She patted her singed hair gingerly with a shaking hand. "I think this calls for a nice cup of, a nice cup of cold water."
Esk sat looking in wonder at her hand.
"That was real magic." she said at last, "And I did it."
"One type of real magic," corrected Granny. "Don't forget that. And you don't want to do that all the time, neither. If it's in you, you've got to learn to control it."
"Can you teach me?"
"Me? No!"
"How can I learn if no one will teach me?"
"You've got to go where they can. Wizard school."
"But you said -"
Granny paused in the act of filling a jug from the water bucket.
"Yes, yes," she snapped, "Never mind what I said, or common sense or anything. Sometimes you just have to go the way things take you, and I reckon you're going to wizard school one way or the other."
Esk considered this.
"You mean it's my destiny?" she said at last.
Granny shrugged. "Something like that. Probably. Who knows? "
That night, long after Esk had been sent to bed, Granny put on her hat, lit a fresh candle, cleared the table, and pulled a small wooden box from its secret hiding place in the dresser. It contained a bottle of ink, an elderly quill pen, and a few sheets of paper.
Granny was not entirely happy when faced with the world of letters. Her eyes protruded, her tongue stuck out, small beads of sweat formed on her forehead, but the pen scratched its way across the page to the accompaniment of the occasional quiet "drat" or "bugger the thing".
The letter read as follows, although this version lacks the candlewax, blots, crossings-out and damp patches of the original.
To then Hed blizzard, Unsene Universety, Greatings, I hop you ar well, I am sending to you won Escarrina Smith, shee bath thee maekings of wizzardery but whot may be ferther dun wyth hyr I knowe not slice is a gode worker and clene about hyr person allso skilled in diuerse arts of thee howse, I will send Monies wyth hyr May you liv longe and ende youre days in pese, And oblije, Esmerelder Weatherwaxe (Mss/ wytch.
Granny held it up to the candlelight and considered it critically. It was a good letter. She had got "diuerse" out of the Alm anack, which she read every night. It was always predicting "diuerse plagues" and "diuerse ill-fortune". Granny wasn't entirely sure what it meant, but it was a damn good word all the same.
She sealed it with candle-wax and put it on the dresser. She could leave it for the carrier to take when she went into the village tomorrow, to see about a new kettle.
Next morning Granny took some pains over her dress, selecting a black dress with a frog and bat motif, a big velvet cloak, or at least a cloak made of the sort of stuff velvet looks like after thirty years of heavy wear, and the pointed hat of office which was crucified with hatpins.
Their first call was to the stonemason, to order a replacement hearthstone. Then they called on the smith.
It was a long and stormy meeting. Esk wandered out into the orchard and climbed up to her old place in the apple tree while from the house came her father's shouts, her mother's wails and long silent pauses which meant that Granny Weatherwax was speaking softly in what Esk thought of as her "just so" voice. The old woman had a flat, measured way of speaking sometimes. It was the kind of voice the Creator had probably used. Whether there was magic in it, or just headology, it ruled out any possibility of argument. It made it clear that whatever it was talking about was exactly how things should be.
The breeze shook the tree gently. Esk sat on a branch idly swinging her legs.
She thought about wizards. They didn't often come to Bad Ass, but there were a fair number of stories about them. They were wise, she recalled, and usually very old and they did powerful, complex and mysterious magics and almost all of them had beards. They were also, without exception, men.
She was on firmer ground with witches, because she'd trailed off with Granny to visit a couple of villages' witches further along the hills, and anyway witches figured largely in Ramtop folklore. Witches were cunning, she recalled, and usually very old, or at least they tried to look old, and they did slightly suspicious, homely and organic magics and some of them had beards. They were also, without exception, women.
There was some fundamental problem in all that which she couldn't quite resolve. Why wouldn't....
Cern and Gulta hurtled down the path and came to a pushing, shoving halt under the tree. They peered up at their sister with a mixture of fascination and scorn. Witches and wizards were objects of awe, but sisters weren't. Somehow, knowing your own sister was learning to be a witch sort of devalued the whole profession.
"You can't really do spells," said Cern. "Can you?"
"Course you can't," said Gulta. "What's this stick?"
Esk had left the staff leaning against the tree. Cern prodded it cautiously.
"I don't want you to touch it," said Esk hurriedly. "Please. It's mine."
Cern normally had all the sensitivity of a ballbearing, but his hand stopped in mid-prod, much to his surprise.
"I didn't want to anyway," he muttered to hide his confusion. "It's only an old stick."
"Is it true you can do spells?" asked Gulta. "We heard Granny say you could."
"We listened at the door," added Cern.
"You said I couldn't," said Esk, airily.
"Well, can you or can't you?" said Gulta, his face reddening.
"Perhaps."
"You can't!"
Esk looked down at his face. She loved her brothers, when she reminded herself to, in a dutiful sort of way, although she generally remembered them as a collection of loud noises in trousers. But there was something awfully pig-like and unpleasant about the way Gulta was staring up at her, as though she had personally insulted him.
She felt her body start to tingle, and the world suddenly seemed very sharp and clear.
"I can," she said.
Gulta looked from her to the staff, and his eyes narrowed. He kicked it viciously.
"Old stick!"
He looked, she thought, exactly like a small angry pig.
Cern's screams brought Granny and his parents first to the back door and then running down the cinder path.
Esk was perched in the fork of the apple tree, an expression of dreamy contemplation on her face. Cern was hiding behind the tree, his face a mere rim around a red, tonsil-vibrating bawl.
Gulta was sitting rather bewildered in a pile of clothing that no longer fitted him, wrinkling his snout.
Granny strode up to the tree until her hooked nose was level with Esk's.
"Turning people into pigs is not allowed," she hissed. "Even brothers."
"I didn't do it, it just happened. Anyway, you must admit it's a better shape for him," said Esk evenly.
"What's going on?" said Smith. "Where's Gulta? What's this pig doing here?"
"This pig", said Granny Weatherwax, "is your son."
There was a sigh from Esk's mother as she collapsed gently backwards, but Smith was slightly less unprepared. He looked sharply from Gulta, who had managed to untangle himself from his clothing and was now rooting enthusiastically among the early windfalls, to his only daughter.
"She did this?"
"Yes. Or it was done through her," said Granny, looking suspiciously at the staff.
"Oh." Smith looked at his fifth son. He had to admit that the shape suited him. He reached out without looking and fetched the screaming Cern a thump on the back of his head.
"Can you turn him back again?" he asked. Granny spun around and glared the question at Esk, who shrugged.
"He didn't believe I could do magic," she said calmly.
"Yes, well, I think you've made the point," said Granny. "And now you will turn him back, madam. This instant. Do you hear?"
"Don't want to. He was rude."
"I see."
Esk gazed down defiantly. Granny glared up sternly. Their wills clanged like cymbals and the air between them thickened. But Granny had spent a lifetime bending recalcitrant creatures to her bidding and, while Esk was a surprisingly strong opponent, it was obvious that she would give in before the end of the paragraph.
"Oh, all right," she whined. "I don't know why anyone would bother turning him into a pig when he was doing such a good job of it all by himself."
She didn't know where the magic had come from, but she mentally faced that way and made a suggestion. Gulta reappeared, naked, with an apple in his mouth.
"Awts aughtning?" he said.
Granny spun around on Smith.
"Now will you believe me?" she snapped. "Do you really think she's supposed to settle down here and forget all about magic? Can you imagine her poor husband if she marries?"
"But you always said it was impossible for women to be wizards," said Smith. He was actually rather impressed. Granny Weatherwax had never been known to turn anyone into anything.
"Never mind that now," said Granny, calming down a bit. "She needs training. She needs to know how to control. For pity's sake put some clothes on that child."
"Gulta, get dressed and stop grizzling," said his father, and turned back to Granny.
"You said there was some sort of teaching place?" he hazarded.
"The Unseen University, yes. It's for training wizards."
"And you know where it is?"
"Yes," lied Granny, whose grasp of geography was slightly worse than her knowledge of sub-atomic physics.
Smith looked from her to his daughter, who was sulking.
"And they'll make a wizard of her?" he said.
Granny sighed.
"I don't know what they'll make of her," she said.
And so it was that, a week later, Granny locked the cottage door and hung the key on its nail in the privy. The goats had been sent to stay with a sister witch further along the hills, who had also promised to keep an Eye on the cottage. Bad Ass would just have to manage without a witch for a while.
Granny was vaguely aware that you didn't find the Unseen University unless it wanted you to, and the only place to start looking was the town of Ohulan Cutash, a sprawl of a hundred or so houses about fifteen miles away. It was where you went to once or twice a year if you were a really cosmopolitan Bad Assian: Granny had only been once before in her entire life and hadn't approved of it at all. It had smelt all wrong, she'd got lost, and she distrusted city folk with their flashy ways.
They got a lift on the cart that came out periodically with metal for the smithy. It was gritty, but better than walking, especially since Granny had packed their few possessions in a large sack. She sat on it for safety.
Esk sat cradling the staff and watching the woods go by. When they were several miles outside the village she said, "I thought you told me plants were different in forn parts."
"So they are."
"These trees look just the same."
Granny regarded them disdainfully.
"Nothing like as good," she said.
In fact she was already feeling slightly panicky. Her promise to accompany Esk to Unseen University had been made without thinking, and Granny, who picked up what little she knew of the rest of the Disc from rumour and the pages of her Almanack, was convinced that they were heading into earthquakes, tidal waves, plagues and massacres, many of them diverse or even worse. But she was determined to see it through. A witch relied too much on words ever to go back on them.
She was wearing serviceable black, and concealed about her person were a number of hatpins and a breadknife. She had hidden their small store of money, grudgingly advanced by Smith, in the mysterious strata of her underwear. Her skirt pockets jingled with lucky charms, and a freshly-forged horseshoe, always a potent preventative in time of trouble, weighed down her handbag. She felt about as ready as she ever would be to face the world.
The track wound down between the mountains. For once the sky was clear, the high Ramtops standing out crisp and white like the brides of the sky (with their trousseaux stuffed with thunderstorms) and the many little streams that bordered or crossed the path flowed sluggishly through strands of meadowsweet and go-fasterroot.
By lunchtime they reached the suburb of Ohulan (it was too small to have more than one, which was just an inn and a handful of cottages belonging to people who couldn't stand the pressures of urban life) and a few minutes later the cart deposited them in the town's main, indeed its only, square.
It turned out to be market day.
Granny Weatherwax stood uncertainly on the cobbles, holding tightly to Esk's shoulder as the crowd swirled around them. She had heard that lewd things could happen to country women who were freshly arrived in big cities, and she gripped her handbag until her knuckles whitened. If any male stranger had happened to so much as nod at her it would have gone very hard indeed for him.
Esk's eyes were sparkling. The square was a jigsaw of noise and colour and smell. On one side of it were the temples of the Disc's more demanding deities, and weird perfumes drifted out to join with the reeks of commerce in a complex ragrug of fragrances. There were stalls filled with enticing curiosities that she itched to investigate.
Granny let the both of them drift with the crowd. The stalls were puzzling her as well. She peered among them, although never for one minute relaxing her vigilance against pickpockets, earthquakes and traffickers in the erotic, until she spied something vaguely familiar.
There was a small covered stall, black draped and musty, that had been wedged into a narrow space between two houses. Inconspicuous though it was, it nevertheless seemed to be doing a very busy trade. Its customers were mainly women, of all ages, although she did notice a few men. They all had one thing in common, though. No one approached it directly. They all sort of strolled almost past it, then suddenly ducked under its shady canopy. A moment later and they would be back again, hand just darting away from bag or pocket, competing for the world's Most Nonchalant Walk title so effectively that a watcher might actually doubt what he or she had just seen.
It was quite amazing that a stall so many people didn't know was there should be quite so popular.
"What's in there?" said Esk. "What's everyone buying?"
"Medicines," said Granny firmly.
"There must be a lot of very sick people in towns," said Esk gravely.
Inside, the stall was a mass of velvet shadows and the herbal scent was thick enough to bottle. Granny poked a few bundles of dry leaves with an expert finger. Esk pulled away from her and tried to read the scrawled labels on the bottles in front of her. She was expert at most of Granny's preparations, but she didn't recognise anything here. The names were quite amusing, like Tiger Oil, Maiden's Prayer and Husband's Helper, and one or two of the stoppers smelled like Granny's scullery after she had done some of her secret distillations.
A shape moved in the stall's dim recesses and a brown wrinkled hand slid lightly on to hers.
"Can I assist you, missy?" said a cracked voice, in tones of syrup of figs, "Is it your fortune you want telling, or is it your future you want changing, maybe?"
"She's with me," snapped Granny, spinning around, "and your eyes are betraying you, Hilta Goatfounder, if you can't tell her age."
The shape in front of Esk bent forward.
"Esme Weatherwax?" it asked.
"The very same," said Granny. "Still selling thunder drops and penny wishes, Hilta? How goes it?"
"All the better for seeing you," said the shape. "What brings you down from the mountains, Esme? And this child - your assistant, perhaps?"
"What's it you're selling, please?" asked Esk. The shape laughed.
"Oh, things to stop things that shouldn't be and help things that should, love," it said. "Let me just close up, my dears, and I will be right with you."
The shape bustled past Esk in a nasal kaleidoscope of fragrances and buttoned up the curtains at the front of the stall. Then the drapes at the back were thrown up, letting in the afternoon sunlight.
"Can't stand the dark and fug myself," said Hilta Goatfounder, "but the customers expect it. You know how it is."
"Yes," Esk nodded sagely. "Headology."
Hilts, a small fat woman wearing an enormous hat with fruit on it, glanced from her to Granny and grinned.
"That's the way of it," she agreed. "Will you take some tea?"
They sat on bales of unknown herbs in the private corner made by the stall between the angled walls of the houses, and drank something fragrant and green out of surprisingly delicate cups. Unlike Granny, who dressed like a very respectable raven, Hilts Goatfounder was all lace and shawls and colours and earrings and so many bangles that a mere movement of her arms sounded like a percussion section falling off a cliff. But Esk could see the likeness.
It was hard to describe. You couldn't imagine them curtseying to anyone.
"So," said Granny, "how goes the life?"
The other witch shrugged, causing the drummers to lose their grip again, just when they had nearly climbed back up.
"Like the hurried lover, it comes and goe-" she began, and stopped at Granny's meaningful glance at Esk.
"Not bad, not bad," she amended hurriedly. "The council have tried to run me out once or twice, you know, but they all have wives and somehow it never quite happens. They say I'm not the right sort, but I say there'd be many a family in this town a good deal bigger and poorer if it wasn't for Madame Goatfounder's Pennyroyal Preventives. I know who comes into my shop, I do. I remember who buys buckeroo drops and ShoNuff Ointment, I do. Life isn't bad. And how is it up in your village with the funny name?"
"Bad Ass," said Esk helpfully. She picked a small clay pot off the counter and sniffed at its contents.
"It is well enough," conceded Granny. "The handmaidens of nature are ever in demand."
Esk sniffed again at the powder, which seemed to be pennyroyal with a base she couldn't quite identify, and carefully replaced the lid. While the two women exchanged gossip in a kind of feminine code, full of eye contact and unspoken adjectives, she examined the other exotic potions on display. Or rather, not on display. In some strange way they appeared to be artfully half-hidden, as if Hilts wasn't entirely keen to sell.
"I don't recognise any of these," she said, half to herself. "What do they give to people?"
"Freedom," said Hilts, who had good hearing. She turned back to Granny. "How much have you taught her?"
"Not that much," said Granny. "There's power there, but what kind I'm not sure. Wizard power, it might be."
Hilts turned around very slowly and looked Esk up and down.
"Ah," she said, "That explains the staff. I wondered what the bees were talking about. Well, well. Give me your hand, child."
Esk held out her hand. Hilta's fingers were so heavy with rings it was like dipping into a sack of walnuts.
Granny sat upright, radiating disapproval, as Hilts began to inspect Esk's palm.
"I really don't think that is necessary," she said sternly. "Not between us."
"You do it, Granny," said Esk, "in the village. I've seen you. And teacups. And cards."
Granny shifted uneasily. "Yes, well," she said. "It's all according. You just hold their hand and people do their own fortune-telling. But there's no need to go around believing it, we'd all be in trouble if we went around believing everything."
"The Powers That Be have many strange qualities, and puzzling and varied are the ways in which they make their desires known in this circle of firelight we call the physical world," said Hilts solemnly. She winked at Esk.
"Well, really," snapped Granny.
"No, straight up," said Hilts. "It's true."
"Hmph."
"I see you going upon a long journey," said Hilts.
"Will I meet a tall dark stranger?" said Esk, examining her palm. "Granny always says that to women, she says -"
"No," said Hilts, while Granny snorted. "But it will be a very strange journey. You'll go a long way while staying in the same place. And the direction will be a strange one. It will be an exploration."
"You can tell all that from my hand?"
"Well, mainly I'm just guessing," said Hilts, sitting back and reaching for the teapot /the lead drummer, who had climbed halfway back, fell on to the toiling cymbalists/. She looked carefully at Esk and added, "A female wizard, eh?"
"Granny is taking me to Unseen University," said Esk.
Hilta raised her eyebrows. "Do you know where it is?"
Granny frowned. "Not in so many words," she admitted. "I was hoping you could give me more explicit directions, you being more familiar with bricks and things."
"They say it has many doors, but the ones in this world are in the city of Ankh-Morpork," said Hilta. Granny looked blank. "On the Circle Sea," Hilta added. Granny's look of polite enquiry persisted. "Five hundred miles away," said Hilta.
"Oh," said Granny.
She stood up and brushed an imaginary speck of dust off her dress.
"We'd better be going, then," she added.
Hilta laughed. Esk quite liked the sound. Granny never laughed, she merely let the corners of her mouth turn up, but Hilta laughed like someone who had thought hard about Life and had seen the joke.
"Start tomorrow, anyway," she said. "I've got room at home, you can stay with me, and tomorrow you'll have the light."
"We wouldn't want to presume," said Granny.
"Nonsense. Why not have a look around while I pack up the stall?"
Ohulan was the market town for a wide sprawling countryside and the market day didn't end at sunset. Instead, torches flared at every booth and stall and light blared forth from the open doorways of the inns. Even the temples put out coloured lamps to attract nocturnal worshippers.
Hilta moved through the crowd like a slim snake through dry grass, her entire stall and stock reduced to a surprisingly small bundle on her back, and her jewellery rattling like a sackful of flamenco dancers. Granny stumped along behind her, her feet aching from the unaccustomed prodding of the cobbles.
And Esk got lost.
It took some effort, but she managed it. It involved ducking between two stalls and then scurrying down a side alley. Granny had warned her at length about the unspeakable things that lurked in cities, which showed that the old woman was lacking in a complete understanding of headology, since Esk was- now determined to see one or two of them for herself.
In fact, since Ohulan was quite barbaric and uncivilised the only things that went on after dark to any degree were a little thievery, some amateurish trading in the courts of lust, and drinking until you fell over or started singing or both.
According to the standard poetic instructions one should move through a fair like the white swan at evening moves o'er the bay, but because of certain practical difficulties Esk settled for moving through the crowds like a small dodgem car, bumping from body to body with the tip of the staff waving a yard above her head. It caused some heads to turn, and not only because it had hit them; wizards occasionally passed through the town and it was the first time anyone had seen one four feet tall with long hair.
Anyone watching closely would have noticed strange things happening as she passed by.
There was, for example, the man with three upturned cups who was inviting a small crowd to explore with him the exciting world of chance and probability as it related to the position of a small dried pea. He was vaguely aware of a small figure watching him solemnly for a few moments, and then a sackful of peas cascaded out of every cup he picked up. Within seconds he was knee-deep in legumes. He was a lot deeper in trouble he suddenly owed everyone a lot of money.
There was a small and wretched monkey that for years had shuffled vaguely at the end of a chain while its owner played something dreadful on a pipe-organ. It suddenly turned, narrowed its little red eyes, bit its keeper sharply in the leg, snapped its chain and had it away over the rooftops with the night's takings in a tin cup. History is silent about what they were spent on.
A boxful of marzipan ducks on a nearby stall came to life and whirred past the stallholder to land, quacking happily, in the river (where, by dawn, they had all melted: that's natural selection for your.
The stall itself sidled off down an alley and was never seen again.
Esk, in fact, moved through the fair more like an arsonist moves through a hayfield or a neutron bounces through a reactor, poets notwithstanding, and the hypothetical watcher could have detected her random passage by tracing the outbreaks of hysteria and violence. But, like all good catalysts, she wasn't actually involved in the processes she initiated, and by the time all the non-hypothetical potential watchers took their eyes off them she had been buffeted somewhere else.
She was also beginning to tire. While Granny Weatherwax approved of night on general principles, she certainly didn't hold with promiscuous candlelight - if she had any reading to do after dark she generally persuaded the owl to come and sit on the back of her chair, and read through its eyes. So Esk expected to go to bed around sunset, and that was long past.
There was a doorway ahead of her that looked friendly. Cheerful sounds were sliding out on the yellow light, and pooling on the cobbles. With the staff still radiating random magic like a demon lighthouse she headed for it, weary but determined.
The landlord of The Fiddler's Riddle considered himself to be a man of the world, and this was right, because he was too stupid to be really cruel, and too lazy to be really mean and although his body had been around quite a lot his mind had never gone further than the inside of his own head.
He wasn't used to being addressed by sticks. Especially when they spoke in a small piping voice, and asked for goat's milk.
Cautiously, aware that everyone in the inn was looking at him and grinning, he pulled himself across the bar top until he could see down. Esk stared up at him. Look 'em right in the eye, Granny had always said: focus your power on 'em, stare 'em out, no one can outstare a witch, 'cept a goat, of course.
The landlord, whose name was Skiller, found himself looking directly down at a small child who seemed to be squinting.
"What?" he said.
"Milk," said the child, still focussing furiously. "You get it out of goats. You know?"
Skiller sold only beer, which his customers claimed he got out of cats. No self-respecting goat would have endured the smell in the Fiddler's Riddle.
"We haven't got any," he said. He looked hard at the staff and his eyebrows met conspiratorially over his nose.
"You could have a look," said Esk.
Skiller eased himself back across the bar, partly to avoid the gaze, which was causing his eyes to water in sympathy, and partly because a horrible suspicion was congealing in his mind.
Even second-rate barmen tend to resonate with the beer they serve, and the vibrations coming from the big barrels behind him no longer had the twang of hop and head. They were broadcasting an altogether more lactic note.
He turned a tap experimentally, and watched a thin stream of milk curdle in the drip bucket.
The staff still poked up over the edge of the counter, like a periscope. He could swear that it was staring at him too.
"Don't waste it," said a voice. "You'll be grateful for it one day."
It was the same tone of voice Granny used when Esk was less than enthusiastic about a plateful of nourishing sallet greens, boiled yellow until the last few vitamins gave in, but to Skiller's hypersensitive ears it wasn't an injunction but a prediction. He shivered. He didn't know where he would have to be to make him grateful for a drink of ancient beer and curdled milk. He'd rather be dead first.
Perhaps he would be dead first.
He very carefully wiped a nearly clean mug with his thumb and filled it from the tap. He was aware that a large number of his guests were quietly leaving. No one liked magic, especially n the hands of a woman. You never could tell what they might take it into their heads to do next.
"Your milk," he said, adding, "Miss."
"I've got some money," Esk said. Granny had always told her: always be ready to pay and you won't have to, people always like you to feel good about them, it's all headology.
"No, wouldn't dream of it," said Skiller hastily. He leaned over the bar. "If you could see, er, your way clear to turning the rest back, though? Not much call for milk in these parts."
He sidled along a little way. Esk had leaned the staff against the bar while she drank her milk, and it was making him uncomfortable.
Esk looked at him over a moustache of cream.
"I didn't turn it into milk, I just knew it would be milk because I wanted milk," she said. "What did you think it was?"
"Er. Beer."
Esk thought about this. She vaguely remembered trying beer once, and it had tasted sort of second-hand. But she could recall something which everyone in Bad Ass reckoned was much better than beer. It was one of Granny's most guarded recipes. It was good for you, because there was only fruit in it, plus lots of freezing and boiling and careful testing of little drops with a lighted flame.
Granny would put a very small spoonful in her milk if it was a really cold night. It had to be a wooden spoon, on account of what it did to metal.
She concentrated. She could picture the taste in her mind, and with the little skills that she was beginning to accept but couldn't understand she found she could take the taste apart into little coloured shapes ....
Skiller's thin wife came out of their back room to see why it had all gone so quiet, and he waved her into shocked silence as Esk stood swaying very slightly with her eyes closed and her lips moving .
. . . little shapes that you didn't need went back into the great pool of shapes, and then you found the extra ones you needed and put them together, and then there was a sort of hook thing which meant that they would turn anything suitable into something just like them, and then ....
Skiller turned very carefully and regarded the barrel behind him. The smell of the room had changed, he could feel the pure gold sweating gently out of that ancient woodwork.
With some care he took a small glass from his store under the counter and let a few splashes of the dark golden liquid escape from the tap. He looked at it thoughtfully in the lamplight,
turned the glass around methodically, sniffed it a few times, and tossed its contents back in one swallow.
His face remained unchanged, although his eyes went moist and his throat wobbled somewhat. His wife and Esk watched him as a thin beading of sweat broke out on his forehead. Ten seconds passed, and he was obviously out to break some heroic record. There may have been steam curling out of his ears, but that could have been a rumour. His fingers drummed a strange tattoo on the bartop.
At last he swallowed, appeared to reach a decision, turned solemnly to Esk, and said, "Hwarl,ish finish saaarghs ishghs oorgsh?"
His brow wrinkled as he ran the sentence past his mind again and made a second attempt.
"Aargh argh shaah gok?"
He gave up.
"Bharrgsh nargh!"
His wife snorted and took the glass out of his unprotesting hand. She sniffed it. She looked at the barrels, all ten of them. She met his unsteady eye. In a private paradise for two they soundlessly calculated the selling price of six hundred gallons of triple-distilled white mountain peach brandy and ran out of numbers.
Mrs Skiller was quicker on the uptake than her husband. She bent down and smiled at Esk, who was too tired to squint back. It wasn't a particularly good smile, because Mrs Skiller didn't get much practice.
"How did you get here, little girl?" she said, in a voice that suggested gingerbread cottages and the slamming of big stove doors.
"I got lost from Granny."
"And where's Granny now, dear? " Clang went the oven doors again; it was going to be a tough night for all wanderers in metaphorical forests.
"Just somewhere, I expect."
"Would you like to go to sleep in a big feather bed, all nice and warm?"
Esk looked at her gratefully, even while vaguely realizing that the woman had a face just like an eager ferret, and nodded.
You're right. It's going to take more than a passing woodchopper to sort this out.
Granny, meanwhile, was two streets away. She was also, by the standards of other people, lost. She would not see it like that. She knew where she was, it was just that everywhere else didn't.
It has already been mentioned that it is much harder to detect a human mind than, say, the mind of a fox. The human mind, seeing this as some kind of a slur, wants to know why. This is why.
Animal minds are simple, and therefore sharp. Animals never spend time dividing experience into little bits and speculating about all the bits they've missed. The whole panoply of the universe has been neatly expressed to them as things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, /c/ run away from, and /d) rocks. This frees the mind from unnecessary thoughts and gives it a cutting edge where it matters. Your normal animal, in fact, never tries to walk and chew gum at the same time.
The average human, on the other hand, thinks about all sorts of things around the clock, on all sorts of levels, with interruptions from dozens of biological calendars and timepieces. There's thoughts about to be said, and private thoughts, and real thoughts, and thoughts about thoughts, and a whole gamut of subconscious thoughts. To a telepath the human head is a din. It is a railway terminus with all the Tannoys talking at once. It is a complete FM waveband - and some of those stations aren't reputable, they're outlawed pirates on forbidden seas who play late-night records with limbic lyrics.
Granny, trying to locate Esk by mind magic alone, was trying to find a straw in a haystack.
She was not succeeding, but enough blips of sense reached her through the heterodyne wails of a thousand brains all thinking at once to convince her that the world was, indeed, as silly as she had always believed it was.
She met Hilta at the corner of the street. She was carrying her broomstick, the better to conduct an aerial search (with great stealth, however; the men of Ohulan were right behind Stay Long Ointment but drew the line at flying women). She was distraught.
"Not so much as a hint of her," said Granny.
"Have you been down to the river? She might have fallen in!"
"Then she'd have just fallen out again. Anyway, she can swim. I think she's hiding, drat her."
"What are we going to do?"
Granny gave her a withering look. "Hilta Goatfounder, I'm ashamed of you, acting like a cowin. Do I look worried?"
Hilta peered at her.
"You do. A bit. Your lips have gone all thin."
"I'm just angry, that's all."
"Gypsies always come here for the fair, they might have taken her."
Granny was prepared to believe anything about city folk but here she was on firmer ground.
"Then they're a lot dafter than I'd give them credit for," she snapped. "Look, she's got the staff."
"What good would that do?" said Hilta, who was close to tears.
"I don't think you've understood anything I've told you," said Granny severely. "All we need to do is go back to your place and wait."
"What for?"
"The screams or the bangs or the fireballs or whatever," Granny said vaguely.
"That's heartless!"
"Oh, I expect they've got it coming to them. Come on, you go on ahead and put the kettle on."
Hilta gave her a mystified look, then climbed on her broom and rose slowly and erratically into the shadows among the chimneys. If broomsticks were cars, this one would be a split window Morris Minor.
Granny watched her go, then stumped along the wet streets after her. She was determined that they wouldn't get her up in one of those things.
Esk lay in the big, fluffy and slightly damp sheets of the spare bed in the attic room of the Riddle. She was tired, but couldn't sleep. The bed was too chilly, for one thing. She wondered uneasily if she dared try to warm it up, but thought better of it. She couldn't seem to get the hang of fire spells, no matter how carefully she experimented. They either didn't work at all or worked only too well. The woods around the cottage were becoming treacherous with the holes left by disappearing fireballs; at least, if the wizardry thing didn't work then Granny said she'd have a fine future as a privy builder or well sinker.
She turned over and tried to ignore the bed's faint smell of mushrooms. Then she reached out in the darkness until her hand found the staff, propped against the bedhead. Mrs Skiller had been quite insistent about taking it downstairs, but Esk had hung on like grim death. It was the only thing in the world she was absolutely certain belonged to her.
The varnished surface with its strange carvings felt oddly comforting. Esk went to sleep, and dreamed bangles, and strange packages, and mountains. And distant stars above the mountains, and a cold desert where strange creatures lurched across the dry sand and stared at her through insect eyes ....
There was a creak on the stairs. Then another. Then a silence, the sort of choking, furry silence made by someone standing as still as possible.
The door swung open. Skiller made a blacker shadow against the candlelight on the stairs, and there was a faintly whispered conversation before he tiptoed as silently as he could towards the bedhead. The staff slipped sideways as his first cautious grope dislodged it, but he caught it quickly and let his breath out very slowly.
So he hardly had enough left to scream with when the staff moved in his hands. He felt the scaliness, the coil and muscle of it ....
Esk sat bolt upright in time to see Skiller roll backwards down the steep stairladder, still flailing desperately at something quite invisible that coiled around his arms. There was another scream from below as he landed on his wife.
The staff clattered to the floor and lay surrounded by a faint octarine glow.
Esk got out of the bed and padded across the floor. There was a terrible cursing; it sounded unhealthy. She peered around the door and looked down on the face of Mrs Skiller.
"Give me that staff!"
Esk reached down behind her and gripped the polished wood. "No," she said. "It's mine."
"It's not the right sort of thing for little girls," snapped the barman's wife.
"It belongs to me," said Esk, and quietly closed the door. She listened for a moment to the muttering from below and tried to think of what to do next. Turning the couple into something would probably only cause a fuss and, anyway, she wasn't quite certain how to do it.
The fact was the magic only really worked when she wasn't thinking about it. Her mind seemed to get in the way.
She padded across the room and pushed open the tiny window. The strange night-time smells of civilization drifted in - the damp smell of streets, the fragrance of garden flowers, the distant hint of an overloaded privy. There were wet tiles outside.
As Skiller started back up the stairs she pushed the staff out on to the roof and crawled after it, steadying herself on the carvings above the window. The roof dipped down to an outhouse and she managed to stay at least vaguely upright as she half-slid, half-scrambled down the uneven tiles. A six-foot drop on to a stack of old barrels, a quick scramble down the slippery wood, and she was trotting easily across the inn yard.
As she kicked up the street mists she could hear the sounds of argument coming from the Riddle.
Skiller rushed past his wife and laid a hand on the tap of the nearest barrel. He paused, and then wrenched it open.
The smell of peach brandy filled the room, sharp as knives. He shut off the flow and relaxed.
"Afraid it would turn into something nasty?" asked his wife. He nodded.
"If you hadn't been so clumsy -"she began.
"I tell you it bit me!"
"You could have been a wizard and we wouldn't have to bother with all this. Have you got no ambition?"
Skiller shook his head. "I reckon it takes more than a staff to make a wizard," he said. "Anyway, I heard where it said wizards aren't allowed to get married, they're not even allowed to -" He hesitated.
"To what? Allowed to what?"
Skiller writhed. "Well. You know. Thing."
"I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about," said Mrs Skiller briskly.
"No, I suppose not."
He followed her reluctantly out of the darkened bar-room. It seemed to him that perhaps wizards didn't have such a bad life, at that.
He was proved right when the following morning revealed that the ten barrels of peach brandy had, indeed, turned into something nasty.
Esk wandered aimlessly through the grey streets until she reached Ohulan's tiny river docks. Broad flat-bottomed barges bobbed gently against the wharves, and one or two of them curled wisps of smoke from friendly stovepipes. Esk clambered easily on to the nearest, and used the staff to lever up the oilcloth that covered most of it.
A warm smell, a mixture of lanolin and midden, drifted up. The barge was laden with wool.
It's silly to go to sleep on an unknown barge, not knowing what strange cliffs may be drifting past when you awake, not knowing that bargees traditionally get an early start (setting out before the sun is barely up), not knowing what new horizons might greet one on the morrow ....
You know that. Esk didn't.
Esk awoke to the sound of someone whistling. She lay quite still, reeling the evening's events across her mind until she remembered why she was here, and then rolled over very carefully and raised the oilcloth a fraction.
Here she was, then. But "here" had moved.
"This is what they call sailing, then," she said, watching the far bank glide past, "It doesn't seem very special."
It didn't occur to her to start worrying. For the first eight years of her life the world had been a particularly boring place and now that it was becoming interesting Esk wasn't about to act ungrateful.
The distant whistler was joined by a barking dog. Esk lay back in the wool and reached out until she found the animal's mind, and Borrowed it gently. From its inefficient and disorganised brain she learned that there were at least four people on this barge, and many more on the others that were strung out in line with it on the river. Some of them seemed to be children.
She let the animal go and looked out at the scenery again for a long time - the barge was passing between high orange cliffs now, banded with so many colours of rock it looked as though some hungry God had made the all-time record club sandwich - and tried to avoid the next thought. But it persisted, arriving in her mind like the unexpected limbo dancer under the lavatory door of Life. Sooner or later she would have to go out. It wasn't her stomach that was pressing the point, but her bladder brooked no delay.
Perhaps if she
The oilcloth over her head was pulled aside swiftly and a big bearded head beamed down at her.
"Well, well," it said. "What have we here, then? A stowaway, yesno?"
Esk gave it a stare. "Yes," she said. There seemed no sense in denying it. "Could you help me out please?"
"Aren't you afraid I shall throw you to the - the pike?" said the head. It noticed her perplexed look. "Big freshwater fish," it added helpfully. "Fast. Lot of teeth. Pike."
The thought hadn't occurred to her at all. "No," she said truthfully. "Why? Will you?"
"No. Not really. There's no need to be frightened."
"I'm not."
"Oh." A brown arm appeared, attached to the head by the normal arrangements, and helped her out of her nest in the fleeces.
Esk stood on the deck of the barge and looked around. The sky was bluer than a biscuit barrel, fitting neatly over a broad valley through which the river ran as sluggishly as a planning inquiry.
Behind her the Ramtops still acted as a hitching rail for clouds, but they no longer dominated as they had done for as long as Esk had known them. Distance had eroded them.
"Where's this?" she said, sniffing the new smells of swamp and sedge.
"The Upper Valley of the River Ankh, " said her captor. "What do you think of it?"
Esk looked up and down the river. It was already much wider than it had been at Ohulan.
"I don't know. There's certainly a lot of it. Is this your ship?"
"Boat," he corrected. He was taller than her father, although not quite so old, and dressed like a gypsy. Most of his teeth had turned gold, but Esk decided it wasn't the time to ask why. He had the kind of real deep tan that rich people spend ages trying to achieve with expensive holidays and bits of tinfoil, when really all you need to do to obtain one is work your arse off in the open air every day. His brow crinkled.
"Yes, it's mine," he said, determined to regain the initiative. "And what are you doing on it, I would like to know? Running away from home, yesno? If you were a boy I'd say are you going to seek your fortune?"
"Can't girls seek their fortune?"
"I think they're supposed to seek a boy with a fortune," said the man, and gave a Zoo-carat grin. He extended a brown hand, heavy with rings. "Come and have some breakfast."
"I'd actually like to use your privy," she said. His mouth dropped open.
"This is a barge, yesno?"
"Yes?"
"That means there's only the river." He patted her hand. "Don't worry," he added. "It's quite used to it."
Granny stood on the wharf, her boot tap-tap-tapping on the wood. The little man who was the nearest thing Ohulan had to a dockmaster was being treated to the full force of one of her stares, and was visibly wilting. Her expression wasn't perhaps as vicious as thumbscrews, but it did seem to suggest that thumbscrews were a real possibility.
"They left before dawn, you say," she said.
"Yes-ss," he said. "Er. I didn't know they weren't supposed to."
"Did you see a little girl on board?" Tap-tap went her boot.
"Um. No. I'm sorry." He brightened. "They were Zoons," he said; "If the child was with them she won't come to harm. You can always trust a Zoon, they say. Very keen on family life."
Granny turned to Hilta, who was fluttering like a bewildered butterfly, and raised her eyebrows.
"Oh, yes," Hilta trilled. "The Zoons have a very good name."
"Mmph," said Granny. She turned on her heel and stumped back towards the centre of the town. The dockmaster sagged as though a coathanger had just been removed from his shirt.
Hilta's lodgings were over a herbalist's and behind a tannery, and offered splendid views of the rooftops of Ohulan. She liked it because it offered privacy, always appreciated by, as she put it, "my more discerning clients who prefer to make their very special purchases in an atmosphere of calm where discretion is forever the watchword".
Granny Weatherwax looked around the sitting room with barelyconcealed scorn. There were altogether too many tassels, bead curtains, astrological charts and black cats in the place. Granny couldn't abide cats. She sniffed.
"Is that the tannery?" she said accusingly.
"Incense," said Hilta. She rallied bravely in the face of Granny's scorn. "The customers appreciate it," she said. "It puts them in the right frame of mind. You know how it is."
"I would have thought one could carry out a perfectly respectable business, Hilta, without resorting to parlour tricks," said Granny, sitting down and beginning the long and tricky business of removing her hatpins.
"It's different in towns," said Hilta. "One has to move with the times."
"I'm sure I don't know why. Is the kettle on?" Granny reached across the table and took the velvet cover off Hilta's crystal ball, a sphere of quartz as big as her head.
"Never could get the hang of this damn silicon stuff," she said. "A bowl of water with a drop of ink in it was good enough when I was a girl. Let's see, now . . . ."
She peered into the dancing heart of the ball, trying to use it to focus her mind on the whereabouts of Esk. A crystal was a tricky thing to use at the best of times, and usually staring into it meant that the one thing the future could be guaranteed to hold was a severe migraine. Granny distrusted them, considering them to smack of wizardry; for two pins, it always seemed to her, the wretched thing would suck your mind out like a whelk from a shell.
"Damn thing's all sparkly," she said, huffing on it and wiping it with her sleeve. Hilta peered over her shoulder.
"That's not sparkle, that means something," she said slowly.
"What?"
"I'm not sure. Can I try? It's used to me." Hilta pushed a cat off the other chair and leaned forward to peer into the glass depths.
"Mnph. Feel free," said Granny, "but you won't find -"
"Wait. Something's coming through."
"Looks all sparkly from here," Granny insisted. "Little silver lights all floating around, like in them little snowstorm-in-abottle toys. Quite pretty, really."
"Yes, but look beyond the flakes . . . ."
Granny looked.
This was what she saw.
The viewpoint was very high up and a wide swathe of country lay below her, blue with distance, through which a broad river wriggled like a drunken snake. There were silver lights floating in the foreground but they were, in a manner of speaking, just a few flakes in the great storm of lights that turned in a great lazy spiral, like a geriatric tornado with a bad attack of snow, and funnelled down, down to the hazy landscape. By screwing up her eyes Granny could just make out some dots on the river.
Occasionally some sort of lighting would sparkle briefly inside the gently turning funnel of motes.
Granny blinked and looked up. The room seemed very dark.
"Odd sort of weather," she said, because she couldn't really think of anything better. Even with her eyes shut the glittering motes still danced across her vision.
"I don't think it's weather," said Hilta. "I don't actually think people can see it, but the crystal shows it. I think it's magic, condensing out of the air."
"Into the staff?"
"Yes. That's what a wizard's staff does. It sort of distils magic."
Granny risked another glance at the crystal.
"Into Esk," she said, carefully.
"Yes."
"There looks like quite a lot of it."
"Yes."
Not for the first time, Granny wished she knew more about how wizards worked their magic. She had a vision of Esk filling up with magic, until every tissue and pore was bloated with the stuff. Then it would start leaking - slowly at first, arcing to ground in little bursts, but then building up to a great discharge of occult potentiality. It could do all kinds of damage.
"Drat," she said. "I never did like that staff."
"At least she's heading towards the University place," said Hilta. "They'll know what to do."
"That's as may be. How far down river do you reckon they are?"
"Twenty miles or so. Those barges only go at walking pace. The Zoons aren't in any hurry."
"Right." Granny stood up, her jaw set defiantly. She reached for her hat and picked up her sack of possessions.
"Reckon I can walk faster than a barge," she said. "The river's all bendy but I can go in straight lines."
"You're going to walk after her?" said Hilta, aghast. "But there's forests and wild animals!"
"Good, I could do with getting back to civilisation. She needs me. That staff is taking over. I said it would, but did anyone listen?"
"Did they?" said Hilta, still trying to work out what Granny meant by getting back to civilisation.
"No," said Granny coldly.
His name was Amschat B'hal Zoon. He lived on the raft with his three wives and three children. He was a Liar.
What always annoyed the enemies of the Zoon tribe was not simply their honesty, which was infuriatingly absolute, but their total directness of approach. The Zoons had never heard about a euphemism, and wouldn't understand what to do with it if they had one, except that they would certainly have called it "a nice way of saying something nasty".
Their rigid adherence to the truth was apparently not enjoined on them by a god, as is usually the case, but appeared to have a genetic base. The average Zoon could no more tell a lie than breathe underwater and, in fact, the very concept was enough to upset them considerably; telling a Lie meant no less than totally altering the universe.
This was something of a drawback to a trading race and so, over the millennia, the elders of the Zoon studied this strange power that everyone else had in such abundance and decided that they should possess it too.
Young men who showed faint signs of having such a talent were encouraged, on special ceremonial occasions, to bend the Truth ever further on a competitive basis. The first recorded Zoon proto-lie was: "Actually my grandfather is quite tall," but eventually they got the hang of it and the office of tribal Liar was instituted.
It must be understood that while the majority of Zoon cannot lie they have great respect for any Zoon who can say that the world is other than it is, and the Liar holds a position of considerable eminence. He represents his tribe in all his dealings with the outside world, which the average Zoon long ago gave up trying to understand. Zoon tribes are very proud of their Liars.
Other races get very annoyed about all this. They feel that the Zoon ought to have adopted more suitable titles, like "diplomat" or "public relations officer". They feel they are poking fun at the whole thing.
"Is all that true?" said Esk suspiciously, looking around the barge's crowded cabin.
"No," said Amschat firmly. His junior wife, who was cooking porridge over a tiny ornate stove, giggled. His three children watched Esk solemnly over the edge of the table.
"Don't you ever tell the truth?"
"Do you?" Amschat grinned his goldmine grin, but his eyes were not smiling. "Why do I find you on my fleeces? Amschat is no kidnapper. There will be people at home who will worry, yesno?"
"I expect Granny will come looking for me," said Esk, "but I don't think she will worry much. Just be angry, I expect. Anyway, I'm going to Ankh-Morpork. You can put me off the ship -"
"- boat -"
"- if you like. I don't mind about the pike."
"I can't do that," said Amschat.
"Was that a lie?"
"No! There is wild country around us, robbers and - things."
Esk nodded brightly. "That's settled, then," she said. "I don't mind sleeping in the fleeces. And I can pay my way. I can do -" She hesitated; her unfinished sentence hung like a little curl of crystal in the air while discretion made a successful bid for control of her tongue. "- helpful things," she finished lamely.
She was aware that Amschat was looking slightly sideways at his senior wife, who was sewing by the stove. By Zoon tradition she wore nothing but black. Granny would have thoroughly approved.
"What sort of helpful things?" he asked. "Washing and sweeping, yesno?"
"If you like," said Esk, "or distillation using the bifold or triple alembic, the making of varnishes, glazes, creams, zuumchats and punes, the rendering of waxes, the manufacture of candles, the proper selection of seeds, roots and cuttings, and most preparations from the Eighty Marvellous Herbs; I can spin, card, rett, Hallow and weave on the hand, frame, harp and Noble looms and I can knit if people start the wool on for me, I can read soil and rock, do carpentry up to the three-way mortise and tenon, predict weather by means of beastsign and skyreck, make increase in bees, brew five types of mead, make dyes and mordants and pigments, including a fast blue, I can do most types of whitesmithing, mend boots, cure and fashion most leathers, and if you have any goats I can look after them. I like goats."
Amschat looked at her thoughtfully. She felt she was expected to continue.
"Granny never likes to see people sitting around doing nothing," she offered. "She always says a girl who is good with her hands will never want for a living," she added, by way of further explanation.
"Or a husband, I expect," nodded Amschat, weakly.
"Actually, Granny had a lot to say about that -"
"I bet she did," said Amschat. He looked at the senior wife, who nodded almost imperceptibly.
"Very well," he said. "If you can make yourself useful you can stay. And can you play a musical instrument?"
Esk returned his steady gaze, not batting an eyelid. "Probably."
And so Esk, with the minimum of difficulty and only a little regret, left the Ramtops and their weather and joined the Zoons on their great trading journey down the Ankh.
There were at least thirty barges with at least one sprawling Zoon family on each, and no two vessels appeared to be carrying the same cargo; most of them were strung together, and the Zoons simply hauled on the cable and stepped on to the next deck if they fancied a bit of socialising.
Esk set up home in the fleeces. It was warm, smelled slightly of Granny's cottage and, much more important, meant that she was undisturbed.
She was getting a bit worried about magic.
It was definitely getting out of control. She wasn't doing magic, it was just happening around her. And she sensed that people probably wouldn't be too happy if they knew.
It meant that if she washed up she had to clatter and splash at length to conceal the fact that the dishes were cleaning themselves. If she did some darning she had to do it on some private part of the deck to conceal the fact that the edges of the hole ravelled themselves together as if . . . as if by magic. Then she woke up on the second day of her voyage to find that several of the fleeces around the spot where she had hidden the staff had combed, carded and spun themselves into neat skeins during the night.
She put all thoughts of lighting fires out of her head.
There were compensations, though. Every sluggish turn of the great brown river brought new scenes. There were dark stretches hemmed in with deep forest, through which the barges traveled in the dead centre of the river with the men armed and the women below - except for Esk, who sat listening with interest to the snortings and sneezings that followed them through the bushes on the banks. There were stretches of farmland. There were several towns much larger than Ohulan. There were even some mountains, although they were old and flat and not young and frisky like her mountains. Not that she was homesick, exactly, but sometimes she felt like a boat herself, drifting on the edge of an infinite rope but always attached to an anchor.
The barges stopped at some of the towns. By tradition only the men went ashore, and only Amschat, wearing his ceremonial Lying hat, spoke to non-Zoons. Esk usually went with him. He tried hinting that she should obey the unwritten rules of Zoon life and stay afloat, but a hint was to Esk what a mosquito bite was to the average rhino because she was already learning that if you ignore the rules people will, half the time, quietly rewrite them so that they don't apply to you.
Anyway, it seemed to Amschat that when Esk was with him he always got a very good price. There was something about a small child squinting determinedly at them from behind his legs that made even market-hardened merchants hastily conclude their business.
In fact, it began to worry him. When a market broker in the walled town of Zemphis offered him a bag of ultramarines in exchange for a hundred fleeces a voice from the level of his pockets said: "They're not ultramarines."
"Listen to the child!" said the broker, grinning. Amschat solemnly held one of the stones to his eye.
"I am listening," he said, "and they do indeed look like ultramarines. They have the glit and shimmy."
Esk shook her head. "They're just spircles," she said. She said it without thinking, and regretted it immediately as both men turned to stare at her.
Amschat turned the stone over in his palm. Putting the chameleon spircle stones into a box with some real gems so that they appeared to change their hue was a traditional trick, but these had the true inner blue fire. He looked up sharply at the broker. Amschat had been finely trained in the art of the Lie. He recognised the subtle signs, now that he came to think about it.
"There seems to be a doubt," he said, "but 'tis easily resolved, we need only take them to the assayer in Pine Street because the world knows that spircles will dissolve in hypactic fluid, yesno?"
The broker hesitated. Amschat had changed position slightly, and the set of his muscles suggested that any sudden movement on the broker's part would see him flat in the dust. And that damn child was squinting at him as though she could see through to the back of his mind. His nerve broke.
"I regret this unfortunate dispute," he said. "I had accepted the stones as ultramarines in good faith but rather than cause disharmony between us I will ask you to accept them as - as a gift, and for the fleeces may I offer this roseatte of the first sorting?"
He took a small red stone from a tiny velvet pouch. Amschat hardly looked at it but, without taking his eyes off the man, passed it down to Esk. She nodded.
When the merchant had hurried off Amschat took Esk's hand and half-dragged her to the assayer's stall, which was little more than a niche in the wall. The old man took the smallest of the blue stones, listened to Amschat's hurried explanation, poured out a saucerful of hypactic fluid and dropped the stone in. It frothed into nothingness.
"Very interesting," he said. He took another stone in a tweezer and examined it under a glass.
"They are indeed spircles, but remarkably fine specimens in their own right," he concluded. "They are by no means worthless, and I for example would be prepared to offer you - is there something wrong with the little girl's eyes?"
Amschat nudged Esk, who stopped trying out another Look.
"- I would offer you, shall we say, two zats of silver?"
"Shall we say five?" said Amschat pleasantly.
"And I would like to keep one of the stones," said Esk. The old man threw up his hands.
"But they are mere curios!" he said. "Of value only to a collector!"
"A collector may yet sell them to an unsuspecting purchaser as finest roseattes or ultramarines," said Amschat, "especially if he was the only assayer in town."
The assayer grumbled a bit at this, but at last they settled on three zats and one of the spircles on a thin silver chain for Esk.
When they were out of earshot Amschat handed her the tiny silver coins and said: "These are yours. You have earned them. But -" he hunkered down so that his eyes were on a level with hers, "- you must tell me how you knew the stones were false."
He looked worried, but Esk sensed that he wouldn't really like the truth. Magic made people uncomfortable. He wouldn't like it if she said simply: spircles are spircles and ultramarines are ultramarines, and though you may think they look the same that is because most people don't use their eyes in the right way. Nothing can entirely disguise its true nature.
Instead she said: "The dwarves mine spircles near the village where I was born, and you soon learn to see how they bend light in a funny way."
Amschat looked into her eyes for some time. Then he shrugged.
"Okay," he said. "Fine. Well, I have some further business here. Why don't you buy yourself some new clothes, or something? I'd warn you against unscrupulous traders but, somehow, I don't know, I don't think you will have any trouble."
Esk nodded. Amschat strode off through the market place. At the first corner he turned, looked at her thoughtfully, and then disappeared among the crowds.
Well, that's the end of sailing, Esk told herself. He's not quite sure but he's going to be watching me now and before I know what's happening the staff will be taken away and there'll be all sorts of trouble. Why does everyone get so upset about magic?
She gave a philosophical sigh and set about exploring the possibilities of the town.
There was the question of the staff, though. Esk had rammed it deep among the fleeces, which were not going to be unloaded yet. If she went back for it people would start asking questions, and she didn't know the answers.
She found a convenient alleyway and scuttled down it until a deep doorway gave her the privacy she required.
If going back was out of the question then only one thing remained. She held out a hand and closed her eyes.
She knew exactly what she wanted to do-it lay in front of her eyes. The staff mustn't come flying through the air, wrecking the barge and drawing attention to itself. All she wanted, she told herself, was for there to be a slight change in the way the world was organised. It shouldn't be a world where the staff was in the fleeces, it should be a world where it was in her hand. A tiny change, an infinitesimal alteration to the Way Things Were.
If Esk had been properly trained in wizardry she would have known that this was impossible. All wizards knew how to move things about, starting with protons and working upwards, but the important thing about moving something from A to Z, according to basic physics, was that at some point it should pass through the rest of the alphabet. The only way one could cause something to vanish at A and appear at Z would be to shuffle the whole of Reality sideways. The problems this would cause didn't bear thinking about.
Esk, of course, had not been trained, and it is well known that a vital ingredient of success is not knowing that what you're attempting can't be done. A person ignorant of the possibility of failure can be a halfbrick in the path of the bicycle of history.
As Esk tried to work out how to move the staff the ripples spread out in the magical ether, changing the Discworld in thousands of tiny ways. Most went entirely unnoticed. Perhaps a few grains of sand lay on their beaches in a slightly different position, or the occasional leaf hung on its tree in a marginally different way. But then the wavefront of probability struck the edge of Reality and rebounded like the slosh off the side of the pond which, meeting the laggard ripples coming the other way, caused small but important whirlpools in the very fabric of existence. You can have whirlpools in the fabric of existence, because it is a very strange fabric.
Esk was completely ignorant of all this, of course, but was quite satisfied when the staff dropped out of thin air into her hand.
It felt warm.
She looked at it for some time. She felt that she ought to do something about it; it was too big, too distinctive, too inconvenient. It attracted attention.
"If I'm taking you to Ankh-Morpork," she said thoughtfully, "You've got to go in disguise."
A few late flickers of magic played around the staff, and then it went dark.
Eventually Esk solved the immediate problem by finding a stall in the main Zemphis marketplace that sold broomsticks, buying the largest, carrying it back to her doorway, removing the handle and ramming the staff deep into the birch twigs. It didn't seem right to treat a noble object in this way, and she silently apologised to it.
It made a difference, anyway. No one looked twice at a small girl carrying a broom.
She bought a spice pasty to eat while exploring (the stallholder carelessly shortchanged her, and only realised later that he had inexplicably handed over two silver pieces; also, rats mysteriously got in and ate all his stock during the night, and his grandmother was struck by lightning).
The town was smaller than Ohulan, and very different because it lay on the junction of three trade routes quite apart from the river itself. It was built around one enormous square which was a cross between a permanent exotic traffic jam and a tent village. Camels kicked mules, mules kicked horses, horses kicked camels and they all kicked humans; there was a riot of colours, a din of noise, a nasal orchestration of smells and the steady, heady sound of hundreds of people working hard at making money.
One reason for the bustle was that over large parts of the continent other people preferred to make money without working at all, and since the Disc had yet to develop a music recording industry they were forced to fall back on older, more traditional forms of banditry.
Strangely enough these often involved considerable effort. Rolling heavy rocks to the top of cliffs for a decent ambush, cutting down trees to block the road, and digging a pit lined with spikes while still keeping a wicked edge on a dagger probably involved a much greater expenditure of thought and muscle than more socially-acceptable professions but, nevertheless, there were still people misguided enough to endure all this, plus long nights in uncomfortable surroundings, merely to get their hands on perfectly ordinary large boxes of jewels.
So a town like Zemphis was the place where caravans split, mingled and came together again, as dozens of merchants and travellers banded together for protection against the socially disadvantaged on the trails ahead. Esk, wandering unregarded amidst the bustle, learned all this by the simple method of finding someone who looked important and tugging on the hem of his coat.
This particular man was counting bales of tobacco and would have succeeded but for the interruption.
"What?"
"I said, what happening here?"
The man meant to say: "Push off and bother someone else." He meant to give her a light cuff about the head. So he was astonished to find himself bending down and talking seriously to a small, grubby-faced child holding a large broomstick (which also, it seemed to him later, was in some indefinable way paying attention).
He explained about the caravans. The child nodded.
"People all get together to travel?"
"Precisely."
"Where to?"
"All sorts of places. Sto Lat, Pseudopolis . . . Ankh-Morpork, of course . . . ."
"But the river goes there," said Esk, reasonably. "Barges. The Zoons."
"Ah, yes," said the merchant, "but they charge high prices and they can't carry everything and, anyway, no one trusts them much."
"But they're very honest!"
"Huh, yes," he said. "But you know what they say: never trust an honest man." He smiled knowingly.
"Who says that?"
"They do. You know. People," he said, a certain uneasiness entering his voice.
"Oh," said Esk. She thought about it. "They must be very silly," she said primly. "Thank you, anyway."
He watched her wander off and got back to his counting. A moment later there was another tug at his coat.
"Fiftysevenfiftysevenfiftysevenwell?" he said, trying not to lose his place.
"Sorry to bother you again," said Esk, "but those bale things ...."
"What about them fiftysevenfiftysevenfiftyseven?"
"Well, are they supposed to have little white worm things in them?"
"Fiftysev - what?" The merchant lowered his slate and stared at Esk, "What little worms?"
"Wriggly ones. White," added Esk, helpfully. "All sort of burrowing about in the middle of the bales."
"You mean tobacco threadworm?" He looked wild-eyed at the stack of bales being unloaded by, now he came to think about it, a vendor with the nervous look of a midnight sprite who wants to get away before you find out what fairy gold turns into in the morning. "But he told me these had been well stored and - how do you know, anyway? "
The child had disappeared among the crowds. The merchant looked hard at the spot where she had been. He looked hard at the vendor, who was grinning nervously. He looked hard at the sky. Then took his sampling knife out of his pocket, stared at it for a moment, appeared to reach a decision, and sidled towards the nearest bale.
Esk, meanwhile, had by random eavesdropping found the caravan being assembled for Ankh-Morpork. The trail boss was sitting at a table made up of a plank across two barrels.
He was busy.
He was talking to a wizard.
Seasoned travellers know that a party setting out to cross possibly hostile country should have a fair number of swords in it but should definitely have a wizard in case there is any need for magic arts and, even if these do not become necessary, for lighting fires. A wizard of the third rank or above does not expect to pay for the privilege of joining the party. Rather, he expects to be paid. Delicate negotiations were even now coming to a conclusion.
"Fair enough, Master Treatle, but what of the young man?" said the trail boss, one Adab Gander, an impressive figure in a trollhide jerkin, rakishly floppy hat and a leather kilt. "He's no wizard, I can see."
"He is in training," said Treatle- a tall skinny wizard whose robes declared him to be a mage of the Ancient and Truly Original Brothers of the Silver Star, one of the eight orders of wizardry.
"Then no wizard he," said Gander. "I know the rules, and you're not a wizard unless you've got a staff. And he hasn't."
"Even now he travels to the Unseen University for that small detail," said Treatle loftily. Wizards parted with money slightly less readily than tigers parted with their teeth.
Gander looked at the lad in question. He had met a good many wizards in his time and considered himself a good judge and he had to admit that this boy looked like good wizard material. In other words, he was thin, gangling, pale from reading disturbing books in unhealthy rooms, and had watery eyes like two lightly-poached eggs. It crossed Gander's mind that one must speculate in order to accumulate.
All he needs to get right to the top, he thought, is a bit of a handicap. Wizards are martyrs to things like asthma and flat feet, it somehow seems to give them their drive.
"What's your name, lad?" he said, as kindly as possible.
"Sssssssssssssss" said the boy. His Adam's apple bobbed like a captive balloon. He turned to his companion, full of mute appeal.
"Simon," said Trestle.
"- imon," agreed Simon, thankfully.
"Can you cast fireballs or whirling spells, such as might be hurled against an enemy?"
Simon looked sideways at Trestle.
"Nnnnnnnnnn" he ventured.
"My young friend follows higher magic than the mere hurling of sorceries," said the wizard.
"-o," said Simon.
Gander nodded.
"Well," he said, "maybe you will indeed be a wizard, lad. Maybe when you have your fine staff you'll consent to travel with me one time, yes? I will make an investment in you, yes?"
"Just nod," said Gander, who was not naturally a cruel man.
Simon nodded gratefully. Treatle and Gander exchanged nods and then the wizard strode off, with his apprentice trailing behind under a weight of baggage.
Gander looked down at the list in front of him and carefully crossed out "wizard".
A small shadow fell across the page. He glanced up and gave an involuntary start.
"Well?" he said coldly.
"I want to go to Ankh-Morpork," said Esk, "please. I've got some money."
"Go home to your mother, child."
"No, really. I want to seek my fortune."
Gander sighed. "Why are you holding that broomstick?" he said.
Esk looked at it as though she had never seen it before.
"Everything's got to be somewhere," she said.
"Just go home, my girl," said Gander. "I'm not taking any runaways to Ankh-Morpork. Strange things can happen to little girls in big cities."
Esk brightened. "What sort of strange things?"
"Look, I said go home, right? Now!"
He picked up his chalk and went on ticking off items on his slate, trying to ignore the steady gaze that seemed to be boring through the top of his head.
"I can be helpful," said Esk, quietly.
Gander threw down the chalk and scratched his chin irritably.
"How old are you?" he said.
"Nine."
"Well, Miss nine-years-old, I've got two hundred animals and a hundred people that want to go to Ankh, and half of them hate the other half, and I've not got enough people who can fight, and they say the roads are pretty bad and the bandits are getting really cheeky up in the Paps and the trolls are demanding a bigger bridge toll this year and there's weevils in the supplies and I keep getting these headaches and where, in all this, do I need you?"
"Oh," said Esk. She looked around the crowded square. "Which one of these roads goes to Ankh, then?"
"The one over there, with the gate."
"Thank you," she said gravely. "Goodbye. I hope you don't have any more trouble and your head gets better."
"Right," said Gander uncertainly. He drummed his fingers on the tabletop as he watched Esk walk away in the direction of the Ankh road. A long, winding road. A road haunted by thieves and gnolls. A road that wheezed through high mountain passes and crawled, panting, over deserts.
"Oh bugger," he said, under his breath. "Hey! You!"
Granny Weatherwax was in trouble.
First of all, she decided, she should never have allowed Hilta to talk her into borrowing her broomstick. It was elderly, erratic, would fly only at night and even then couldn't manage a speed much above a trot.
Its lifting spells had worn so thin that it wouldn't even begin to operate until it was already moving at a fair lick. It was, in fact, the only broomstick ever to need bump-starting.
And it was while Granny Weatherwax, sweating and cursing, was running along a forest path holding the damn thing at shoulder height for the tenth time that she had found the bear trap.
The second problem was that a bear had found it first. In fact this hadn't been too much of a problem because Granny, already in a bad temper, hit it right between the eyes with the broomstick and it was now sitting as far away from her as it was possible to get in a pit, and trying to think happy thoughts.
It was not a very comfortable night and the morning wasn't much better for the party of hunters who, around dawn, peered over the edge of the pit.
"About time, too," said Granny. "Get me out."
The startled heads withdrew and Granny could hear a hasty whispered conversation. They had seen the hat and broomstick.
Finally a bearded head reappeared, rather reluctantly, as if the body it was attached to was being pushed forward.
"Um," it began, "look, mother -"
"Im not a mother," snapped Granny. "I'm certainly not your mother, if you ever had mothers, which I doubt. If I was your mother I'd have run away before you were born."
"It's only a figure of speech," said the head reproachfully.
"It's a damned insult is what it is!"
There was another whispered conversation.
"If I don't get out," said Granny in ringing tones, "there will be Trouble. Do you see my hat, eh? Do you see it?"
The head reappeared.
"That's the whole point, isn't it?" it said. "I mean, what will there be if we let you out? It seems less risky all round if we just sort of fill the pit in. Nothing personal, you understand."
Granny realized what it was that was bothering her about the head.
"Are you kneeling down?" she said accusingly. "You're not, are you! You're dwarves!"
Whisper, whisper.
"Well, what about it?" asked the head defiantly. "Nothing wrong with that, is there? What have you got against dwarves?"
"Do you know how to repair broomsticks?"
"Magic broomsticks?"
"Yes!"
Whisper, whisper.
"What if we do?"
"Well, we could come to some arrangement . . . ."
The dwarf halls rang to the sound of hammers, although mainly for effect. Dwarves found it hard to think without the sound of hammers, which they found soothing, so well-off dwarves in the clerical professions paid goblins to hit small ceremonial anvils, just to maintain the correct dwarvish image.
The broomstick lay between two trestles. Granny Weatherwax sat on a rock outcrop while a dwarf half her height, wearing an apron that was a mass of pockets, walked around the broom and occasionally poked it.
Eventually he kicked the bristles and gave a long intake of breath, a sort of reverse whistle, which is the secret sign of craftsmen across the universe and means that something expensive is about to happen.
"Weellll," he said. "I could get the apprentices in to look at this, I could. It's an education in itself. And you say it actually managed to get airborne?"
"It flew like a bird," said Granny.
The dwarf lit a pipe. "I should very much like to see that bird," he said reflectively. "I should imagine it's quite something to watch, a bird like that."
"Yes, but can you repair it?" said Granny. "I'm in a hurry."
The dwarf sat down, slowly and deliberately.
"As for repair," he said, "well, I don't know about repair. Rebuild, maybe. Of course, it's hard to get the bristles these days even if you can find people to do the proper binding, and the spells need -"
"I don't want it rebuilt, I just want it to work properly," said Granny.
"It's an early model, you see," the dwarf plugged on. "Very tricky, those early models. You can't get the wood -"
He was picked up bodily until his eyes were level with Granny's. Dwarves, being magical in themselves as it were, are quite resistant to magic but her expression looked as though she was trying to weld his eyeballs to the back of his skull.
"Just repair it," she hissed. "Please?"
"What, make a bodge job?" said the dwarf, his pipe clattering to the floor.
"Yes."
"Patch it up, you mean? Betray my training by doing half a job?"
"Yes," said Granny. Her pupils were two little black holes.
"Oh," said the dwarf. "Right, then."
Gander the trail boss was a worried man.
They were three mornings out from Zemphis, making good time, and were climbing now towards the rocky pass through the mountains known as the Paps of Scilla (there were eight of them; Gander often wondered who Scilla had been, and whether he would have liked her/.
A party of gnolls had crept up on them during the night. The nasty creatures, a variety of stone goblin, had slit the throat of a guard and must have been poised to slaughter the entire party. Only....
Only no one knew quite what had happened next. The screams had woken them up, and by the time people had puffed up the fires and Treatle the wizard had cast a blue radiance over the campsite the surviving gnolls were distant, spidery shadows, running as if all the legions of Hell were after them.
Judging by what had happened to their colleagues, they were probably right. Bits of gnolls hung from the nearby rocks, giving them a sort of jolly, festive air. Gander wasn't particularly sorry about that - gnolls liked to capture travellers and practise hospitality of the red-hot-knife-and-bludgeon kind - but he was nervous of being in the same area as Something that went through a dozen wiry and wickedly armed gnolls like a spoon through a lightly-boiled egg but left no tracks.
In fact the ground was swept clean.
It had been a very long night, and the morning didn't seem to be an improvement. The only person more than half-awake was Esk, who had slept through the whole thing under one of the wagons and had complained only of odd dreams.
Still, it was a relief to get away from that macabre sight. Gander considered that gnolls didn't look any better inside than out. He hated their guts.
Esk sat on Treatle's wagon, talking to Simon who was steering inexpertly while the wizard caught up with some sleep behind them.
Simon did everything inexpertly. He was really good at it. He was one of those tall lads apparently made out of knees, thumbs and elbows. Watching him walk was a strain, you kept waiting for the strings to snap, and when he talked the spasm of agony on his face if he spotted an S or W looming ahead in the sentence made people instinctively say them for him. It was worth it for the grateful look which spread across his acned face like sunrise on the moon.
At the moment his eyes were streaming with hayfever.
"Did you want to be a wizard when you were a little boy?"
Simon shook his head. "I just www-"
"- wanted -"
"- tto find out how things www -"
"- worked? -"
"Yes. Then someone in my village told the University and Mmaster T-Treatle was sent to bring me. I shall be a www-"
"- wizard -"
"- one day. Master Treatle says I have an exceptional grasp of ththeory." Simon's damp eyes misted over and an expression almost of bliss drifted across his ravaged face.
"He t-tells me they've got thousands of b-books in the library at Unseen University," he said, in the voice of a man in love. "More bbooks than anyone could read in a lifetime."
"I'm not sure I like books," said Esk conversationally. "How can paper know things? My granny says books are only good if the paper is thin."
"No, that's not right," said Simon urgently. "Books are full of www" he gulped air and gave her a pleading look.
"- words? -"said Esk, after a moment's thought.
"- yes, and they can change th-things. Th-that's wuwuw, that wuwuwwhha-whha-"
"-what-"
"-I must f-find. I know it's th-there, somewhere in all the old books. They ssss-"
"-say
"there's no new spells but I know that it's there somewhere, hiding, the wwwwwuwu-"
"- words -"
"yes, that no wiwiwi-"
"- Wizard? -"said Esk, her face a frown of concentration.
"Yes, has ever found." His eyes closed and he smiled a beatific smile and added, "The Words that Will change the World."
"What?"
"Eh?" said Simon, opening his eyes in time to stop the oxen wandering off the track.
"You said all those wubbleyous!"
"Idid?"
"I heard you! Try again."
Simon took a deep breath. "The worworwor - the wuwuw -" he said. "The wowowoo-" he continued.
"It's no good, it's gone," he said. "It happens sometimes, if I don't think about it. Master Treatle says I'm allergic to something."
"Allergic to double-yous?"
"No, sisssisi-"
//-silly-" said Esk, generously.
"- there's sososo-"
"- something -"
"- in the air, p-pollen maybe, or g-grass dust. Master Treatle has tried to find the cause of it but no magic seems to h-help it."
They were passing through a narrow pass of orange rock. Simon looked at it disconsolately.
"My granny taught me some hayfever cures," Esk said. "We could try those."
Simon shook his head. It looked touch and go whether it would fall off.
"Tried everything," he said. "Fine wwiwwi-magician I'd make, eh, can't even sss-utter the wowo-name."
"I could see where that would be a problem," said Esk. She watched the scenery for a while, marshalling a train of thought.
"Is it, er, possible for a woman to be, you know, a wizard? " she said eventually.
Simon stared at her. She gave him a defiant look.
His throat strained. He was trying to find a sentence that didn't start with a W. In the end he was forced to make concessions.
"A curious idea," he said. He thought some more, and started to laugh until Esk's expression warned him.
"Rather funny, really," he added, but the laughter in his face faded and was replaced by a puzzled look. "Never really tthought about it, before."
"Well? Can they?" You could have shaved with Esk's voice.
"Of course they can't. It is self-evident, child. Simon, return to your studies."
Treatle pushed aside the curtain that led into the back of the wagon and climbed out on to the seat board.
The look of mild panic took up its familiar place on Simon's face. He gave Esk a pleading glance as Treatle took the reins from his hands, but she ignored him.
"Why not? What's so self-evident?"
Treatle turned and looked down at her. He hadn't really paid much attention before, she was simply just another figure around the campfires.
He was the Vice-Chancellor of Unseen University, and quite used to seeing vague scurrying figures getting on with essential but unimportant jobs like serving his meals and dusting his rooms. He was stupid, yes, in the particular way that very clever people can be stupid, and maybe he had all the tact of an avalanche and was as selfcentred as a tornado, but it would never have occurred to him that children were important enough to be unkind to.
From long white hair to curly boots, Treatle was a wizard's wizard. He had the appropriate long bushy eyebrows, spangled robe and patriarchal beard that was only slightly spoiled by the yellow nicotine stains (wizards are celibate but, nevertheless, enjoy a good cigar.
"It will all become clear to you when you grow up," he said. "It's an amusing idea, of course, a nice play on words. A female wizard! You might as well invent a male witch!"
"Warlocks," said Esk.
"Pardon me?"
"My granny says men can't be witches," said Esk. "She says if men tried to be witches they'd be wizards."
"She sounds a very wise woman," said Treatle.
"She says women should stick to what they're good at," Esk went on.
"Very sensible of her."
"She says if women were as good as men they'd be a lot better!"
Treatle laughed.
"She's a witch," said Esk, and added in her mind: there, what do you think of that, Mr so-called cleverwizard?
"My dear good young lady, am I supposed to be shocked? I happen to have a great respect for witches."
Esk frowned. He wasn't supposed to say that.
"You have?"
"Yes indeed. I happen to believe that witchcraft is a fine career, for a woman. A very noble calling."
"You do? I mean, it is?"
"Oh yes. Very useful in rural districts for, for people who are -having babies, and so forth. However, witches are not wizards. Witchcraft is Nature's way of allowing women access to the magical fluxes, but you must remember it is not high magic."
"I see. Not high magic," said Esk grimly.
"Oh, no. Witchcraft is very suitable for helping people through life, of course, but -"
"I expect women aren't really sensible enough to be wizards," said Esk. "I expect that's it, really."
"I have nothing but the highest respect for women," said Treatle, who hadn't noticed the fresh edge to Esk's tone. "They are without parallel when, when -"
"For having babies and so forth?"
"There is that, yes," the wizard conceded generously. "But they can be a little unsettling at times. A little too excitable. High magic requires great clarity of thought, you see, and women's talents do not lie in that direction. Their brains tend to overheat. I am sorry to say there is only one door into wizardry and that is the main gate at Unseen University and no woman has ever passed through it."
"Tell me," said Esk, "what good is high magic, exactly?"
Treatle smiled at her.
"High magic, my child," he said, "can give us everything we want."
"Oh."
"So put all this wizard nonsense out of your head, all right?" Treatle gave her a benevolent smile. "What is your name, child?"
"Eskarina."
"And why do you go to Ankh, my dear?"
"I thought I might seek my fortune," muttered Esk, "but I think perhaps girls don't have fortunes to seek. Are you sure wizards give people what they want?"
"Of course. That is what high magic is for."
"I see."
The whole caravan was travelling only a little faster than walking pace. Esk jumped down, pulled the staff from its temporary hiding place among the bags and pails on the side of the wagon, and ran back along the line of carts and animals. Through her tears she caught a glimpse of Simon peering from the back of the wagon, an open book in his hands. He gave her a puzzled smile and started to say something, but she ran on and veered off the track.
Scrubby whinbushes scratched her legs as she scrambled up a clay bank and then she was running free across a barren plateau, hemmed in by the orange cliffs.
She didn't stop until she was good and lost but the anger still burned brightly. She had been angry before, but never like this; normally anger was like the red flame you got when the forge was first lit, all glow and sparks, but this anger was different-it had the bellows behind it, and had narrowed to the tiny bluewhite flame that cuts iron.
It made her body tingle. She had to do something about it or burst.
Why was it that, when she heard Granny ramble on about witchcraft she longed for the cutting magic of wizardry, but whenever she heard Treatle speak in his high-pitched voice she would fight to the death for witchcraft? She'd be both, or none at all. And the more they intended to stop her, the more she wanted it.
She'd be a witch and a wizard too. And she would show them.
Esk sat down under a low-spreading juniper bush at the foot of a steep, sheer cliff, her mind seething with plans and anger. She could sense doors being slammed before she had barely begun to open them. Treatle was right; they wouldn't let her inside the University. Having a staff wasn't enough to be a wizard, there had to be training too, and no one was going to train her.
The midday sun beat down off the cliff and the air around Esk began to smell of bees and gin. She lay back, looking at the nearpurple dome of the sky through the leaves and, eventually, she fell asleep.
One side-effect of using magic is that one tends to have realistic and disturbing dreams. There is a reason for this, but even thinking about it is enough to give a wizard nightmares.
The fact is that the minds of wizards can give thoughts a shape. Witches normally work with what actually exists in the world, but a wizard can, if he's good enough, put flesh on his imagination. This wouldn't cause any trouble if it wasn't for the fact that the little circle of candlelight loosely called "the universe of time and space" is adrift in something much more unpleasant and unpredictable. Strange Things circle and grunt outside the flimsy stockades of normality; there are weird hootings and howlings in the deep crevices at the edge of Time. There are things so horrible that even the dark is afraid of them.
Most people don't know this and this is just as well because the world could not really operate if everyone stayed in bed with the blankets over their head, which is what would happen if people knew what horrors lay a shadow's width away.
The problem is people interested in magic and mysticism spend a lot of time loitering on the very edge of the light, as it were, which gets them noticed by the creatures from the Dungeon Dimensions who then try to use them in their indefatigable efforts to break into this particular Reality.
Most people can resist this, but the relentless probing by the Things is never stronger than when the subject is asleep.
Bel-Shamharoth, C'hulagen, the Insider - the hideous old dark gods of the Necrotelicomnicon, the book known to certain mad adepts by its true name of Liber Paginarum Fulvarum, are always ready to steal into a slumbering mind. The nightmares are often colourful and always unpleasant.
Esk had got used to them ever since that first dream after her first Borrowing, and familiarity had almost replaced terror. When she found herself sitting on a glittering, dusty plain under unexplained stars she knew it was time for another one.
"Drat," she said. "All right, come on then. Bring on the monsters. I just hope it isn't the one with his winkle on his face."
But this time it seemed that the nightmare had changed. Esk looked around and saw, rearing up behind her, a tall black castle. Its turrets disappeared among the stars. Lights and fireworks and interesting music cascaded from its upper battlements. The huge double doors stood invitingly open. There seemed to be quite an amusing party going on in there.
She stood up, brushed the silver sand off her dress, and set off for the gates.
She had almost reached them when they slammed. They didn't appear to move; it was simply that in one instant they were lounging ajar, and the next they were tight shut with a clang that shook the horizons.
Esk reached out and touched them. They were black, and so cold that ice was beginning to form on them.
There was a movement behind her. She turned around and saw the staff, without its broomstick disguise, standing upright in the sand. Little worms of light crept around its polished wood and crept around the carvings no one could ever quite identify.
She picked it up and smashed it against the doors. There was a shower of octarine sparks, but the black metal was unscathed.
Esk's eyes narrowed. She held the staff at arm's length and concentrated until a thin line of fire leapt from the wood and burst against the gate. The ice flashed into steam but the darkness - she was sure now that it wasn't metal - absorbed the power without so much as glowing. She doubled the energy, letting the staff put all its stored magic into a beam that was now so bright that she had to shut her eyes /and could still see it as a brilliant line in her mind/.
Then it winked out.
After a few seconds Esk ran forward and touched the doors gingerly. The coldness nearly froze her fingers off.
And from the battlements above she could hear the sound of sniggering. Laughter wouldn't have been so bad, especially an impressive demonic laugh with lots of echo, but this was just -sniggering.
It went on for a long time. It was one of the most unpleasant sounds Esk had ever heard.
She woke up shivering. It was long after midnight and the stars looked damp and chilly; the air was full of the busy silence of the night, which is created by hundreds of small furry things treading very carefully in the hope of finding dinner while avoiding being the main course.
A crescent moon was setting and a thin grey glow towards the rim of the world suggested that, against all probability, another day was on the cards.
Someone had wrapped Esk in a blanket.
"I know you're awake," said the voice of Granny Weatherwax. "You could make yourself useful and light a fire. There's damn all wood in these parts."
Esk sat up, and clutched at the juniper bush. She felt light enough to float away.
"Fire?" she muttered.
"Yes. You know. Pointing the finger and whoosh," said Granny sourly. She was sitting on a rock, trying to find a position that didn't upset her arthritis.
"I - I don't think I can."
"You tell me?" said Granny cryptically.
The old witch leaned forward and put her hand on Esk's forehead; it was like being caressed by a sock full of warm dice.
"You're running a bit of a temperature," she added. "Too much hot sun and cold ground. That's forn parts for you."
Esk let herself slump forward until her head lay in Granny's lap, with its familiar smells of camphor, mixed herbs and a trace of goat. Granny patted her in what she hoped was a soothing way.
After a while Esk said, in a low voice, "They're not going to allow me into the University. A wizard told me, and I dreamed about it, and it was one of those true dreams. You know, like you told me, a maty-thing."
"Metterfor," said Granny calmly.
"One of them."
"Did you think it would be easy?" asked Granny. "Did you think you'd walk into their gates waving your staff? Here I am, I want to be a wizard, thank you very much?"
"He told me there's no women allowed in the University!"
"He's wrong."
"No, I could tell he was telling the truth. You know, Granny, you can tell how -"
"Foolish child. All you could tell was that he thought he was telling the truth. The world isn't always as people see it."
"I don't understand," said Esk.
"You'll learn," said Granny. "Now tell me. This dream. They wouldn't let you into their university, right?"
"Yes, and they laughed!"
"And then you tried to burn down the doors?"
Esk turned her head in Granny's lap and opened a suspicious eye.
"How did you know?"
Granny smiled, but as a lizard would smile.
"I was miles away," she said. "I was bending my mind towards you, and suddenly you seemed to be everywhere. You shone out like a beacon, so you did. As for the fire - look around."
In the halflight of dawn the plateau was a mass of baked clay. In front of Esk the cliff was glassy and must have flowed like tar under the onslaught; there were great gashes across it which had dripped molten rock and slag. When Esk listened she could hear the faint "pink, pink" of cooling rock.
"Oh," she said, "did I do that?"
"So it would appear," said Granny.
"But I was asleep! I was only dreaming!"
"It's the magic," said Granny. "It's trying to find a way out. The witch magic and the wizard magic are, I don't know, sort of feeding off each other. I think."
Esk bit her lip.
"What can I do?" she asked. "I dream of all sorts of things!"
"Well, for a start we're going straight to the University," decided Granny. "They must be used to apprentices not being able to control magic and having hot dreams, else the place would have burned down years ago."
She glanced towards the Rim, and then down at the broomstick beside her.
We will pass over the running up and down, the tightening of the broomstick's bindings, the muttered curses against dwarves, the brief moments of hope as the magic flickered fitfully, the horrible black feelings as it died, the tightening of the bindings again, the running again, the sudden catching of the spell, the scrambling aboard, the yelling, the takeoff ....
Esk clung to Granny with one hand and held her staff in the other as they, frankly, pottered along a few hundred feet above the ground. A few birds flew alongside them, interested in this new flying tree.
"Bugger off!" screamed Granny, taking off her hat and flapping it.
"We're not going very fast, Granny," said Esk meekly.
"We're going quite fast enough for me!"
Esk looked around. Behind them the Rim was a blaze of gold, barred with cloud.
"I think we ought to go lower, Granny," she said urgently. "You said the broomstick won't fly in sunlight." She glanced down at the landscape below them. It looked sharp and inhospitable. It also looked expectant.
"I know what I'm doing, Miss," snapped Granny, gripping the broomstick hard and trying to make herself as light as possible.
It has already been revealed that light on the Discworld travels slowly, the result of its passage through the Disc's vast and ancient magical field.
So dawn isn't the sudden affair that it is on other worlds. The new day doesn't erupt, it sort of sloshes gently across the sleeping landscape in the same way that the tide sneaks in across the beach, melting the sandcastles of the night. It tends to flow around mountains. If the trees are close together it comes out of woods cut to ribbons and sliced with shadows.
An observer on some suitable high point, let's say for the sake of argument a wisp of cirro-stratus on the edge of space, would remark on how lovingly the light spreads across the land, how it leaps forward on the plains and slows down when it encounters high ground, how beautifully it ....