Year of the Griffin. Diana Wynne Jones

were being tipped from a giant invisible hopper. Odder still, someone seemed to be trying to climb the stairs in spite of the sand. Corkoran could see a half-buried figure floundering and struggling about a third of the way up. As far as he could tell, it was a man in tight-fitting black clothes. Corkoran saw a black-hooded head emerge from the mighty dune, then a flailing arm with a black glove on its hand, before both were covered by the inexorably pouring sand. A moment later, black-clad legs appeared, frantically kicking. Those were swallowed up almost instantly. A turmoil in the sand showed Corkoran where to look next, and he saw a tight black torso briefly, rather lower down. By this time, the sand was piled halfway across the stone floor of the foyer.

      Corkoran wondered what to do. The older wizards had warned him before they retired that he should expect all sorts of magical pranks from the students, but so far nothing of this nature had occurred. Most students had seemed uninventive, or docile, or both. Corkoran had had absolutely no experience of this kind of thing. He watched the seething sand pile ever higher and the struggling black-clad fellow appear, lower down each time, and dithered.

      While he dithered, the onrushing sand swept the black-clad man down to floor level, where he staggered to his feet, tall, thin and somehow unexpectedly menacing. Corkoran had just a glimpse of a grim, expressionless face and a black moustache, before a large pit opened under the fellow’s staggering black boots and the man vanished down into it with a yelp.

      That, thought Corkoran, was surely not one of our students. He went to the edge of the pit and peered down. It was fairly deep, breathing out a curious fruity darkness. He could just see the pale oval of the man’s face at the bottom, and the dark bar of the fellow’s moustache. “You’re not a student here, are you?” he called down, just to be sure.

      “No,” said the man. “Help. Get me out.”

      Sand was already pattering into the pit. At this rate, it would fill up enough in five minutes for the man to climb out. Corkoran could not help thinking that this was a bad idea. “Sorry,” he said. “You’re trespassing on University property.” He stepped back and covered the pit with the Inescapable Net he used to stop air leaking from his moonboat.

      Then he turned his attention to the sand.

      This proved to be far more of a problem. It took Corkoran three tries just to stop more of it arriving. The spell was decidedly peculiar, some kind of adaptation of a little-known deadfall spell, with a timer to it that had to be removed before the main spell could be cancelled. But eventually the sand stopped coming and Corkoran was merely faced with the small mountain of it that was there already. He raised his arms and tried to dismiss it back to the desert it had presumably come from.

      It would not budge.

      Feeling rather irritated by now, Corkoran performed divinatory magic. All this told him was that the sand had to be returned to the place it had come from – which he knew already. He was forced to go and pick up a handful of the grey dusty granules, in order to perform a more difficult hands-on spell of enquiry.

      “Help me!” commanded a voice from near his feet.

      Corkoran whirled round and saw black-gloved fingers clinging to the underside of the Inescapable Net. The fellow had magic, and he was probably unbelievably strong, too, to have climbed right to the top of the pit. This was bad news. “No,” he said. “You stay there.”

      “But this pit is filling with poisoned water!” the intruder panted.

      Corkoran leaned over and saw the man crouched at the head of the pit, with his black boots against the rough side of it and his hands clutching the Net. Below him, quite near and obviously rising, was dark glinting liquid. The smell of it puzzled Corkoran. Some kind of fruit, he thought. The smell brought back memories of the Holy City, when he was there as a Wizard Guide during the tours, and of a priest of Anscher passing him a bright, round, pimply fruit. Then he had it. “It’s only orange juice,” he said. “Tell me who you are, and what you think you’re doing here, and I’ll let you out.”

      “No,” said the intruder. “My lips are sealed by oath. But you can’t let me drown in orange juice. It is not a manly death.”

      Corkoran considered this. The man did have a point. He sighed and cast away his handful of sand. “Bother you. You are an infernal nuisance.” He levitated the Inescapable Net from the top of the pit, bringing the man upwards with it. The man promptly let go of the Net with one hand and grabbed Corkoran by his flowing peacock-feather tie. And twisted it. This was not simple panic. Corkoran quite clearly saw a knife glitter in the man’s other hand, the one still clinging to the Net.

      Corkoran panicked. He was suddenly in a fierce struggle, brute strength against magic, killer-training against panic. Being throttled with your own tie, Corkoran found himself thinking in the midst of his terror, was quite as disgraceful as being drowned in orange juice. At that stage, he was trying to throw the murderer back into the pit. But the fellow was far too strong. He hauled on the tie until Corkoran could hardly breathe and the glittering knife crept up towards Corkoran’s right eye. The only thing that saved Corkoran was the Net, which was still in the way between them. Corkoran pushed back at the fellow and at the knife with every spell he could think of, and for some reason it was only the strange spells he could think of. And the struggle ended with the murderer two inches long and imprisoned in the Inescapable Net, which had turned itself into a bag around him.

      Corkoran held the bag up and looked at it, quite as surprised as his attacker must have been. He loosened his tie. Relief. He was shaking. “Let that be a lesson to you,” he told the bag hoarsely. Then, because he could not think what else to do with it, he levitated the bag to hang on the massive light fitment that dangled from the vaulted stone ceiling, where it was at least out of the way, and turned back to the mountain of sand.

      He took up a handful, murmured the spell, and then let it patter to the floor as he asked it, “What are you? Where are you from?”

      A soft, spattering answer came. “We are dust from the moon.”

      “Moondust?” Corkoran turned to the stairway and looked at the enormous pile of fine grey-white sand with astonished admiration. Moondust. This had to be an omen. He had half a mind to let it stay there to encourage him in his work. But he realised that it would be very inconvenient. And he was the person best qualified to send it back to the moon. Yes, definitely an omen. From being shaken and sore-throated and angry, he found he had become light-hearted and almost benevolent towards whichever student had done this. It was a silly prank, but it had given him an omen.

      He told the sand to go back to the moon. It vanished at once, every grain of it. Corkoran had a vision of the spell working – which was not something that often happened with him – and the sand sailing up past the Observatory tower, through the clouds, and siphoning onward in a spiral to that half-moon up there. Smiling, he turned to the pit and told that to go too. It closed up, sploshily, with a clap and a sharp smell of oranges.

      Here he became aware that the monstrous din out in the courtyard had gone away as well. Thank the gods! This must mean that the prank spell had finished now. Corkoran took the noise-abatement spell off his ears and thankfully climbed the stairs – which had a clean, sand-blasted look to them – on his way to bed.

      At the top, he encountered Wizard Dench the Bursar. Dench came shuffling across the landing wearing old slippers and a moth-eaten grey dressing gown. “Oh, there you are, Corkoran,” he said. “I’d been to your rooms to look for you.” For some reason, Dench was carrying a black cockerel upside down by its legs.

      Corkoran stared at it, wondering if Dench was taking up black magic and if he ought to sack Dench on the spot. “Dench,” he said, “why are you carrying a black chicken by its legs?”

      “On the farm when I was a boy,” Dench replied, “we always carried them this way. It’s the best way to capture them. That’s why I was coming to look for you. I don’t know if I was dreaming or not – I was certainly asleep – but while it was climbing through my window, I got the idea it was a man. But when I woke up and looked, it was a cockerel. Running everywhere, making a dreadful noise. What do you think I should do with it?”