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.