It was gray dawn: A warn-spell was dancing up and down his body on top of his blankets. “Urgent from Wizard Finn,” chanted the spell. “Urgent from Wizard Finn. Accident to one of your students. Staircase five, room three. Come quickly.”
“Gods and little fishes!” groaned Corkoran. “Whatever next?” He surged up, swatted the spell, and climbed into jeans and a sweater. The morning was truly chilly. There was frost on Wizard Policant as Corkoran pelted crosswise through the courtyard. Staircase five was in the far corner near the main gate. The first thing Corkoran saw there was Elda. She was up on the roof, with all four sets of talons clamped on the gutter and her wings spread for balance, so that she could crane down with her head upside down through the window. Corkoran hated heights. It made him dizzy just to look at her. And he could see the gutter bending as he raced over there.
“It was your fault as well,” she was saying into the window. “You would keep reading things out of The Red Book.”
“It was not my fault so!” Ruskin’s voice rasped from inside.
“Elda, get down!” Corkoran panted. “You’re breaking the gutter!”
Elda’s head shot right way up in shock, and she lost her balance. Corkoran gasped. But Elda simply swirled a wing and flipped her tail and landed on her feet like a cat outside the entry to the staircase. She sat up and looked soulfully at Corkoran. “I’m too big to get inside the room, you see.”
“Tough.” Corkoran shot past under her beak and pounded up the worn wooden stairs indoors. Room three was on the upper floor, with a second window that gave a pleasant view over the town. It was fairly bare, but full of people. Finn was there, and Olga, both of them in the blue tights and white jerkins of the Rowing Club. How does Finn find the energy? Corkoran wondered. Ruskin was there, standing on tiptoe to peer out the inner window at Elda. It was obvious, Corkoran thought, that Ruskin slept with all those bones in his pigtails. He could not have had time to plait them all in before he arrived here. Lukin and Claudia were there, too, red-eyed and sleepy, Lukin wrapped in Olga’s fur cloak and Claudia in one of those Empire garments that always reminded Corkoran of a very large bath towel. All of them except Ruskin were staring at the thing in the middle of the room.
The thing—whatever it was—was a little taller than Lukin and quite smooth and rounded and domed. At first Corkoran thought it was made of strangely smooth tree bark, but as he went closer, he saw that the seeming bark was leather, leather in long, narrow strips with gold lettering on each strip. It reminded Corkoran of nothing so much as a beehive, but a beehive that seemed to be made of books. When he put out a finger with a magnifying spell on it to the nearest gold lettering, he found it read Advanced Protective Magic. Yes, definitely books. But quite the most alarming feature was the long, spear-shaped knife sticking out of one side of it.
Corkoran’s touch seemed to disturb the
beehive. It waddled uncertainly in Ruskin’s direction. Dim cries and scrabbling came from deep inside it.
“He’s not happy,” Ruskin stated.
“Well, would you be?” Claudia asked. “He must have been in there for at least six hours.”
“Who is it?” Corkoran demanded.
“Felim,” said Lukin. “Assassins were after him, you see, and we tried to give the poor fellow some protections.” He gave an enormous yawn that reminded Corkoran irresistibly of last night’s pit.
The yawn made Corkoran realize he was as sleepy as Lukin, but he began to understand the happenings of last night. “Why did you use library books?”
“Those aren’t really library books,” Claudia explained. “Elda says the real books are still on the floor in her room.”
“It just came out like this because stupid Elda built the pentagram out of books,” Ruskin growled. “And I don’t care what she says. It was not my fault!”
“The important question is,” said Finn, “can you get it off him? I can’t. They can’t. They’re not even sure how they did it.”
Corkoran rubbed his bristly chin. What a way to appear before students! And here was Finn all trim and clean-shaven, just as if he had never been outside half last night in purple pajamas. “Well, it’s going to take some divination then. Is the knife part of it? Whose is it?”
“The knife’s nothing to do with it,” Olga said. “It belongs to the man hanging by one leg outside the window.”
“What?” Finn looked at Corkoran, and Corkoran stared at Olga. She seemed utterly calm.
Both wizards hurried to the window that looked out over the town.
The man dangling outside was dressed in black like Corkoran’s attacker. The first part of him they saw was the sole of a black boot, which was gripped very tightly around the ankle by a thick orange rope that appeared to be welded to the windowsill. Finn put out a finger and very cautiously touched the rope. A familiar gust of oranges came to Corkoran’s nostrils. “This is like a steel hawser!” Finn said wonderingly.
Hearing him speak, the dangling man raised his face, which was bright red and encased in a black hood, from the region of the lower windows. “Let me up, for pity’s sake! I’m going to die like this!”
“Poor fellow!” said Finn.
“No, he isn’t. I heard that sort of talk last night,” said Corkoran. “But we’d better haul him up, anyway. I want an explanation. But go very carefully.”
Neither of them could budge the orange rope. It defied both spells of levitation and spells of release, and after that it defied plain pulling. It was not until Ruskin came over to wrap his large hands around the rope and heave with his powerful shoulders that the hanging man began to inch up the outside wall.
“Thought so,” Ruskin grunted rather proudly. “This trap’s one of mine.”
Corkoran got his shrinking spell ready. As soon as the black boot came up level with the windowsill, he grasped the toe of it and clapped the spell on. Then he whipped forth a bag of Inescapable Net and crammed the tiny, struggling man inside it. Even so, the assassin contrived to stab Corkoran in the thumb with his tiny dagger. “Ouch!” cried Corkoran.
A clatter from the middle of the room made them all whirl around.