‘Burn them,’ he said. ‘All of them.’
Midnight strutted its black stuff along the corridors of Unseen University as Spelter, with rather less confidence, crept cautiously towards the impassive doors of the Library. He knocked, and the sound echoed so loudly in the empty building that he had to lean against the wall and wait for his heart to slow down a bit.
After a while he heard a sound like heavy furniture being moved about.
‘Oook?’
‘It’s me.’
‘Oook?’
‘Spelter.’
‘Oook.’
‘Look, you’ve got to get out! He’s going to burn the Library!’
There was no reply.
Spelter let himself sag to his knees.
‘He’ll do it, too,’ he whispered. ‘He’ll probably make me do it, it’s that staff, um, it knows everything that’s going on, it knows that I know about it … please help me …’
‘Oook?’
‘The other night, I looked into his room … the staff, the staff was glowing, it was standing there in the middle of the room like a beacon and the boy was on the bed sobbing, I could feel it reaching out, teaching him, whispering terrible things, and then it noticed me, you’ve got to help me, you’re the only one who isn’t under the-’
Spelter stopped. His face froze. He turned around very slowly, without willing it, because something was gently spinning him.
He knew the University was empty. The wizards had all moved into the New Tower, where the lowliest student had a suite more splendid than any senior mage had before.
The staff hung in the air a few feet away. It was surrounded by a faint octarine glow.
He stood up very carefully and, keeping his back to the stonework and his eyes firmly fixed on the thing, slithered gingerly along the wall until he reached the end of the corridor. At the corner he noted that the staff, while not moving had revolved on its axis to follow him.
He gave a little cry, grasped the skirts of his robe, and ran.
The staff was in front of him. He slid to a halt and stood there, catching his breath.
‘You don’t frighten me,’ he lied, and turned on his heel and marched off in a different direction, snapping his fingers to produce a torch that burned with a fine white flame (only its penumbra of octarine proclaimed it to be of magical origin).
Once again, the staff was in front of him. The light of his torch was sucked into a thin, singing steam of white fire that flared and vanished with a ‘pop’.
He waited, his eyes watering with blue after-images, but if the staff was still there it didn’t seem to be inclined to take advantage of him. When vision returned he felt he could make out an even darker shadow on his left. The stairway down to the kitchens.
He darted for it, leaping down the unseen steps and landing heavily and unexpectedly on uneven flags. A little moonlight filtered through a grating in the distance and somewhere up there, he knew, was a doorway into the outside world.
Staggering a little, his ankles aching, the noise of his own breath booming in his ears as though he’d stuck his entire head in a seashell, Spelter set off across the endless dark desert of the floor.
Things clanked underfoot. There were no rats here now, of course, but the kitchen had fallen into disuse lately - the University’s cooks had been the best in the world, but now any wizard could conjure up meals beyond mere culinary skill. The big copper pans hung neglected on the wall, their sheen already tarnishing, and the kitchen ranges under the giant chimney arch were filled with nothing but chilly ash …
The staff lay across the back door like a bar. It spun up as Spelter tottered towards it and hung, radiating quiet malevolence, a few feet away. Then, quite smoothly, it began to glide towards him.
He backed away, his feet slipping on the greasy stones. A thump across the back of his thighs made him yelp, but as he reached behind him he found it was only one of the chopping blocks.
His hand groped desperately across its scarred surface and, against all hope, found a cleaver buried in the wood. In an instinctive gesture as ancient as mankind, Spelter’s fingers closed around its handle.
He was out of breath and out of patience and out of space and time and also scared, very nearly, out of his mind.