Wermacht glared at him and turned to put both hands on two of the cloakrack’s battered wooden hooks. He grasped them firmly, closed his eyes, and concentrated. The next instant, both Wermacht and the cloakrack were surrounded in a bluish lightning flash. There was a strong smell of ozone. The instant after that, Wermacht and the cloakrack appeared to melt into one another, folding downward as they melted. By the time everyone had blinked and exclaimed, the only thing left of Wermacht or the cloakrack was a large, leather-topped bar stool standing in the aisle on four chunky wooden legs.

“Oh, dear,” Flury said, blinking with the rest of them. “I’d no idea that was going to happen.” Elda, all the same, had the feeling that he was not nearly as surprised as he claimed to be.

Claudia’s immediate action was to retreat experimentally to the other side of the lab. To her enormous relief, the bar stool made no move to follow her. It just stood there, looking woebegone. The reaction of everyone else was almost as swift and entirely practical. Everyone except Elda put notebooks back into bags and pens into pockets, and while Elda was staring at Flury and realizing that he was no sort of hallucination at all, everyone else was cheerfully making for the door. They were almost there when Flury said, “Why are you all going? Don’t you want to learn magic?”

“Yes, of course we do,” someone told him joyfully, “but no one can learn magic from a bar stool.”

“I can teach you, though,” Flury said, looking hurt and injured.

The students looked at one another. Somehow they all found that they did not like to hurt Flury’s feelings. They shrugged, turned around, and sat at the desks again, where they resignedly got out notebooks. Flury prowled to the front and sat on his haunches by the lectern, still big, but not quite as big as he had been when he towered over Wermacht. He looked at the students. They stared dubiously back.

“What have you done so far?” Flury asked them. “Setting wards? Pattern magic? Power sharing? Conjuring? Numerology? Theurgy? Scrying? Raising lone power?” Heads were shaken at each question. “Conjuring fire then?” Flury asked as if this were a last resort. “Levitation then? Translocation? Crystallography? Bespelling objects?” Heads were shaken again. No one knew what half these things were. “May I look at one of your notebooks to see what you have done then?” Flury asked rather hopelessly.

Melissa, who was as obliging as she was beautiful, handed him hers. Flury flicked over pages covered with Melissa’s round writing with little hearts for dots over the is and frowned. A frown on even a mild-faced griffin like Flury was a menacing thing. Everyone sat very still, except for Elda, who was used to Kit. Mara often said that when Kit frowned, the universe cracked. Elda simply twiddled her talons and wondered how, and why, Flury was never the same size for more than five minutes. He was about her own size, or a little larger, as he flicked pages and frowned. “Wermacht seems to take a lot of classes,” he murmured. “You should have got through more than this.” Eventually he handed the notebook back. “Well,” he said, “I’d better invent some way of making up for lost time. If you don’t mind pushing these desks back and standing in a ring holding hands, we’ll set wards by sharing power and kill two humans with one stone.”

Notebooks were put away again, and everyone rather cautiously did as Flury suggested. The caution was reasonable, Elda thought. Flury was obviously a wizard as well as a griffin. But after that she and everyone else were so absorbed and busy that no one had time to feel nervous, and the rest of the hour passed before they were aware. They used their joined power to raise wards around the North Lab in six ways that Flury said were elementary and they should have known already. Then they used their joined power to scry. All of them saw, clear as clear, as if they were inside the various rooms, Corkoran sitting in his lab, the librarian resetting Inventory-spells, and the buttery bar with a few idle students in there drinking beer. Flury said the results would be better when they learned to use crystals. Then he had them conjure into the North Lab all the bar stools that no one was actually sitting on. After that the hour was suddenly over. The top of Wermacht’s hourglass was empty of every grain and the bottom full of sand.

“Do you know, I actually learned something!” Melissa was heard proclaiming in surprised tones while everyone was leaving.

Someone returned all the stools to the buttery bar, including Wermacht, although nobody liked to sit on Wermacht until the bar became crowded later that evening. He was easily distinguishable by being taller and gloomier than any of the other stools. Elda, who was couched comfortably against the wall with a straw in her beak and Claudia leaning on her beaming because she was free of that cloakrack at last, looked at that stool and wondered if Flury had intended this to happen to Wermacht. Flury was a total mystery, she thought. Around her everyone else talked of mousetraps or the moon. Ruskin had designed what he felt was the perfect mousetrap, until Olga pointed out, with what seemed to be family feeling, that these mice had human brains.

“Hmm,” Ruskin grunted. “You have a point there. I’ll think again.” And he joined Felim in considering how to send Corkoran to the moon.

Felim seemed to be becoming obsessed with the moonshot. Elda was embarrassed. “You don’t need to worry about it,” she protested.

“But it is a superb intellectual problem,” Felim said. “The things we learned this afternoon, particularly the notion of several people combining powers, is, I think, the key to the problem.”

“You mean, several people combining to do something like translocation?” Lukin asked.

“It beats me why Corkoran didn’t plan to translocate there, anyway,” Ruskin growled. “It’s the obvious way.”

“Do you think that maybe he can’t?” Claudia suggested. “Oh, no, we saw him translocate, didn’t we, Olga, the day Felim was inside the books?”

“Yes, but he probably can’t go very far,” Elda said. “My dad can’t. He can only go five miles at his best. The moon’s further than that, isn’t it?”

Felim laughed. “Many thousands of miles further. This is why a boost from several people is certainly necessary.”

“But remember there’s no air there,” Olga put in. “You’d need to translocate him in an enclosed bubble of air and you’d have to be sure there was enough air for him. How would you do that?”

“By compressing it?” Lukin suggested. “If you had the outside of your bubble made of squashed-up air that could be gradually released, that would hold the bubble firm, too, wouldn’t it?”

“Darned good idea!’ Ruskin said. He and Claudia began calculations to find out how much air Corkoran would need, while Lukin worked out spells that might compress it, and Felim tried to calculate how many people it would take combining their powers to send the lot as far as the moon.

They’re all doing it! Elda thought. And they’re only doing it because they thi

nk I’m still in love with Corkoran. She would have squirmed if Claudia had not been leaning on her. It seemed too late to explain that she was simply sorry for Corkoran. She spent the whole of the next day in a state of mingled guilt and embarrassment, while calculations and discussions went on obsessively around her, until she simply had to explain to someone.

“You don’t need to send Corkoran to the moon just because I said so,” she said to Lukin as they sat facing one another across a chessboard at Chess Club that evening.

Lukin moved a knight and took it back again quickly as he saw Elda would have his queen if he moved it. “It’s not on your orders, if that’s what you think. You just produced the right idea. It’s to show Corkoran that our adaptation of spells really does work. Felim simply couldn’t believe it when Corkoran gave him such a low mark for his essay, he said he filled it with the best stuff he knew and Corkoran simply spat in his face. He says it’s his honor at stake. And Ruskin was stunned. Did you see his face when he looked at his mark? Or Claudia’s? Claudia went grass green, and her eyes seemed to swallow up the rest of her face.”

“What about you and Olga, though?” Elda slyly moved her queen one square.

“Seen that!” said Lukin, moving up a high priest. “Olga was furious. Corkoran had the cheek to say there probably wasn’t such a thing as air elementals. It really upset her. And I’ve always thought Corkoran needs showing that he’s running in blinkers.”

“Filbert hates blinkers,” Elda agreed. “I was a bit sad about my essay, too, but that wasn’t why I thought of sending Corkoran to the moon.”

“I know,” Lukin said kindly. “You’re far too nice, Elda. And then Flury comes along and shows us how to combine power and that was that. Check.”

Tags: Diana Wynne Jones Derkholm Fantasy
Source: readsnovelonline.net