Dragonborn (11 page)

for Starback, for now. It was his rest, his food, and his strength. He rode the currents and reflected.

The danger was still there for Sam. The wizards were after him.

He folded his wings, lowered his head, and arrowed to the ground, pulling out of the dive at the last moment, and swooped up again.

Khazib, the dark one with the fast horse—he should be first. He would be fastest. He must be stopped.

It would be easy enough to kill the wizard, for a dragon. For a Green and Blue. That would stop him.

Except that Khazib was a Flaxfield wizard. He had served his apprenticeship under the best there was and might be difficult to kill. Starback had never killed yet, and he didn't want to start. He didn't want to fail.

There was a place, the Palace of Boolat. It was many years since Starback had been there. It would be a good place to lead Khazib and the others. It would detain them without danger. He sped back to Flaxfield's house and followed Khazib's trail, with dragon sight and dragon wiles.

Khazib had already passed the weaver's house and was well on his way to catching up with Sam. Starback flew ahead, swooped down, and scattered the trail that Sam had left.

He could feel Khazib's magic probing the road, testing the route. It thrilled Starback and made him shiver with the strangeness of it. It was a scented, intricate magic, of shadows and colors. The dragon would have liked to stay some time within it, but there was a task to do.

He threw a false scent, trailing in a gradual curve away from Canterstock. A sudden diversion would make the wizard suspicious. Starback led him around, away, and pointed him to Boolat.

and Smedge on the other.

These were the pupils that Professor Frastfil had summoned to take care of Sam and to show him around.

“Best to get you straight into lessons.” He smiled. “Throw you in at the deep end.”

Sam was so relieved that he didn't have to go out friendless from the building that he was glad to agree to anything.

“Whose lesson are you in, boys?” Frosty asked.

“Dr. Duddle's,” said Tim.

“Splendid,” Frastfil jangled. “Couldn't be better. Run along now, and look after, uh …”

“Cartouche,” said Sam, feeling a little foolish with a name that didn't fit him.

“We'll have to get you outfitted,” said Tim.

“Can't have you looking like that,” Smedge agreed.

“Aren't we going to lessons?” Sam asked.

“Later.”

“I don't want to get into trouble,” said Sam.

“Old Frosty meant us to get you outfitted first. He just didn't think of it. No good at all on practical things.”

“What is he good at?” asked Sam.

“So,” said Tim. “First off, the uniform.”

He ran shrieking with pleasure down the corridors, followed by Smedge, who tried to sound the same, but didn't seem as comfortable with the noise as Tim was. Sam had to run as well to keep up, but he didn't shriek at all, just in case.

“Come on, Vengeabil,” Tim called. “Wakey, wakey! We need some clothes.”

The storeroom was a long, low-ceilinged room that ran underneath the corridor on the ground floor. Lit by the same bouncing globes, though dim and weak down here, it was full of dark corners and suspicious nooks.

“Vengeabil!” Tim shouted. “We'll help ourselves!” He prodded Sam. “Vengeabil is past it, really. Sleeping in a corner, I shouldn't wonder. Should have retired ages ago. We'll just have to help ourselves.”

He jumped over the counter and started to look through a pile of pullovers with the Canterstock crest on them.

“You should wait for Vengeabil,” said Smedge.

“Give me a hand,” called Tim.

Sam watched the two boys. Smedge was a little shorter than
Sam. He looked as though his uniform had been ironed on him. There was not a crease or a loose button, and everything fit him perfectly. He smiled a lot, but seemed to think about everything before he did it or before he spoke. Nothing came rushing out.

“I think we'd better just stand here,” he advised Sam. “Frosty said I should keep an eye on you.”

Tim Masrani, though clean and tidy enough, was more ragged around the edges. He looked as though he might just have had a fight, or have run away from a farm. His clothes looked lived in. Just now, as he was rummaging through the pile of jerkins, one of them wound itself around his head and turned into a bat, its wings covering his face. Tim grabbed it and tried to pull it off. Another jerkin slid down, turning into a snake as it fell, and wrapped itself around his legs. Then a third leaped from the shelf and, becoming a jellyfish in mid-air, splatted onto Tim's own school jerkin, and slithered down to the floor with a wet flop.

“Ugh,” mumbled Tim. “Ugh, disgusting.
Groew, urrgh”
He was tugging at the bat and trying to kick away the snake, and flailing about, getting more and more tangled up.

Sam shuddered. He lifted a hand to send a flash of magic to help his new friend.

“None of that,” said a quiet voice.

A dry, wrinkled hand settled on Sam's shoulder.

“Save your magic,” he said. “He'll be all right.”

“Vengeabil, you old fraud. Get them off,” Tim gasped.

“Can't you work it?” said the old man. “Try Book Two of Charms for Beasts.”

Tim groaned.

“Forgotten already?”

Tim nodded as well as he could with a bat wrapped around his face.

“You?” Vengeabil asked Smedge.

The other boy took a wand from his pocket, a slim twig of elm, brown and worn, and, waving it at Tim, chanted a quick spell. The bat and the snake and the jellyfish turned instantly back into jerkins with the College crest on them.

“New boy?” asked Vengeabil.

“Yes.”

“Name?”

“Cartouche.”

Vengeabil, who had been grabbing shirts and jerkins and socks and trousers, paused, looked hard at Sam, and said, “Really?” his eyebrows raised.

“Leave him alone, you,” said Tim. “I'm looking after him, and I don't want him to end up in some dusty storeroom after he's finished here.”

The jerkin that had been a jellyfish slid across the floor and up Tim's leg, leaving a soggy trail on his trousers.

“Oh, Vengeabil, that's not good,” he complained.

Vengeabil laughed and gave Sam his uniform, which was mostly just the College jerkin.

Smedge gave him a hand while Tim made a drying off spell that more or less worked, though his shoe was still soggy and squelched when he walked.

“You need to pay a bit more attention to your work, young Tim,” said Vengeabil. “Good-bye, Master Cartouche. Come back and see me for a chat when you haven't got that idiot with you.”

“I will,” said Sam. He looked at Tim and blushed. “Not that, I mean.”

“That's all right,” said Tim. “Vengeabil is a dry old fossil”—the storekeeper raised an eyebrow toward the slimy jerkin—“but he's not far off about me being an idiot.”

“You'll do,” said Vengeabil. “Off you go.”

They clattered up the stairs.

“I'll show you to our dorm,” said Tim, “and you can get changed.”

“Someone should teach Vengeabil a lesson,” said Smedge. Sam wondered what sort of lesson he meant, and looked at Smedge. The boy's face was set with an idea. Sam felt it, and it was as though he had eaten something disagreeable, his stomach protesting. Smedge caught Sam's expression, and his face changed. He smiled broadly.

“You know. Let him see he's here to help us, not to throw his weight around.”

“Oh, he's all right,” said Tim. “Knows what he's doing, really.” He shook his wet foot. “Horrid smell that thing's left, though. I'll change my socks while we're up there.”

“Up there” was a dormitory right up at the top of the stairs, with little dormer windows that jutted out like mountain peaks on the roof. Sam felt silly in his new uniform. He didn't like looking like everyone else.

“Are you hungry?” asked Tim.

Sam was.

“If we wait here for a bit we can go straight to lunch and miss the end of Duddle's class,” said Tim. He floated up to the roof and perched on a crossbeam.

“We should go back,” said Smedge.

“It's boring,” said Tim.

“I'm going back.”

“If you go, we all have to go,” Tim complained.

“That's up to you,” he said. “I won't tell.”

“You won't have to.” Tim floated sadly down and landed gently on his own bed, which was next to Sam's. “What do you want to do, Sam?”

“I don't mind. I'm a bit nervous, so I wouldn't mind waiting to go to my fist class.”

“There you are,” said Tim. “We'll wait till after lunch.”

Smedge came and took Sam's arm. “You have to go,” he said. “You don't want to get into trouble on the first day, do you? Rules are here to help us. The sooner you get into the swing of things the easier it will be.”

“I'll do whatever I'm told to do,” said Sam.

“Then you will do very well,” said Smedge.

“We'll see,” warned Tim. “We all start off like that.”

Smedge gave Tim a friendly punch. “We don't all end up being idiots,” he said.

“What happens to people when they leave the College?” asked Sam.

They were clattering back down the spiral staircase.

“That's what Duddle's class is all about,” said Smedge.

“You can be anything you want,” said Tim. “Court Wizard to a great prince. Local Wizard in a small town. Personal Wizard to a rich businessman. Set yourself up as a wizard and let people come to you and pay every time. You can stay here and teach. You can do anything you like.”

“If you go to classes,” said Smedge. “Otherwise, you end up an idiot and have to take any job you can, and hope you don't mess it up.”

“You mean you can end up here in the kitchens? Or in the storeroom?”

“Exactly,” said Smedge. “You don't want to do that.”

Tim looked embarrassed.

As they passed one of the higher landings, Sam saw a half-open door and eyes watching them. As soon as he caught the glance of the one beyond the door, the eyes blinked, the door slammed, and he heard footsteps running away. Sam had a sense of fear on the other side of the door, and he felt that there was also something for him to fear there. He stopped, put his hand on the doorknob.

“No,” said Smedge. “Leave it.”

“What was it?”

“Nothing,” said Smedge. “Come on.”

“It was something,” said Sam. “And it was looking for me.”

Tim took his arm, reassuringly. “It can't have been. No one here knows who you are.”

“What was it?” Sam repeated.

“It was just Tamrin,” said Tim, giving Smedge a sideways look. “Forget it.”

“Come on.” Smedge led them farther downstairs.

“What do you mean, mess it up?” asked Sam, going back to their conversation.

“If a carpenter makes a bad chair, you fall off it,” said Tim. “Not much harm done.”

“But if an incompetent wizard, one who doesn't know what he's doing, makes a bad spell,” said Smedge, “there's no knowing what the end of it will be.”

“Magic that doesn't stop when it should, that doesn't get the job done properly, can go on and on getting more things wrong,” said Tim. “And then you need a really good wizard to put it right.”

This sounded more like the sort of thing that Flaxfield said, and it comforted Sam.

They were back in the classroom corridor, with its stinks and sounds.

“Where did you come from?” asked Smedge.

“Oh, a fair way off.”

“You're old to be starting here,” he said.

Sam blushed.

“Leave him alone,” said Tim. “It's none of our business.”

“Okay,” said Smedge. “How about your friends? Are you going to miss them?”

Before Sam had the chance to reply, a bell rang.

“Lunch,” said Tim. “Excellent.”

“We'd better introduce Cartouche to Dr. Duddle,” said Smedge.

“No way,” Tim argued. “We're going to eat. Come on!”

He grabbed Sam and whisked him off across the quad and into yet another part of the College. Sam felt he would need to be there for most of the rest of his life just to find his way around. Flaxfield's cottage and the weaver's house were the only other buildings he remembered ever being in.

When he saw the dining hall he stopped still and gawped. It was enormous. Long wooden tables with benches ran along the sides and center. At the far end another table ran at a right angle to the rest. Boys and girls, dozens and dozens of them, perhaps hundreds, surged forward like marbles spilling out from a bag, carrying Tim and Sam before them until the two boys were rolled up near to the front of the room, and sat down.

Lunch was soup and bread and roast lamb and mashed potatoes and mint sauce and gravy and runner beans and jam sponge and custard.

Sam ate it all in as much silence as he could get away with. He knew there were lots of people in the world. All the books showed him that, and there had been a number of people coming to Flaxfield's door for his help, but they never came in more than threes or fours. The wizards who had come when Flaxfield died, thirty or forty of them, were the most people that Sam had ever seen at one time. Now there were hundreds, all in the same room.

And they talked. They talked all the time and to everyone.
They talked to the person next to them. They shouted across to people three tables away.

There was magic everywhere. No one asked for the mint sauce to be passed to them, they used magic to bring it. And they showed off. The ones who couldn't be bothered just let it slide over the table to them. Others made it float. One had it up in the air and spinning, not spilling a drop, and then pouring itself over his lamb. Another, a joker, made the dish grow legs and waddle across the table to him, complaining that it had a sore knee.