She grasped the knocker, which was shaped like a dragon's head, and rapped smartly, three times. After a while the door was opened by a young woman with her mouth full of clothespegs.
"Ot o0 00 ont?" she enquired.
Granny bowed, giving the girl a chance to take in the pointy black hat with the batwing hatpins. It had an impressive effect: she blushed and, peering out into the quiet alley-way, hurriedly motioned Granny inside. There was a big mossy courtyard on the other side of the wall, crisscrossed with washing lines. Granny had the chance to become one of the very few women to learn what it really is that wizards wear under their robes, but modestly averted her eyes and followed the girl across the flagstones and down a wide flight of steps.
They led into a long, high tunnel lined with archways and, currently, full of steam. Granny caught sight of long lines of washtubs in the big rooms off to the sides; the air had the warm fat smell of ironing. A gaggle of girls carrying washbaskets pushed past her and hurried up the steps - then stopped, halfway up, and turned slowly to look at her.
Granny set her shoulders back and tried to look as mysterious as possible.
Her guide, who still hadn't got rid of her clothes-pegs, led her down a side-passage into a room that was a maze of shelves piled with laundry. In the very centre of the maze, sitting at a table, was a very fat woman with a ginger wig. She had been writing in a very large laundry book-it was still open in front of her-but was currently inspecting a large stained vest.
"Have you tried bleaching?" she asked.
"Yes, m'm," said the maid beside her.
"What about tincture of myrryt?"
"Yes, m'm. It just turned it blue, m'm."
"Well, it's a new one on me," said the laundry woman. "And Ay've seen brimstone and soot and dragon blood and demon blood and Aye don't know what else." She turned the vest over and read the nametape carefully sewn inside. "Hmm. Granpone the White. He's going to be Granpone the Grey if he doesn't take better care of his laundry. Aye tell you, girl, a white magician is just a black magician with a good housekeeper. Take it -"
She caught sight of Granny, and stopped.
"Ee ocked hat hee oor," said Granny's guide, dropping a hurried curtsey. "Oo ed hat -"
"Yes, yes, thank you, Ksandra, you may go," said the fat woman. She stood up and beamed at Granny, and with an almost perceptible click wound her voice up several social classes.
"Pray hexcuse us," she said. "You find us hall at sixes and sevens, it being washing day and heverything. His this a courtesy call or may I make so bold as to ask -"she lowered her voice -" his there a message from the Hother Sade?"
Granny looked blank, but only a fraction of a second. The witchmarks on the doorpost had said that the housekeeper welcomed witches and was particularly anxious for news of her four husbands; she was also in random pursuit of a fifth, hence the ginger wig and, if Granny's ears weren't deceiving her, the creak of enough whalebone to infuriate an entire ecology movement. Gullible and foolish, the signs had said. Granny withheld judgment, because city witches didn't seem that bright themselves.
The housekeeper must have mistaken her expression.
"Don't be afraid," she said. "May staff have distinct instructions to welcome witches, although of course they upstairs don't approve. No doubt you would like a cup of tea and something to eat?"
Granny bowed solemnly.
"And Aye will see if we can't find a nice bundle of old clothes for you, too," the housekeeper beamed.
"Old clothes? Oh. Yes. Thank you, m'm."
The housekeeper swept forward with a sound like an elderly tea clipper in a gale, and beckoned Granny to follow her.
"Aye'll have the tea brought to my flat. Tea with a lot of tealeaves."
Granny stumped along after her. Old clothes? Did this fat woman really mean it? The nerve! Of course, if they were good quality ....
There seemed to be a whole world under the University. It was a maze of cellars, coldrooms, stillrooms, kitchens and sculleries, and every inhabitant was either carrying something, pumping something, pushing something or just standing around and shouting. Granny caught glimpses of rooms full of ice, and others glowing with the heat from red-hot cooking stoves, wall-sized. Bakeries smelled of new bread and taprooms smelled of old beer. Everything smelled of sweat and woodsmoke:
The housekeeper led her up an old spiral staircase and unlocked the door with one of the large number of keys that hung from her belt.
The room inside was pink and frilly. There were frills on things that no one in their right mind would frill. It was like being inside candyfloss.
"Very nice," said Granny. And, because she felt it was expected of her, "Tasteful." She looked around for something unfrilly to sit on, and gave up.
"Whatever am Aye thinking of?" the housekeeper trilled. "Aye'm Mrs Whitlow but I expect you know, of course. And Aye have the honour to be addressing - ?"
"Eh? Oh, Granny Weatherwax," said Granny. The frills were getting to her. They gave pink a bad name.
"Ay'm psychic myself, of course," said Mrs Whitlow.
Granny had nothing against fortune-telling provided it was done badly by people with no talent for it. It was a different matter if people who ought to know better did it, though. She considered that the future was a frail enough thing at best, and if people looked at it hard they changed it. Granny had some quite complex theories about space and time and why they shouldn't be tinkered with, but fortunately good fortune-tellers were rare and anyway people preferred bad fortune-tellers, who could be relied upon for the correct dose of uplift and optimism.
Granny knew all about bad fortune-telling. It was harder than the real thing. You needed a good imagination.
She couldn't help wondering if Mrs Whitlow was a born witch who somehow missed her training. She was certainly laying siege to the future. There was a crystal ball under a sort of pink frilly tea cosy, and several sets of divinatory cards, and a pink velvet bag of rune stones, and one of those little tables on wheels that no prudent witch would touch with a ten-foot broomstick, and -Granny wasn't sure on this point - either some special dried monkey turds from a llamassary or some dried llama turds from a monastery, which apparently could be thrown in such a way as to reveal the sum total of knowledge and wisdom in the universe. It was all rather sad. .
"Or there's the tea-leaves, of course," said Mrs Whitlow, indicating the big brown pot on the table between them. "Aye know witches often prefer them, but they always seem so, well, common to me. No offence meant."
There probably wasn't any offence meant, at that, thought Granny. Mrs Whitlow was giving her the sort of look generally used by puppies when they're not sure what to expect next, and are beginning to worry that it may be the rolled-up newspaper.
She picked up Mrs Whitlow's cup and had started to peer into it when she caught the disappointed expression that floated across the housekeeper's face like a shadow across a snowfield. Then she remembered what she was doing, and turned the cup widdershins three times, made a few vague passes over it and mumbled a charm which she normally used to cure mastitis in elderly goats, but never mind. This display of obvious magical talent seemed to cheer up Mrs. Whitlow no end.
Granny wasn't normally very good at tea-leaves, but she squinted at the sugar-encrusted mess at the bottom of the cup and let her mind wander. What she really needed now was a handy rat or even a cockroach that happened to be somewhere near Esk, so that she could Borrow its mind.
What Granny actually found was that the University had a mind of its own.
It is well known that stone can think, because the whole of electronics is based on that fact, but in some universes men spend ages looking for other intelligences in the sky without once looking under their feet. That is because they've got the time-span all wrong. From stone's point of view the universe is hardly created and mountain ranges are bouncing up and down like organ-stops while continents zip backwards and forwards in general high spirits, crashing into each other from the sheer joy of momentum and getting their rocks off. It is going to be quite some time before stone notices its disfiguring little skin disease and starts to scratch, which is just as well.
The rocks from which Unseen University was built, however, have been absorbing magic for several thousand years and all that random power has had to go somewhere.
The University has, in fact, developed a personality.
Granny could sense it like a big and quite friendly animal, just waiting to roll over on its roof and have its floor scratched. It was paying no attention to her, however. It was watching Esk.
Granny found the child by following the threads of the University's attention and watched in fascination as the scenes unfolded in the Great Hall ....
"- in there?"
The voice came from a long way away.
"Mmph 7 "
"Aye said, what do you see in there?" repeated Mrs Whitlow.
"Eh?"
"Aye said, what do -"
"Oh." Granny reeled her mind in, quite confused. The trouble with Borrowing another mind was, you always felt out of place when you got back to your own body, and Granny was the first person ever to read the mind of a building. Now she was feeling big and gritty and full of passages.
"Are you all right?"
Granny nodded, and opened her windows. She extended her east and west wings and tried to concentrate on the tiny cup held in her pillars.
Fortunately Mrs Whitlow put her plaster complexion and stony silence down to occult powers at work, while Granny found that a brief exposure to the vast silicon memory of the University had quite stimulated her imagination.
In a voice like a draughty corridor, which made the housekeeper very impressed, she wove a future full of keen young men fighting for Mrs Whitlow's ample favours. She also spoke very quickly, because what she had seen in the Great Hall made her anxious to go around to the main gates again.
"There is another thing," she added.
"Yes? Yes?"
"I see you hiring a new servant - you do hire the servants here, don't you? Right - and this one is a young girl, very economical, very good worker, can turn her hand to anything."
"What about her, then?" said Mrs Whitlow, already savouring Granny's surprisingly graphic descriptions of her future and drunk with curiosity.
"The spirits are a little unclear on this point," said Granny, "But it is very important that you hire her."
"No problem there," said Mrs Whitlow, "can't keep servants here, you know, not for long. It's all the magic. It leaks down here, you know. Especially from the library, where they keep all them magical books. Two of the top floor maids walked out yesterday, actually, they said they were fed up going to bed not knowing what shape they would wake up in the morning. The senior wizards turn them back, you know. But it's not the same."
"Yes, well, the spirits say this young lady won't be any trouble as far as that is concerned," said Granny grimly.
"If she can sweep and scrub she's welcome, Aye'm sure," said Mrs Whitlow, looking puzzled.
"She even brings her own broom. According to the spirits, that is."
"How very helpful. When is this young lady going to arrive?"
"Oh, soon, soon - that's what the spirits say."
A faint suspicion clouded the housekeeper's face. "This isn't the sort of thing spirits normally say. Where do they say that, exactly?"
"Here," said Granny. "Look, the little cluster of tea-leaves between the sugar and this crack here. Am I right?"
Their eyes met. Mrs Whitlow might have had her weaknesses but she was quite tough enough to rule the below-stairs world of the University. However, Granny could outstare a snake; after a few seconds the housekeeper's eyes began to water.
"Yes, Aye expect you are," she said meekly, and fished a handkerchief from the recesses of her bosom.
"Well then," said Granny, sitting back and replacing the teacup in its saucer.
"There are plenty of opportunities here for a young woman willing to work hard," said Mrs Whitlow. "Aye myself started as a maid, you know."
"We all do," said Granny vaguely. "And now I must be going." She stood up and reached for her hat.
"But -"
"Must hurry. Urgent appointment," said Granny over her shoulder as she hurried down the steps.
"There's a bundle of old clothes -"
Granny paused, her instincts battling for mastery.
"Any black velvet?"
"Yes, and some silk."
Granny wasn't sure she approved of silk, she'd heard it came out of a caterpillar's bottom, but black velvet had a powerful attraction. Loyalty won.
"Put it on one side, I may call again," she shouted, and ran down the corridor.
Cooks and scullery maids darted for cover as the old woman pounded along the slippery flagstones, leapt up the stairs to the courtyard and skidded out into the lane, her shawl flying out behind her and her boots striking sparks from the cobbles. Once out into the open she hitched up her skirts and broke into a full gallop, turning the corner into the main square in a screeching two-boot drift that left a long white scratch across the stones.
She was just in time to see Esk come running through the gates, in tears.
"The magic just wouldn't work! I could feel it there but it just wouldn't come out!"
"Perhaps you were trying too hard," said Granny. "Magic's like fishing. Jumping around and splashing never caught any fish, you have to bide quiet and let it happen natural."
"And then everyone laughed at me! Someone even gave me a sweet!"
"You got some profit out of the day, then," said Granny.
"Granny!" said Esk accusingly.
"Well, what did you expect?" she asked. "At least they only laughed at you. Laughter don't hurt. You walked up to chief wizard and showed off in front of everyone and only got laughed at? You're doing well, you are. Have you eaten the sweet?"
Esk scowled. "Yes."
"What kind was it?"
"Toffee."
"Can't abide toffee."
"Huh," said Esk, "I suppose you want me to get peppermint next time?"
"Don't you sarky me, young-fellow-me-lass. Nothing wrong with peppermint. Pass me that bowl."
Another advantage of city life, Granny had discovered, was glassware. Some of her more complicated potions required apparatus which either had to be bought from the dwarves at extortionate rates or, if ordered from the nearest human glassblower, arrived in straw and, usually, pieces. She had tried blowing her own and the effort always made her cough, which produced some very funny results. But the city's thriving alchemy profession meant that there were whole shops full of glass for the buying, and a witch could always arrange bargain prices.
She watched carefully as yellow steam surged along a twisty maze of tubing and eventually condensed as one large, sticky droplet. She caught it neatly on the end of a glass spoon and very carefully tipped it into a tiny glass phial.
Esk watched her through her tears.
"What's that?" she asked.
"It's a neveryoumind," said Granny, sealing the phial's cork with wax.
"A medicine?"
"In a manner of speaking." Granny pulled her writing set towards her and selected a pen. Her tongue stuck out of the corner of her mouth as she very carefully wrote out a label, with much scratching and pausing to work out the spellings.
"Who's it for?"
"Mrs Herapath, the glassblower's wife."
Esk blew her nose. "He's the one who doesn't blow much glass, isn't he?"
Granny looked at her over the top of the desk.
"How do you mean?"
"When she was talking to you yesterday she called him Old Mister Once A Fortnight."
"Mmph," said Granny. She carefully finished the sentence: "Dylewt in won pint warter and won droppe in hys tee and be Shure to wear loose clowthing allso that no vysitors exspected."
One day, she told herself, I'm going to have to have that talk with her.
The child seemed curiously dense. She had already assisted at enough births and taken the goats to old Nanny Annaple's billy without drawing any obvious conclusions. Granny wasn't quite certain what she should do about it, but the time never seemed appropriate to bring up the subject. She wondered whether, in her hearts of hearts, she was too embarrassed; she felt like a farrier who could shoe horses, cure them, rear them and judge them, but had only the sketchiest idea about how one rode them.
She pasted the label on to the phial and wrapped it carefully in plain paper.
Now.
"There is another way into the University," she said, looking sidelong at Esk, who was making a disgruntled job of mashing herbs in a mortar. "A witches' way."
Esk looked up. Granny treated herself to a thin smile and started work on another label; writing labels was always the hard part of magic, as far as she was concerned.
"But I don't expect you'd be interested," she went on. "It's not very glamorous."
"They laughed at me," Esk mumbled.
"Yes. You said. So you won't be wanting to try again, then. I quite understand."
There was silence broken only by the scratching of Granny's pen. Eventually Esk said: "This way -"
"Mmph?"
"It'll get me into the University?"
"Of course," said Granny haughtily. "I said I'd find a way, didn't I? A very good way, too. You won't have to bother with lessons, you can go all over the place, no one will notice you you'll be invisible really - and, well, you can really clean up. But of course, after all that laughing, you won't be interested. Will you?"
"Pray have another cup of tea, Mrs Weatherwax?" said Mrs Whitlow.
"Mistress," said Granny.
"Pardon?"
"It's Mistress Weatherwax," said Granny. "Three sugars, please."
Mrs Whitlow pushed the bowl towards her. Much as she looked forward to Granny's visits it came expensive in sugar. Sugar lumps never seemed to last long around Granny.
"Very bad for the figure," she said. "And the teeth, so Aye hear."
"I never had a figure to speak of and my teeth take care of themselves," said Granny. It was true, mores the pity. Granny suffered from robustly healthy teeth, which she considered a big drawback in a witch. She really envied Nanny Annaple, the witch over the mountain, who managed to lose all her teeth by the time she was twenty and had real crone-credibility. It meant you ate a lot of soup, but you also got a lot of respect. And then there was warts. Without any effort Nanny managed to get a face like a sockful of marbles, while Granny had tried every reputable wart-causer and failed to raise even the obligatory nose wart. Some witches had all the luck.
"Mmph?" she said, aware of Mrs Whitlow's fluting.
"Aye said," said Mrs Whitlow, "that young Eskarina is a real treasure. Quate the little find. She keeps the floors spotless, spotless. No task too big. Aye said to her yesterday, Aye said, that broom of yours might as well have a life of its own, and do you know what she said?"
"I couldn't even venture a guess," said Granny, weakly.
"She said the dust was afraid of it! Can you imagine?"
"Yes," said Granny.
Mrs Whitlow pushed her teacup towards her and gave her an embarrassed smile.
Granny sighed inwardly and squinted into the none-too-clean depths of the future. She was definitely beginning to run out of imagination.
The broom whisked down the corridor raising a great cloud of dust which, if you looked hard at it, seemed somehow to be sucked back into the broomstick. If you looked even harder you'd see that the broom handle had strange markings on it, which were not so much carved as clinging and somehow changed shape as you watched.
But no one looked.
Esk sat at one of the high deep windows and stared out over the city. She was feeling angrier than usual, so the broom attacked the dust with unusual vigour. Spiders ran desperate eight-legged dashes for safety as ancestral cobwebs disappeared into the void. In the walls mice clung to each other, legs braced against the inside of their holes. Woodworm scrabbled in the ceiling beams as they were drawn, inexorably, backwards down their tunnels.
"'You can really clean up'," said Esk. "Huh!"
There were some good points, she had to admit. The food was simple but there was plenty of it, and she had a room to herself somewhere in the roof and it was quite luxurious because here she could lie in until five a. m., which to Granny's way of thinking was practically noon. The work certainly wasn't hard. She just started sweeping until the staff realised what was expected of it, and then she could amuse herself until it was finished. If anyone came the staff would immediately lean itself nonchalantly against a wall.
But she wasn't learning any wizardry. She could wander into empty classrooms and look at the diagrams chalked on the board, and on the floor too in the more advanced classes, but the shapes were meaningless. And unpleasant.
They reminded Esk of the pictures in Simon's book. They looked alive.
She gazed out across the rooftops of Ankh-Morpork and reasoned like this: writing was only the words that people said, squeezed between layers of paper until they were fossilized. Fossils were well-known on the Discworld, great spiralled shells and badly-constructed creatures that were left over from the time when the Creator hadn't really decided what He wanted to make and was, as it were, just idly messing around with the Pleistocene). And the words people said were just shadows of real things. But some things were too big to be really trapped in words, and even the words were too powerful to be completely tamed by writing.
So it followed that some writing was actually trying to become things. Esk's thoughts became confused things at this point, but she was certain that the really magic words were the ones that pulsed angrily, trying to escape and become real.
They didn't look very nice.
But then she remembered the previous day.
It had been rather odd. The University classrooms were designed on the funnel principle, with tiers of seats - polished by the bottoms of the Disc's greatest mages - looking precipitously down into a central area where there was a workbench, a couple of blackboards and enough floor space for a decent-sized instructional octogram. There was a lot of dead space under the tiers and Esk had found it a quite useful observation post, peering around between the apprentice wizards' pointy boots at the instructor. It was very restful, with the droning of the lecturers drifting over her as gently as the buzzing of the slightly zonked bees in Granny's special herb garden. There never seemed to be any practical magic, it always seemed to be just words. Wizards seemed to like words.
But yesterday had been different. Esk had been sitting in the dusty gloom, trying to do even some very simple magic, when she heard the door open and boots clump across the floor. That was surprising in itself. Esk knew the timetable, and the Second Year students who normally occupied this room were down for Beginners' Dematerialisation with Jeophal the Spry in the gym. (Students of magic had little use for physical exercise; the gym was a large room lined with lead and rowan wood, where neophytes could work out at High magic without seriously unbalancing the universe, although not always without seriously unbalancing themselves. Magic had no mercy on the ham-fisted. Some clumsy students were lucky enough to walk out, others were removed in bottles.)
Esk peeped between the slats. These weren't students, they were wizards. Quite high ones, to judge by their robes. And there was no mistaking the figure that climbed on to the lecturer's dais like a badlystrung puppet, bumping heavily into the lectern and absent-mindedly apologising to it. It was Simon. No one else had eyes like two raw eggs in warm water and a dose bright red from blowing. For Simon, the pollen count always went to infinity.
It occurred to Esk that, minus his general allergy to the whole of Creation and with a decent haircut and a few lessons in deportment, the boy could look quite handsome. It was an unusual thought, and she squirrelled it away for future consideration.
When the wizards had settled down, Simon began to talk. He read from notes, and every time he stuttered over a word the wizards, as one man, without being able to stop themselves, chorused it for him.
After a while a stick of chalk rose from the lectern and started to write on the blackboard behind him. Esk had picked up enough about wizard magic to know that this was an astounding achievement- Simon had been at the University for a couple of weeks, and most students hadn't mastered Light Levitation by the end of their second year.
The little white stub skittered and squeaked across the blackness to the accompaniment of Simon's voice. Even allowing for the stutter, he was not a very good speaker. He dropped notes. He corrected himself. He ummed and ahhed. And as far as Esk was concerned he wasn't saying anything very much. Phrases filtered down to her hiding place. "Basic fabric of the universe" was one, and she didn't understand what that was, unless he meant denim, or maybe flannelette. "Mutability of the possibility matrix" she couldn't guess at all.
Sometimes he seemed to be saying that nothing existed unless people thought it did, and the world was really only there at all because people kept on imagining it. But then he seemed to be saying that there was lots of worlds, all nearly the same and all sort of occupying the same place but all separated by the thickness of a shadow, so that everything that ever could happen would have somewhere to happen in.
(Esk could get to grips with this. She had half-suspected it ever since she cleaned out the senior wizards' lavatory, or ratherwhile the staff got on with the job while Esk examined the urinals and, with the assistance of some half-remembered details of her brothers in the tin bath in front of the fire at home, formulated her unofficial General Theory of comparative anatomy. The senior wizards' lavatory was a magical place, with real running water and interesting tiles and, most importantly, two big silver mirrors fixed to opposite walls so that someone looking into one could see themselves repeated again and again until the image was too small to see. It was Esk's first introduction to the idea of infinity. More to the point, she had a suspicion that one of the mirror Esks, right on the edge of sight, was waving at her.)
There was something disturbing about the phrases Simon used. Half the time he seemed to be saying that the world was about as real as a soap bubble, or a dream.
The chalk shrieked its way across the board behind him. Sometimes Simon had to stop and explain symbols to the wizards, who seemed to Esk to be getting excited at some very silly sentences. Then the chalk would start again, curving across the darkness like a comet, trailing its dust behind it.
The light was fading out of the sky outside. As the room grew more gloomy the chalked words glowed and the blackboard appeared to Esk to be not so much dark as simply not there at all, but just a square hole cut out of the world.
Simon talked on, about the world being made up of tiny things whose presence could only be determined by the fact that they were not there, little spinning balls of nothingness that magic could shunt together to make stars and butterflies and diamonds. Everything was made up of emptiness.
The funny thing was, he seemed to find this fascinating.
Esk was only aware that the walls of the room grew as thin and insubstantial as smoke, as if the emptiness in them was expanding to swallow whatever it was that defined them as walls, and instead there was nothing but the familiar cold, empty, glittering plain with its distant worn hills, and the creatures that stood as still as statues, looking down. There were a lot more of them now. They seemed for all the world to be clustering like moths around a light.
One important difference was that a moth's face, even close up, was as friendly as a bunny rabbit's compared to the things watching Simon.
Then a servant came in to light the lamps and the creatures vanished, turning into perfectly harmless shadows that lurked in the corners of the room.
At some time in the recent past someone had decided to brighten the ancient corridors of the University by painting them, having some vague notion that Learning Should Be Fun. It hadn't worked. It's a fact known throughout the universes that no matter how carefully the colours are chosen, institutional decor ends up as either vomit green, unmentionable brown, nicotine yellow or surgical appliance pink. By some little understood process of sympathetic resonance, corridors painted in those colours always smell slightly of boiled cabbage-even if no cabbage is ever cooked in the vicinity.
Somewhere in the corridors a bell rang. Esk dropped lightly from her windowsill, grabbed the staff and started to sweep industriously as doors were flung open and the corridors filled with students. They streamed past her on two sides, like water around a rock. For a few minutes there was utter confusion. Then doors slammed, a few laggard feet pattered away in the distance, and Esk was by herself again.
Not for the first time, Esk wished that the staff could talk. The other servants were friendly enough, but you couldn't talk to them. Not about magic, anyway.
She was also coming to the conclusion that she ought to learn to read. This reading business seemed to be the key to wizard magic, which was all about words. Wizards seemed to think that names were the same as things, and that if you changed the name, you changed the thing. At least, it seemed to be something like that ....
Reading. That meant the library. Simon had said there were thousands of books in it, and amongst all those words there were bound to be one or two she could read. Esk put the staff over her shoulder and set off resolutely for Mrs Whitlow's office.
She was nearly there when a wall said "Psst!" When Esk stared at it it turned out to be Granny. It wasn't that Granny could make herself invisible, it was just that she had this talent for being able to fade into the foreground so that she wasn't noticed.
"How are you getting on, then?" asked Granny. "How's the magic coming along?"
"What are you doing here, Granny?" said Esk.
"Been to tell Mrs Whitlow her fortune," said Granny, holding up a large bundle of old clothes with some satisfaction. Her smile faded under Esk's stern gaze.
"Well, things are different in the city," she said. "City people are always worried about the future, it comes from eating unnatural food. Anyway," she added, suddenly realising that she was whining, "Why shouldn't I tell fortunes?"
"You always said Hilta was playing on the foolishness of her sex," said Esk. "You said that them as tell fortunes should be ashamed of themselves, and anyway, you don't need old clothes."
"Waste not, want not," said Granny primly. She had spent her entire life on the old-clothes standard and wasn't about to let temporary prosperity dislodge her: "Are you getting enough to eat?"
"Yes," said Esk. "Granny, about this wizard magic, it's all words -"
"Always said it was," said Granny.
"No, I mean -" Esk began, but Granny waved a hand irritably.
"Can't be bothered with this at the moment," she said. "I've got some big orders to fill by tonight, if it goes on like this I'm going to have to train someone up. Can't you come and see me when you get an afternoon off, or whatever it is they give you?"
"Train someone up?" said Esk, horrified. "You mean as a witch?"
"No," said Granny. "I mean, perhaps."
"But what about me?"
"Well, you're going your own way," said Granny. "Wherever that is."
"Mmph," said Esk. Granny stared at her.
"I'll be off, then," she said at last. She turned and strode off towards the kitchen entrance. As she did so her cloak swirled out, and Esk saw that it was now lined with red. A dark, winy red, but red nevertheless. On Granny, who had never been known to wear any visible clothing that was other than a serviceable black, it was quite shocking.
"The library?" said Mrs Whitlow. "Aye don't think anyone cleans the library!" She looked genuinely puzzled.
"Why?" said Esk, "Doesn't it get dusty?"
"Well," said Mrs Whitlow. She thought for a while. "Aye suppose it must do, since you come to mention it. Aye never really thought about it."
"You see, I've cleaned everywhere else," said Esk, sweetly.
"Yes," said Mrs Whitlow, "You have, haven't you."
"Well, then."
"It's just that we've never - done it before," said Mrs Whitlow, "but for the life of me, Aye can't think why."
"Well, then," said Esk.
"Ook?" said the Head Librarian, and backed away from Esk. But she had heard about him and had come prepared. She offered him a banana.
The orang-outan reached out slowly and then snatched it with a grin of triumph.
There may be universes where librarianship is considered a peaceful sort of occupation, and where the risks are limited to large volumes falling off the shelves on to one's head, but the keeper of a magic library is no job for the unwary. Spells have power, and merely writing them down and shoving them between covers doesn't do anything to reduce it. The stuff leaks. Books tend to react with one another, creating randomised magic with a mind of its own. Books of magic are usually chained to their shelves, but not to prevent them being stolen ....
One such accident had turned the librarian into an ape, since when he had resisted all attempts to turn him back, explaining in sign language that life as an orang-outan was considerably better than life as a human being, because all the big philosophical questions resolved themselves into wondering where the next banana was coming from. Anyway, long arms and prehensile feet were ideal for dealing with high shelves.
Esk gave him the whole bunch of bananas and scurried away amongst the books before he could object.
Esk had never seen more than one book at a time and so the library was, for all she knew, just like any other library. True, it was a bit odd the way the floor seemed to become the wall in the distance, and there was something strange about the way the shelves played tricks on the eyes and seemed to twist through rather more dimensions than the normal three, and it was quite surprising to look up and see shelves on the ceiling, with the occasional student wandering unconcernedly among them.
The truth was that the presence of so much magic distorted the space around it. Down in the stacks the very denim, or possibly flannelette, of the universe was tortured into very peculiar shapes. The millions of trapped words, unable to escape, bent reality around them.
It seemed logical to Esk that among all these books should be one that told you how to read all the others. She wasn't sure how to find it, but deep in her soul she felt it would probably have pictures of cheerful rabbits and happy kittens on the cover.
The library certainly wasn't silent. There was the occasional zip and sizzle of a magical discharge, and an octarine spark would flash from shelf to shelf. Chains clinked, faintly. And, of course, there was the faint rustle of thousands of pages in their leather-bound prisons.
Esk made sure no one was paying her any attention and pulled at the nearest volume. It sprang open in her hands, and she saw gloomily that there were the same unpleasant types of diagram that she had noticed in Simon's book. The writing was entirely unfamiliar, and she was glad about that - it would be horrible to know what all those letters, which seemed to be made up of ugly creatures doing complicated things to each other, actually meant. She forced the cover shut, even though the words seemed to be desperately pushing back. There was a drawing of a creature on the front; it looked suspiciously like one of the things from the cold desert. It certainly didn't look like a happy kitten.
"Hallo! Esk, isn't it? H-how d-did you get h-here?"
It was Simon, standing there with a book under each arm. Esk blushed.
"Granny won't tell me," she said. "I think it's something to do with men and women."
Simon looked at her blankly. Then he grinned. Esk thought about the question a second time.
"I work here. I sweep up." She waved the staff in explanation.
"Inhere?"
Esk stared at him. She felt alone, and lost, and more than a little betrayed. Everyone seemed to be busy living their own lives, except her. She would spend the rest of her life cleaning up after wizards. It wasn't fair, and she'd had enough.
"Actually I don't. Actually I'm learning to read so I can be a wizard."
The boy regarded her through his damp eyes for some seconds. Then he gently took the book out of Esk's hands and read its title.
"Demonylogie Malyfycorum of Henchanse thee Unsatyfactory. How did you think you could learn to r-read this?"
"Um," said Esk, "Well, you just keep trying until you can, don't you? Like milking, or knitting, or . . . ." Her voice faded away.
"I don't know about that. These books can be a bit, well, aggressive. If you d-don't be careful they start reading you."
"What do you mean?"
"T-they ssss-"
"- say -"said Esk, automatically.
"- that there was once a wwww-"
"- wizard -"
"- who started to r-read the Necrotelecomnicon and let his m-mind wwwwww-"
"- wander -"
"- and next morning they f-found all his clothes on the chair and hhis hat on t-top of them and the b-book had -"
Esk put her fingers in her ears, but not too hard in case she missed anything.
"I don't want to know about it if it's horrid."
"- had a lot more pages."
Esk took her fingers out of her ears. "Was there anything on the pages?"
Simon nodded solemnly. "Yes. On every sssingle one of ththem there www-"
"No," said Esk. "I don't even want to imagine it. I thought reading was more peaceful than that, I mean, Granny read her Almanack every day and nothing ever happened to her."
"I d-daresay ordinary tame www-"
"- words -"
"- are all right," Simon conceded, magnanimously.
"Are you absolutely certain?" said Esk.
"It's just that words can have power," said Simon, slotting the book firmly back on its shelf, where it rattled its chains at him. "And they do say the p-pen is mightier than the sss-"
"- sword," said Esk. "All right, but which would you rather be hit with?"
"Um, I d-don't think it's any use m-me t-telling you you shouldn't be in here, is it?" said the young wizard.
Esk gave this due consideration. "No," she said, "I don't think it is."
"I could send for the p-porters and have you t-taken away."
"Yes, but you won't."
"I just d-don't www-"
"- want -"
"- you to get hurt, you see. I r-really don't. This can b-be a ddddangerou-"
Esk caught a faint swirling in the air above his head. For a moment she saw them, the great grey shapes from the cold place. Watching. And in the calm of the Library, when the weight of magic was wearing the Universe particularly thin, they had decided to Act.
Around her the muted rustling of the books rose to a desperate riffling of pages. Some of the more powerful books managed to jerk out of their shelves and swung, flapping madly, from the end of their chains. A huge grimoire plunged from its eyrie on the topmost shelf - tearing itself free of its chain in the process - and flopped away like a frightened chicken, scattering its pages behind it.
A magical wind blew away Esk's headscarf and her hair streamed out behind her. She saw Simon trying to steady himself against a bookshelf as books exploded around him. The air was thick and tasted of tin. It buzzed.
"They're trying to get in!" she screamed.
Simon's tortured face turned to her. A fear-crazed incunable hit him heavily in the small of the back and knocked him to the heaving floor before it bounced high over the shelves. Esk ducked as a flock of thesauri wheeled past, towing their shelf behind them, and scuttled on hands and knees towards him.
"That's what's making the books so frightened!" she shrieked in his ear. "Can't you see them up there?"
Simon mutely shook his head. A book burst its bindings over them, showering them in pages.
Horror can steal into the mind via all the senses. There's the sound of the little meaningful chuckle in the locked dark room, the sight of half a caterpillar in your forkful of salad, the curious smell from the lodger's bedroom, the taste of slug in the cauliflower cheese. Touch doesn't normally get a look-in.
But something happened to the floor under Esk's hands. She looked down, her face a rictus of horror, because the dusty floorboards suddenly felt gritty. And dry. And very, very cold.
There was fine silver sand between her fingers.
She grabbed the staff and, sheltering her eyes against the wind, waved it at the towering figures above her. It would have been nice to report that a searing flash of pure white fire cleansed the greasy air. It failed to materialise ....
The staff twisted like a snake in her hand and caught Simon a crack on the side of the head.
The grey Things wavered and vanished.
Reality returned, and tried to pretend that it had never left. Silence settled like thick velvet, wave after wave of it. A heavy, echoing silence. A few books dropped heavily out of the air, feeling silly.
The floor under Esk's feet was undoubtedly wooden. She kicked it hard to make sure.
There was blood on the floor, and Simon lay very quietly in the centre of it. Esk stared down at him, and then up at the still air, and then at the staff. It looked smug.
She was aware of distant voices and hurrying feet.
A hand like a fine leather glove slipped gently into hers and a voice behind said "Ook," very softly. She turned, and found herself staring down into the gentle, inner-tube face of the librarian. He put his finger to his lips in an unmistakable gesture and tugged gently at her hand.
"I've killed him!" she whispered.
The librarian shook his head, and tugged insistently.
"Ook," he explained, "Ook."
He dragged her reluctantly down a side alley-way in the maze of ancient shelving a few seconds before a party of senior wizards, drawn by the noise, rounded the corner.
"The books have been fighting again . . . ."
"Oh, no! It'll take ages to capture all the spells again, you know they go and find places to hide . . . ."
"Who's that on the floor?"
There was a pause.
"He's knocked out. A shelf caught him, by the looks of it."
"Who is he?"
"That new lad. You know; the one they say has got a whole head full of brains?"
"If that shelf had been a bit closer we'd be able to see if they were right."
"You two, get him along to the infirmary. The rest of you better get these books rounded up. Where's the damn librarian? He ought to know better than to let a Critical Mass build up."
Esk glanced sideways at the orang-outan, who waggled his eyebrows at her. He pulled a dusty volume of gardening spells out of the shelves beside him, extracted a soft brown banana from the recess behind it, and ate it with the quiet relish of one who knows that whatever the problems are, they belong firmly to human beings.
She looked the other way, at the staff in her hand, and her lips went thin. She knew her grip hadn't slipped. The staff had lunged at Simon, with murder in its heartwood.
The boy lay on a hard bed in a narrow room, a cold towel folded across his forehead. Treatle and Cutangle watched him carefully.
"How long has it been?" said Cutangle.
Trestle shrugged. "Three days."
"And he hasn't come around once?"
"No."
Cutangle sat down heavily on the edge of the bed, and pinched the bridge of his nose wearily. Simon had never looked particularly healthy, but now his face had a horrible sunken look.
"A. brilliant mind, that one," he said. "His explanation of the fundamental principles of magic and matter - quite astounding."
Trestle nodded.
"The way he just absorbs knowledge," said Cutangle: "I've been a working wizard all my life, and somehow I never really understood magic until he explained it. So clear. So, well, obvious."
"Everyone says that," said Trestle gloomily. "They say it's like having a hoodwink pulled off and seeing the daylight for the first time."
"That's exactly it," said Cutangle, "He's sourcerer material, sure enough. You were right to bring him here."
There was a thoughtful pause.
"Only -"said Trestle.
"Only what?" asked Cutangle.
"Only what was it you understood?" said Trestle. "That's what's bothering me. I mean, can you explain it?"
"How do you mean, explain?" Cutangle looked worried.
"What he keeps talking about," said Trestle, a hint of desperation in his voice. "Oh, it's the genuine stuff, I know. But what exactly is it?"
Cutangle looked at him, his mouth open. Eventually he said, "Oh, that's easy. Magic fills the universe, you see, and every time the universe changes, no, I mean every time magic is invoked, the universe changes, only in every direction at once, d'you see, and -" he moved his hands uncertainly, trying to recognise a spark of comprehension in Trestle's face. "To put it another way, any piece of matter, like an orange or the world or, or -"
"- a crocodile?" suggested Trestle.
"Yes, a crocodile, or - whatever, is basically shaped like a carrot."
"I don't remember that bit," said Trestle.
"I'm sure that's what he said," said Cutangle. He was starting to sweat.
"No, I remember the bit where he seemed to suggest that if you went far enough in any direction you would see the back of your head," Trestle insisted.
"You're sure he didn't mean someone else's head?"
Trestle thought for a bit.
"No, I'm pretty sure he said the back of your own head," he said. "I think he said he could prove it."
They considered this in silence.
Finally Cutangle spoke, very slowly and carefully.
"I look at it all like this," he said. "Before I heard him talk, I was like everyone else. You know what I mean? I was confused and uncertain about all the little details of life. But now," he brightened up, "while I'm still confused and uncertain it's on a much higher plane, d'you see, and at least I know I'm bewildered about the really fundamental and important facts of the universe."
Trestle nodded. "I hadn't looked at it like that," he said, "but you're absolutely right. He's really pushed back the boundaries of ignorance. There's so much about the universe we don't know."
They both savoured the strange warm glow of being much more ignorant than ordinary people, who were ignorant of only ordinary things.
Then Trestle said: "I just hope he's all right. He's over the fever but he just doesn't seem to want to wake up."
A couple of servants came in with a bowl of water and fresh towels. One of them carried a rather tatty broomstick. As they began to change the sweat-soaked sheets under the boy the two wizards left, still discussing the vast vistas of unknowingness that Simon's genius had revealed to the world.
Granny waited until their footsteps had died away and took off her headscarf.
"Damn thing," she said. "Esk, go and listen at the door." She removed the towel from Simon's head and felt his temperature.
"It was very good of you to come," said Esk. "And you so busy with your work, and everything."
"Mmmph." Granny pursed her lips. She pulled up Simon's eyelids and sought his pulse. She laid an ear on his xylophone chest and listened to his heart. She sat for some time quite motionless, probing around inside his head.
She frowned.
"Is he all right?" said Esk anxiously.
Granny looked at the stone walls.
"Drat this place," she said. "It's no place for sick people."
"Yes, but is he all right?"
"What?" Granny was startled out of her thoughts. "Oh. Yes. Probably. Wherever he is."
Esk stared at her, and then at Simon's body.
"Nobody's home," said Granny, simply.
"What do you mean?"
"Listen to the child," said Granny. "You'd think I taught her nothing. I mean his mind's Wandering. He's gone Out of his Head."
She looked at Simon's body with something verging on admiration.
"Quite surprisin', really," she added. "I never yet met a wizard who could Borrow."
She turned to Esk, whose mouth was a horrified O.
"I remember when I was a girl, old Nanny Annaple went Wanderin'. Got too wrapped up with being a vixen, as I recall. Took us days to find her. And then there was you, too. I never would have found you if it wasn't for that staff thing, and what have you done with it, girl?"
"It hit him," Esk muttered. "It tried to kill him. I threw it in the river."
"Not a nice thing to do to it after it saved you," said Granny.
"It saved me by hitting him?"
"Didn't you realise? He was callin' to - them Things."
"That's not true!"
Granny stared into Esk's defiant eyes and the thought came to her mind: I've lost her. Three years of work down the privy. She couldn't be a wizard but she might have been a witch.
"Why isn't it true, Miss Clever?" she said.
"He wouldn't do something like that!" Esk was near to tears. "I heard him speak, he's - well, he's not evil, he's a brilliant person, he nearly understands how everything works, he's -"
"I expect he's a very nice boy," said Granny sourly. "I never said he was a black wizard, did I?"
"They're horrible Things!" Esk sobbed. "He wouldn't call out to them, he wants everything that they're not, and you're a wicked old -"
The slap rang like a bell. Esk staggered back, white with shock. Granny stood with her hand upraised, trembling.
She'd struck Esk once before - the blow a baby gets to introduce it to the world and give it a rough idea of what to expect from life. But that had been the last time. In three years under the same roof there had been cause enough, when milk had been left to boil over or the goats had been carelessly left without water, but a sharp word or a sharper silence had done more than force ever could and left no bruises.
She grabbed Esk firmly by the shoulders and stared into her eyes.
"Listen to me," she said urgently. "Didn't I always say to you that if you use magic you should go through the world like a knife goes through water? Didn't I say that?"
Esk, mesmerised like a cornered rabbit, nodded.
"And you thought that was just old Granny's way, didn't you? But the fact is that if you use magic you draw attention to yourself. From Them. They watch the world all the time. Ordinary minds are just vague to them, they hardly bother with them, but a mind with magic in it shines out, you see, it's a beacon to them. It's not darkness that calls Them, it's light, light that creates the shadows!"
"But - but - why are They interested? What do They wwant?"
"Life and shape," said Granny.
She sagged, and let go of Esk.
"They're pathetic, really," she said. "They've got no life or shape themselves but what they can steal. They could no more survive in this world than a fish could live in a fire, but that doesn't stop them trying. And they're just bright enough to hate us because we're alive."
Esk shivered. She remember the gritty feel of the cold sand.
"What are They? I always thought they were just a sort - a sort of demon?"
"Nah. No one really knows. They're just the Things from the Dungeon Dimensions outside the universe, that's all. Shadow creatures."
She turned back to the prone form of Simon.
"You wouldn't have any idea where he is, would you?" she said, looking shrewdly at Esk. "Not gone off flying with the seagulls, has he?"
Esk shook her head.
"No," said Granny, "I didn't think so. They've got him, haven't they."
It wasn't a question. Esk nodded, her face a mask of misery.
"It's not your fault," said Granny, "His mind gave them an opening, and when he was knocked out they took it back with them. Only. . . ."
She drummed her fingers on the edge of the bed, and appeared to reach a decision.
"Who's the most important wizard around here?" she demanded.
"Um, Lord Cutangle," said Esk. "He's the Archchancellor. He was one of the ones who was in here."
"The fat one, or the one like a streak of vinegar?"
Esk dragged her mind from the image of Simon on the cold desert and found herself saying: "He's an Eighth Level wizard and a 33° mage, actually."
"You mean he's bent?" said Granny. "All this hanging around wizards has made you take them seriously, my girl. They all call themselves the Lord High this and the Imperial That, it's all part of the game. Even magicians do it, you'd think they'd be more sensible at least, but no, they call around saying they're the Amazing-Bonko-and-Doris. Anyway, where is this High Rumtiddlypo?"
"They'll be at dinner in the Great Hall," said Esk. "Can he bring Simon back, then?"
"That's the difficult part," said Granny. "I daresay we could all get something back easily enough, walking and talking just like anyone. Whether it would be Simon is quite another sack of ferrets."
She stood up. "Let's find this Great Hall, then. No time to waste."
"Um, women aren't allowed in," said Esk.
Granny stopped in the doorway. Her shoulders rose. She turned around very slowly.
"What did you say?" she said. "Did these old ears deceive me, and don't say they did because they didn't."
"Sorry," said Esk. "Force of habit."
"I can see you've been getting ideas below your station," said Granny coldly. "Go and find someone to watch over the lad, and let's see what's so great about this hall that I mustn't set foot in it."
And thus it was that while the entire faculty of Unseen University were dining in the venerable hall the doors were flung back with a dramatic effect that was rather spoiled when one of them rebounded off a waiter and caught Granny a crack on the shin. Instead of the defiant strides she had intended to make across the chequered floor she was forced to half-hop, half-limp. But she hoped that she hopped with dignity.
Esk hurried along behind her, acutely aware of the hundreds of eyes that were turned towards them.
The roar of conversation and the clatter of cutlery faded away. A couple of chairs were knocked over. At the far end of the hall she could see the most senior wizards at their high table, which in fact bobbed a few feet off the floor. They were staring.
A medium-grade wizard - Esk recognised him as a lecturer in Applied Astrology - rushed towards them, waving his hands.
"Nononono," he shouted. "Wrong door. You must go away."
"Don't mind me," said Granny calmly, pushing past him.
"Nonono, it's against the lore, you must go away now. Ladies are not allowed in here!"
"I'm not a lady, I'm a witch," said Granny. She turned to Esk. "Is he very important?"
"I don't think so," said Esk.
"Right." Granny turned to the lecturer: "Go and find me an important wizard, please. Quickly."
Esk tapped her on the back. A couple of wizards with a rather greater presence of mind had nipped smartly out of the door behind them, and now several college porters were advancing threateningly up the hall, to the cheers and catcalls of the students. Esk had never much liked the porters, who lived a private life in their lodge, but now she felt a pang of sympathy for them.
Two of them reached out hairy hands and grabbed Granny's shoulders. Her arm disappeared behind her back and there was a brief flurry of movement that ended with the men hopping away, clutching bits of themselves and swearing.
"Hatpin," said Granny. She grabbed Esk with her free hand and swept towards the high table, glaring at anyone who so much as looked as if they were going to get in her way. The younger students, who knew free entertainment when they saw it, stamped and cheered and banged their plates on the long tables. The high table settled on the tiles with a thump and the senior wizards hurriedly lined up behind Cutangle as he tried to summon up his reserves of dignity. His efforts didn't really work; it is very hard to look dignified with a napkin tucked into one's collar.
He raised his hands for silence, and the hall waited expectantly as Granny and Esk approached him. Granny was looking interestedly at the ancient paintings and statues of bygone mages.
"Who are them buggers?" she said out of the corner of her mouth.
"They used to be chief wizards," whispered Esk.
"They look constipated. I never met a wizard who was regular," said Granny.
"They're a nuisance to dust, that's all I know," said Esk.
Cutangle stood with legs planted wide apart, arms akimbo and stomach giving an impression of a beginners' ski slope, the whole of him therefore adopting a pose usually associated with Henry VIII but with an option on Henry IX and X as well.
"Well?" he said, "What is the meaning of this outrage?"
"Is he important?" said Granny to Esk.
"I, madam, am the Archchancellor! And I happen to run this University! And you, madam, are trespassing in very dangerous territory indeed! I warn you that - stop looking at me like that!"
Cutangle staggered backwards, his hands raised to ward off Granny's gaze. The wizards behind him scattered, turning over tables in their haste to avoid the stare.
Granny's eyes had changed.
Esk had never seen them like this before. They were perfectly silver, like little round mirrors, reflecting all they saw. Cutangle was a vanishingly small dot in their depths, his mouth open, his tiny matchstick arms waving in desperation.
The Archchancellor backed into a pillar, and the shock made him recover. He shook his head irritably, cupped a hand and sent a stream of white fire streaking towards the witch.
Without dropping her iridescent stare Granny raised a hand and deflected the flames towards the roof. There was an explosion and a shower of tile fragments.
Her eyes widened.
Cutangle vanished. Where he had been standing a huge snake coiled, poised to strike.
Granny vanished. Where she had been standing was a large wicker basket.
The snake became a giant reptile from the mists of time.
The basket became the snow wind of the Ice Giants, coating the struggling monster with ice.
The reptile became a sabre-toothed tiger, crouched to spring.
The gale became a bubbling tar pit.
The tiger managed to become an eagle, stooping.
The tar pits became a tufted hood.
Then the images began to flicker as shape replaced shape. Stroboscope shadows danced around the hall. A magical wind sprang up, thick and greasy, striking octarine sparks from beards and fingers. In the middle of it all Esk, peering through streaming eyes, could just make out the two figures of Granny and Cutangle, glossy statues in the midst of the hurtling images.
She was also aware of something else, a high-pitched sound almost beyond hearing.
She had heard it before, on the cold plain - a busy chittering noise, a beehive noise, an anthill sound ....
"They're coming!" she screamed about the din. "They're coming now!"
She scrambled out from behind the table where she had taken refuge from the magical duel and tried to reach Granny. A gust of raw magic lifted her off her feet and bowled her into a chair.
The buzzing was louder now, so that the air roared like a three-week corpse on a summer's day. Esk made another attempt to reach Granny and recoiled when green fire roared along her arm and singed her hair.
She looked around wildly for the other wizards, but those who had fled from the effects of the magic were cowering behind overturned furniture while the occult storm raged over their heads.
Esk ran down the length of the hall and out into the dark corridor. Shadows curled around her as she hurried, sobbing, up the steps and along the buzzing corridors towards Simon's narrow room.
Something would try to enter the body, Granny had said. Something that would walk and talk like Simon, but would be something else ....
A cluster of students were hovering anxiously outside the door. They turned pale faces towards Esk as she darted towards them, and were sufficiently shaken to draw back nervously in the face of her determined progress.
"Something's in there," said one of them.
"We can't open the door!"
They looked at her expectantly. Then one of them said: "You wouldn't have a pass key, by any chance?"
Esk grabbed the doorhandle and turned it. It moved slightly, but then spun back with such force it nearly took the skin off her hands. The chittering inside rose to a crescendo and there was another noise, too, like leather flapping.
"You're wizards!" she screamed. "Bloody well wizz!"
"We haven't done telekinesis yet," said one of them.
"I was ill when we did Firethrowing -"
"Actually, I'm not very good at Dematerialisation -"
Esk went to the door, and then stopped with one foot in the air. She remembered Granny talking about how even buildings had a mind, if they were old enough. The University was very old.
She stepped carefully to one side and ran her hands over the ancient stones. It had to be done carefully, so as not to frighten it - and now she could feel the mind in the stones, slow and simple, but still mind. It pulsed around her; she could feel the little sparkles deep in the rock.
Something was hooting behind the door.
The three students watched in astonishment as Esk stood rock still with her hands and forehead pressed against the wall.
She was almost there. She could feel the weight of herself, the ponderousness of her body, the distant memories of the dawn of time when rock was molten and free. For the first time in her life she knew what it was like to have balconies.
She moved gently through the building-mind, refining her impressions, looking as fast as she dared for this corridor, this door.
She stretched out one arm, very carefully. The students watched as she uncurled one finger, very slowly.
The door hinges began to creak.
There was a moment of tension and then the nails sprang from the hinges and clattered into the wall behind her. The planks began to bend as the door still tried to force itself open against the strength of -whatever was holding it shut.
The wood billowed.
Beams of blue light lanced out into the corridor, moving and dancing as indistinct shapes shuffled through the blinding brilliance inside the room. The light was misty and actinic, the sort of light to make Steven Spielberg reach for his copyright lawyer.
Esk's hair leapt from her head so that she looked like an ambulant dandelion. Little firesnakes of magic crackled across her skin as she stepped through the doorway.
The students outside watched in horror as she disappeared into the light.
It vanished in a silent explosion.
When they eventually found enough courage to look inside the room, they saw nothing there but the sleeping body of Simon. And Esk, silent and cold on the floor, breathing very slowly. And the floor was covered with a fine layer of silver sand.
Esk floated through the mists of the world, noticing with a curious impersonal feeling the precise way in which she passed through solid matter.
There were others with her. She could hear their chittering.
Fury rose like bile. She turned and set out after the noise, fighting the seductive forces that kept telling her how nice it would be just to relax her grip on her mind and sink into a warm sea of nothingness. Being angry, that was the thing. She knew it was most important to stay really angry.
The Discworld fell away, and lay below her as it did on the day she had been an eagle. But this time the Circle Sea was below her - it certainly was circular, as if God had run out of ideas - and beyond it lay the arms of the continent, and the long chain of the Ramtops marching all the way to the Hub. There were other continents she had never heard of, and tiny island chains.
As her point of view changed, the Rim came into sight. It was night time and, since the Disc's orbiting sun was below the world, it lit up the long waterfall that girdled the Edge.
It also lit up Great A'Tuin the World Turtle. Esk had often wondered if the Turtle was really a myth. It seemed a lot of trouble to go to just to move a world. But there It was, almost as big as the Disc it carried, frosted with stardust and pocked with meteor craters.
Its head passed in front of her and she looked directly into an eye big enough to float all the fleets in the world. She had heard it said that if you could look far enough into the direction that Great A'Tuin was staring, you would see the end of the universe. Maybe it was just the set of its beak, but Great A'Tuin looked vaguely hopeful, even optimistic. Perhaps the end of everything wasn't as bad as all that.
Dreamlike, she reached out and tried to Borrow the biggest mind in the universe.
She stopped herself just in time, like a child with a toy toboggan who expected a little gentle slope and suddenly looks out of the magnificent mountains, snow-covered, stretching into the icefields of infinity. No one would ever Borrow that mind, it would be like trying to drink all the sea. The thoughts that moved through it were as big and as slow as glaciers.
Beyond the Disc were the stars, and there was something wrong with them. They were swirling like snowflakes. Every now and again they would settle down and look as immobile as they always did, and then they'd suddenly take it into their heads to dance.
Real stars shouldn't do that, Esk decided. Which meant she wasn't looking at real stars. Which meant she wasn't exactly in a real place. But a chittering close at hand reminded her that she could almost certainly really die if she once lost track of those noises. She turned and pursued the sounds through the stellar snowstorm.
And the stars jumped, and settled, jumped, and settled ....
As she swooped upward Esk tried to concentrate on everyday things, because if she let her mind dwell on precisely what it was she was following then she knew she would turn back, and she wasn't sure she knew the way. She tried to remember the eighteen herbs that cured ear-ache, which kept her occupied for a while because she could never recall the last four.
A star swooped past, and then was violently jerked away; it was about twenty feet across.
When she ran out of herbs she started on the diseases of goats, which took quite a long time because goats can catch a lot of things that cows can catch plus a lot of things plus that sheep plus catch plus a complete range of horrible ailments of their very own. When she had finished listing wooden udder, ear wilt and the octarine garget she tried to recall the complex code of dots and lines that they used to cut in the trees around Bad Ass, so that lost villagers could find their way home on snowy nights.
She was only as far as dot dot dot dash dot dash (Hub-byTurnwise, one mile from the village) when the universe around her vanished with a faint pop. She fell forward, hit something hard and gritty and rolled to a halt.
The grittiness was sand. Fine, dry, cold sand. You could tell that even if you dug down several feet it would be just as cold and just as dry.
Esk lay with her face in it for a moment, summoning the courage to look up. She could just see, a few feet away from her, the hem of someone's dress: Something's dress, she corrected herself. Unless it was a wing. It could be a wing, a particularly tatty and leathery one.
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 ....