surface in front of his face. They smelt divinely to Ruskin of dust and old gloves. “Thank you,” he rumbled. He sneaked a look towards the Inventory. The others had by no means finished there. Elda was just dashing off with three more cards skewered to her right front talons. He raised his list. “And Cyclina on Tropism, Tangential Magic, Paraphysics Applied, Thought Theorem, Dysfunctions of Reality, Universa Qualitava and – er – The Manifold of Changes,” he read in a long throaty grumble.
“All of them?” the librarian exclaimed.
“Every single one, please,” Ruskin husked. “And if you have any others on the same lines—”
“Your student limit is nine books,” the librarian snapped, and began making gestures again.
By the time the steep pile of books arrived – Tangential Magic was enormous and some of the rest almost as mighty – the others were making their way to the librarian’s desk, each with a pile of slimmer volumes, to have them checked out. The librarian eyed the advancing forty-five books and said, “I shall have to report this to your tutor.”
They tried not to exchange uneasy looks. Eyes front, Claudia asked, “Why is that?”
“Because it’s not normal,” said the librarian.
“Oh no, of course it isn’t,” Olga said resourcefully. “Corkoran wondered if you’d worry, but he wants us to get into the habit of consulting more than just one book at a time.”
She did not need to nudge Elda for Elda to chime in with “He’s such a lovely tutor. Even his ideas are interesting.”
Elda was so obviously sincere that the librarian shrugged, grumbled, “Oh very well,” and stamped all fifty-four books, with some sighing but no more threats.
They hurried with their volumes to Elda’s concert hall, Ruskin almost invisible under his. Once there, they spread the books out on the floor and got to work examining them for usefulness. Lukin was particularly good at this. He could pick up a book, flip through it and know at once what was in it. Felim did nothing much but sit quivering in a ring of books, as if the books themselves gave him protection. Ruskin was even less useful. He settled himself cross-legged on Elda’s bed with The Red Book of Costamaret open across his knees and turned its pages greedily. He would keep interrupting everyone by reading out things like “To become a wizard, it is needful to think deeper than other men on all things, possible and impossible.”
“Very true. Now shut up,” said Olga. “This one looks very helpful. It’s got lots of diagrams.”
“Put it on this pile then,” said Lukin.
Eventually they had three piles of books. One, a small pile of three, turned out to be almost entirely about raising demons, which they all agreed was not helpful. “My dad raised one once when he was a student,” Elda told them, “and he couldn’t get it to leave. It could be a worse menace than an assassin.”
The other two piles were what Lukin called the offensive and the defensive parts of the campaign, six books on spells of personal protection and thirty-six on magical alarms, traps, deadfalls and trip spells. Claudia knelt between the two piles with her wet-looking curls disordered and her face smudged with dust. “We’ve got roughly three hours until supper,” she said. “I reckon we should get all the protections round him first and then do as many traps as we’ve got time for. How do we start, Lukin?”
“Behold,” boomed Ruskin as Lukin took up the top book from the middle pile, “Behold the paths to the realms beyond. They are all around you and myriad.”
By this time everyone was ignoring Ruskin. “Nearly all of them start with the subject inside a pentagram,” Lukin said, doing his rapid page-flipping. “Some of them have pentagrams chalked on the subject’s forehead, feet and hands too.”
“We’ll do them all,” said Claudia. “Take your shoes off, Felim.”
“What colour pentagrams?” Elda asked, swooping on Felim with a box of chalks.
Lukin turned pages furiously, with Olga leaning over his shoulder. “It varies,” Lukin said. “Green, blue, black, red. Here’s one that says purple.”
“Do one of each colour, Elda,” Claudia instructed.
“Candles,” said Lukin. “That’s constant too. Maximum of twelve candles.” While Olga got up and raced off to the nearest lab for a supply of candles and Elda busily chalked a purple five-sided star on Felim’s forehead, Lukin leafed through all six books again and added, “None of them say what colour the pentagram round the subject should be – just that it must be drawn on the floor.”
“The floor’s all covered with carpet,” Elda objected, drawing a green star on the sole of Felim’s right foot. “Keep still, Felim.”
“You’re tickling!” Felim said.
“Use the top of his foot instead,” Claudia suggested. “Can’t one draw on a carpet with chalk?”
“Yes, but I like my carpet,” said Elda.
“The method of a spell,” Ruskin intoned from the platform, “is not fixed as a law is of nature, but varies as a spirit varies. Consider and think, o mage, and do not do a thing only for the reason it was always done before.”
“Some useful advice for a change,” Elda remarked. She finished drawing on Felim, put the chalks away and arranged the thirty-six books from Lukin’s “offensive” pile into a pentagram around Felim, working with such strong concentration that her narrow golden tongue stuck out from the end of her beak. “There. That saves my nice carpet.”
“The matter of nature,” Ruskin proclaimed, “treated with respect, responds most readily to spells of the body.”
“Oh gods! Is he still at it?” Olga said, returning with a sack of candles from Wermacht’s store cupboard. “Do shut up, Ruskin.”
“Yes, come on down here, Ruskin,” Lukin said, climbing to his feet. “Time to get to work. There are five points to this pattern and five of us apart from Felim, so it stands to reason we’re going to need you.”
Ruskin sighed and pushed The Red Book of Costamaret carefully off his knees. “It’s blissful,” he said. “It’s what I always imagined a book of magic was – until I came here and found Wermacht, I mean. What do we do?”
“Everything out of these six books, I think,” Lukin said. “It ought to be pretty well unbreakable if we do it all, eh, Felim?”
“One would hope,” Felim agreed wanly.
They started with a ring of ninety-nine candles around the pentagram of books, this being all the candles in the sack. Because no one knew how to conjure fire to light them yet, Ruskin lit them all with his flint lighter. Then they stood, one at each point of the pentagram, passing books from hand to hand to talon, reciting rhymes, shouting words of power and attempting to make the gestures in the illustrations. One spell required Elda to hunt out her hand mirror and pass that around too, carefully facing the glass outwards to reflect enemy attacks away from Felim. In between spellings, they all looked anxiously at Felim, but he sat there stoically upright and did not seem to be coming to any harm.
“You will yell if it hurts or anything, won’t
