“Hmm,” said Ruskin. “Why are doors an obstacle when it was able to get out of the pit?”
“That took it two days,” Olga pointed out.
“But surely fairly strong magic,” said Felim. “Let us test it for magic.”
>
It was a fairly easy matter to coax the cloakrack into Elda’s concert hall. There they tried all the divination spells for magic on it that they knew. Every single one was negative. Ruskin said that he was quite good at sensing magic, anyway, and put his great dwarf hands on it. After a moment he shook his head. “Not a thing,” he said. Elda, after her experience in the refectory the other night, was fairly sure that she would be able to sense if there was any magic in the cloakrack, too, but she, like Ruskin, could feel nothing. It seemed simply to be neutral wood.
“At least Wermacht didn’t put any of your magic in it,” Olga said as they went over to the tutorial room with the cloakrack bumping along behind. “You can be thankful for that, anyway.”
“Look at it this way,” Lukin said when they reached the tall stone room. He slammed the door to keep the cloakrack out. “It’s not doing you any harm. It’s not magic itself. It’s just following you around because stupid Wermacht linked it to you rather powerfully somehow.”
“Or my jinx did,” Claudia said with rueful creases in her cheeks. “I’m not scared of it exactly. It’s—it’s just embarrassing. I won’t dare go to choir practice.”
“We must get Wermacht to undo what he did,” said Felim.
Inevitably, when Corkoran opened the door of the tutorial room and hurried inside, the cloakrack sidled in after him. Corkoran frowned at it absently. But he was late anyhow, because so many people had stopped him on his way here to complain of mice. It seemed as if the former pirates had tunneled their way out of the pit. Corkoran wondered what everyone thought he could do about it. He was far too busy, anyway, trying to construct his moonsuit, and he did not want any more calls on his time. So he ignored the cloakrack and got straight down to handing back essays and explaining to his students that what they had been saying in them had nothing to do with the real world.
His pupils stared sadly at the marks he had given them and then equally sadly at his tie, which today had a pattern of stars and comets on it. Corkoran thought they seemed unwarrantably depressed. “What I’m trying to tell you,” he said encouragingly, “is that everything has to have limitations. It’s no good expecting magic to perform wonders if those wonders are against the laws of nature.”
“But a lot of magic is against the laws of nature,” Elda protested. “I couldn’t fly without magic. Neither could dragons.”
Lukin, the dedicated chess player, said, “You mean you have to have rules or the game won’t work? But magic isn’t a game. And anyway, rules can be changed.”
“You’re not seeing my point,” Corkoran told him. “You have to use magic like a tool, for a certain set of things, and you have to operate within certain safe limits, even then, or you’re in trouble. Take magic to do with time, which you’ll be doing in your second year. It is known that if you speed time up or slow it down too often in the same place, you weaken the walls between universes and let all sorts of undesirable things through. It’s thought that this is how Mr. Chesney got here.”
They looked glum. They were too young, Corkoran thought, to understand the troubles Mr. Chesney had caused. “Or take my own work,” he said. “I’m up against a law of nature at the moment, which magic has no power to change. There is no air to breathe on the moon. If I got in my moonship and went there as I am, I would suffocate, or worse, because where there is no air, my experiments have proved that the human body implodes, collapses in upon itself. I am having to design a special suit to keep myself in one piece.”
“What kind of suit?” Ruskin asked.
And suddenly, to Corkoran’s slight bewilderment, everyone was agog with interest. Questions were fired at him, and suggestions after those. Ruskin and Lukin discussed articulated joints for the moonsuit, which Corkoran had not realized he would need, while Olga recommended several air-spells Corkoran did not know, saying she had always kept several kinds ready in case her father’s ship sank. Claudia, after some scribbling and calculating, came up with a formula for exactly how thick the metal of a moonsuit would have to be, and while Ruskin snatched her paper, checked it, and pronounced it could be thinner than that, Felim produced a scheme for surrounding the whole moon in an envelope of air. “Using your Impenetrable Net to hold it there,” he explained.
“But,” said Elda, “why not make the moonsuit out of Impenetrable Net, anyway? With one of Olga’s air-spells on each shoulder. That’s what I’d do.”
While Corkoran was staring at her, wondering why this had never occurred to him, Felim observed, “You might have to stiffen the net to prevent implosion.” And Claudia began calculating again just how stiff it should be.
After this Ruskin asked about the construction of the moonship in such detail and so knowledgeably that the idea began to grow in Corkoran that he might get Ruskin to finish the moonship for him. Dwarf craftsmanship was just what was needed, delicate and strong. Perhaps offer Ruskin a scholarship … Offer Claudia another, so that she could do his calculations … But before these ideas had quite ripened to a decision, Corkoran found Ruskin’s eye on him, round and blue and innocent. “Pity dwarf work costs such a lot,” Ruskin mused. “Such a very great deal that even the Emperor can’t afford it most of the time.”
Ah, well, Corkoran thought. He had enough new ideas to go on, anyway. He rushed away back to his lab, half an hour early, almost dizzy with all the possibilities his students had suggested.
There was a small square of paper lying in the middle of his lab floor. Corkoran picked it up, idly reading it as he threw it away and turned to his workbench. “MAKE US THE RIGHT SIZE,” it said, in rather small letters, “AND WE GO. DO NOT, THEN BEWARE.” Corkoran let it fall into his wastebin without bothering to think about it. He did not even glance toward the rat cage, where the Impenetrable Net hung off the front and the bars were forced outward. He had forgotten the assassins days ago. He got down to puzzling out articulated joints for his moonsuit.
Meanwhile a young woman was walking through the city. Every so often she stopped someone and politely inquired the way to the University. Each person she asked directed her with willing eagerness and smiled as she walked on the way he or she had pointed. She was that kind of young lady. She walked very upright in a plain cloak that swirled sedately aside to show a worn blue woolen dress, and her hair, which was on the dark side of brown, curled a little around a face that was longish and not quite pretty, but it was so full of humor and confidence and kindness that most people reacted to her as if she were a raving beauty. The porter at the University gates was no exception. He bowed to her.
“That way, my lady. Taking coffee by the statue in the main courtyard at this hour usually.” And after the young lady had given him a smile that half stunned him, he said to the janitor, “Quite the most lovely lady I ever set eyes on, and I seen a few. Puts Wizard Myrna and that Melissa quite in the shade, I say.”
The young lady walked on into the courtyard, where Elda and her friends were gathered around Wizard Policant and Olga had just fetched coffee.
“Forget Corkoran. He can’t see beyond his tie,” Lukin said to Ruskin. “How are the food-spells coming on?”
Ruskin grumped. His room was now a mess of little bowls and dishes, and tiny cooking fires in clay pots, where the smells of bread or fried fish regularly woke him during the night. “I can’t seem to balance the smell with the taste yet,” he confessed. “If I do get a good steak pie, it smells of lavender, or I got a lovely chowder, but it—”
Lukin gave a great shout and raced away across the courtyard. “Isodel!” he yelled, and flung both arms around the young lady. She hugged him back heartily.
Olga had gone white again. Elda cocked an eye at her. “His sister,” she said. “My brother Blade thinks she’s wonderful.”
“Oh,” Olga said rather faintly, and her face flooded red.