Tanya Grotter and the Golden Leech

Tanya calmed down. It meant that great-grandfather found nothing to worry about.

“And the Rope of the Seventeen Hanged Men did not break?” Tanya hurried to ask; however, grandfather Theophilus did not give this question a definite answer. The ring mysteriously hesitated, irrelevantly shot a couple of sparks, and became silent.

Having tightened the pins, Tanya got up high above the island, where constant airstreams began. One of them set off to the east, and another – into cold Antarctica, populated by mysterious spirits, which almost nothing was known about and which it was not possible to call either friends or enemies of magicians. Trying not to fall into these air streams in order not to be carried away, Tanya, keeping on the edge, flew over the shore.

Long sandy stretches alternated with eroded cliffs. On one of the sandy stretches, the bearded sea king Neptune was bashfully soaping and cleaning some of his linen. Beside him in the shallow water lay his trident. For a second Tanya wanted to rush over his head and tease him a little, but she reconsidered. Being mixed up with Neptune was dangerous. He could unceremoniously summon a storm. Moreover, according to rumours, he was a good friend of Professor Stinktopp.

A cold wind gusted from the ocean, sprays reached her, and Tanya turned the double bass around and directed it south of Tibidox – to the woods, which occupied a substantial part of the island. For some not entirely intelligible reason the students were forbidden to walk into this forest. True, the ban was extended only to strolling by foot. Along the majority of the paths were special guard spells – Slander and Dentistikha, rare masters of magical trickeries, had already worked on this for a while. If one of them was set off, Slander would immediately teleport himself to this place, and the consequences were sufficiently unpleasant for the offenders. The least it was possible to get away with was grinding earthworms in the meat grinder, preparing stuffing for the griffins, and enduring the mockery of the omnipresent ghosts all through the vacations.

“A strange thing. Why are they so attached to these woods? It’s possible even to think that the Teaches fear something. One can’t get lost there – can always send a signal spark… No, there’s clearly something else here,” thought Tanya.

Now, rushing over the forest on the double bass, Tanya attentively looked down. The further it was, the more impassable the wind-fallen trees. Moss-covered trunks piled up side by side along the paths. “Sardanapal could send cyclopes here to rake up everything, but for some reason he’s not doing it…” Tanya decided.

Keeping above the tops of the trees, she crossed the forest in a slant and again found herself along the shore – true, from the other side of the island, where the powerful roots of pines courageously fought with the friable cliffs. It began to get dusky. Tanya had already intended to turn around when unexpectedly it seemed to her that she saw a rippling white haze.

The girl guessed that, confusing directions in the darkness, she was again approaching Tibidox, but only from the other side. As for the white haze, it was rising… from the ruins. From those most uninhabited ruins of The Ancient One’s gatehouse, which were now directly underneath. Tanya replaced the high-speed spell with the slow – Pilotus kamikazis – and approached carefully, trying to hide behind the crowns of the trees.

Smoke was pouring from the chimney, which was like a reproachful brick thumb jutting from the collapsed roof. The first two windows were half-flooded with water. Water beetles flickered flippantly among the emerald duckweed. The high stone porch-gallery, like in the ancient buildings of Suzdal, went directly out to the lake and there suddenly broke off. “One of two things: either The Ancient One had an oddity and he adored bathing in slime, or the lake flooded the house considerably later,” Tanya said to herself.

The meadow still bore the tracks of the recent battle. Here and there were grooves from the boots of the heroes. Mermaid scales gleamed. From a deep ditch poked out an arc of Sardanapal’s crushed glasses. On the side, next to a scrap of material from Medusa’s raincoat, was scattered Stinktopp’s absurd shoe with a bow like those of an old woman. Tanya picked it up and discovered inside the shoe the hidden lift, which made the short professor taller by five centimetres. “Well, Stinktoppik! A sheer cheat! I’ll not be surprised if he turns out to have a hat with springs and high-heel slippers!” she decided.