“Typical of this place!” exclaimed the student who had suggested the fire. “There must be a birds’ ne—”
“Hush!” said everyone else.
Some of the coughing was coming from inside the chimney.
Everyone backed away in a rush, as two long black-clad legs appeared in the fireplace, groping for the ground. Melissa screamed.
And Wermacht strode into the lab just as a wildly coughing assassin ducked out from under the mantelpiece and advanced on the students with his dagger raised. There were screams from others besides Melissa. Elda, Olga, Claudia, Ruskin, and Lukin plunged amid the panic to the place where they had last seen Felim and relaxed in relief when they found him safely encased in the beehive of books again. Elda, unable to stop, charged on into the beehive and sent it reeling and blundering among the desks. A lot of desks were knocked over, some of them by Elda.
Behind Elda, the assassin reached out to take the nearest student hostage. With a certain inevitability, it was Melissa he grabbed at, and Melissa went into hysterics of terror. “Save me! Save me!” she screamed, and went on screaming it even though the assassin’s black-gloved hand never reached her. Instead, the hand, followed by the arm, followed swiftly by the rest of the man, dissolved into little flakes of sooty ash. The flakes swirled about but hung together in a vague man shape that dithered against the mantelpiece, as if the assassin were wondering what in the world had happened to him.
The greenish blush swept across Claudia’s face as she recognized her burned-grass spell. Melissa turned, still screaming, to see what everyone was staring at and saw what seemed to be a black ashy ghost reaching for her. Screaming even harder, she rushed for the door. Since Wermacht was standing just in front of the door, stock-still and staring, Melissa rushed into Wermacht and flung her arms around him. “Save me!” she shrieked.
As every male person in the University afterward agreed, and this included the cook, the janitor, the porter, and half the office staff, anyone else who was lucky enough to have Melissa fling her arms around him would have made the most of it. Not Wermacht. He unwrapped Melissa and shoved her aside. He said, “This is a ridiculous fuss over nothing. You with the secondhand jacket and you with the armor, pick up those desks. And you come out from inside those books, whoever you are.”
“He can’t,” Olga explained. “They only go away when the danger’s over.”
Wermacht stroked his beard smugly. “There is no danger,” he said.
At this everyone gasped and tried to explain that the ghostly figure made up of whirling ashes was a trained assassin and that the fact that Felim was still inside the beehive showed there was danger.
“There is no danger,” Wermacht repeated, against the chorus of agitated voices. “Go and sit at your desks, all of you. Corkoran will be here shortly. I have sent him a warn-spell. Wait quietly until he gets here. Let’s have no more silly screaming and rushing about.”
“The man’s mad!” Ruskin said as everyone moved nervously to sit down.
When Corkoran swept into the North Lab with his pink iris tie streaming over one shoulder, he was slightly surprised to find all the students sitting uneasily at a somewhat uneven row of desks—uneven because a large space had to be left for the beehive standing in the middle of the lab—while Wermacht stood with his arms proudly folded beside the peculiar whirling figure on the hearth.
“Ah, Corkoran,” Wermacht said in his smarmiest manner, “I’ve neutralized the assassin for you, as you see, but I didn’t like to ash him completely without word from you, so I’ve kept him under my spell until you got here.”
There was a gasp of pure indignation from Claudia. Her face was almost olive-colored as she whispered to Olga, “It was my spell! It’s almost the only one I’ve done that worked!”
Corkoran was saying at the same moment, “Thanks, Wermacht. Very good of you.” He had a bag of Inescapable Net ready for this one. He reached out and rather tentatively tweaked at the nearest twirling flake of ash in the creature’s arm. To his relief, the assassin promptly became a two-inch-high pile of whirling dust. Corkoran blew it into his bag with a minor draft spell and no trouble at all. He stood up, smiled soothingly around at the students, and walked away.
A slight thumping made him turn in the doorway. Felim was now standing where the beehive had been. Felim’s face was red, and his usually smooth black hair was sticking out in all directions, but he was grinning at Elda.
“Five down,” Corkoran heard someone say as he hurried away. “Two to go.” He hoped whoever said that was wrong. He had had enough alarms. And the rat cage was quite crowded when he tipped the little dust storm into it. He turned it back into a rat-size man to prevent it trying to squeeze through the bars or the net, and the cage seemed more crowded than ever. Yes, he thought, as he went back to the careful magics of the moonship, five assassins is quite enough.
An hour later the students boiled out of the North Lab into the courtyard, full of indignation. Every one of them was sufficiently attuned to magic to know that Wermacht had not cast a spell of any kind on the assassin. “Taking the credit just to suck up to Corkoran!” most of them were saying. “What a creep!” Even Melissa was saying it, and she was more indignant than anyone. “Did you see the way he treated me?” she kept asking. “I might have been a dog with mange!”
“I must say I am highly interested that everyone else has arrived at the same opinion of Wermacht as we have,” Felim remarked. “It suggests that our judgment was sound.”
“I’m just downright relieved that the protections came back around you,” said Olga. “My heart stood still when I saw those legs coming down the chimney. What’s the matter, Claudia?”
“Nothing—or at least I have the most dreadful mixed feelings,” Claudia said. “You don’t know how good it feels to do a spell that works for once! But then I think of the way it turned a person into ash and I feel dreadful! And I keep hoping Corkoran isn’t going to do anything terrible to him.”
“Of course he isn’t,” said Ruskin.
“He’s probably simply going to release him into the wild or something,” Lukin said soothingly. “That’s the obvious thing to do. And let’s hope those protections go on working because there are still two more assassins somewhere.”
Everyone knew there were two more. The entire student population, not to speak of the kitchen staff and the janitor, spent the rest of the day jumping at sudden noises and looking nervously over their shoulders. Felim’s friends arranged that he should never be alone. “But I am quite all right! The protection is better than armor,” Felim protested when Ruskin insisted on coming with him every time he went to the toilet.
“Yes, but do you know how long the spell will last?” Ruskin retorted.
The rest of Felim’s friends insisted that he spend the day in Elda’s room, where there was space for everyone.
“I don’t pretend to be a fighter,” Lukin said, “but I can open a pit anytime, and Olga can fetch monsters. And if all else fails, Ruskin and Elda can take the assassins apart.”
“I notice you don’t mention me,” Claudia said wryly, and Elda, who was couched on the floor amid the shriveling remains of the spells, carefully penning an extremely argumentative essay, looked up to say, “I don’t like the idea of taking people apart. I never have. But I’ll try.”