to the windowsill. Finn put out a finger and very cautiously touched the rope. A familiar gust of oranges came to Corkoran’s nostrils. “This is like a steel hawser!” Finn said wonderingly.