Year of the Griffin (Derkholm 2)

The griffins had landed here and there about the courtyard, apparently randomly, but somehow in positions where they cut Elda and her friends off from every doorway. Elda did not need to turn her head to see the ragged brown-and-white male behind her, looming in front of the door of her concert hall. Being able to see behind you was an advantage that griffins had over humans, but as Elda realized now, it was no advantage at all with other griffins. They were all so large, too, at least as big as Callette, and filled the air with raffish aggressiveness. Otherwise they were an ill-matched lot. The main one, who was now strutting toward Elda, jeeringly swinging his tail, was streaky chestnut with a shaggy dark brown crest and bold yellow eyes. Another was pigeon colors, but so unkempt that the pinks and greens on his gray neck barely showed at all. One was plain dull brown, and the fifth ought to have been white, but he was so dirty he looked yellowish. At any other time Elda would have been marveling that there should turn out to be so many kinds of griffin, but here and now she was plain scared.

“Where’s Callette?” the strutting griffin demanded. “I know she came this way. She doesn’t escape Jessak Atreck just by crossing the ocean.”

“You can see she’s not here,” said Elda.

The griffin’s yellow eyes flicked around the courtyard. “She’s hiding. There are at least four doors here big enough for her to get through.”

“Want me to search the place, Jessak?” the off-white griffin asked.

Jessak looked at Elda with his scruffy head on one side and pretended to consider. “No. This little yellow cat can tell me. Can’t you, runtlet?”

“No,” said Elda. “Even if I could, I wouldn’t.”

Jessak’s answer to this was to extend his neck, so that it became improbably long and scrawny, with chestnut feathers sticking out all around it, until his beak was pointing into the middle of Elda’s forehead and his yellow eyes were glaring into hers. He raised a forefoot and pretended to scratch his beak, showing talons at least twice the size of Elda’s and wickedly sharp. “Yes, you will, runtlet.”

Claudia tried to distract Jessak by calling out, rather shrilly, “What do you want with Callette, anyway?”

Jessak did not bother to move or answer, but the brown-and-white griffin said, “Jessak’s sworn to marry Callette and teach her manners. She scratched his—”

“Shut up!” said Jessak, still glaring at Elda.

“It’s a funny kind of human, anyway,” grumbled the brown-and-white griffin. “Greenish. Shall I tear it up?”

“When I’ve got Callette,” said Jessak. “You want to keep your eyes, yellow cat, you tell me where she is.”

Elda simply remained as still as a statue, as still as a cat at a mousehole, and did not answer. Her scalp and the line of her backbone ached, her hackles were up so high. She understood exactly why Callette had said this griffin made her feel soft and squeamish inside. The smell of him, the way he glared, and the great eagle-lion shape of him were making strong primitive demands that Elda had never met before. He made her, like a cat or a bird, or even like a lioness, want to lie down and give in. Her insides crawled with what seemed to be lust. But griffins were a higher order of being than cats or eagles, as Elda remembered Mum’s firmly telling her once when she caught Elda chasing mice, and the way Jessak was deliberately making her feel was beginning to enrage her.

Behind the brown-and-white griffin, in the doorway of the concert hall, Felim, Olga, and Lukin rather frantically tried a third spell. They had tried to open one of Lukin’s pits under each griffin, and then to turn the invaders into mice, and now they tried a simple banishment spell. This one had no effect on the invaders either. “I do not understand this,” Felim whispered. “They seem to have some kind of magical immunity.”

Ruskin, standing beside Elda, had discovered the same thing and then remembered that dwarflore stated that griffins in the old days could not be touched by magic. “These griffins are throwbacks,” he rumbled disgustedly. “Cave griffins! Why don’t they just go away?”

Jessak’s beak stabbed around at Ruskin with incredible speed. Ruskin sprang backward. Elda, beginning to be really angry, clapped her right wing over the dwarf and hauled him against her flank, glaring at Jessak while she did so. The other griffins snapped their beaks, clapped their wings, and screamed with amusement.

“Ho, ho, ho!” howled the pigeon-colored one. “She’s ready to be a mother, isn’t she? Can I have her, Jessak?”

That did it. Elda’s building rage erupted and exploded at the full pitch of her lungs. She had a very powerful voice. As Derk had often ruefully pointed out, the youngest in a family of vociferous griffins had to be the loudest in order to get heard at all. “You disgusting crew of horrible little birds! You barge in here, you strut about, you do your best to bully and frighten everyone, and you haven’t even the decency to wash! Or even preen. You stink! And then you have the cheek to think that my sister would have anything to do with you! You, when you’re so filthy and so rude and haven’t three brain cells among the lot of you, you think you can come in here and lord it over decent people....”

There was a lot more than this. Once Elda got going, she got going with a vengeance. Jessak, still with his neck stretched out, put his head on one side and pretended to admire her, which made Elda angrier than ever.

“Even your ancestral pigeon would be ashamed of you!” she screamed. “The half-breed vulture you have for a grandmother must be writhing in her muck heap. And your mother, who was obviously a street-walking baboon or an unusually stupid civet cat, probably died of humiliation long ago!”

There was a sound like a whip crack beside her. Air blasted Elda’s wing feathers sideways. And, to Elda’s enormous relief, her human brother Blade appeared beside her. “Carry on, Elda,” he said. “Keep their attention. You’re doing wonderfully. We got your message. Kit’ll be here in a moment.”

TWELVE

ELDA FILLED HER lungs joyfully and screamed again. “Your grandfathers were all rats, and they were educated by jackals!”

But Jessak and his friends were no longer listening. They were looking at Blade and drawing together into a huddle in what looked very like dismay. “You again!” said Jessak.

Blade folded his arms and tapped with one booted foot. “Yes. Me again. I warned you when they exiled you that if you came over here, I’d make you sorry. And I will. I give you a count of ten to get out of this place. One. Two.”

Elda looked fondly down at Blade as he stood and counted. Blade these days was tall and rather thin, with straight, fairish hair and a straight, fairish face that usually held the same mild, friendly look that his father, Derk’s, did. You would not think to look at him that he was one of the four most powerful wizards in the world. Elda just wished she could learn to be anything like so good.

“Five. Six,” said Blade. “Seven.”

Elda noticed that Blade was keeping half an eye on the evening sky above the Spellman Building as he counted. She kept half an eye there, too. Blade and Kit usually worked as a pair. Sure enough, there was a dark bird-shaped speck against the sunset there, and it grew very rapidly larger and darker. Kit was flying flat out.

“Eight,” said Blade. “Nine.”