lay couched on her stomach thinking crossly about the mess her room was in. Before long she was thinking what a long time it was until breakfast, and then how lucky it was that she still had some oranges. After that there was nothing for it but to get up and tread carefully about, eating an orange. After that she thought she would try to get at least some of the ninety-nine pools of wax out of the carpet. That, even with efficient griffin talons, took more than half an hour of scraping and scratching, but there was still a long time until breakfast. Elda began hopping between spells, collecting the other forty-odd books from the Library into piles. This was how she discovered Policant’s Philosophy of Magic. Ruskin had missed it because it looked very much like the other, more ordinary books.
“Oh well,” said Elda. “Dad did say to read it.”
She flew back to her bed with it and started to read.
It was not at all what she had expected, although she saw at once why it would appeal to her father. Policant had a way of putting together two ideas which ought not to have had anything to do with one another, and then giving them a slight twist so that they did after all go together – rather like Derk himself had done to eagle and lion to make griffin, Elda thought. To her mind, the way Policant did it was a bit forced. But Policant kept asking questions. They were all questions that made Elda say to herself, “I wouldn’t ask this like that!” or, “That’s not the right question – he should be asking this!” Before long, she was wondering if Policant might not be asking the wrong questions on purpose, to make you notice the right ones. After that, she was hooked. It dawned on her that she had chosen the most exciting subject in the world to study, and she read and read and read. In the end she was almost late for breakfast because she just had to finish Section Five.
She floated into the refectory, feeling utterly absent-minded, but terribly alert somewhere, as if her brain had been opened up like an umbrella – or rather, a whole stack of umbrellas, some of them inside out.
“What is the matter?” Felim asked, seeing the way Elda’s wings and crest kept spreading and her tail tossing.
“Nothing,” said Elda. “I’ve just been reading Policant.”
“Good, is he?” asked Lukin.
“Yes, but in a very queer way. I couldn’t stop reading,” Elda said.
Her friends eyed Elda’s arching neck and shining eyes with some awe. “May I read him after you?” Felim enquired politely.
“You all must!” Elda declared. “Even you,” she said to Ruskin, who looked up from Cyclina with his eyes unfocused and grunted.
Elda was so anxious to get back to Policant before Wermacht’s class that she only spared a minute to watch Corkoran racing to his moonlab, with his tie of peacock feathers floating out behind him. She stared briefly at his rushing figure and then galloped back to her concert hall. Corkoran did not notice her at all. He had problems. Surrounding a peach with a cannonball turned out to make it far too heavy. He knew he would hardly be able to walk in that much iron, even if, as his experiments suggested, he was going to feel lighter on the moon. He was thinking of magical ways to reduce the weight of iron, or maybe pare down a cannonball, and he was simply irritated when he found the neat little stick-it spell the librarian had left on his desk. So his first-year students had taken out fifty-four books? Why not? He had chosen them to teach because they might turn out to be exceptional. He forgot the matter, and spent the next two days carefully dunking balls of iron into different magical solutions.
In those two days, Policant went the rounds of all Elda’s friends, followed by The Red Book of Costamaret, followed by Cyclina and the rest. None of them found The Red Book quite as marvellous as Ruskin had, but Policant grabbed them all, and Felim became so absorbed in the wonders of Tangential Magic, vast as it was, that he forgot about assassins and almost forgot to go to Wermacht’s classes. Olga only got him there by marching up to Felim’s room and snapping her fingers between Felim’s eyes and the book, almost as if she were breaking a spell. And once there in the class, Felim gazed broodingly at Wermacht and shook his head from time to time.
But Wermacht struck them all that way now they had read those books. As Olga put it, when they gathered round the statue of Wizard Policant after classes, listening to Wermacht now was like trying to hear one raindrop in a thunderstorm. There was just so much more of magic. “But please don’t keep shaking your head at Wermacht like that, Felim,” she added. “The beastly man’s coming right back into form.”
This was true. For half a day after Corkoran’s threat, Wermacht had been almost subdued. He plugged away, dictating his big headings and drawing his diagrams, and hardly looked at the students at all. Then he started stroking his beard again. The following morning, he called Ruskin “You with the voice” – luckily Ruskin was thinking of a really difficult idea in Thought Theorem and hardly noticed – and began to address Lukin as “You with the—” before he stopped and said “golden notebook”. By that afternoon, it seemed to have occurred to him that if he pretended Elda was not there, towering and golden at the back of the North Lab, Corkoran would have no grounds for firing him. He stalked up to the front of the class in quite his usual manner, planted his hour-glass, and swung round, stroking his beard.
“This afternoon,” he announced, “we were supposed to be doing conjuring flame. But someone seems to have taken all the candles. Anyone have a confession to make?” His eyes travelled over the class, so accusingly that half the students cowered and appeared to be searching their souls. Olga’s lovely face remained frigidly innocent.
“Right,” said Wermacht, after nearly five minutes’ worth of sand had poured into the lower bulb of the hour-glass. “It seems we have a hardened criminal in our midst. So we are going to do something far more difficult. All of you write down ‘Raising Magefire’. Underline it. Keep your notebooks open and all of you stand up.” Seats scraped on stone as everyone rose to his or her feet. “Now hold out both hands cupped in front of you.” When Elda hastily rose to her haunches, sending her desk scraping too, in order to do this, Wermacht stroked his beard and ignored her. “Now sit down again and write a description of the precise position you were in.” Seats scraped again. Everyone scribbled. “That’s it. Now stand up and adopt the position again.” Wermacht stuck his thumbs into the armholes of his robe and stalked back and forth as everyone once more stood up. “Good. Higher, you with the second-hand jacket. Nearer your chin. Better. Now concentrate and find your centre. You’ll find that under the tenth big heading in your notes from last week. Sit down and turn back to the place. You’ll find you have written – even you with the voice, look at your notes – that your centre – you with the second-hand jacket, I said consult your notes – your centre is a small, multidimensional, sun-like body, situated just below the breastbone in men and around the navel in women. Now stand up and locate it in yourself.”
Everyone rather wearily stood up again, cupping hands and talons. But this was only the third time. Wermacht, smugly marching back and forth, had them up and down like yo-yos, until even Elda had lost count.
Finally he said, “That’s better. Now, keeping the position and concentrating on your centres, smoothly transfer some of the energy from your centre to between your hands.”
There was a long, straining silence, while everyone tried to do this.
“Think,” Wermacht said, with contemptuous patience. “Think of flame between your hands.”
“Then why didn’t you say so?” Ruskin rumbled.
“Did you say something, you with the voice?” Wermacht asked nastily.
Ruskin
