Year of the Griffin (Derkholm 2)

“Oh, what now?” Corkoran started up the ladder, nearly fell off it when his robes tangled around his feet, and angrily conjured the robes away, back to his rooms. He arrived in the dim wooden loft with the janitor panting at his heels.

All the small, rounded pigeon doors at the end were open, letting in a chilly draft and enough light to show gray feathers and splashes of blood everywhere. Two pigeons lay on their backs with their pink claws uppermost, dead, right by Corkoran’s feet. Beyond them was the corpse of a mouse that seemed to have been pecked to death.

“I ain’t been drinking,” said the janitor.

“I’m sure you haven’t,” Corkoran said, stunned.

“You got to believe what I saw,” the janitor asserted. “I heard this noise, see, as I was on my rounds, and I climbs up to investigate. And—you got to believe this—there was battle and mayhem going on, hordes of mice going for the pigeons and the pigeons flying every which way and some of them fighting back. So I jumps inside here and shouts, and the mice all run away down between the floorboards. Then—you got to believe this!—I see a lot of little tiny men at the end there. Climbing about opening the pigeon doors, some were, and some of them was pushing pigeons out through the doors and two of them were fixing a message to another pigeon. When they sees I see them, they push that pigeon out, too, and run for it. Wriggle down cracks in the floor, just like the mice. And I’ve not touched a drop of drink, I swear.”

“Tell me,” asked Corkoran, “were these little men dressed all over in black?”

“They were and all,” said the janitor. “That’s why I didn’t see them first off.”

&n

bsp; “Then I believe you completely,” said Corkoran. He looked glumly around the shambles in the loft. The assassins had teamed up with the ex-pirates, by the look of things, and from what the janitor had seen, the assassins had just sent a pigeon for reinforcements, while making sure there were no pigeons that the University could send for help. Corkoran shivered. For a moment he was almost tempted to send Finn or Wermacht to ask Querida to come here quickly. But no. Querida was such a tyrant. She was almost certain, if she came, to reorganize the University around him, and she would start by canceling his moonshot, Corkoran knew it. Much better to manage by himself. He had dealt with assassins and pirates once. He could do it again. “Are there any pigeons left at all?” he asked the janitor.

There was a stirring in the rafters over his head. “Croo. Some of us. Up here,” a warbling voice replied.

Corkoran raised mage light in one hand and discovered five decidedly battered birds crouched along the highest beam. Some of his anxiety left him. “I’m going to put the strongest possible protections around you—particularly you,” he said, pointing to the one that seemed the least battered. “I need you to take a message for me.” The bird hunched a bit but obediently fluttered down to the rail beside the message desk. “You,” Corkoran said to the janitor, “go and get all the mousetraps you can find and set them up all around this loft.”

“Think that’ll work?” the janitor asked dubiously. “These looked to be brainy mice.”

“They’ll work when I’ve put spells on them,” Corkoran said grimly. “Killer-spells.”

“Right.” The janitor collected the three corpses for disposal and clumped away down the ladder.

Corkoran got to work putting protection around the remaining pigeons. He enhanced it upon his chosen pigeon and then, since the bird did look very battered, added a strong speed-spell as well. The ink for writing messages had been spilled in the affray, and all the little slips of paper had been torn up. The assassins had been making darned sure no one could send for help. Too bad. Corkoran conjured more ink and paper. Then he wrote a careful and accurate account of his conversation with the two senators, their hints and their offer of money, and dwelt particularly on their final threat, citing the dwarfs as witnesses to the whole interview. He addressed it to Emperor Titus. He did not ask the Emperor for money or for help from any assassins the senators planned to send. That would have been crude. He was sure he could rely on the Emperor’s gratitude for both.

“Now,” he said as he fixed the flimsy paper into the tube on the bird’s leg, “you are to take this to Condita in the Empire and deliver it to Emperor Titus. The Emperor in person and no one else. Have you got that?”

“I’ll try,” croodled the bird. “I’ve heard they bag you in butterfly nets and take you to the Senate down there.”

“Avoid that,” said Corkoran. “Find the Emperor.” He took the pigeon’s warm, light bulk in both hands and carried it to the open pigeon doors. “Don’t let anyone lay hands on you until you find the Emperor.” He let the bird climb to the small doorstep and watched it wing rather wearily away.

The janitor arrived back then with an armload of mousetraps. Corkoran spent quite a time setting them up with some distinctly vicious spells, while the four remaining pigeons craned down from their beam to watch. When Corkoran finally climbed away down the ladder, the birds exchanged looks, crooned at one another, and fluttered down to the doors. Corkoran had hardly reached the bottom of the ladder before the pigeons were gone, too, winging painfully away to Derkholm.

The sun was setting by the time Corkoran reached his lab. He turned on the lights with a sigh of relief. And stood with his hand on the switches, appalled. The assassins and their mouse allies had been here, too. His notes and calculations had been gnawed into confetti-sized scraps and tossed about in heaps. His experiments for the moonsuit had been broken and spilled and emptied all over the floor. But worst and most heartbreaking of all, his precious moonship, his carefully designed and cherished moonship, which had taken him three years and untold amounts of money to build—and had been two-thirds finished by now—had been hacked to bits. Shining shards of it lay in a heap by the window. Corkoran could see hundreds of very small gleaming sword cuts on each shard. Those assassins must have sat in their cage, day by day, learning exactly what things were most important to him.

Corkoran stared at it all numbly.

ELEVEN

LUKIN HELD THE door of Elda’s concert hall open for Olga, then shut it and leaned against it while Olga slowly shed her cloak. He felt weak. The others, scattered around the room, watched him anxiously.

“Phew!” he said. “You hit the bull’s-eye, Elda. Ruskin, you are legally my slave, and I’ve got a bill of sale to prove it.” He flourished his signed and sealed parchment. “Regard yourself as a citizen of Luteria from now on.”

“Wey-HAY!” Ruskin bounded to his small legs, pigtails flying, and did a clacking dance of triumph with Felim. In the course of it the cloakrack got knocked over. Claudia let it lie. Her position was nothing like so certain as Ruskin’s. The fact that no legionaries had come to arrest her was small comfort. The senators could be starting extradition proceedings in the city at this moment. She huddled among the cushions on the stage, wondering what to do about it.

“You stick close to me,” Elda told her, picking up the cloakrack. “Fetch your things, and sleep in here from now on. I can handle those soldiers.”

Olga was not joining in the rejoicing any more than Claudia was. She was standing near the door beside the dropped furry heap of her cloak, staring into nowhere. “I think,” Lukin said to her, “that I handled those dwarfs rather well.”

“Do you?” Olga said.

“Yes, I do,” Lukin said, hurt by her lack of enthusiasm. “Dwarfs are such tricksy beggars. You have to pin them down in all directions. I was afraid they were going to sheer off even before the bargaining started, when you were telling them how you got the notebook. You sounded so wooden, as if you were reciting a lesson you’d learned or something.”

Olga whirled around on him in a swirl of hair. “Oh, did I? Mr. Crown Prince Lukin! And how was I supposed to behave when you were lording around telling lies about dowries and brides-to-be? Was I supposed to simper? Was I supposed to say, ‘Oh, yes, Lukin’s father’s just dying to have a pirate in the family. And a mouse’?”