“Then you can stand there until you do, and write your notes up afterward,” Wermacht told her. “The rest of you describe the process as exactly as you can.”
Everyone wrote, while Claudia stood there miserably dangling her flame, until Elda remembered her own experience and hissed across at Claudia, “Ask yourself questions, like Policant.”
Claudia stared at Elda for a moment and then said, “Oh!” The flame vanished. Claudia sat down and scribbled angrily.
“I can see I’m going to be ‘you with the jinx’ from now on,” she said to the others as they crowded out into the courtyard.
“Join the club,” said Lukin. “Why doesn’t somebody assassinate that man?”
Felim flinched and went gray.
“It’s all right, Felim,” Elda said. “You’ve got protections like nobody ever before.”
Elda proved to be right.
Around midnight that night Corkoran locked his lab and thought about going to bed. His rooms were in the Spellman Building on the same floor as the library, along with Finn’s and Dench the Bursar’s, who were the only other wizards who actually lived in the University. All the rest of the staff lived in the town. Corkoran strolled across the courtyard in a chilly, fine mist that raised goose bumps below the sleeves of his T-shirt, and found the University looking its most romantic. It was utterly quiet—which, considering the usual habits of students, was quite surprising—with just a few golden lights showing in the turreted black buildings around him. These stood like cutouts again
st a dark blue sky, only faintly picked out in places by misty lamps from the town beyond the walls. Better still, the moon was riding above the mist, just beside the tower of the Observatory. She was only about half there, a sort of peachy slice above a faint bluish puff of cloud, and Corkoran was ravished by the sight. He stood leaning against the statue of Wizard Policant, gazing up at the place where he so longed to be. So very far away, so very difficult to get to. But his moonship was about half built now. It would only take another few years.
“I’m going to do it,” he said to the statue of Wizard Policant, and slapped it on its stone legs.
As if that were a signal, a monstrous noise broke out. If you were to beat forty gongs and a hundred tin tea trays with spades and axes, while ringing ten templefuls of bells and throwing a thousand cartloads of bricks and a similar number of saucepans down from the Observatory tower, you might have some notion of the noise. Mixed in among this sound, and almost drowned by the din, a great voice seemed to be shouting. DANGER, it bellowed. INVASION.
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.”