“You can write them out for me here,” said Titus, “and I’ll sign and seal them now—and at the same time, I’d like you to write out the Declaration of Martial Law. Could you do both in the short form? I’m in a hurry.”
Cornelius calculated, looking along the rows of his clerks. “We’ll need—let me see—All of you do two copies of both, that’s two hundred of each. Get writing, everybody. Short forms are on the end shelf. Somebody find the Great Seal and the sealing wax. Hurry!”
There was a scurrying for parchment, and for forms to copy, a slapping as parchment went down on the tables, followed by the quiet, swift scritting of pens. Titus caught the boy who fetched the Great Seal and sent him off to lock the door of the large office, where those who had come to him after breakfast were, he hoped, still waiting.
“Nice thought,” commented Agricola. “But I think your cook’s honest, or you wouldn’t be standing here. That reminds me: your Personal Guard. Those boys are bound to make trouble when I start arresting their granddads.”
Titus smiled blissfully. “They’re standing in rows in the exercise yard, waiting for me to inspect them. Just detail someone to keep going to them with a message that I’m on my way. With luck you can keep them there all day.”
Agricola laughed about this all the time Titus was signing the parchments and passing them to Cornelius to have the Great Seal properly affixed to each. He was still grinning as he collected the sheaf of orders for martial law in both his muscular arms, gave them a shake to make sure the red disks with griffin rampant on them all hung down one side, and put his square chin on the heap to hold it down. He looked sideways at the heap of audit orders left on the table. “Squads to accompany the auditors will be here in ten minutes,” he promised Cornelius. He nodded to the rows of grinning clerks. “Good hunting,” he said as he followed the Emperor outside. “Pigeons,” he added to Titus while they hurried across the yard, “to the rest of the legions to get them here soonest, while the home-based legions surround the Senate. Senatorial legion to be confined to barracks now, and the Personal Guard the same as soon as they smell a rat. Criers to announce martial law. Do me a favor, my Emperor, and come back soon, because it’s going to be chaos, rumors, and mayhem until you do.”
“I’ll try,” Titus promised, and pelted for the stable yard. He took both horses, telling the surprised groom that he had still not made up his mind which to ride, and arrived at the north gate almost at the same time as his cavalry escort.
The pigeon meanwhile, having fed and preened and found itself in perfect health, took off for home. It circled the palace once to find its direction, passing over soldiers seething in all directions, except for some finely dressed ones who were standing in rows in a big space, looking rather hot and bored, and then, finding north, it turned toward Derkholm. It sheered away from the Senate building, having no wish for someone to scoop it up in a butterfly net. There were soldiers on its roof by then, and more quietly gathering in the roads all around it, but the rest of the city seemed full of ordinary, busy people in the usual way. Just outside Condita, the pigeon flew over a small troop of Imperial horsemen trotting secretly and sedately through an industrial suburb and dipped its wings in greeting. Titus waved cheerfully back. He was wondering just how long the Personal Guard would stand in the sun before someone came and told them that the Emperor was missing, believed poisoned. That was when Agricola would really have his hands full.
FIFTEEN
AT THE UNIVERSITY Corkoran sat in his ruined lab, wondering whether to end it all. Sometimes he held his throbbing head in both hands—this was on the occasions it seemed about to fall apart in segments, li
ke one of Derk’s oranges—and sometimes he simply stared miserably at the remains of his sabotaged moonship. A lot of the time he just stared at the wall. It seemed a yellow sort of color that he did not remember its usually being. He was thinking that when he had the energy, he would climb to the top of the Observatory tower and throw himself off, when someone opened the lab door.
“I told you I didn’t need you,” he said, assuming it was his assistant.
“You haven’t told me anything yet,” the intruder replied.
It was a much larger voice than Corkoran’s assistant’s, with windy undertones and shrill overtones that made Corkoran shudder. He turned around—too quickly; it made him yelp—and saw the front parts of a strange griffin sticking through the doorway. He remembered uneasily then that Finn had said something about a plague of griffins. But at least the creature was a soothing shade of brown. Even its unusual heavy-lidded eyes were a restful mud color, and its feathers, though crisply glossy, were no harder to look at than the crust of a loaf. “What do you want?” Corkoran said. “Who are you?”
The griffin ducked its great head apologetically. “I’m Flury. I want to join up as a student here.”
“You can’t,” Corkoran told him. Or was it her? It was hard to tell from just the front view. “You’re too late. Term has already started. You’ll have to wait until next autumn now.”
“But I didn’t know. I’m from the other continent,” Flury protested. “Can’t you make an allowance for that?”
The voice grated on Corkoran. It was too big. “No,” he said. “Apply next spring with proof of magical attainments, and we’ll see what we can do. I suppose you do have some magical abilities?”
Flury looked shy. “Some,” he admitted.
“And you’ll find the fees are quite high,” said Corkoran. “Have you money?”
“Quite a lot,” Flury admitted bashfully.
“Good. Then come back next spring,” said Corkoran. “Now go away.”
There was a fraught pause. The door frame creaked. “I can’t,” Flury said. “I’m stuck.”
“Oh, ye gods!” said Corkoran. They really shouldn’t trouble him with griffins when he felt like death and had just remembered he had a lecture to give. He needed help. And consideration. At this it occurred to him that Healers Hall had headache remedies. They had soft hands and soothing voices, too. That was what he needed. Hoping that if he took no notice and went away, Flury would prove to be a monstrous hallucination, Corkoran stood up and translocated to find a healer.
Seeing the room suddenly empty, Flury shrugged, causing the door frame to jiggle. “Oh, well,” he said. “I tried.” He put his head sideways, listening in case Corkoran was on his way back with levers or spells to get him out of the doorway. When it was apparent that Corkoran had simply forgotten him, Flury shook himself loose from the door frame and advanced into the lab. He was now about the size of a small lion. This put his beak at an entirely convenient height for sniffing along benches at the ruins of the moonsuit experiments. These puzzled him extremely. So did the torn-up calculations on the floor. He picked quite a few up, held them together where they seemed to fit, and examined them. He shook his head, baffled. Then he found the rat cage, with the Inescapable Net still hanging off it and its bars bent. He put his beak right inside it and closed his eyes to analyze the smells he found there.
“Ah,” he said. “That’s what I’ve been smelling. They were here for some time before they got out and started lurking. Can’t say that I blame them really.”
He then padded across to the remains of the moonship and spent some time carefully inspecting what was left of it. He nodded sadly. “Waste of effort,” he said. “It would never have flown anywhere, anyway.”
Then he padded away and carefully shut the door behind him.
Elda was surprised to see Flury at Corkoran’s lecture, bulking huge and beach-leaf brown near the back. It was surprising also that no one else seemed to notice him and even more surprising that he fitted in. The lecture hall was crammed. By breakfast time every student in the University knew that Corkoran’s moonship was in ruins and Corkoran himself devastated.
Breakfast had been a disaster because the mice had got into the kitchens. Aided by vigorous miniature assassins, they had got into all the cupboards and even into the cold store, where they sucked eggs, chewed bacon, squeezed fruit, poured out milk, and split open bags of cereal. Almost the only thing left to eat was bread—which had luckily been set to rise in a heavy iron oven—and there was only black coffee to drink.