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Lab, where they were shortly listening to Wizard Wermacht’s important footsteps and watching Wizard Wermacht stroke the little beard at the end of his long pink face while he gazed contemptuously around them all, ending with Lukin and Ruskin.
    â€œNo more deep holes, roaring, or monkeys today, I hope,” Wermacht said. He had said this at each class, sometimes twice a day, for the last week. Felim glowered, Olga made a small, impatient sound, Ruskin and Lukin ground their teeth, and Elda’s beak gave out a loud, grating crack . Claudia merely sighed. The rest of the students, as usual, shifted and muttered. It seemed to everyone as if Wermacht had been saying this for several years. “Notebooks out,” said Wermacht. “You’ll need rulers for diagrams under your first big heading.”
    Nobody had a ruler. They used pencils and the edges of desks rather than have another scene. So far they had got by without one by keeping as quiet as they could. But Lukin’s face was blanched with rage. Ruskin’s was deep pink, and he was muttering, “Oppression!” even before the top of the hourglass emptied and Wermacht’s heavy feet went striding away.
    â€œPlain damn rudeness, I call it!” Lukin snarled as they pushed their way out into the courtyard. “I’m so busy keeping my temper that I haven’t time to learn anything!” Olga took his arm and patted it while she led the way across the courtyard for coffee. Olga drank coffee by the quart. She said she needed it to run in her veins. “ And we’ve got the beastly man again this afternoon!” Lukin complained. He was soothed by Olga’s patting, but not by much.
    â€œAnd in between comes lunch,” said Claudia, “which may even be worse than Wermacht.”
    The rest groaned. Of all of them, Claudia probably suffered most from the truly horrible food provided by the refectory. She was used to the food that the Emperor ate and the exquisite, spicy waterweeds of the Marshes. But dwarfs ate delicately, too, Ruskin said, even the lower tribes; and, Felim added, so did the Emirates. Elda craved fresh fruit; Olga yearned for fresh fish. Lukin did not mind much. The poverty of Luteria made the food there very little better than the stuff from the refectory.
    â€œBut,” Lukin said, as they forced a way up the crowded refectory steps, “I would give my father’s kingdom for a properly baked oatcake.”
    â€œOatcake!” Claudia cried out, quite disgusted.
    â€œWhy not?” Olga asked. “There’s little to beat it if it’s made right.” Her northern accent came out very strongly as she said this. It always did on the few occasions when she spoke of anything to do with her home. “Find me a fire and a griddle, Claudia, and I’ll make you one.”
    â€œYes, please!” said Lukin.
    It was one of those muggily warm autumn days. Every student in the place seemed to be outside sitting on the refectory steps. Olga put their six cups of coffee on a tray and carried it over to the statue of Wizard Policant instead, where they all sat on his plinth except Elda, who spread herself out at their feet, alternately bending down to sip at her straw and raising her big golden beak to sniff the mushroom and wheat straw scent of autumn, carried in from beyond the town by the faint, muggy wind. Something in those scents excited her, she was not sure what, but it made her tail lash a little.
    â€œA fire and a griddle,” Claudia said. “If I could do it unjinxed, I’d fetch you both, Olga. Why, with all this magical ability there is in this University, doesn’t anybody make the food at least taste better ?”
    â€œThat’s an idea,” Ruskin grunted, banging his dangling heels against the plinth. “I’ll do it as soon as I learn how. Promise. Charcoal roast and mussels with garlic. How about that?”
    â€œNewly caught trout with