“Like wildfire,” Olga said, grinding her teeth, and summoned suddenly a tall green twirling fire which forked at the top. The forks twisted together almost to the ceiling.
“Oh dear!” said Lukin. He had managed to do it too, but his blue fire was, for some reason, dancing in a little pit in the middle of his desk.
Wermacht exclaimed angrily and came striding up the lab. “Trust you lot to make a mess of it! You with the second-hand jacket, pick that flame up. Cherish it. Go on, it won’t burn you. And you, girl with the long nose, pull your flame in. Think of it as smaller at once, before you make a mess of the ceiling.”
Olga shot a furious look at Wermacht and managed to reduce her forked green flame to about a foot high. Lukin leaned forward and gingerly coaxed his blue flame to climb into his hands. Wermacht made an angry, spread-fingered gesture over the desk, whereupon the small pit vanished.
“What is it with you?” he said to Lukin. “Do you have an affinity for deep pits, or something?” Before Lukin could reply, Wermacht turned to where Felim was nonchalantly balancing a bright sky-blue spire of light on one palm. “Both hands, I said!”
“Is there a reason for using two hands?” Felim asked politely.
“Yes. We do moving the fire about next week,” Wermacht told him.
Elda, all this while, had her eyes shut, hunting inside herself for her centre. She had never yet been able to discover it. It made her anxious and unhappy. Nobody else seemed to have any difficulty finding the place. But now, after reading Policant, she began to ask herself Why? And the answer was easy. Griffins were a different shape from human people. Her centre was going to be in another place. She gave up hunting for it up and down her stomach and looked into herself all over. And there it was. A lovely, bright, spinning essence-of-Elda was whirling inside her big griffin ribs, in her chest, where she had always unconsciously known it was.
There was a tingling around her front talons.
Elda opened her eyes and gazed admiringly at the large transparent pear-shape of golden-white fire trembling between her claws. “Oh!” she said. “How beautiful!”
This left only Claudia without magefire in the entire class. Wermacht turned from Felim to find Claudia with her eyes shut and her cheeks wrinkled with effort. “No, no!” he said. “Eyes open and see the flame in your mind.”
Claudia’s eyes popped open and slid sideways towards Wermacht. “I shut my eyes because you were distracting me,” she said. “I have a jinx, you know, and I’m finding this very difficult.”
“There is no such thing as a jinx,” Wermacht pronounced. “You’re just misdirecting your power. Look at your cupped hands and concentrate.”
“I am,” said Claudia. “Please move away.”
But Wermacht stood looming over Claudia, while everyone else stared at her until Elda expected her to scream. And just at the point when Elda herself would have screamed, Claudia said, “Oh – blah!” and took her aching hands down.
Almost everyone in the lab cried, “There!”
“What do you all mean – there?” Claudia asked irritably.
Wermacht took hold of Claudia’s skinny right arm and bent it up towards her face. “I can’t think what you did,” he said, “but it’s there. Look.”
Claudia craned round herself and stared, dumbfounded and gloomy, at the little turquoise flame hanging downwards from the back of her wrist. “I told you I had a jinx,” she said.
“Nonsense,” said Wermacht and strode away to the front of the class. “Withdraw the flame back to your centre now,” he said. This was surprisingly easy to do, even for Elda, whose heart ached at having to get rid of her lovely transparent teardrop. “Sit down,” said Wermacht. Seats obediently scraped. “Write in your own words – you too, you with the jinx. You can stop admiring your excrescence, dismiss it and sit down now.”
“But I can’t,” Claudia protested. “I don’t know what I did to get it.”
“Then you can stand there until you do, and write your notes up afterwards,” Wermacht told her. “The rest of you describe the process as exactly as you can.”
Everyone wrote, while Claudia stood there miserably, dangling her flame, until Elda remembered her own experience and hissed across at Claudia, “Ask yourself questions, like Policant.”
Claudia stared at Elda for a moment and then said, “Oh!” The flame vanished. Claudia sat down and scribbled angrily. “I can see I’m going to be ‘You with the jinx’ from now on,” she said to the others as they crowded out into the courtyard.
“Join the club,” said Lukin. “Why doesn’t somebody assassinate that man?”
Felim flinched and went grey.
“It’s all right, Felim,” Elda said. “You’ve got protections like nobody ever had before.”
Elda proved to be right.
Around midnight that night, Corkoran locked his lab and thought about going to bed. His rooms were in the Spellman Building on the same floor as the Library, along with Finn’s and Dench the Bursar’s, who were the only other wizards who actually lived in the University. All the rest of the staff lived in the town. Corkoran strolled across the courtyard in a chilly fine mist that raised goose bumps below the sleeves of his T-shirt and found the University looking its most romantic. It was utterly quiet – which, considering the usual habits of students, was quite surprising – with just a few golden lights showing in the turreted black buildings around him. These stood like cut-outs against a dark blue sky, only faintly picked out in places by misty lamps from the town beyond the walls. Better still, the moon was riding above the mist, just beside the tower of the Observatory. She was only about half there, a sort of peachy slice above a faint, bluish puff of cloud, and Corkoran was ravished by the sight. He stood leaning against the statue of Wizard Policant, gazing up at the place where he so longed to be. So very far away, so very difficult to get to. But his moonship was about half built now. It would only take another few years.
“I’m going to do it,” he said to the statue of Wizard Policant, and slapped it on its stone legs.
As if that was a signal, a monstrous noise broke out. If you were to beat forty gongs and a hundred tin tea trays with spades and axes, while ringing ten temples-full of bells and throwing a thousand cartloads of bricks and a similar number of saucepans down from the Observatory tower, you might have some notion of the noise. Mixed in among this sound, and almost drowned by the din, a great voice seemed to be shouting. DANGER, it bellowed. INVASION.
Corkoran clutched the statue in shock for a second. The noise seemed to turn his head inside out. He was aware of distant howlings from the main gate, where the janitor, who was a werewolf, had reacted to the shock by shifting shape, and he realised that the man was not likely to be any help. But Corkoran was, after all, a wizard. He knew he must do something. Although the bonging and clattering and crashing seemed to be coming from all directions, the huge muffled voice definitely came from the Spellman Building. Corkoran clapped a noise-reduction spell over his ears and sprinted for the building’s main door.
“This has to be a student joke,” Corkoran muttered. He threw wide the doors of the Spellman Building and turned on all the lights without bothering with the switches. He was so astonished at what he saw that he let the doors crash shut behind him and seal themselves by magic, while he stood and stared.
The grand stairway was buried under a mountain of sand. And went on