SIXTEEN

QUERIDA ARRIVED AT lunchtime. As the house she owned in the city was let out to a friend, she went straight to Healers Hall, where she arranged stabling for Hobnob and lodging for herself, and then made sure that she was invited to lunch there. She entered the University an hour later at the head of a procession of three young healers, each of whom carefully carried a cat basket.

Flury peered down at her from the roof of the Spellman Building. He could see at once who and what she was. But Querida’s expression was that of a snake looking for something to sink its fangs into. He decided to give her a while to get settled.

Querida made straight for the Council Chamber. When Flury crawled in there, at his very smallest and meekest and least noticeable, there were already three dead mice laid in a row under the table by Querida’s tiny feet. Querida had piles of paper and ledgers in front of her on the table, together with a saucer of milk—Sabrina having refused utterly to eat on the floor after the trials of the journey—and she had Wizard Dench and Wizard Finn standing on either side of her. Both wizards looked thoroughly miserable.

“I can just about forgive the upper floor of this building being turned into luxury flats for wizards,” Querida was saying, “but the two other things I will never forgive. Dench, be kind enough to explain how you came to let Corkoran squander all this money.”

Wizard Dench squirmed. “The moonshot, you know. It’s a very prestigious project.”

“Prestigious!” hissed Querida. “Prestigious! Corkoran is no more able to get to the moon than you are. And you know it!”

Flury went smaller yet and tiptoed away to a corner. He could tell he had not given Querida nearly enough time to get settled.

“As for you, Finn,” Querida continued, “had you no idea that the wards here—Who are you?” she snapped at Flury. “You there! Stop crawling about like that!”

Flury stopped and turned to her respectfully. This was a wizard to be reckoned with. Very few people could see him unless he wanted them to. “I’m Flury, ma’am.”

Querida frowned. “Flury?”

“Flurian Atreck,” Flury admitted. “And I’m afraid I’ve got some more upsetting news—”

Querida’s brows went up. “The wizard? I’ve heard of you, though I had no idea you were a griffin. And I’m sorry. If you were hoping for some kind of high-powered conference with wizards of this continent, you’ll have to wait. We have a crisis here. The University wards are all but down.”

“I know, ma’am,” said Flury. “That’s why I stayed here. I was in charge of four exiled griffins, you see, with a contract from my government to get them painlessly neutralized—”

Sharp as a striking snake, Querida demanded, “Was one of them called Jessak?” Flury nodded. “Then I do not love you, Flurian,” she said. “You sent them to me, didn’t you?”

“Not exactly,” Flury protested. “I laid it on them to go where they would be neutralized. It was a tricky matter, ma’am, because they were largely immune to magic, and I couldn’t neutralize them myself because they were distant cousins. I brought them here first, thinking the University would be full of people who could do it, and I had rather a shock when I found that the place was pretty nearly powerless. I had to call for help, or young Elda would have been hurt. Then when they’d gone, I stayed to see if I could restore the power here. But I can’t. I think it’s because Corkoran refused to enroll me as a member.”

Querida looked at the ribbed stone ceiling. “Typical. I get angrier with Corkoran with every minute that passes. Finn, you were about to say where you think Corkoran is, I think.”

&n

bsp; “No, I wasn’t,” Finn said. “He’s, er, he’s unavailable.”

“Nonsense!” hissed Querida. “Unless he’s really gone to the moon, that is.”

“That’s just the trouble,” Flury said unhappily. “He has. Only I think they missed.”

They knew they had missed when they saw the moon whip past in the distance. Corkoran moaned at the sight. His teeth chattered in his gray face, and he clutched his arms around himself, trying not to look at the deep stars in the black sky outside the bubble or at the tiny, shrinking blue ball of the earth. “I was always afraid of heights!” he said, not for the first time.

“Do shut up!” Elda snapped at him. She was slightly ashamed of snapping, but she was having a harder time than Corkoran, being so much bigger. She had never expected not to be able to stand with her feet or push with her wings. Kit was trying to wedge her in, but he had nothing to brace on either. They were slowly wheeling over and over inside the sphere, along with everyone else wheeling in different ways, and it was making Elda feel sick. She had not expected the extreme cold either. It was eating through fur and feathers, into her wings particularly, until she felt she was turning into a block of ice. Ruskin was resourcefully muttering heat spells, and Blade was backing him up, but the sphere seemed to shed the heat as fast as they made it. And there was no way to thicken the outside because, as they quickly discovered, there was nothing out here to thicken it with.

“We forgot heat and neglected to provide gravity,” Felim said, shivering ruefully. “Is there perhaps some means of reversing ourselves?”

“I’d need something to kick off from before I could turn us,” Kit said.

Corkoran moaned again. “We won’t find anything now before the air runs out.”

They all looked anxiously at what they could see of the compressed air at the rim of the sphere. It was almost impossible to tell how thick it was. The blue haze looked different from every angle. Elda supposed it was a comfort to know there was still some there. “Do, please, try not to be so depressing,” Olga said to Corkoran. “Think how lucky it is that we all came, too. You’d hate to be all alone.”

“But you’re using the air up!” said Corkoran. “All of you. The griffins most of all. You’re killing me!”

Nobody tried to point out to Corkoran that he had been wanting to travel like this for years, or that they had been trying to please him—or, anyway, show him it could be done. They were all too anxious. Ruskin did mutter, from the midst of his heat spells, something about ungrateful bunny rabbits, and Blade, still sending Ruskin power, said, “You know, I just don’t understand. This is really only a simple translocation. Normally when you translocate, you get there almost at once.”

“We must be going rather a long way then,” Lukin said.

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