Her eyes followed it up until she found a face, higher than a house, outlined against the starry sky. Its owner was obviously trying to look nightmarish, but had tried too hard. The basic appearance was that of a chicken that had been dead for about two months, but the unpleasant effect was rather spoiled by warthog tusks, moth antennae, wolf ears and a unicorn spike. The whole thing had a selfassembled look, as if the owner had heard about anatomy but couldn’t quite get to grips with the idea.

It was staring, but not at her. Something behind her occupied all its interest. Esk turned her head very slowly.

Simon was sitting cross-legged in the centre of a circle of Things. There were hundreds of them, as still and silent as statues, watching him with reptilian patience.

There was something small and angular held in his cupped hands. It gave off a fuzzy blue light that made his face look strange.

Other shapes lay on the ground beside him, each in its little soft glow. They were the regular sort of shapes that Granny dismissed airily as jommetry-cubes, many-sided diamonds, cones, even a globe. Each one was transparent and inside was ….

Esk edged closer. No one was taking any notice of her.

Inside a crystal sphere that had been tossed aside on to the sand floated a blue-green ball, crisscrossed with tiny white cloud patterns and what could almost have been continents if anyone was silly enough to try to live on a ball. It might have been a sort of model, except something about its glow told Esk that it was quite real and probably very big and not—in every sense—totally inside the sphere.

She put it down very gently and sidled over to a ten-sided block in which floated a much more acceptable world. It was properly discshaped, but instead of the Rimfall there was a wall of ice and instead of the Hub there was a gigantic tree, so big that its roots merged into mountain ranges.

A prism beside it held another slowly-turning disc, surrounded by little stars. But there were no ice walls around this one, just a red-gold thread that turned out on closer inspection to be a snake—a snake big enough to encircle a world. For reasons best known to itself it was biting its own tail.

Esk turned the prism over and over curiously, noticing how the little disc inside stayed resolutely upright.

Simon giggled softly. Esk replaced the snake-disc and peered carefully over his shoulder.

He was holding a small glass pyramid. There were stars in it, and occasionally he would give it a little shake so that the stars swirled up like snow in the wind, and then settled back in their places. Then he would giggle.

And beyond the stars ….

It was the Discworld. A Great A’Tuin no bigger than a small saucer toiled along under a world that looked like the work of an obsessive jeweller.

Jiggle, swirl. Jiggle, swirl, giggle. There were already hairline cracks in the glass.

Esk looked at Simon’s blank eyes and then up into the hungry faces of the nearest Things, and then she reached across and pulled the pyramid out of his hands and turned and ran.

The Things didn’t stir as she scurried towards them, bent almost double, with the pyramid clasped tightly to her chest. But suddenly her feet were no longer running over the sand and she was being lifted into the frigid air, and a Thing with a face like a drowned rabbit turned slowly towards her and extended a talon.

You’re not really here, Esk told herself. It’s only a sort of dream, what Granny calls an annaloggy. You can’t really be hurt, it’s all imagination. There’s absolutely no harm that can come to you, it’s all really inside your mind.

I wonder if it knows that?

The talon picked her out of the air and the rabbit face split like a banana skin. There was no mouth, just a dark hole, as if the Thing was itself an opening to an even worse dimension, a place by comparison with which freezing sand and moonless moonlight would be a jolly afternoon at the seaside.

Esk held the Disc-pyramid and flailed with her free hand at the claw around her. It had no effect. The darkness loomed over her, a gateway to total oblivion.

She kicked it as hard as she could.

Which was not, given the circumstances, very hard. But where her foot struck there was an explosion of white sparks and a pop -which would have been a much more satisfying bang if the thin air here didn’t suck the sound away.

The Thing screeched like a chainsaw encountering, deep inside an unsuspecting sapling, a lurking and long-forgotten nail. The others around it set up a sympathetic buzzing.

Esk kicked again and the Thing shrieked and dropped her to the sand. She was bright enough to roll, with the tiny world hugged protectively to her, because even in a dream a broken ankle can be painful.

The Thing lurched uncertainly above her. Esk’s eyes narrowed. She put the world down very carefully, hit the Thing very hard around the point where its shins would be, if there were shins under that cloak, and picked up the world again in one neat movement.

The creature howled, bent double, and then toppled slowly, like a sackful of coathangers. When it hit the ground it collapsed into a mass of disjointed limbs; the head rolled away and rocked to a standstill.

Is that all? thought Esk. They can hardly walk, even! When you hit them they just fall over?

The nearest Things chittered and tried to back away as she marched determinedly towards them, but since their bodies seemed to be held together more or less by wishful thinking they weren’t very good at it. She hit one, which had a face like a small family of squid, and it deflated into a pile of twitching bones and bits of fur and odd ends of tentacle, very much like a Greek meal. Another was slightly more successful and had begun to shamble uncertainly away before Esk caught it a crack on one of its five shins.

It flailed desperately as it fell and brought down another two.

By then the others had managed to lurch out of her way and stood watching from a distance.

Esk took a few steps towards the nearest one. It tried to move away, and fell over.

They may have been ugly. They may have been evil. But when it came to poetry in motion, the Things had all the grace and coordination of a deck-chair.

Esk glared at them, and took a look at the Disc in its glass pyramid. All the excitement didn’t seem to have disturbed it a bit.

She’d been able to get out, if this indeed was out and if the Disc could be said to be in. But how was one supposed to get back?

Somebody laughed. It was the sort of laugh

Basically, it was p’ch’zarni’chiwkov. This epiglottis-throttling word is seldom used on the Disc except by highly-paid stunt linguists and, of course, the tiny tribe of the K’turni, who invented it. It has no direct synonym, although the Cumhoolie word “squemt” (’the feeling upon finding that the previous occupant of the privy has used all the paper’) begins to approach it in general depth of feeling. The closest translation is as follows:

the nasty little sound of a sword being unsheathed right behind one at just the point when one thought one had disposed of one’s enemies

— although K’tumi speakers say that this does not convey the cold sweating, heart-stopping, gut-freezing sense of the original.

It was that kind of laugh.

Esk turned around slowly. Simon drifted towards her across the sand, with his hands cupped in front of him. His eyes were tight shut.

“Did you really think it would be as easy as that? " he said. Or something said; it didn’t sound like Simon’s voice, but like dozens of voices speaking’at once.

“Simon?” she said, uncertainly.

“He is of no further use to us,” said the Thing with Simon’s shape. “He has shown us the way, child. Now give us our property.”

Esk backed away.

“I don’t think it belongs to you,” she said, “whoever you are.”

The face in front of her opened its eyes. There was nothing there but blackness—not a colour, just holes into some other space.

“We could say that if you gave it to us we would be merciful. We could say we would let you go from here in your own shape. But there wouldn’t really be much point in us saying that, would there?”

“I wouldn’t believe you,” said Esk.

“Well, then.”

The Simon-thing grinned.

“You’re only putting off the inevitable,” it said.

“Suits me.”

“We could take it anyway.”

“Take it, then. But I don’t think you can. You can’t take anything unless it’s given to you, can you?”

They circled round.

“You’ll give it to us,” said the Simon-thing.

Some of the other Things were approaching now, striding back across the desert with horrible jerky motions.

“You’ll get tired,” it continued. “We can wait. We’re very good at waiting.”

It made a feint to the left, but Esk swung around to face it.

“That doesn’t matter,” she said. “I’m only dreaming this, and you can’t get hurt in dreams.”

The Thing paused, and looked at her with its empty eyes.

“Have you got a word in your world, I think it’s called ’psychosomatic’?”

“Never heard of it,” snapped Esk.

“It means you can get hurt in your dreams. And what is so interesting is that if you die in your dreams you stay here. That would be niiiiice.”

Esk glanced sideways at the distant mountains, sprawled on the chilly horizon like melted mud pies. There were no trees, not even any rocks. Just sand and cold stars and

She felt the movement rather than heard it and turned with the pyramid held between her hands like a club. It hit the Simon-thing in mid-leap with a satisfying thump, but as soon as it hit the ground it somersaulted forward and bounced upright with unpleasant ease. But it had heard her gasp and had seen the brief pain in her eyes. It paused.

“Ah, that hurt you, Did it not? You don’t like to see another one suffer, yes? Not this one, it seems.”

It turned and beckoned, and two of the tall Things lurched over to it and gripped it firmly by the arms.

Its eyes changed. The darkness faded, and then Simon’s own eyes looked out of his face. He stared up at the Things on either side of him and struggled briefly, but one had several pairs of tentacles wrapped around his wrist and the other was holding his arm in the world’s largest lobster claw.

Then he saw Esk, and his eyes fell to the little glass pyramid.

“Run away!” he hissed. “Take it away from here! Don’t let them get it!” He grimaced as the claw tightened on his arm.

“Is this a trick?” said Esk. “Who are you really?”

“Don’t you recognise me?” he said wretchedly. “What are you doing in my dream?”

“If this is a dream then I’d like to wake up, please,” said Esk.

“Listen. You must run away now, do you understand? Don’t stand there with your mouth open.”

GIVE IT To us, said a cold voice inside Esk’s head.

Esk looked down at the glass pyramid with its unconcerned little world and stared up at Simon, her mouth an O of puzzlement.

“But what is it?”

“Look hard at it!”

Esk peered through the glass. If she squinted it seemed that the little Disc was granular, as if it was made up of millions of tiny specks. If she looked hard at the specks

“It’s just numbers!” she said. “The whole world—it’s all made up of numbers . . . .”

“It’s not the world, it’s an idea of the world,” said Simon. “I created it for them. They can’t get through to us, do you see, but ideas have got a shape here. Ideas are real!”

GIVE IT TO US.

“But ideas can’t hurt anyone!”

“I turned things into numbers to understand them, but they just want to control,” Simon said bitterly. “They burrowed into my numbers like—”

He screamed.

GIVE IT TO US OR WE WILL TAKE HIM TO BITS.

Esk looked up at the nearest nightmare face.

“How do I know I can trust you?” she said.

YOU CAN’T TRUST US. BUT YOU HAVE NO CHOICE.

Esk looked at the ring of faces that not even a necrophile could love, faces put together from a fishmonger’s midden, faces picked randomly from things that lurked in deep ocean holes and haunted caves, faces that were not human enough to gloat or leer but had all the menace of a suspiciously v-shaped ripple near an incautious bather.

She couldn’t trust them. But she had no choice.

 

Something else was happening, in a place as far away as the thickness of a shadow.

The student wizards had run back to the Great Hall, where Cutangle and Granny Weatherwax were still locked in the magical equivalent of Indian arm wrestling. The flagstones under Granny were halfmelted and cracked and the table behind Cutangle had taken root and already bore a rich crop of acorns.

One of the students had earned several awards for bravery by daring to tug at Cutangle’s cloak ….

And now they were crowded into the narrow room, looking at the two bodies.

Cutangle summoned doctors of the body and doctors of the mind, and the room buzzed with magic as they got to work.

Granny tapped him on the shoulder.

“A word in your ear, young man,” she said.

“Hardly young, madam,” sighed Cutangle, “hardly young.” He felt drained. It had been decades since he’d duelled in magic, although it was common enough among students. He had a nasty feeling that Granny would have won eventually. Fighting her was like swatting a fly on your own nose. He couldn’t think what had come over him to try it.

Granny led him out into the passage and around the corner to a window-seat. She sat down, leaning her broomstick against the wall. Rain drummed heavily on the roofs outside, and a few zigzags of lightning indicated a storm of Ramtop proportions approaching the city.

“That was quite an impressive display,” she said: “You nearly won once or twice there.”

“Oh,” said Cutangle, brightening up. “Do you really think so?”

Granny nodded.

Cutangle patted at various bits of his robe until he located a tarry bag of tobacco and a roll of paper. His hands shook as he fumbled a few shreds of second-hand pipeweed into a skinny homemade. He ran the wretched thing across his tongue, and barely moistened it. Then a dim remembrance of propriety welled up in the back of his mind.

“Um,” he said, “do you mind if I smoke?”

Granny shrugged. Cutangle struck a match on the wall and tried desperately to navigate the flame and the cigarette into approximately the same position. Granny gently took the match from his trembling hand and lit it for him.

Cutangle sucked on the tobacco, had a ritual cough and settled back, the glowing end of the rollup the only light in the dim corridor.

“They’ve gone Wandering,” said Granny at last.

“I know,” said Cutangle.

“Your wizards won’t be able to get them back.”

“I know that, too.”

“They might get something back, though.”

“I wish you hadn’t said that.”

There was a pause while they contemplated what might come back, inhabiting living bodies, acting almost like the original inhabitants.

“It’s probably my fault—”they said in unison, and stopped in astonishment.

“You first, madam,” said Cutangle.

“Them cigaretty things,” asked Granny, “are they good for the nerves?”

Cutangle opened his mouth to point out very courteously that tobacco was a habit reserved for wizards, but thought better of it. He extended the tobacco pouch towards Granny.

She told him about Esk’s birth, and the coming of the old wizard, and the staff, and Esk’s forays into magic. By the time she had finished she had succeeded in rolling a tight, thin cylinder that burned with a small blue flame and made her eyes water.

“I don’t know that shaky nerves wouldn’t be better,” she wheezed.

Cutangle wasn’t listening.

“This is quite astonishing,” he said. “You say the child didn’t suffer in any way?”

“Not that I noticed,” said Granny. “The staff seemed—well, on her side, if you know what I mean.”

“And where is this staff now?”

“She said she threw it in the river . . . .”

The old wizard and the elderly witch stared at each other, their faces illuminated by a flare of lightning outside.

Cutangle shook his head. “The river’s flooding,” he said. “It’s a million-to-one chance.”

Granny smiled grimly. It was the sort of smile that wolves ran away from. Granny grasped her broomstick purposefully.

“Million-to-one chances,” she said, “crop up nine times out of ten.”

 

There are storms that are frankly theatrical, all sheet lightning and metallic thunder rolls. There are storms that are tropical and sultry, and incline to hot winds and fireballs. But this was a storm of the Circle Sea plains, and its main ambition was to hit the ground with as much rain as possible. It was the kind of storm that suggests that the whole sky has swallowed a diuretic. The thunder and lightning hung around in the background, supplying a sort of chorus, but the rain was the star of the show. It tap-danced across the land.

The grounds of the University stretched right down to the river. By day they were a neat formal pattern of gravel paths and hedges, but in the middle of a wet wild night the hedges seemed to have moved and the paths had simply gone off somewhere to stay dry.

A weak wyrdlight shone inefficiently among the dripping leaves. But most of the rain found its way through anyway.

“Can you use one of them wizard fireballs?”

“Have a heart, madam.”

“Are you sure she would have come this way?”

“There’s a sort of jetty thing down here somewhere, unless I’m lost.”

There was the sound of a heavy body blundering wetly into a bush, and then a splash.

“I’ve found the river, anyway.”

Granny Weatherwax peered through the soaking darkness. She could hear a roaring and could dimly make out the white crests of floodwater. There was also the distinctive river smell of the Ankh, which suggested that several armies had used it first as a urinal and then as a sepulchre.

Cutangle splashed dejectedly towards her.

“This is foolishness,” he said, “meaning no offence, madam. But it’ll be out to sea on this flood. And I’ll die of cold.”

“You can’t get any wetter than you are now. Anyway, you walk wrong for rain.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You go all hunched up, you fight it, that’s not the way. You shouldwell, move between the drops.” And, indeed, Granny seemed to be merely damp.

“I’ll bear that in mind. Come on, madam. It’s me for a roaring fire and a glass of something hot and wicked.”

Granny sighed. “I don’t know. Somehow I expected to see it sticking out of the mud, or something. Not just all this water.”

Cutangle patted her gently on the shoulder.

“There may be something else we can do—” he began, and was interrupted by a zip of lightning and another roll of thunder.

“I said maybe there’s something—” he began again.

“What was that I saw?” demanded Granny.

“What was what?” said Cutangle, bewildered.

“Give me some light!”

The wizard sighed wetly, and extended a hand. A bolt of golden fire shot out across the foaming water and hissed into oblivion.

“There!” said Granny triumphantly.

“It’s just a boat,” said Cutangle. “The boys use them in the summer—”

He waded after Granny’s determined figure as fast as he could.

“You can’t be thinking of taking it out on a night like this,” he said. “It’s madness!”

Granny slithered along the wet planking of the jetty, which was already nearly under water.

“You don’t know anything about boats!” Cutangle protested.

“I shall have to learn quickly, then,” replied Granny calmly.

“But I haven’t been in a boat since I was a boy!”

“I wasn’t actually asking you to come. Does the pointy bit go in front?”

Cutangle moaned.

“This is all very creditable,” he said, “but perhaps we can wait till morning?”

A flash of lightning illuminated Granny’s face.

“Perhaps not,” Cutangle conceded. He lumbered along the jetty and pulled the little rowing boat towards him. Getting in was a matter of luck but he managed it eventually, fumbling with the painter in the darkness.

The boat swung out into the flood and was carried away, spinning slowly.

Granny clung to the seat as it rocked in the turbulent waters, and looked expectantly at Cutangle through the murk.

“Well?” she said.

“Well what?” said Cutangle.

“You said you knew all about boats.”

“No. I said you didn’t.”

“Oh.”

They hung on as the boat wallowed heavily, miraculously righted itself, and was carried backwards downstream.

“When you said you hadn’t been in a boat since you were a boy. . .” Granny began.

“I was two years old, I think.”

The boat caught on a whirlpool, spun around, and shot off across the flow.

“I had you down as the sort of boy who was in and out of boats all day long.”

“I was born up in the mountains. I get seasick on damp grass, if you must know,” said Cutangle.

The boat banged heavily against a submerged tree trunk, and a wavelet lapped the prow.

“I know a spell against drowning,” he added miserably.

“I’m glad about that.”

“Only you have to say it while you’re standing on dry land.”

“Fake your boots off.” Granny commanded.

“What?”

“Take your boots off, man!”

Cutangle shifted uneasily on his bench.

“What have you in mind?” he said.

“The water is supposed to be outside the boat, I know that much!” Granny pointed to the dark tide sloshing around the bilges: “Fill your boots with water and tip it over the side!”

Cutangle nodded. He felt that the last couple of hours had somehow carried him along without him actually touching the sides, and for a moment he nursed the strangely consoling feeling that his life was totally beyond his control and whatever happened no one could blame him. Filling his boots with water while adrift on a flooded river at midnight with what he could only describe as a woman seemed about as logical as anything could be in the circumstances.

A fine figure of a woman, said a neglected voice at the back of his mind. There was something about the way she used the tattered broomstick to scull the boat across the choppy water that troubled long-forgotten bits of Cutangle’s subconscious.

Not that he could be certain about the fine figure, of course, what with the rain and the wind and Granny’s habit of wearing her entire wardrobe in one go. Cutangle cleared his throat uncertainly. Metaphorically a fine figure, he decided.

“Um, look,” he said. “This is all very creditable, but consider the facts, I mean, the rate of drift and so forth, you see? It could be miles out on the ocean by now. It might never come to shore again. It might even go over the Rimfall.”

Granny, who had been staring out across the water, turned around.

“Can’t you think of anything else at all helpful that we could be doing?” she demanded.

Cutangle baled for a few moments.

“No,” he said.

“Have you ever heard of anyone coming Back?”

“No.”

“Then it’s worth a try, isn’t it?”

“I never liked the ocean,” said Cutangle. “It ought to be paved over. There’s dreadful things in it, down in the deep bits. Ghastly sea monsters. Or so they say.”

“Keep baling, my lad, or you’ll be able to see if they’re right.”

The storm rolled backwards and forwards overhead. It was lost here on the flat river plains; it belonged in the high Ramtops, where they knew how to appreciate a good storm. It grumbled around, looking for even a moderately high hill to throw lightning at.

The rain settled down to the gentle patter of rain that is quite capable of keeping it up for days. A sea fog also rolled in to assist it.

“If we had some oars we could row, if we knew where we were going,” said Cutangle. Granny didn’t answer.

He heaved a few more bootfuls of water over the side, and it occurred to him that the gold braiding on his robe would probably never be the same again. It would be nice to think it might matter, one day.

“I don’t suppose you do know which way the Hub is, by any chance?” he ventured. “Just making conversation.”

“Look for the mossy side of trees,” said Granny without turning her head.

“Ali, " said Cutangle, and nodded.

He peered down gloomily at the oily waters, and wondered which particular oily waters they were. Judging by the salty smell they were out in the bay now.

What really terrified him about the sea was that the only thing between him and the horrible things that lived at the bottom of it was water. Of course, he knew that logically the only thing that separated him from, say, the man-eating tigers in the jungles of Klatch was mere distance, but that wasn’t the same thing at all. Tigers didn’t rise up out of the chilly depths, mouths full of needle teeth ….

He shivered.

“Can’t you feel it?” asked Granny. “You can taste it in the air. Magic! It’s leaking out from something.”

“It’s not actually water soluble,” said Cutangle. He smacked his lips once or twice. There was indeed a tinny taste to the fog, he had to admit, and a faint greasiness to the air.

“You’re a wizard,” said Granny, severely. “Can’t you call it up or something?”

“The question has never arisen,” said Cutangle. “Wizards never throw their staffs away.”

“It’s around here somewhere,” snapped Granny. “Help me look for it, man!”

Cutangle groaned. It had been a busy night, and before he tried any more magic he really needed twelve hours sleep, several good meals, and a quiet afternoon in front of a big fire. He was getting too old, that was the trouble. But he closed his eyes and concentrated.

There was magic around, all right. There are some places where magic naturally accumulates. It builds up around deposits of the transmundane metal octiron, in the wood of certain trees, in isolated lakes, it sleets through the world and those skilled in such things can catch it and store it. There was a store of magic in the area.

“It’s potent,” he said. “Very potent.” He raised his hands to his temples.

“It’s getting bloody cold,” said Granny. The insistent rain had turned to snow.

There was a sudden change in the world. The boat stopped, not with a jar, but as if the sea had suddenly decided to become solid. Granny looked over the side.

The sea had become solid. The sound of the waves was coming from a long way away and getting further away all the time.

She leaned over the side of the boat and tapped on the water.

“Ice,” she said. The boat was motionless in an ocean of ice. It creaked ominously.

Cutangle nodded slowly.

“It makes sense,” he said. “If they are . . . where we think they are, then it’s very cold. As cold as the night between the stars, it is said. So the staff feels it too.”

“Right,” said Granny, and stepped out of the boat. “All we have to do is find the middle of the ice and there’s the staff, right?”

“I knew you were going to say that. Can I at least put my boots on?”

They wandered across the frozen waves, with Cutangle stopping occasionally to try and sense the exact location of the staff. His robes were freezing on him. His teeth chattered.

“Aren’t you cold?” he said to Granny, whose dress fairly crackled as she walked.

“I’m cold,” she conceded, “I just ain’t shivering.”

“We used to have winters like this when I was a lad,” said Cutangle, blowing on his fingers. “It doesn’t snow in Ankh, hardly.”

“Really,” said Granny, peering ahead through the freezing fog.

“There was snow on the tops of the mountains all year round, I recall. Oh, you don’t get temperatures like you did when I was a boy.”

“At least, until now,” he added, stamping his feet on the ice. It creaked menacingly, reminding him that it was all that lay between him and the bottom of the sea. He stamped again, as softly as possible.

“What mountains were these?” asked Granny.

“Oh, the Ramtops. Up towards the Hub, in fact. Place called Brass Neck.”

Granny’s lips moved. “Cutangle, Cutangle,” she said softly. “Any relation to old Acktur Cutangle? Used to live in a big old house under Leaping Mountain, had a lot of sons.”

“My father. How on disc d’you know that?”

“I was raised up there,” said Granny, resisting the temptation merely to smile knowingly. “Next valley. Bad Ass. I remember your mother. Nice woman, kept brown and white chickens, I used to go up there to buy eggs for me mam. That was before I was called to witching, of course.”

“I don’t remember you,” said Cutangle. “Of course, it was a long time ago. There was always a lot of children around our house.” He sighed. “I suppose it’s possible I pulled your hair once. It was the sort of thing I used to do.”

“Maybe. I remember a fat little boy. Rather unpleasant.”

“That might have been me. I seem to recall a rather bossy girl, but it was a long time ago. A long time ago.”

“I didn’t have white hair in those days,” said Granny.

“Everything was a different colour in those days.”

“That’s true.”

“It didn’t rain so much in the summer time.”

“The sunsets were redder.”

“There were more old people. The world was full of them,” said the wizard.

“Yes, I know. And now it’s full of young people. Funny, really. I mean, you’d expect it to be the other way round.”

“They even had a better kind of air. It was easier to breathe,” said Cutangle. They stamped on through the swirling snow, considering the curious ways of time and Nature.

“Ever been home again?” said Granny.

Cutangle shrugged. “When my father died. It’s odd, I’ve never said this to anyone, but-well, there were my brothers, because I am an eighth son of course, and they had children and even grandchildren, and not one of them can hardly write his name. I could have bought the whole village. And they treated me like a king, but— I mean, I’ve been to places and seen things that would curdle their minds, I’ve faced down creatures wilder than their nightmares, I know secrets that are known to a very few—”

“You felt left out,” said Granny. “There’s nothing strange in that. It happens to all of us. It was our choice.”

“Wizards should never go home,” said Cutangle.

“I don’t think they can go home,” agreed Granny. “You can’t cross the same river twice, I always say.”

Cutangle gave this some thought.

“I think you’re wrong there,” he said. “I must have crossed the same river, oh, thousands of times.”

“Ah, but it wasn’t the same river.”

“It wasn’t?”

“No.”

Cutangle shrugged. “It looked like the same bloody river.”

“No need to take that tone,” said Granny. “I don’t see why I should listen to that sort of language from a wizard who can’t even answer letters!”

Cutangle was silent for a moment, except for the castanet chatter of his teeth.

“Oh,” he said. “Oh, I see. They were from you, were they?”

“That’s right. I signed them on the bottom. It’s supposed to be a sort of clue, isn’t it?”

“All right, all right. I just thought they were a joke, that’s all,” said Cutangle sullenly.

“A joke?”

“We don’t get many applications from women. We don’t get any.”

“I wondered why I didn’t get a reply,” said Granny.

“I threw them away, if you must know.”

“You could at least have—there it is!”

“Where? Where? Oh, there.”

The fog parted and they now saw it clearly—a fountain of snowflakes, a ornamental pillar of frozen air. And below it….

The staff wasn’t locked in ice, but lay peacefully in a seething pool of water.

One of the unusual aspects of a magical universe is the existence of opposites. It has already been remarked that darkness isn’t the opposite of light, it is simply the absence of light. In the same way absolute zero is merely the absence of heat. If you want to know what real cold is, the cold so intense that water can’t even freeze but anti-boils, look no further than this pool.

They looked in silence for some seconds, their bickering forgotten. Then Cutangle said slowly: “If you stick your hand in that, your fingers’ll snap like carrots.”

“Do you think you can lift it out by magic?” said Granny.

Cutangle started to pat his pockets and eventually produced his rollup bag. With expert fingers he shredded the remains of a few dogends into a fresh paper and licked it into shape, without taking his eyes off the staff.

“No,” he said. “but I’ll try anyway.”

He looked longingly at the cigarette and then poked it behind his ear. He extended his hands, fingers splayed, and his lips moved soundlessly as he mumbled a few words of power.

The staff spun in its pool and then rose gently away from the ice, where it immediately became the centre of a cocoon of frozen air. Cutangle groaned with the effort—direct levitation is the hardest of the practical magics, because of the ever-present danger of the wellknown principles of action and reaction, which means that a wizard attempting to lift a heavy item by mind power alone faces the prospect of ending up with his brains in his boots.

“Can you stand it upright?” said Granny.

With great delicacy the staff turned slowly in the air until it hung in front of Granny a few inches above the ice. Frost glittered on its carvings, but it seemed to Cutangle—through the red haze of migraine that hovered in front of his eyes—to be watching him. Resentfully.

Granny adjusted her hat and straightened up purposefully.

“Right,” she said. Cutangle swayed. The tone of voice cut through him like a diamond saw. He could dimly remember being scolded by his mother when he was small; well, this was that voice, only refined and concentrated and edged with little bits of carborundum, a tone of command that would have a corpse standing to attention and could probably have marched it halfway across its cemetery before it remembered it was dead.

Granny stood in front of the hovering staff, almost melting its icy covering by the sheer anger in her gaze.

“This is your idea of proper behaviour, is it? Lying around on the sea while people die? Oh, very well done!”

She stomped around in a semi-circle. To Cutangle’s bewilderment, the staff turned to follow her.

“So you were thrown away,” snapped Granny. “So what? She’s hardly more than a child, and children throw us all away sooner or later. Is this loyal service? Have you no shame, lying around sulking when you could be of some use at last?”

She leaned forward, her hooked nose a few inches from the staff. Cutangle was almost certain that the staff tried to lean backwards out of her way.

“Shall I tell you what happens to wicked staffs?” she hissed. “If Esk is lost to the world, shall I tell you what I will do to you? You were saved from the fire once, because you could pass on the hurt to her. Next time it won’t be the fire.”

Her voice sank to a whiplash whisper.

“First it’ll be the spokeshave. And then the sandpaper, and the auger, and the whittling knife—”

“I say, steady on,” said Cutangle, his eyes watering.

“—and what’s left I’ll stake out in the woods for the fungus and the woodlice and the beetles. It could take years.”

The carvings writhed. Most of them had moved around the back, out of Granny’s gaze.

“Now,” she said. “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to pick you up and we are all going back to the University, aren’t we? Otherwise it’s blunt saw time.”

She rolled up her sleeves and extended a hand.

“Wizard,” she said, “I shall want you to release it.”

Cutangle nodded miserably.

“When I say now, now! Now!”

 

Cutangle opened his eyes again.

Granny was standing with her left arm extended full length in front of her, her hand clamped around the staff.

The ice was exploding off it, in gouts of steam.

“Right,” finished Granny, “and if this happens again I shall be very angry, do I make myself clear?”

Cutangle lowered his hands and hurried towards her.

“Are you hurt?”

She shook her head. “It’s like holding a hot icicle,” she said. “Come on, we haven’t got time to stand around chatting.”

“How are we going to get back?”

“Oh, show some backbone, man, for goodness sake. We’ll fly,”

Granny waved her broomstick. The Archchancellor looked at it doubtfully.

“On that?”

“Of course. Don’t wizards fly on their staffs?”

“It’s rather undignified.”

“If I can put up with that, so can you.”

“Yes, but is it safe?”

Granny gave him a withering look.

“Do you mean in the absolute sense?” she asked. “Or, say, compared with staying behind on a melting ice floe?”

 

“This is the first time I have ever ridden on a broomstick,” said Cutangle.

“Really.”

“I thought you just had to get on them and they flew,” said the wizard. “I didn’t know you had to do all that running up and down and shouting at them.”

“It’s a knack,” said Granny.

“I thought they went faster,” Cutangle continued, “and, to be frank, higher.”

“What do you mean, higher?” asked Granny, trying to compensate for the wizard’s weight on the pillion as they turned back upriver. Like pillion passengers since the dawn of time, he persisted in leaning the wrong way.

“Well, more sort of above the trees,” said Cutangle, ducking as a dripping branch swept his hat away.

“There’s nothing wrong with this broomstick that you losing a few stone wouldn’t cure,” snapped Granny. “Or would you rather get off and walk?”

“Apart from the fact that half the time my feet are touching the ground anyway,” said Cutangle. “I wouldn’t want to embarrass you. If someone had asked me to list all the perils of flying, you know, it would never have occurred to me to include having one’s legs whipped to death by tall bracken.”

“Are you smoking?” said Granny, staring grimly ahead. “Something’s burning.”

“It was just to calm my nerves what with all this headlong plunging through the air, madam.”

“Well, put it out this minute. And hold on.”

The broomstick lurched upwards and increased its speed to that of a geriatric jogger.

“Mr Wizard.”

“Hallo?”

“When I said hold on—”

“Yes?”

“I didn’t mean there.”

There was a pause.

“Oh. Yes. I see. I’m terribly sorry.”

“That’s all right.”

“My memory isn’t what it was . . . I assure you . . . no offence meant.”

“None taken.”

They flew in silence for a moment.

“Nevertheless,” said Granny thoughtfully, “I think that, on the whole, I would prefer you to move your hands.”

 

Rain gushed across the leads of Unseen University and poured into the gutters where ravens’ nests, abandoned since the summer, floated like very badly-built boats. The water gurgled along ancient, crusted pipes. It found its way under tiles and said hallo to the spiders under the eaves. It leapt from gables and formed secret lakes high amongst the spires.

Whole ecologies lived in the endless rooftops of the University, which by comparison made Gormenghast look like a toolshed on a railway allotment; birds sang in tiny jungles grown from apple pips and weed seeds, little frogs swam in the upper gutters, and a colony of ants were busily inventing an interesting and complex civilisation.

One thing the water couldn’t do was gurgle out of the ornamental gargoyles ranged around the roofs. This was because the gargoyles wandered off and sheltered in the attics at the first sign of rain. They held that just because you were ugly it didn’t mean you were stupid.

It rained streams. It rained rivers. It rained seas. But mainly it rained through the roof of the Great Hall, where the duel between Granny and Cutangle had left a very large hole, and Treatle felt that it was somehow raining on him personally.

He stood on a table organising the teams of students who were taking down the paintings and ancient tapestries before they got soaked. It had to be a table, because the floor was already several inches deep in water.

Not rainwater, unfortunately. This was water with real personality, the kind of distinctive character water gets after a long journey through silty countryside. It had the thick texture of authentic Ankh water—too stiff to drink, too runny to plough.

The river had burst its banks and a million little watercourses were flowing backwards, bursting in through the cellars and playing peekaboo under the flagstones. There was the occasional distant boom as some forgotten magic in a drowned dungeon shorted out and surrendered up its power; Treatle wasn’t at all keen on some of the unpleasant bubblings and hissings that were escaping to the surface.

He thought again how nice it would be to be the sort of wizard who lived in a little cave somewhere and collected herbs and thought significant thoughts and knew what the owls were saying. But probably the cave would be damp and the herbs would be poisonous and Treatle could never be sure, when all was said and done, exactly what thoughts were really significant.

He got down awkwardly and paddled through the dark swirling waters. Well, he had done his best. He’d tried to organise the senior wizards into repairing the roof by magic, but there was a general argument over the spells that could be used and a consensus that this was in any case work for artisans.

That’s wizards for you, he thought gloomily as he waded between the dripping arches, always probing the infinite but never noticing the definite, especially in the matter of household chores. We never had this trouble before that woman came.

He squelched up the steps, lit by a particularly impressive flash of lightning. He had a cold certainty that while of course no one could possibly blame him for all this, everybody would. He seized the hem of his robe and wrung it out wretchedly, then he reached for his tobacco pouch.

It was a nice green waterproof one. That meant that all the rain that had got into it couldn’t get out again. It was indescribable.

He found his little clip of papers. They were fused into one lump, like the legendary pound note found in the back pockets of trousers after they have been washed, spun, dried and ironed.

“Bugger,” he said, with feeling.

“I say! Treatle!”

Treatle looked around. He had been the last to leave the hall, where even now some of the benches were beginning to float. Whirlpools and patches of bubble marked the spots where magic was leaking from the cellars, but there was no one to be seen.

Unless, of course, one of the statues had spoken. They had been too heavy to move, and Trestle remembered telling the students that a thorough wash would probably do them good.

He looked at their stern faces and regretted it. The statues of very powerful dead mages were sometimes more lifelike than statues had any right to be. Maybe he should have kept his voice down.

“Yes?” he ventured, acutely aware of the stony stares.

“Up here, you fool!”

He looked up. The broomstick descended heavily through the rain in a series of swoops and jerks. About five feet above the water it lost its few remaining aerial pretensions, and flopped noisily into a whirlpool.

“Don’t stand there, idiot!”

Treatle peered nervously into the gloom.

“I’ve got to stand somewhere,” he said.

“I mean give us a hand!” snapped Cutangle, rising from the wavelets like a fat and angry Venus. “The lady first, of course.”

He turned to Granny, who was fishing around in the water.

“I’ve lost my hat,” she said.

Cutangle sighed. “Does that really matter at a time like this?”

“A witch has got to have a hat, otherwise who’s to know?” said Granny. She made a grab as something dark and sodden drifted by, cackled triumphantly, tipped out the water and rammed the hat on her head. It had lost its stiffening and flopped rather rakishly over one eye.

“Right,” she said, in a tone of voice that suggested the whole universe had just better watch out.

There was another brilliant flash of lightning, which shows that even the weather gods have a well-developed sense of theatre.

“It rather suits you,” said Cutangle.

“Excuse me,” said Trestle, “but isn’t she the w—”

“Never mind that,” said Cutangle, taking Granny’s hand and helping her up the steps. He flourished the staff.

“But it’s against the lore to allow w—”

He stopped and stared as Granny reached out and touched the damp wall by the door. Cutangle tapped him on the chest.

“Show me where it’s written down,” said Cutangle.

“They’re in the Library,” Granny interrupted.

“It was the only dry place,” said Treatle, “but—”

“This building is frightened of thunderstorms,” said Granny. “It could do with comforting.”

“But the lore—”repeated Treatle desperately.

Granny was already striding down the passage, with Cutangle hopping along behind. He turned.

“You heard the lady,” he said.

Treatle watched them go, with his mouth hanging open. When their footsteps had died away in the distance he stood silently for a moment, thinking about life and where his could have gone wrong.

However, he wasn’t going to be accused of disobedience.

Very carefully, without knowing exactly why, he reached out and gave the wall a friendly pat.

“There, there,” he said.

Strangely enough, he felt a lot better.

 

It occurred to Cutangle that he ought to lead the way in his own premises, but Granny in a hurry was no match for a nearterminal nicotine addict and he kept up only by a sort of crabwise leaping.

“It’s this way,” he said, splashing through the puddles.

“I know. The building told me.”

“Yes, I was meaning to ask about that,” said Cutangle, “because you see it’s never said anything to me and I’ve lived here for years.”

“Have you ever listened to it?”

“Not exactly listened, no,” Cutangle conceded. “Not as such.”

“Well then,” said Granny, edging past a waterfall where the kitchen steps used to be (Mrs Whitlow’s washing would never be the same again). “I think it’s up here and along the passage, isn’t it?”

She swept past a trio of astonished wizards, who were surprised by her and completely startled by her hat.

Cutangle panted after her and caught her arm at the doors to the Library.

“Look,” he said desperately, “No offence, Miss—um, Mistress—”

“I think Esmerelda will suffice now. What with us having shared a broomstick and everything.”

“Can I go in front? It is my Library,” he begged.

Granny turned around, her face a mask of surprise. Then she smiled.

“Of course. I’m so sorry.”

“For the look of the thing, you see,” said Cutangle apologetically. He pushed the door open.

The Library was full of wizards, who care about their books in the same way that ants care about their eggs and in time of difficulty carry them around in much the same way. The water was getting in even here, and turning up in rather odd places because of the Library’s strange gravitational effects. All the lower shelves had been cleared and relays of wizards and students were piling the volumes on every available table and dry shelf. The air was full of the sound of angry rustling pages, which almost drowned out the distant fury of the storm.

This was obviously upsetting the librarian, who was scurrying from wizard to wizard, tugging ineffectually at their robes and shouting “ook".

He spotted Cutangle and knuckled rapidly towards him. Granny had never seen an orang-outan before, but wasn’t about to admit it, and remained quite calm in the face of a small potbellied man with extremely long arms and a size IZ skin on a size 8 body.

“Ook,” it explained, “ooook.”

“I expect so,” said Cutangle shortly, and grabbed the nearest wizard, who was tottering under the weight of a dozen grimoires. The man stared at him as if he was a ghost, looked sideways at Granny, and dropped the books on the floor. The librarian winced.

“Archchancellor?” gasped the wizard, “you’re alive? I mean -we heard you’d been spirited away by—” he looked at Granny again, “—I mean, we thought—Treatle told us—”

“Oook,” said the librarian, shooing some pages back between their covers.

“Where are young Simon and the girl? What have you done with them?” Granny demanded.

“They—we put them over here,” said the wizard, backing away. “Um—”

“Show us,” said Cutangle. “And stop stuttering, man, you’d think you’d never seen a woman before.”

The wizard swallowed hard and nodded vigorously.

“Certainly. And—I mean—please follow me—um—”

“You weren’t going to say anything about the lore, were you?” asked Cutangle.

“Um—no, Archchancellor.”

“Good.”

They followed hard on his trodden-down heels as he scurried between the toiling wizards, most of whom stopped working to stare as Granny strode past.

“This is getting embarrassing,” said Cutangle, out of the corner of his mouth. “I shall have to declare you an honorary wizard.”

Granny stared straight ahead and her lips hardly moved.

“You do,” she hissed, “and I will declare you an honorary witch.”

Cutangle’s mouth snapped shut.

Esk and Simon were lying on a table in one of the side readingrooms, with half a dozen wizards watching over them. They drew back nervously as the trio approached, with the librarian swinging along behind.

“I’ve been thinking,” said Cutangle. “Surely it would be better to give the staff to Simon? He is a wizard, and—”

“Over my dead body,” said Granny. “Yours, too. They’re getting their power through him, do you want to give them more?”

Cutangle sighed. He had been admiring the staff, it was one of the best he had seen.

“Very well. You’re right, of course.”

He leaned down and laid the staff on Esk’s sleeping form, and then stood back dramatically.

Nothing happened.

One of the wizards coughed nervously.

Nothing continued to happen.

The carvings on the staff appeared to be grinning.

“It’s not working,” said Cutangle, “is it?”

“Ook.”

“Give it time,” said Granny.

They gave it time. Outside the storm strode around the sky, trying to lift the lids off houses.

Granny sat down on a pile of books and rubbed her eyes. Cutangle’s hands strayed towards his tobacco pocket. The wizard with the nervous cough was helped out of the room by a colleague.

“Ook,” said the librarian.

“I know!” said Granny, so that Cutangle’s half-rolled homemade shot out of his nerveless fingers in a shower of tobacco.

“What?”

“It’s not finished!”

“What?”

“She can’t use the staff, of course,” said Granny, standing up.

“But you said she swept the floors with it and it protects her and—” Cutangle began.

“Nonono,” said Granny. “That means the staff uses itself or it uses her, but she’s never been able to use it, d’you see?”

Cutangle stared at the two quiet bodies. “She should be able to use it. It’s a proper wizard’s staff.”

“Oh,” said Granny. “So she’s a proper wizard, is she?”

Cutangle hesitated.

“Well, of course not. You can’t ask us to declare her a wizard. Where’s the precedent?”

“The what?” asked Granny, sharply.

“It’s never happened before.”

“Lots of things have never happened before. We’re only born once.”

Cutangle gave her a look of mute appeal. “But it’s against the I—”

He began to say “lore", but the word mumbled into silence.

“Where does it say it?” said Granny triumphantly. “Where does it say women can’t be wizards?”

The following thoughts sped through Cutangle’s mind:

… It doesn’t say it anywhere, it says it everywhere.

… But young Simon seemed to say that everywhere is so much like nowhere that you can’t really tell the difference .

… Do I want to be remembered as the first Archchancellor to allow women into the University? Still . . . I’d be remembered, that’s for sure .

… She really is a rather impressive woman when she stands in that sort of way .

… That staff has got ideas of its own .

… There’s a sort of sense to it .

… I would be laughed at .

… It might not work .

… It might work.

 

She couldn’t trust them. But she had no choice.

Esk stared at the terrible faces peering down at her, and the lanky bodies, mercifully cloaked.

Her hands tingled.

In the shadow-world, ideas are real. The thought seemed to travel up her arms.

It was a buoyant sort of thought, a thought full of fizz. She laughed, and moved her hands apart, and the staff sparkled in her hands like solid electricity.

The Things started to chitter nervously and one or two at the back started to lurch away. Simon fell forward as his captors hastily let go, and he landed on his hands and knees in the sand.

“Use it!” he shouted. “That’s it! They’re frightened!”

Esk gave him a smile, and continued to examine the staff. For the first time she could see what the carvings actually were.

Simon snatched up the pyramid of the world and ran towards her.

“Come on!” he said. “They hate it!”

“Pardon?” said Esk.

“Use the staff,” said Simon urgently, and reached out for it. “Hey! It bit me!”

“Sorry,” said Esk. “What were we talking about?” She looked up and regarded the keening Things as it were for the first time.

“Oh, those. They only exist inside our heads. If we didn’t believe in them, they wouldn’t exist at all.”

Simon looked around at them.

“I can’t honestly say I believe you,” he said.

“I think we should go home now,” said Esk. “People will be worrying. ”

She moved her hands together and the staff vanished, although for a moment her hands glowed as though they were cupped around a candle.

The Things howled. A few of them fell over.

“The important thing about magic is how you don’t use it,” said Esk, taking Simon’s arm.

He stared at the crumbling figures around him, and grinned foolishly.

“You don’t use it?” he queried.

“Oh, yes,” said Esk, as they walked towards the Things. “Try it yourself.”

She extended her hands, brought the staff out of the air, and offered it to him. He went to take it, then drew back his hand.

“Uh, no,” he said, “I don’t think it likes me much.”

“I think it’s all right if I give it to you. It can’t really argue with that,” said Esk.

“Where does it go?”

“It just becomes an idea of itself, I think.”

He reached out his hand again and closed his fingers around the shining wood.

“Right,” he said, and raised it in the classical revengeful wizard’s pose. “I’ll show them!”

“No, wrong.”

“What do you mean, wrong? I’ve got the power!”

“They’re sort of-reflections of us,” said Esk. “You can’t beat your reflections, they’ll always be as strong as you are. That’s why they draw nearer to you when you start using magic. And they don’t get tired. They feed off magic, so you can’t beat them with magic. No, the thing is . . . well, not using magic because you can’t, that’s no use at all. But not using magic because you can, that really upsets them. They hate the idea. If people stopped using magic they’d die.”

The Things ahead of them fell over each other in their haste to back away.

Simon looked at the staff, then at Esk, then at the Things, then back at the staff.

“This needs a lot of thinking about,” he said uncertainly. “I’d really like to work this out.”

“I expect you’ll do it very well.”

“Because you’re saying that the real power is when you go right through magic and out the other side.”

“It works, though, doesn’t it?”

They were alone on the cold plain now. The Things were distant stick-figures.

“I wonder if this is what they mean by sourcery?” said Simon.

I don’t know. It might be.”

“I’d really like to work this out,” said Simon again, turning the staff over and over in his hands. “We could set up some experiments, you know, into deliberately not using magic. We could carefully not draw an octogram on the floor, and we could deliberately not call up all sorts of things, and—it makes me sweat just to think about it!”

“I’d like to think about how to get home,” said Esk, looking down at the pyramid.

“Well, that is supposed to be my idea of the world. I should be able to find a way. How do you do this thing with the hands?”

He moved his hands together. The staff slid between them, the light glowing through his fingers for a moment, and then vanished. He grinned. “Right. Now all we have to do is look for the University …”

 

Cutangle lit his third rollup from the stub of the second. This last cigarette owed a lot to the creative powers of nervous energy, and looked like a camel with the legs cut off.

He had already watched the staff lift itself gently from Esk and land on Simon.

Now it had floated up into the air again.

Other wizards had crowded into the room. The librarian was sitting under the table.

“If only we had some idea what is going on,” said Cutangle. “It’s the suspense I can’t stand.”

“Think positively, man,” snapped Granny. “And put out that bloody cigarette, I can’t imagine anyone wanting to come back to a room that smells like a fireplace.”

As one man the assembled college of wizards turned their faces towards Cutangle, expectantly.

He took the smouldering mess out of his mouth and, with a glare that none of the assembled wizards cared to meet, trod it underfoot.

“Probably time I gave it up anyway,” he said. “That goes for the rest of you, too. Worse than an ashpit in this place, sometimes.”

Then he saw the staff. It was

The only way Cutangle could describe the effect was that it seemed to be going very fast while staying in exactly the same place.

Streamers of gas flared away from it and vanished, if they were gas. It blazed like a comet designed by an inept special effects man. Coloured sparks leapt out and disappeared somewhere.

It was also changing colour, starting with a dull red and then climbing through the spectrum until it was a painful violet. Snakes of white fire coruscated along its length.

There should be a word for words that sound like things would sound like if they made a noise, he thought. The word “glisten” does indeed gleam oily, and if there was ever a word that sounded exactly the way sparks look as they creep across burned paper, or the way the lights of cities would creep across the world if the whole of human civilisation was crammed into one night, then you couldn’t do better than “coruscate".

He knew what would happen next.

“Look out,” he whispered. “It’s going to go—”

In total silence, in the kind of silence in fact that sucks in sounds and stifles them, the staff flashed into pure octarine along the whole of its length.

The eighth colour, produced by light falling through a strong magical field, blazed out through bodies and bookshelves and walls. Other colours blurred and ran together, as though the light was a glass of gin poured over the watercolour painting of the world. The clouds over the University glowed, twisted into fascinating and unexpected shapes, and streamed upwards.

An observer above the Disc would have seen a little patch of land near the Circle Sea sparkle like a jewel for several seconds, then wink out.

The silence of the room was broken by a wooden clatter as the staff dropped out of the air and bounced on the table.

Someone said “Ook", very faintly.

Cutangle eventually remembered how to use his hands and raised them to where he hoped his eyes would be. Everything had gone black.

“Is—anyone else there?” he said.

“Gods, you don’t know how glad I am to hear you say that,” said another voice. The silence was suddenly full of babble.

“Are we still where we were?”

“I don’t know. Where were we?”

“Here, I think.”

“Can you reach out?”

“Not unless I am quite certain about what I’m going to touch, my good man,” said the unmistakable voice of Granny Weatherwax.

“Everyone try and reach out,” said Cutangle, and choked down a scream as a hand like a warm leather glove closed around his ankle. There was a satisfied little “ook", which managed to convey relief, comfort and the sheer joy of touching a fellow human being or, in this case, anthropoid.

There was a scratch and then a blessed flare of red light as a wizard on the far side of the room lit a cigarette.

“Who did that?”

“Sorry, Archchancellor, force of habit.”

“Smoke all you like, that man.”

“Thank you, Archchancellor.”

“I think I can see the outline of the door now,” said another voice.

“Granny?”

“Yes, I can definitely see—”

“Esk?”

“I’m here, Granny.”

“Can I smoke too, sir?”

“Is the boy with you?”

“Yes.”

“Ook.”

“I’m here.”

“What’s happening?”

“Everyone stop talking!”

Ordinary light, slow and easy on the eye, sidled back into the Library.

Esk sat up, dislodging the staff. It rolled under the table. She felt something slip over her eyes, and reached up for it.

“Just a moment,” said Granny, darting forward. She gripped the girl’s shoulders and peered into her eyes.

“Welcome back,” she said, and kissed her.

Esk reached up and patted something hard on her head. She lifted it down to examine it.

It was a pointed hat, slightly smaller than Granny’s, but bright blue with a couple of silver stars painted on it.

“A wizard hat?” she said.

Cutangle stepped forward.

“Ah, yes,"he said, and cleared his throat: “You see, we thought—it seemed—anyway, when we considered it—”

“You’re a wizard,” said Granny, simply. “The Archchancellor changed the lore. Quite a simple ceremony, really.”

“There’s the staff somewhere about here,” said Cutangle. “I saw it fall down—oh.”

He stood up with the staff in his hand, and showed it to Granny.

“I thought it had carvings on,” he said. “This looks just like a stick.” And that was a fact. The staff looked as menacing and potent as a piece of kindling.

Esk turned the hat around in her hands, in the manner of one who, opening the proverbial brightly-wrapped package, finds bath salts.

“It’s very nice,” she said uncertainly.

“Is that all you can say?” said Granny.

“It’s pointed, too.” Somehow being a wizard didn’t feel any different from not being a wizard.

Simon leaned over.

“Remember,” he said, “you’ve got to have been a wizard. Then you can start looking on the other side. Like you said.”

Their eyes met, and they grinned.

Granny stared at Cutangle. He shrugged.

“Search me,” he said. “What’s happened to your stutter, boy?”

“Seems to have gone, sir,” said Simon brightly. “Must have left it behind, somewhere.”

 

The river was still brown and swollen but at least it resembled a river again.

It was unnaturally hot for late autumn, and across the whole of the lower part of Ankh-Morpork the steam rose from thousands of carpets and blankets put out to dry. The streets were filled with silt, which on the whole was an improvement—AnkhMorpork’s impressive civic collection of dead dogs had been washed out to sea.

The steam also rose from the flagstones of the Archchancellor’s personal verandah, and from the teapot on the table.

Granny lay back in an ancient cane chair and let the unseasonal warmth creep around her ankles. She idly watched a team of city ants, who had lived under the flagstones of the University for so long that the high levels of background magic had permanently altered their genes, anthandling a damp sugar lump down from the bowl on to a tiny trolley. Another group was erecting a matchstick gantry at the edge of the table.

Granny may or may not have been interested to learn that one of the ants was Drum Billet, who had finally decided to give Life another chance.

“They say,” she said, “that if you can find an ant on Hogswatch Day it will be very mild for the rest of the winter.”

“Who says that?” said Cutangle.

“Generally people who are wrong,” said Granny. “I makes a note in my Almanack, see. I checks. Most things most people believe are wrong.”

“Like `red sky at night, the city’s alight’,” said Cutangle. “And you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”

“I don’t think that’s what old dogs are for,” said Granny. The sugar lump had reached the gantry now, and a couple of ants were attaching it to a microscopic block and tackle.

“I can’t understand half the things Simon says,” said Cutangle, “although some of the students get very excited about it.

“I understand what Esk says all right, I just don’t believe it,” said Granny. “Except the bit about wizards needing a heart.”

“She said that witches need a head, too,” said Cutangle. “Would you like a scone? A bit damp, I’m afraid.”

“She told me that if magic gives people what they want, then not using magic can give them what they need,” said Granny, her hand hovering over the plate.

“So Simon tells me. I don’t understand it myself, magic’s for using, not storing up. Go on, spoil yourself.”

“Magic beyond magic,” snorted Granny. She took the scone and spread jam on it. After a pause she spread cream on it too.

The sugar lump crashed to the flagstones and was immediately surrounded by another team of ants, ready to harness it to a long line of red ants enslaved from the kitchen garden.

Cutangle shifted uneasily in his seat, which creaked.

“Esmerelda,” he began, “I’ve been meaning to ask—”

“No,” said Granny.

“Actually I was going to say that we think we might allow a few more girls into the University. On an experimental basis. Once we get the plumbing sorted out,” said Cutangle.

“That’s up to you, of course.”

“And, and, it occurred to me that since we seem destined to become a co-educational establishment, as it were, it seemed to me, that is—”

“Well?”

“If you might see your way clear to becoming, that is, whether you would accept a Chair.”

He sat back. The sugar lump passed under his chair on matchstick rollers, the squeaking of the slavedriver ants just at the edge of hearing.

“Hmm,” said Granny, “I don’t see why not. I’ve always wanted one of those big wicker ones, you know, with the sort of sunshade bit on the top. If that’s not too much trouble.”

“That isn’t exactly what I meant,” said Cutangle, adding quickly, “although I’m sure that could be arranged. No, I mean, would you come and lecture the students? Once in a while?”

“What on?”

Cutangle groped for a subject.

“Herbs?” he hazarded. “We’re not very good on herbs here. And headology. Esk told me a lot about headology. It sounds fascinating.”

The sugar lump disappeared through a crack in a nearby wall with a final jerk. Cutangle nodded towards it.

“They’re very heavy on the sugar,” he said, “but we haven’t got the heart to do anything about it.”

Granny frowned, and then nodded across the haze over the city to the distant glitter of the snow on the Ramtops.

“It’s a long way,” she said. “I can’t be keeping on going backwards and forwards at my time of life.”

“We could buy you a much better broomstick,” said Cutangle. “One you don’t have to bump start. And you, you could have a flat here. And all the old clothes you can carry,” he added, using the secret weapon. He had wisely invested in some conversation with Mrs Whitlow.

“Mmph,” said Granny, “Silk?”

“Black and red,” said Cutangle. An image of Granny in black and red silk trotted across his mind, and he bit heavily into his scone.

“And maybe we can bring some students out to your cottage in the summer,” Cutangle went on, “for extra-mural studies.”

“Who’s Extra Muriel?”

“I mean, there’s lots they can learn, I’m sure.”

Granny considered this. Certainly the privy needed a good seeing-to before the weather got too warm, and the goat shed was ripe for the mucking-out by spring. Digging over the Herb bed was a chore, too. The bedroom ceiling was a disgrace, and some of the tiles needed fixing.

“Practical things?” she said, thoughtfully.

“Absolutely,” said Cutangle.

“Mmph. Well, I’ll think about it,” said Granny, dimly aware that one should never go too far on a first date.

“Perhaps you would care to dine with me this evening and let me know?” said Cutangle, his eyes agleam.

“What’s to eat?”

“Cold meat and potatoes.” Mrs Whitlow had done her work well.

There was.

Esk and Simon went on to develop a whole new type of magic that no one could exactly understand but which nevertheless everyone considered very worthwhile and somehow comforting.

Perhaps more importantly, the ants used all the sugar lumps they could steal to build a small sugar pyramid in one of the hollow walls, in which, with great ceremony, they entombed the mummified body of a dead queen. On the wall of one tiny hidden chamber they inscribed, in insect hieroglyphs, the true secret of longevity.

They got it absolutely right and it would probably have important implications for the universe if it hadn’t, next time the University flooded, been completely washed away.