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