The jeweller turned the gold slowly over the tiny anvil, tapping the last strangely-cut diamond into place.
   ‘From a troll’s tooth, you say?’ he muttered, squinting losely at his work.
   ‘Yesh,’ said Cohen, ‘and as I shay, you can have all the resht.’ He was fingering a tray of gold rings.
   ‘Very generous,’ murmured the jeweller, who was dwar-vish and knew a good deal when he saw one. He sighed.
   ‘Not much work lately?’ said Cohen. He looked out through the tiny window and watched a group of empty-eyed people gathered on the other side of the narrow street.
   ‘Times are hard, yes.’
   ‘Who are all theshe guysh with the starsh painted on?’ said Cohen.
   The dwarf jeweller didn’t look up.
   ‘Madmen,’ he said. ‘They say I should do no work because the star comes. I tell them stars have never hurt me, I wish I could say the same about people.’
   Cohen nodded thoughtfully as six men detached themselves from the group and came towards the shop. They were carrying an assortment of weapons, and had a driven, determined look about them.
   ‘Strange,’ said Cohen.
   ‘I am, as you can see, of the dwarvish persuasion,’ said the jeweller. ‘One of the magical races, it is said. The star people believe that the star will not destroy the Disc if we turn aside from magic. They’re probably going to beat me up a bit. So it goes.’
   He held up his latest work in a pair of tweezers.
   ‘The strangest thing I have ever made,’ he said, ‘but practical, I can see that. What did you say they were called again?’
   ‘Din-chewersh,’ said Cohen. He looked at the horseshoe shapes nestling in the wrinkled palm of his hand, then opened his mouth and made a series of painful grunting noises.
   The door burst open. The men strode in and took up positions around the walls. They were sweating and uncertain, but their leader pushed Cohen aside disdainfully and picked up the dwarf by his shirt.
   ‘We tole you yesterday, small stuff,’ he said. ‘You go ut feet down or feet up, we don’t mind. So now we gonna get really —.’
   Cohen tapped him on the shoulder. The man looked around irritably.
   ‘What do you want, grandad?’ he snarled.
   Cohen paused until he had the man’s full attention, and then he smiled. It was a slow, lazy smile, unveiling about 300 carats of mouth jewellery that seemed to light up the room.
   ‘I will count to three,’ he said, in a friendly tone of voice. ‘One. Two.’ His bony knee came up and buried itself in the man’s groin with a satisfyingly meaty noise, and he half-turned to bring the full force of an elbow into the kidneys as the leader collapsed around his private universe of pain.
   ‘Three,’ he told the ball of agony on the floor. Cohen had heard of fighting fair, and had long ago decided he wanted no part of it.
   He looked up at the other men, and flashed his incredible srnile.
   They ought to have rushed him. Instead one of them, secure in the knowledge that he had a broadsword and Cohen didn’t, sidled crabwise towards him.
   ‘Oh, no,’ said Cohen, waving his hands. ‘Oh, come on, lad, not like that.’
   The man looked sideways at him.
   ‘Not like what?’ he asked suspiciously.
   ‘You never held a sword before?’
   The man half-turned to his colleagues for reassurance.
   ‘Not a lot, no,’ he said. ‘Not often.’ He waved his sword menacingly.
   Cohen shrugged. ‘I may be going to die, but I should hope I could be killed by a man who could hold his sword like a warrior,’ he said.
   The man looked at his hands. ‘Looks all right,’ he said, doubtfully.
   ‘Look, lad, I know a little about these things. I mean, come here a minute and—do you mind?—right, your eft hand goes here, around the pommel, and your right hand goes—that’s right, just here — and the blade goes right into your leg.’
   As the man screamed and clutched at his foot Cohen kicked his remaining leg away and turned to the room at large.
   ‘This is getting fiddly,’ he said. Why don’t you rush me?’
   ‘That’s right,’ said a voice by his waist. The jeweller had produced a very large and dirty axe, guaranteed to add tetanus to all the other terrors of warfare.
   The four men gave these odds some consideration, and backed towards the door.
   ‘And wipe those silly stars off,’ said Cohen. ‘You can tell everyone that Cohen the Barbarian will be very angry if he sees stars like that again, right?’
   The door slammed shut. A moment later the axe thumped into it, bounced off, and took a sliver of leather off the toe of Cohen’s sandal.
   ‘Sorry,’ said the dwarf. ‘It belonged to my grandad. I only use it for splitting firewood.’
   Cohen felt his jaw experimentally. The dine chewers seemed to be settling in quite well.
   ‘If I was you, I’d be getting out of here anyway,’ he said. But the dwarf was already scuttling around the room, tipping trays of precious metal and gems into a leather sack. A roll of tools went into one pocket, a packet of finished jewellery went into another, and with a grunt the dwarf stuck his arms through handles on either side of his little forge and heaved it bodily onto his back.
   ‘Right,’ he said. I’m ready.’
   ‘You’re coming with me?’
   ‘As far as the city gates, if you don’t mind,’ he said. ‘You can’t blame me, can you?’
   ‘No. But leave the axe behind.’
   They stepped out into the afternoon sun and a deserted street. When Cohen opened his mouth little pinpoints of bright light illuminated all the shadows.
   ‘I’ve got some friends around here to pick up,’ he said, nd added, ‘I hope they’re all right. What’s your name?’
   ‘Lackjaw.’
   ‘Is there anywhere around here where I can—’ Cohen paused lovingly, savouring the words—‘where I can get a steak?’
   The star people have closed all the inns. They said it’s wrong to be eating and drinking when —’
   ‘I know, I know,’ said Cohen. ‘I think I’m beginning to get the hang of it. Don’t they approve of anything?’
   Lackjaw was lost in thought for a moment. ‘Setting fire to things,’ he said at last. ‘They’re quite good at that. Books and stuff. They have these great big bonfires.’
   Cohen was shocked.
   ‘Bonfires of books?’
   ‘Yes. Horrible, isn’t it?’
   ‘Right,’ said Cohen. He thought it was appalling. Someone who spent his life living rough under the sky knew the value of a good thick book, which ought to outlast at least a season of cooking fires if you were careful how you tore the pages out. Many a life had been saved on a snowy night by a handful of sodden kindling and a really dry book. If you felt like a smoke and couldn’t find a pipe, a book was your man every time.
   Cohen realised people wrote things in books. It had always seemed to him to be a frivolous waste of paper.
   I’m afraid if your friends met them they might be in trouble,’ said Lackjaw sadly as they walked up the street.
   They turned the corner and saw the bonfire. It was in the middle of the street. A couple of star people were feeding it with books from a nearby house, which had its door smashed in and had been daubed with stars.
   News of Cohen hadn’t spread too far yet. The book burners took no notice as he wandered up and leaned against the wall. Curly flakes of burnt paper bounced in the hot air and floated away over the rooftops.
   ‘What are you doing?’ he said.
   One of the star people, a woman, pushed her hair out of her eyes with a soot-blackened hand, gazed intently t Cohen’s left ear, and said, ‘Ridding the disc of wickedness.’
   Two men came out of the building and glared at Cohen, or at least at his ear.
   Cohen reached out and took the heavy book the woman was carrying. Its cover was crusted with strange red and black stones that spelled out what Cohen was sure was a word. He showed it to Lackjaw.
   ‘The Necrotelecomnicon,’ said the dwarf. ‘Wizards use it. It’s how to contact the dead, I think.’
   ‘That’s wizards for you,’ said Cohen. He felt a page between finger and thumb; it was thin, and quite soft. The rather unpleasant organic-looking writing didn’t worry him at all. Yes, a book like this could be a real friend to a man —
   ‘Yes? You want something?’ he said to one of the star men, who had gripped his arm.
   ‘All books of magic must be burned,’ said the man, but a little uncertainly, because something about Cohen’s teeth was giving him a nasty feeling of sanity.
   ‘Why?’ said Cohen.
   ‘It has been revealed to us.’ Now Cohen’s smile was as wide as all outdoors, and rather more dangerous.
   ‘I think we ought to be getting along,’ said Lackjaw nervously. A party of star people had turned into the street behind them.
   ‘I think I would like to kill someone,’ said Cohen, still smiling.
   ‘The star directs that the Disc must be cleansed,’ said the man, backing away.
   ‘Stars can’t talk,’ said Cohen, drawing his sword.
   ‘If you kill me a thousand will take my place,’ said the man, who was now backed against the wall.
   ‘Yes,’ said Cohen, in a reasonable tone of voice, ‘but that isn’t the point, is it? The point is, you’ll be dead.’
   The man’s adam’s apple began to bob like a yoyo. He squinted down at Cohen’s sword.
   ‘There is that, yes,’ he conceded. ‘Tell you what—how bout if we put the fire out?’ ‘Good idea,’ said Cohen.
   Lackjaw tugged at his belt. The other star people were running towards them. There were a lot of them, many of them were armed, and it began to look as though things would become a little more serious.
   Cohen waved his sword at them defiantly, and turned and ran. Even Lackjaw had difficulty in keeping up.
   ‘Funny,’ he gasped, as they plunged down another alley, ‘I thought—for a minute—you’d want to stand—and fight them.’
   ‘Blow that—for a—lark.’
   As they came out into the light at the other end of the alley Cohen flung himself against the wall, drew his sword, stood with his head on one side as he judged the approaching footsteps, and then brought the blade around in a dead flat sweep at stomach height. There was an unpleasant noise and several screams, but by then Cohen was well away up the street, moving in the unusual shambling run that spared his bunions.
   With Lackjaw pounding along grimly beside him he turned off into an inn painted with red stars, jumped onto a table with only a faint whimper of pain, ran along it—while, with almost perfect choreography, Lackjaw ran straight underneath without ducking—jumped down at the other end, kicked his way through the kitchens, and came out into another alley.
   They scurried around a few more turnings and piled into a doorway. Cohen clung to the wall and wheezed until the little blue and purple lights went away.
   ‘Well,’ he panted, ‘what did you get?’
   ‘Um, the cruet,’ said Lackjaw.
   ‘Just that?’
   ‘Well, I had to go under the table, didn’t I? You didn’t do so well yourself.’
   Cohen looked disdainfully at the small melon he had managed to skewer in his flight.
   ‘This must be pretty tough here,’ he said, biting through 159 the rind.
   ‘Want some salt on it?’ said the dwarf.
   Cohen said nothing. He just stood holding the melon, with his mouth open.
   Lackjaw looked around. The cul de sac they were in was empty, except for an old box someone had left against a wall.
   Cohen was staring at it. He handed the melon to the dwarf without looking at him and walked out into the sunlight. Lackjaw watched him creep stealthily around the box, or as stealthily as is possible with joints that creaked like a ship under full sail, and prod it once or twice with his sword, but very gingerly, as if he half-expected it to explode.
   ‘It’s just a box,’ the dwarf called out. ‘What’s so special about a box?’
   Cohen said nothing. He squatted down painfully and peered closely at the lock on the lid.
   ‘What’s in it?’ said Lackjaw.
   ‘You wouldn’t want to know,’ said Cohen. ‘Help me up, will you?’
   ‘Yes, but this box —’
   ‘This box,’ said Cohen, ‘this box is—’he waved his arms vaguely.
   ‘Oblong?’
   ‘Eldritch,’ said Cohen mysteriously.
   ‘Eldritch?’
   ‘Yup.’
   ‘Oh,’ said the dwarf. They stood looking at the box for a moment.
   ‘Cohen?’
   ‘Yes?’
   ‘What does eldritch mean?’
   ‘Well, eldritch is—’ Cohen paused and looked down irritably. ‘Give it a kick and you’ll see.’
   Lockjaw’s steel-capped dwarfboot whammed into the side of the box. Cohen flinched. Nothing else happened.
   ‘I see,’ said the dwarf. ‘Eldritch means wooden?’
   ‘No,’ said Cohen. ‘It—it oughtn’t to have done that.’
   ‘I see,’ said Lackjaw, who didn’t, and was beginning to wish Cohen hadn’t gone out into all this hot sunlight. ‘It ought to have run away, you think?’
   ‘Yes. Or bitten your leg off.’
   ‘Ah,’ said the dwarf. He took Cohen gently by the arm. ‘It’s nice and shady over here,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you just have a little —’
   Cohen shook him off.
   ‘It’s watching that wall,’ he said. ‘Look, that’s why it’s not taking any notice of us. It’s staring at the wall.’
   ‘Yes, that’s right,’ said Lackjaw soothingly. ‘Of course it’s watching that wall with its little eyes —’
   ‘Don’t be an idiot, it hasn’t got any eyes,’ snapped Cohen.
   ‘Sorry, sorry,’ said Lackjaw hurriedly. ‘It’s watching the wall without eyes, sorry.’
   ‘I think it’s worried about something,’ said Cohen.
   ‘Well, it would be, wouldn’t it,’ said Lackjaw. ‘I expect it just wants us to go off somewhere and leave it alone.’
   ‘I think it’s very puzzled,’ Cohen added.
   ‘Yes, it certainly looks puzzled,’ said the dwarf. Cohen glared at him.
   ‘How can you tell?’ he snapped.
   It struck Lackjaw that the roles were unfairly reversing. He looked from Cohen to the box, his mouth opening and shutting.
   ‘How can you tell?’ he said. But Cohen wasn’t listening anyway. He sat down in front of the box, assuming that the bit with the keyhole was the front, and watched it intently. Lackjaw backed away. Funny, said his mind, but the damn thing is looking at me.
   ‘All right,’ said Cohen, ‘I know you and me don’t see eye to eye, but we’re all trying to find someone we care for, okay?’
   ‘I’m—’ said Lackjaw, and realised that Cohen was talking to the box.
   ‘So tell me where they’ve gone.’
   As Lackjaw looked on in horror the Luggage extended 161 its little legs, braced itself, and ran full tilt at the nearest wall. Clay bricks and dusty mortar exploded around it.
   Cohen peered through the hole. There was a small grubby storeroom on the other side. The Luggage stood in the middle of the floor, radiating extreme bafflement.

   ‘Shop!’ said Twoflower.
   ‘Anyone here?’ said Bethan.
   ‘Urrgh,’ said Rincewind.
   ‘I think we ought to sit him down somewhere and get him a glass of water,’ said Twoflower. ‘If there’s one here.’
   ‘There’s everything else,’ said Bethan.
   The room was full of shelves, and the shelves were full of everything. Things that couldn’t be accommodated on them hung in bunches from the dark and shadowy ceiling; boxes and sacks of everything spilled onto the floor.
   There was no sound from outside. Bethan looked around and found out why.
   ‘I’ve never seen so much stuff,’ said Twoflower.
   ‘There’s one thing it’s out of stock of,’ said Bethan, firmly..
   ‘How can you tell?’
   ‘You just have to look. It’s fresh out of exits.’
   Twoflower turned around. Where the door and window had been there were shelves stacked with boxes; they looked as, though they had been there for a long time.
   Twoflower sat Rincewind down on a rickety chair by the counter and poked doubtfully at the shelves. There were boxes of nails, and hairbrushes. There were bars of soap, faded with age. There was a stack of jars containing deliquescent bath salts, to which someone had fixed a rather sad and jaunty little notice announcing, in the face of all the evidence, that one would make an Ideal Gift. There was also quite a lot of dust.
   Bethan peered at the shelves on the other wall, and laughed.
   ‘Would you look at this!’ she said.
   Twoflower looked. She was holding a—well, it was a little mountain chalet, but with seashells stuck all over it, and then the perpetrator had written ‘A Special Souvenir’ in pokerwork on the roof (which, of course, opened so that cigarettes could be kept in it, and played a tinny little tune).
   ‘Have you ever seen anything like it?’ she said.
   Twoflower shook his head. His mouth dropped open.
   ‘Are you all right?’ said Bethan.
   ‘I think it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,’ he said.
   There was a whirring noise overhead. They looked up.
   A big black globe had lowered itself from the darkness of the ceiling. Little red lights flashed on and off on it, and as they stared it spun around and looked at them with a big glass eye. It was menacing, that eye. It seemed to suggest very emphatically that it was watching something distasteful.
   ‘Hallo?’ said Twoflower.
   A head appeared over the edge of the counter. It looked angry.
   ‘I hope you were intending to pay for that,’ it said nastily. Its expression suggested that it expected Rincewind to say yes, and that it wouldn’t believe him.
   ‘This?’ said Bethan. ‘I wouldn’t buy this if you threw in a hatful of rubies and —’
   ‘I’ll buy it. How much?’ said Twoflower urgently, reaching into his pockets. His face fell.
   ‘Actually, I haven’t got any money,’ he said. ‘It’s in my Luggage, but I —’
   There was a snort. The head disappeared from behind the counter, and reappeared from behind a display of toothbrushes.
   It belonged to a very small man almost hidden behind a green apron. He seemed very upset.
   ‘No money?’ he said. ‘You come into my shop —’
   ‘We didn’t mean to,’ said Twoflower quickly. ‘We didn’t notice it was there.’
   ‘It wasn’t,’ said Bethan firmly. ‘It’s magical, isn’t it?’
   The small shopkeeper hesitated.
   ‘Yes,’ he reluctantly agreed. ‘A bit.’
   ‘A bit?’ said Bethan. ‘A bit magical?’
   ‘Quite a bit, then,’ he conceded, backing away, and, ‘All right,’ he agreed, as Bethan continued to glare at him. ‘It’s magical. I can’t help it. The bloody door hasn’t been and gone again, has it?’
   ‘Yes, and we’re not happy about that thing in the ceiling.’
   He looked up, and frowned. Then he disappeared through a little beaded doorway half-hidden among the merchandise. There was a lot of clanking and whirring, and the black globe disappeared into the shadows. It was replaced by, in succession, a bunch of herbs, a mobile advertising something Twoflower had never heard of but which was apparently a bedtime drink, a suit of armour and a stuffed crocodile with a lifelike expression of extreme pain and surprise.
   The shopkeeper reappeared.
   ‘Better?’ he demanded.
   ‘It’s an improvement,’ said Twoflower, doubtfully. ‘I liked the herbs best.’
   At this point Rincewind groaned. He was about to wake up.

   There have been three general theories put forward to explain the phenomenon of the wandering shops or, as they are generically known, tabernae vagantes.
   The first postulates that many thousands of years ago there evolved somewhere in the multiverse a race whose single talent was to buy cheap and sell dear. Soon they controlled a vast galactic empire or, as they put it, Emporium, and the more advanced members of the species found a way to equip their very shops with unique propulsion units that could break the dark walls of space itself and open up vast new markets. And long after the orlds of the Emporium perished in the heat death of their particular universe, after one last defiant fire sale, the wandering starshops still ply their trade, eating their way through the pages of spacetime like a worm through a three-volume novel.
   The second is that they are the creation of a sympathetic Fate, charged with the role of supplying exactly the right thing at the right time.
   The third is that they are simply a very clever way of getting around the various Sunday Closing acts.
   All these theories, diverse as they are, have two things in common. They explain the observed facts, and they are completely and utterly wrong.

   Rincewind opened his eyes and lay for a moment looking up at the stuffed reptile. It was not the best thing to see when awakening from troubled dreams...
   Magic! So that’s what it felt like! No wonder wizards didn’t have much truck with sex!
   Rincewind knew what orgasms were, of course, he’d had a few in his time, sometimes even in company, but nothing in his experience even approximated to that tight, hot moment when every nerve in his body streamed with blue-white fire and raw magic had blazed forth from his fingers. It filled you and lifted you and you surfed down the rising, curling wave of elemental force. No wonder wizards fought for power...
   And so on. The Spell in his head had been doing it, though, not Rincewind. He was really beginning to hate that Spell. He was sure that if it hadn’t frightened away all the other spells he’d tried to learn he could have been a decent wizard in his own right. ‘
   Somewhere in Rincewind’s battered soul the worm of rebellion flashed a fang.
   Right, he thought. You’re going back into the Octavo, first chance I get.
   He sat up.
   ‘Where the hell is this?’ he said, grabbing his head to stop it exploding.
   ‘A shop,’ said Twoflower mournfully.
   ‘I hope it sells knives because I think I’d like to cut my head off,’ said Rincewind. Something about the expression of the two opposite him sobered him up.
   ‘That was a joke,’ he said. ‘Mainly a joke, anyway. Why are we in this shop?’
   ‘We can’t get out,’ said Bethan.
   ‘The door’s disappeared,’ added Twoflower helpfully.
   Rincewind stood up, a little shakily.
   ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘One of those shops?’
   ‘All right,’ said the shopkeeper testily. ‘It’s magical, yes, it moves around, yes, no, I’m not telling you why —’
   ‘Can I have a drink of water, please?’ said Rincewind.
   The shopkeeper looked affronted.
   ‘First no money, then they want a glass of water,’ he snapped. ‘That’s just about —’
   Bethan snorted and strode across to the little man, who tried to back away. He was too late.
   She picked him up by his apron straps and glared at him eye to eye. Torn though her dress was, disarrayed though her hair was, she became for a moment the symbol of every woman who has caught a man with his thumb on the scales of life.
   ‘Time is money,’ she hissed. ‘I’ll give you thirty seconds to get him a glass of water. I think that’s a bargain, don’t you?’
   ‘I say,’ Twoflower whispered. ‘She’s a real terror when she’s roused, isn’t she?’
   ‘Yes,’ said Rincewind’, without enthusiasm.
   ‘All right, all right,’ said the shopkeeper, visibly cowed.
   ‘And then you can let us out,’ Bethan added.
   ‘That’s fine by me, I wasn’t open for business anyway, I just stopped for a few seconds to get my bearings and you barged in!’
   He grumbled off through the bead curtains and returned ith a cup of water.
   ‘I washed it out special,’ he said, avoiding Bethan’s gaze.
   Rincewind looked at the liquid in the cup. It had probably been clean before it was poured in, now drinking it would be genocide for thousands of innocent germs.
   He put it down carefully.
   ‘Now I’m going to have a good wash!’ stated Bethan, and stalked off through the curtain.
   The shopkeeper waved a hand vaguely and looked appealingly at Rincewind and Twoflower.
   ‘She’s not bad,’ said Twoflower. ‘She’s going to marry a friend of ours.’
   ‘Does he know?’
   ‘Things not so good in the starshop business?’ said Rincewind, as sympathetically as he could manage.
   The little man shuddered. ‘You wouldn’t believe it,’ he said. ‘I mean, you learn not to expect much, you make a sale here and there, it’s a living, you know what I mean? But these people you’ve got these days, the ones with these star things painted on their faces, well, I hardly have time to open the store and they’re threatening to burn it down. Too magical, they say. So I say, of course magical, what else?’
   ‘Are there a lot of them about, then?’ said Rincewind.
   ‘All over the Disc, friend. Don’t ask me why.’
   ‘They believe a star is going to crash into the Disc,’ said Rincewind.
   ‘Is it?’
   ‘Lots of people think so.’
   That’s a shame. I’ve done good business here. Too magical, they say! What’s wrong with magic, that’s what I’d like to know?’
   ‘What will you do?’ said Twoflower.
   ‘Oh, go to some other universe, there’s plenty around,’ said the shopkeeper airily. ‘Thanks for telling me about the star, though. Can I drop you off somewhere?’
   The Spell gave Rincewind’s mind a kick.
   ‘‘Er, no,’ he said, ‘I think perhaps we’d better stay. To ee it through, you know.’
   ‘You’re not worried about this star thing, then?’
   ‘The star is life, not death,’ said Riricewind.
   ‘How’s that?’
   ‘How’s what?’
   ‘You did it again!’ said Twoflower, pointing an accusing finger. ‘You say things and then don’t know you’ve said them!’
   ‘I just said we’d better stay,’ said Rincewind.
   ‘You said the star was life, not death,’ said Twoflower. ‘Your voice went all crackly and far away. Didn’t it?’ He turned to the shopkeeper for confirmation.
   ‘That’s true,’ said the little man. ‘I thought his eyes crossed a bit, too.’
   ‘It’s the Spell, then,’ said Rincewind. ‘It’s trying to take me over. It knows what’s going to happen, and I think it wants to go to Ankh-Morpork. I want to go too,’ he added defiantly. ‘Can you get us there?’
   ‘Is that the big city on the Ankh? Sprawling place, smells of cesspits?’
   ‘It has an ancient and honourable history,’ said Rincewind, his voice stiff with injured civic pride.
   ‘That’s not how you described it to me,’ said Twoflower. ‘You told me it was the only city that actually started out decadent.’
   Rincewind looked embarrassed. Yes, but, well, it’s my home, don’t you see?’
   ‘No,’ said the shopkeeper, ‘not really. I always say home is where you hang your hat.’
   ‘Um, no,’ said Twoflower, always anxious to enlighten. ‘Where you hang your hat is a hatstand. A home is —’
   ‘I’ll just go and see about setting you on your way,’ said the shopkeeper hurriedly, as Bethan came in. He scooted past her.
   Twoflower followed him.
   On the other side of the curtain was a room with a small bed, a rather grubby stove, and a three-legged table. Then the shopkeeper did something to the table, here was a noise like a cork coming reluctantly out of a bottle, and the room contained a wall-to-wall universe.
   ‘Don’t be frightened,’ said the shopkeeper, as stars streamed past.
   ‘I’m not frightened,’ said Twoflower, his eyes sparkling.
   ‘Oh,’ said the shopkeeper, slightly annoyed. ‘Anyway, it’s just imagery generated by the shop, it’s not real.’
   ‘And you can go anywhere?’
   ‘Oh no,’ said the shopkeeper, deeply shocked. ‘There’s all kinds of fail-safes built in, after all, there’d be no point in going somewhere with insufficient per capita disposable income. And there’s got to be a suitable wall, of course. Ah, here we are, this is your universe. Very bijou, I always think. A sort of universette...’

   Here is the blackness of space, the myriad stars gleaming like diamond dust or, as some people would say, like great balls of exploding hydrogen a very long way off. But then, some people would say anything.
   A shadow starts to blot out the distant glitter, and it is blacker than space itself.
   From here it also looks a great deal bigger, because space is not really big, it is simply somewhere to be big in. Planets are big, but planets are meant to be big and there is nothing clever about being the right size.
   But this shape blotting out the sky like the footfall of God isn’t a planet.
   It is a turtle, ten thousand miles long from its crater-pocked head to its armoured tail.
   And Great A’Tuin is huge.
   Great flippers rise and fall ponderously, warping space into strange shapes. The Discworld slides across the sky like a royal barge. But even Great A’Tuin is struggling now as it leaves the free depths of space and must fight the tormenting pressures of the solar shallows. Magic is weaker here, on the littoral of light. Many more days of his and the Discworld will be stripped away by the pressures of reality.
   Great A’Tuin knows this, but Great A’Tuin can recall doing all this before, many thousands of years ago.
   The astrochelonian’s eyes, glowing red in the light of the dwarf star, are not focussed on it but at a little patch of space nearby...

   ‘Yes, but where are we?’ said Twoflower. The shopkeeper, hunched over his table, just shrugged.
   ‘I don’t think we’re anywhere,’ he said. ‘We’re in a cotangent incongruity, I believe. I could be wrong. The shop generally knows what it’s doing.’
   ‘You mean you don’t?’
   ‘I pick a bit up, here and there.’ The shopkeeper blew his nose. ‘Sometimes I land on a world where they understand these things.’ He turned a pair of small, sad eyes on Twoflower. ‘You’ve got a kind face, sir. I don’t mind telling you.’
   ‘Telling me what?’
   ‘It’s no life, you know, minding the Shop. Never settling down, always on the move, never closing.’
   Why don’t you stop, then?’
   ‘Ah, that’s it, you see, sir—I can’t. I’m under a curse, I am. A terrible thing.’ He blew his nose again.
   ‘Cursed to run a shop?’
   ‘Forever, sir, forever. And never closing! For hundreds of years! There was this sorcerer, you see. I did a terrible thing.’
   ‘In a shop?’ said Twoflower.
   ‘Oh, yes. I can’t remember what it was he wanted, but when he asked for it I—I gave one of those sucking-in noises, you know, like whistling only backwards?’ He demonstrated.
   Twoflower looked sombre, but he was at heart a kind man and always ready to forgive.
   ‘I see,’ he said slowly. ‘Even so —’
   ‘That’s not all!’
   ‘Oh.’
   ‘I told him there was no demand for it!’
   ‘After making the sucking noise?’
   ‘Yes. I probably grinned, too.’
   ‘Oh, dear. You didn’t call him squire, did you?’
   ‘I—I may have done.’
   ‘Um.’
   ‘There’s more.’
   ‘Surely not?’
   ‘Yes, I said I could order it and he could come back next day.’
   ‘That doesn’t sound too bad,’ said Twoflower, who alone of all the people in the multiverse allowed shops to order things for him and didn’t object at all to paying quite large sums of money to reimburse the shopkeeper for the inconvenience of having a bit of stock in his store often for several hours.
   ‘It was early closing day,’ said the shopkeeper.
   ‘Oh.’
   ‘Yes, and I heard him rattling the doorhandle, I had this sign on the door, you know, it said something like "Closed even for the sale of Necromancer cigarettes," anyway, I heard him banging and I laughed.’
   ‘You laughed?’
   ‘Yes. Like this. Hnufhnufhnufblort.’
   ‘Probably not a wise thing to do,’ said Twoflower, shaking his head.
   ‘I know, I know. My father always said, he said, Do not peddle in the affairs of wizards... Anyway, I heard him shouting something about never closing again, and a lot of words I couldn’t understand, and then the shop—the shop—the shop came alive.’
   ‘And you’ve wandered like this ever since?’
   ‘Yes. I suppose one day I might find the sorcerer and perhaps the thing he wanted will be in stock. Until then I must go from place to place —’
   ‘That was a terrible thing to do,’ said Twoflower.
   The shopkeeper wiped his nose on his apron. ‘Thank you,’ he said.
   ‘Even so, he shouldn’t have cursed you quite so badly,’ Twoflower added.
   ‘Oh. Yes, well.’ The shopkeeper straightened his apron and made a brave little attempt to pull himself together. ‘Anyway, this isn’t getting you to Ankh-Morpork, is it?’
   ‘Funny thing is,’ said Twoflower, ‘that I bought my Luggage in a shop like this, once. Another shop, I mean.’
   ‘Oh yes, there’s several of us,’ said the shopkeeper, turning back to the table, ‘that sorcerer was a very impatient man, I understand.’
   ‘Endlessly roaming through the universe,’ mused Twoflower.
   ‘That’s right. Mind you, there is a saving on the rates.’
   ‘Rates?’
   ‘Yes, they’re—’ the shopkeeper paused, and wrinkled his forehead. ‘I can’t quite remember, it was such a long time ago. Rates, rates —’
   ‘Very large mice?’
   ‘That’s probably it.’

   ‘Hold on—it’s thinking about something,’ said Cohen.
   Lackjaw looked up wearily. It had been quite nice, sitting here in the shade. He had just worked out that in trying to escape from a city of crazed madmen he had appeared to have allowed one mad man to give him his full attention. He wondered whether he would live to regret this.
   He earnestly hoped so.
   ‘Oh yes, it’s definitely thinking,’ he said bitterly. ‘Anyone can see that.’
   ‘I think it’s found them.’
   ‘Oh, good.’
   ‘Hold onto it.’
   ‘Are you mad?’ said Lackjaw.
   ‘I know this thing, trust me. Anyway, would you rather be left with all these star people? They might be interested in having a talk with you.’
   Cohen sidled over to the Luggage, and then flung himself astride it. It took no notice.
   ‘Hurry up,’ he said. ‘I think it’s going to go.’
   Lackjaw shrugged, and climbed on gingerly behind Cohen.
   ‘Oh?’ he said, ‘and how does it g —’

   Ankh-Morpork!
   Pearl of cities!
   This is not a completely accurate description, of course—it was not round and shiny—but even its worst enemies would agree that if you had to liken Ankh-Morpork to anything, then it might as well be a piece of rubbish covered with the diseased secretions of a dying mollusc.
   There have been bigger cities. There have been richer cities. There have certainly been prettier cities. But no city in the multiverse could rival Ankh-Morpork for its smell.
   The Ancient Ones, who know everything about all the universes and have smelt the smells of Calcutta and!Xrc —! and dauntocum Marsport, have agreed that even these fine examples of nasal poetry are mere limericks when set against the glory of the Ankh-Morpork smell.
   You can talk about ramps. You can talk about garlic. You can talk about France. Go on. But if you haven’t smelled Ankh-Morpork on a hot day you haven’t smelled anything.
   The citizens are proud of it. They carry chairs outside to enjoy it on a really good day. They puff out their cheeks and slap their chests and comment cheerfully on its little distinctive nuances. They have even put up a statue to it, to commemorate the time when the troops of a rival state tried to invade by stealth one dark night and managed to get to the top of the walls before, to their horror, their nose plugs gave out. Rich merchants who ave spent many years abroad sent back home for specially-stoppered and sealed bottles of the stuff, which brings tears to their eyes.
   It has that kind of effect.
   There is only really one way to describe the effect the smell of Ankh-Morpork has on the visiting nose, and that is by analogy.
   Take a tartan. Sprinkle it with confetti. Light it with strobe lights.
   Now take a chameleon.
   Put the chameleon on the tartan.
   Watch it closely.
   See?
   Which explains why, when the shop finally materialised in Ankh-Morpork, Rincewind sat bolt upright and said ‘We’re here,’ Bethan went pale and Twoflower, who had no sense of smell, said, ‘Really? How can you tell?’
   It had been a long afternoon. They had broken into realspace in a number of walls in a variety of cities because, according to the shopkeeper, the Disc’s magical field was playing up and upsetting everything.
   All the cities were empty of most of their citizens and belonged to roaming gangs of crazed left-ear people.
   ‘Where do they all come from?’ said Twoflower, as they fled yet another mob.
   ‘Inside every sane person there’s a madman struggling to get out,’ said the shopkeeper. ‘That’s what I’ve always thought. No one goes mad quicker than a totally sane person.’
   ‘That doesn’t make sense,’ said Bethan, ‘or if it makes sense, I don’t like it.’.
   The star was bigger than the sun. There would be no night tonight. On the opposite horizon the Disc’s own sunlet was doing its best to set normally, but the general effect of all that red light was to make the city, never particularly beautiful, look like something painted by a fanatical artist after a bad time on the shoe polish.
   But it was home. Rincewind peered up and down the mpty street and felt almost happy.
   At the back of his mind the Spell was kicking up a ruckus, but he ignored it. Maybe it was true that magic was getting weaker as the star got nearer, or perhaps he’d had the Spell in his head for so long he had built up some kind of psychic immunity, but he found he could resist it.
   ‘We’re in the docks,’ he declared. ‘Just smell that sea air!’
   ‘Oh,’ said Bethan, leaning against the wall, ‘yes.’
   ‘That’s ozone, that is,’ said Rincewind. That’s air with character, is that.’ He breathed deeply.
   Twoflower turned to the shopkeeper.
   ‘Well, I hope you find your sorcerer,’ he said. ‘Sorry we didn’t buy anything, but all my money’s in my Luggage, you see.’
   The shopkeeper pushed something into his hand.
   ‘A little gift,’ he said. ‘You’ll need it.’
   He darted back into his shop, the bell jangled, the sign saying Call Again Tomorrow For Spoonfetcher’s Leeches, the Little Suckers banged forlornly against the door, and the shop faded into the brickwork as though it had never been. Twoflower reached out gingerly and touched the wall, not quite believing it.
   ‘What’s in the bag?’ said Rincewind.
   It was a thick brown paper bag, with string handles.
   ‘If it sprouts legs I don’t want to know about it,’ said Bethan.
   Twoflower peered inside, and pulled out the contents.
   Is that all?’ said Rincewind. ‘A little house with shells on?’
   ‘It’s very useful,’ said Twoflower defensively. ‘You can keep cigarettes in it.’
   ‘And they’re what you really need, are they?’ said Rincewind.
   ‘I’d plump for a bottle of really strong sun-tan oil,’ said Bethan.
   ‘Come on,’ said Rincewind, and set off down the street. The others followed.
   It occurred to Twoflower that some words of comfort were called for, a little tactful small talk to take Bethan out f herself, as he would put it, and generally cheer her up.
   ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. There’s just a chance that Cohen might still be alive.’
   ‘Oh, I expect he’s alive all right,’ she said, stamping along the cobbles as if she nursed a personal grievance against each one of them. ‘You don’t live to be eighty-seven in his job if you go around dying all the time. But he’s not here.’
   ‘Nor is my Luggage,’ said Twoflower. ‘Of course, that’s not the same thing.’
   ‘Do you think the star is going to hit the Disc?’
   ‘No,’ said Twoflower confidently.
   ‘Why not?’
   ‘Because Rincewind doesn’t think so.’
   She looked at him in amazement.
   ‘You see,’ the tourist went on, ‘you know that thing you do with seaweed?’
   Bethan, brought up on the Vortex Plains, had only heard of the sea in stories, and had decided she didn’t like it. She looked blank.
   ‘Eat it?’
   ‘No, what you do is, you hang it up outside your door, and it tells you if it’s going to rain.’
   Another thing Bethan had learned was that there was no real point in trying to understand anything Twoflower said, and that all anyone could do was run alongside the conversation and hope to jump on as it turned a corner.
   ‘I see,’ she said.
   ‘Rincewind is like that, you see.’
   ‘Like seaweed.’
   ‘Yes. If there was anything at all to be frightened about, he’d be frightened. But he’s not. The star is just about the only thing I’ve ever seen him not frightened of. If he’s not worried, then take it from me, there’s nothing to worry about.’
   ‘It’s not going to rain?’ said Bethan.
   ‘Well, no. Metaphorically speaking.’
   ‘Oh.’ Bethan decided not to ask what ‘metaphorically’ meant, in case it was something to do with seaweed.
   Rincewind turned around.
   ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Not far now.’
   ‘Where to?’ said Twoflower.
   ‘ Unseen University, of course.’
   ‘Is that wise?’
   ‘Probably not, but I’m still going—’ Rincewind paused, his face a mask of pain. He put his hand to his ears and groaned.
   ‘Spell giving you trouble?’
   ‘Yargh.’
   ‘Try humming.’
   Rincewind grimaced. ‘I’m going to get rid of this thing,’ he said thickly. ‘It’s going back into the book where it belongs. I want my head back!’
   ‘But then—’ Twoflower began, and stopped. They could all hear it—a distant chanting and the stamping of many feet.
   ‘Do you think it’s star people?’ said Bethan.
   It was. The lead marchers came around a corner a hundred yards away, behind a ragged white banner with an eight-pointed star on it.
   ‘Not just star people,’ said Twoflower. ‘All kinds of people!’
   The crowd swept them up in its passage. One moment they were standing in the deserted street, the next they were perforce moving with a tide of humanity that bore them onwards through the city.

Torchlight flickered easily on the damp tunnels far under the University as the heads of the eight Orders of wizardry filed onwards.
   ‘At least it’s cool down here,’ said one.
   ‘We shouldn’t be down here.’
   Trymon, who was leading the party, said nothing. But he was thinking very hard. He was thinking about the ottle of oil in his belt, and the eight keys the wizards carried—eight keys that would fit the eight locks that chained the Octavo to its lectern. He was thinking that old wizards who sense that magic is draining away are preoccupied with their own problems and are perhaps less alert than they should be. He was thinking that within a few minutes the Octavo, the greatest concentration of magic on the Disc, would be under his hands.
   Despite the coolness of the tunnel he began to sweat.
   They came to a lead-lined door set in the sheer stone. Trymon took a heavy key—a good, honest iron key, not like the twisted and disconcerting keys that would unlock the Octavo—gave the lock a squirt of oil, inserted the key, turned it. The lock squeaked open protestingly.
   ‘Are we of one resolve?’ said Trymon. There was a series of vaguely affirmative grunts.
   He pushed at the door.
   A warm gale of thick and somehow oily air rolled over them. The air was filled with a high-pitched and unpleasant chittering. Tiny sparks of octarine fire flared off every nose, fingernail and beard.
   The wizards, their heads bowed against the storm of randomised magic that blew out of the room, pushed forward. Half-formed shapes giggled and fluttered around them as the nightmare inhabitants of the Dungeon Dimensions constantly probed (with things that passed for fingers only because they were at the ends of their arms) for an unguarded entry into the circle of firelight that passed for the universe of reason and order.
   Even at this bad time for all things magical, even in a room designed to damp down all magical vibrations, the Octavo was still crackling with power.
   There was no real need for the torches. The Octavo filled the room with a dull, sullen light, which wasn’t strictly light at all but the opposite of light; darkness isn’t the opposite of light, it is simply its absence, and what was radiating from the book was the light that lies on the far side of darkness, the light fantastic.
   It was a rather disappointing purple colour.
   As has been noted before, the Octavo was chained to a lectern carved into the shape of something that looked vaguely avian, slightly reptilian and horribly alive. Two glittering eyes regarded the wizards with hooded hatred.
   ‘I saw it move,’ said one of them.
   ‘We’re safe so long as we don’t touch the book,’ said Trymon. He pulled a scroll out of his belt and unrolled it.
   ‘Bring that torch here,’ he said, ‘and put that cigarette out!’
   He waited for the explosion of infuriated pride. But none came. Instead, the offending mage removed the dogend from his lips with trembling fingers and ground it into the floor.
   Trymon exulted. So, he thought, they do what I say. Just for now, maybe—but just for now is enough.
   He peered at the crabby writing of a wizard long dead.
   ‘Right,’ he said, let’s see: "To Appease Yt, The Thynge That Ys The Guardian..." ‘

   The crowd surged over one of the bridges that linked Morpork with Ankh. Below it the river, turgid at the best of times, was a mere trickle which steamed.
   The bridge shook under their feet rather more than it should. Strange ripples ran across the muddy remains of the river. A few tiles slid off the roof of a nearby house.
   ‘What was that?’ said Twoflower.
   Bethan looked behind them, and screamed.
   The star was rising. As the Disc’s own sun scurried for safety below the horizon the great bloated ball of the star climbed slowly into the sky until the whole of it was several degrees above the edge of the world.
   They pulled Rincewind into the safety of a doorway. The crowd hardly noticed them, but ran on, terrified as lemmings.
   ‘The star’s got spots on,’ said Twoflower.
   ‘No,’ said Rincewind. ‘They’re... things. Things going around the star. Like the sun goes around the Disc. But they’re close in, because, because...’ he paused. ‘I nearly know!’
   ‘Know what?’
   ‘I’ve got to get rid of this Spell!’
   ‘Which way is the University?’ said Bethan.
   ‘This way!’ said Rincewind, pointing along the street.
   ‘It must be very popular. That’s where everyone’s going.’
   ‘I wonder why?’ said Twoflower.
   ‘Somehow,’ said Rincewind, ‘I don’t think it’s to enroll for evening classes.’
   In fact Unseen University was under siege, or at least those parts of it that extruded into the usual, everyday dimensions were under siege. The crowds outside its gates were, generally, making one of two demands. They were demanding that either a) the wizards should stop messing about and get rid of the star or, and this was the demand favoured by the star people, that b) they should cease all magic and commit suicide in good order, thus ridding the Disc of the curse of magic and warding off the terrible threat in the sky.
   The wizards on the other side of the walls had no idea how to do a) and no intention of doing b) and many had in fact plumped for c), which largely consisted of nipping out of hidden side doors and having it away on their toes as far as possible, if not faster.
   What reliable magic still remained in the University was being channelled into keeping the great gates secure. The wizards were learning that while it was all very fine and impressive to have a set of gates that were locked by magic, it ought to have occurred to the builders to include some sort of emergency back-up device such as, for example, a pair of ordinary, unimpressive stout iron bolts.
   In the square outside the gates several large bonfires had been lit, for effect as much as anything else, because the heat from the star was scorching.
   ‘But you can still see the stars,’ said Twoflower, ‘the ther stars, I mean. The little ones. In a black sky.’
   Rincewind ignored him. He was looking at the gates. A group of star people and citizens were trying to batter them down.
   ‘It’s hopeless,’ said Bethan. ‘We’ll never get in. Where are you going?’
   ‘For a walk,’ said Rincewind. He was setting off determinedly down a side street.
   There were one or two freelance rioters here, mostly engaged in wrecking shops. Rincewind took no notice, but followed the wall until it ran parallel to a dark alley that had the usual unfortunate smell of all alleys, everywhere.
   Then he started looking very closely at the stonework. The wall here was twenty feet high, and topped with cruel metal spikes.
   ‘I need a knife,’ he said.
   ‘You’re going to cut your way through?’ said Bethan.
   ‘Just find me a knife,’ said Rincewind. He started to tap stones.
   Twoflower and Bethan looked at each other, and shrugged. A few minutes later they returned with a selection of knives, and Twoflower had even managed to find a sword.
   ‘We just helped ourselves,’ said Bethan.
   ‘But we left some money,’ said Twoflower. ‘I mean, we would have left some money, if we’d had any —’
   ‘So he insisted on writing a note,’ said Bethan wearily.
   Twoflower drew himself up to his full height, which was hardly worth it.
   ‘I see no reason—’ he began, stiffly.
   ‘Yes, yes,’ said Bethan, sitting down glumly. ‘I know you don’t. Rincewind, all the shops have been smashed open, there was a whole bunch of people across the street helping themselves to musical instruments, can you believe that?’
   ‘Yeah,’ said Rincewind, picking up a knife and testing its blade thoughtfully. ‘Luters, I expect.’
   He thrust the blade into the wall, twisted it, and stepped ack as a heavy stone fell out. He looked up, counting under his breath, and levered another stone from its socket.
   ‘How did you do that?’ said Twoflower.
   ‘Just give me a leg up, will you?’ said Rincewind. A moment later, his feet wedged into the holes he had created, he was making further steps halfway up the wall.
   ‘It’s been like this for centuries,’ his voice floated down. ‘Some of the stones haven’t got any mOrtar. Secret entrance, see? Watch out below.’
   Another stone cracked into the cobbles.
   ‘Students made it long ago,’ said Rincewind. ‘Handy way in and out after lights out.’
   ‘Ah,’ said Twoflower, ‘I understand. Over the wall and out to brightly-lit tavernas to drink and sing and recite poetry, yes?’
   ‘Nearly right except for the singing and the poetry, yes,’ said Rincewind. ‘A couple of these spikes should be loose—’ There was a clang.
   ‘There’s not much of a drop this side,’ came his voice after a few seconds. ‘Come on, then. If you’re coming.’

   And so it was that Rincewind, Twoflower and Bethan entered Unseen University.
   Elsewhere on the campus—
   The eight wizards inserted their keys and, with many a worried glance at one another, turned them. There was a faint little snicking sound as the lock slid open.
   The Octavo was unchained. A faint octarine light played across its bindings.
   Trymon reached out and picked it up, and none of the others objected. His arm tingled.
   He turned towards the door.
   ‘Now to the Great Hall, brothers,’ he said, ‘if I may lead the way —’
   And there were no objections.
   He reached the door with the book tucked under his rm. It felt hot, and somehow prickly.
   At every step he expected a cry, a protest, and none came. He had to use every ounce of control to stop himself from laughing. It was easier than he could have imagined.
   The others were halfway across the claustrophobic dungeon by the time he was through the door, and perhaps they had noticed something in the set of his shoulders, but it was too late because he had crossed the threshold, gripped the handle, slammed the door, turned the key, smiled the smile.
   He walked easily back along the corridor, ignoring the enraged screams of the wizards who had just discovered how impossible it is to pass spells in a room built to be impervious to magic.
   The Octavo squirmed, but Trymon held it tightly. Now he ran, putting out of his mind the horrible sensations under his arm as the book shape-changed into things hairy, skeletal and spiky. His hand went numb. The faint chittering noises he had been hearing grew in volume, and there were other sounds behind them—leering sounds, beckoning sounds, sounds made by the voices of unimaginable horrors that Trymon found it all too easy to imagine. As he ran across the Great Hall and up the main staircase the shadows began to move and reform and close in around him, and he also became aware that something was following, something with skittery legs moving obscenely fast. Ice formed on the walls. Doorways lunged at him as he barrelled past. Underfoot the stairs began to feel just like a tongue...
   Not for nothing had Trymon spent long hours in the University’s curious equivalent of a gymnasium, building up mental muscle. Don’t trust the senses, he knew, because they can be deceived. The stairs are there, somewhere—will them to be there, summon them into being as you climb and, boy, you better get good at it. Because this isn’t all imagination.

   Great A’Tuin slowed.
   With flippers the size of continents the skyturtle fought the pull of the star, and waited. There would not be long to wait...

   Rincewind sidled into the Great Hall. There were a few torches burning, and it looked as though it had been set up for some sort of magical work. But the ceremonial candlesticks had been overturned, the complex octograms chalked on the floor were scuffed as if something had danced on them, and the air was full of a smell unpleasant even by Ankh-Morpork’s broad standards. There was a hint of sulphur to it, but that underlay something worse. It smelt like the bottom of a pond.
   There was a distant crash, and a lot of shouting.
   ‘Looks like the gates have gone down,’ said Rincewind.
   ‘Let’s get out of here,’ said Bethan.
   ‘The cellars are this way,’ said Rincewind, and set off through an arch.
   ‘Down there!’
   ‘Yes. Would you rather stay here?’
   He took a torch from its bracket on the wall and started down the steps.
   After a few flights the walls stopped being panelled and were bare stone. Here and there heavy doors had been propped open.
   ‘I heard something,’ said Twoflower.
   Rincewind listened. There did seem to be a noise coming from the depths below. It didn’t sound frightening. It sounded like a lot of people hammering on a door and shouting ‘Oi!’
   ‘It’s not those Things from the Dungeon Dimensions you were telling us about, is it?’ said Bethan.
   They don’t swear like that,’ said Rincewind. ‘Come on.’
   They hurried along the dripping passages, following the screamed curses and deep hacking coughs that were somehow reassuring; anything that wheezed like that, the listeners decided, couldn’t possibly represent a danger.
   At last they came to a door set in an alcove. It looked strong enough to hold back the sea. There was a tiny grille.
   ‘Hey!’ shouted Rincewind. It wasn’t very useful, but he couldn’t think of anything better.
   There was a sudden silence. Then a voice from the other side of the door said, very slowly, Who is out there?’
   Rincewind recognised that voice. It had jerked him from daydreams into terror on many a hot classroom afternoon, years before. It was Lemuel Panter, who had once made it his personal business to hammer the rudiments of scrying and summoning into young Rincewind’s head. He remembered the eyes like gimlets in a piggy face and the voice saying ‘And now Mister Rincewind will come out here and draw the relevant symbol on the board’ and the million mile walk past the waiting class as he tried desperately to remember what the voice had been droning on about five minutes before. Even now his throat was going dry with terror and randomised guilt. The Dungeon Dimensions just weren’t in it.
   ‘Please sir, it’s me, sir, Rincewind, sir,’he squeaked. He saw Twoflower and Bethan staring at him, and coughed, ‘Yes,’ he added, in as deep a voice as he could manage. That’s who it is. Rincewind. Right.’
   There was a susurration of whispers on the other side of the door.
   ‘Rincewind?’
   ‘Prince who?’
   ‘I remember a boy who wasn’t any—’
   ‘The spell, remember?’
   ‘Rincewind?’
   There was a pause. Then the voice said, ‘I suppose the key isn’t in the lock, is it?’
   ‘No,’ said Rincewind.
   ‘What did he say?’
   ‘He said no.’
   ‘Typical of the boy.’
   ‘Um, who is in there?’ said Rincewind.
   ‘The Masters of Wizardry,’ said the voice, haughtily.
   ‘Why?’
   There was another pause, and then a conference of embarrassed whispers.
   ‘We, uh, got locked in,’ said the voice, reluctantly.
   ‘What, with the Octavo?’
   Whisper, whisper.
   ‘The Octavo, in fact, isn’t in here, in fact,’ said the voice slowly.
   ‘Oh. But you are?’ said Rincewind, as politely as possible while grinning like a necrophiliac in a morgue.
   ‘That would appear to be the case.’
   ‘Is there anything we can get you?’ said Twoflower anxiously.
   ‘You could try getting us out.’
   ‘Could we pick the lock?’ said Bethan.
   ‘No use,’ said Rincewind. ‘Totally thief-proof.’
   ‘I expect Cohen would have been able to,’ said Bethan loyally. ‘Wherever he’s got to.’
   ‘The Luggage would soon smash it down,’ agreed Twoflower.
   ‘Well, that’s it then,’ said Bethan. ‘Let’s get out into the fresh air. Fresher air, anyway.’ She turned to walk away.
   ‘Hang on, hang on,’ said Rincewind. That’s just typical, isn’t it? Old Rincewind won’t have any ideas, will he? Oh, no, he’s just a makeweight, he is. Kick him as you pass. Don’t rely on him, he’s —’
   ‘All right,’ said Bethan. ‘Let’s hear it, then.’
   ‘– a nonentity, a failure, just a—what?’
   ‘How are you going to get the door open?’ said Bethan.
   Rincewind looked at her with his mouth open. Then he looked at the door. It really was very solid, and the lock had a smug air.
   But he had got in, once, long ago. Rincewind the student had pushed at the door and it had swung open, and then a moment later the Spell had jumped into his mind and ruined his life.
   ‘Look,’ said a voice from behind the grille, as kindly as it could manage. ‘Just go and find us a wizard, there’s a good fellow.’
   Rincewind took a deep breath.
   ‘Stand back,’ he rasped.
   ‘What?’
   ‘Find something to hide behind,’ he barked, with his voice shaking only slightly. ‘You too,’ he said to Bethan and Twoflower.
   ‘But you can’t —’
   ‘I mean it!’
   ‘He means it,’ said Twoflower. ‘That little vein on the side of his forehead, you know, when it throbs like that, well —’
   ‘Shut up!’
   Rincewind raised one arm uncertainly and pointed it at the door.
   There was total silence.
   Oh gods, he thought, what happens now?
   In the blackness at the back of his mind the Spell shifted uneasily.
   Rincewind tried to get in tune or whatever with the metal of the lock. If he could sow discord amongst its atoms so that they flew apart —
   Nothing happened.
   He swallowed hard, and turned his attention to the wood. It was old and nearly fossilised, and probably wouldn’t burn even if soaked in oil and dropped into a furnace. He tried anyway, explaining to the ancient molecules that they should try to jump up and down to keep warm —
   In the strained silence of his own mind he glared at the Spell, which looked very sheepish.
   He considered the air around the door itself, how it might best be twisted into weird shapes so that the door existed in another set of dimensions entirely.
   The door sat there, defiantly solid.
   Sweating, his mind beginning the endless walk up to 187 the blackboard in front of the grinning class, he turned desperately to the lock again. It must be made of little bits of metal, not very heavy —
   From the grille came the faintest of sounds. It was the noise of wizards untensing themselves and shaking their heads.
   Someone whispered, ‘I told you—’
   There was a tiny grinding noise, and a click.
   Rincewind’s face was a mask. Perspiration dripped off his chin.
   There was another click, and the grinding of reluctant spindles. Trymon had oiled the lock, but the oil had been soaked up by the rust and dust of years, and the only way for a wizard to move something by magic, unless he can harness some external movement, is to use the leverage of his mind itself.
   Rincewind was trying very hard to prevent his brain being pushed out of his ears.
   The lock rattled. Metal rods flexed in pitted groves, gave in, pushed levers.
   Levers clicked, notches engaged. There was a long drawn-out grinding noise that left Rincewind on his knees.
   The door swung open on pained hinges. The wizards sidled out cautiously.
   Twoflower and Bethan helped Rincewind to his feet. He stood grey-faced and swaying.
   ‘Not bad,’ said one of the wizards, looking closely at the lock. ‘A little slow, perhaps.’
   ‘Never mind that!’ snapped Jiglad Wert. ‘Did you three see anyone on the way down here?’
   ‘No,’ said Twoflower.
   ‘Someone has stolen the Octavo.’
   Rincewind’s head jerked up. His eyes focussed.
   ‘Who?’
   ‘Trymon —’
   Rincewind swallowed. ‘Tall man?’ he said. ‘Fair hair, looks a bit like a ferret?’
   ‘Now that you mention it —’
   ‘He was in my class,’ said Rincewind. ‘They always said he’d go a long way.’
   ‘He’ll go a lot further if he opens the book,’ said one of the wizards, who was hastily rolling a cigarette in shaking fingers.
   ‘Why?’ said Twoflower. ‘What will happen?’
   The wizards looked at one another.
   ‘It’s an ancient secret, handed down from mage to mage, and we can’t pass it on to knowlessmen,’ said Wert.
   ‘Oh, go on,’ said Twoflower.
   ‘Oh well, it probably doesn’t matter any more. One mind can’t hold all the spells. It’ll break down, and leave a hole.’
   ‘What? In his head?’
   ‘Um. No. In the fabric of the Universe,’ said Wert. ‘He might think he can control it by himself, but —’
   They felt the sound before they heard it. It started off in the stones as a slow vibration, then rose suddenly to a knife-edge whine that bypassed the eardrums and bored straight into the brain. It sounded like a human voice singing, or chanting, or screamfng, but there were deeper and more horrible harmonics.
   The wizards went pale. Then, as one man, they turned and ran up the steps.
   There were crowds outside the building. Some people were holding torches, others had stopped in the act of piling kindling around the walls. But everyone was staring up at the Tower of Art.
   The wizards pushed their way through the unheeding bodies, and turned to look up.
   The sky was full of moons. Each one was three times bigger than the Disc’s own moon, and each was in shadow except for a pink crescent where it caught the light of the star.
   But in front of everything the top of the Tower of Art was an incandescent fury. Shapes could be dimly glimpsed within it, but there was nothing reassuring about them. The sound had changed now to the wasplike buzzing, magnified a million times.
   Some of the wizards sank to their knees.
   ‘He’s done it,’ said Wert, shaking his head. ‘He’s opened a pathway.’
   ‘Are those things demons?’ said Twoflower.
   ‘Oh, demons,’ said Wert. ‘Demons would be a picnic compared with what’s trying to come through up there.’
   ‘They’re worse than anything we can possibly imagine,’ said Panter.
   ‘I can imagine some pretty bad things,’ said Rincewind.
   ‘These are worse.’
   ‘Oh.’
   ‘And what do you propose to do about it?’ said a clear voice.
   They turned. Bethan was glaring at them, arms folded.
   ‘Pardon?’ said Wert.
   ‘You’re wizards, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘Well, get on with it.’
   ‘What, tackle that?’ said Rincewind.
   ‘Know anyone else?’
   Wert pushed forward. ‘Madam, I don’t think you quite understand —’
   ‘The Dungeons Dimensions will empty into our Universe, right?’ said Bethan.
   ‘Well, yes —’
   ‘We’ll all be eaten by things with tentacles for faces, right?’
   ‘Nothing so pleasant, but —’
   ‘And you’re just going to let it happen?’
   ‘Listen,’ said Rincewind. ‘It’s all over, do you see? You can’t put the spells back in the book, you can’t unsay what’s been said, you can’t —’
   ‘You can try!’
   Rincewind sighed, and turned to Twoflower.
   He wasn’t there. Rincewind’s eyes turned inevitably towards the base of the Tower of Art, and he was just in time to see the tourist’s plump figure, sword inexpertly in hand, as it disappeared into a door.
   Rincewind’s feet made their own decision and, from the oint of view of his head, got it entirely wrong.
   The other wizards watched him go.
   ‘Well?’ said Bethan. ‘He’s going.’. The wizards tried to avoid one another’s eyes.
   Eventually Wert said, ‘We could try, I suppose. It doesn’t seem to be spreading.’
   ‘But we’ve got hardly any magic to speak of,’ said one of the wizards.
   ‘Have you got a better idea, then?’
   One by one, their ceremonial robes glittering in the weird light, the wizards turned and trudged towards the tower.
   The tower was hollow inside, with the stone treads of its staircase mortared spiral-fashion into the walls. Twoflower was already several turns up by the time Rincewind caught him.
   ‘Hold on,’ he said, as cheerfully as he could manage. ‘This sort of thing is a job for the likes of Cohen, not you. No offence.’
   ‘Would he do any good?’
   Rincewind looked up at the actinic light that lanced down through the distant hole at the top of the staircase.
   ‘No,’ he admitted.
   Then I’d be as good as him, wouldn’t I?’ said Twoflower, flourishing his looted sword.
   Rincewind hopped after him, keeping as close to the wall as possible.
   ‘You don’t understand!’ he shouted. There’s unimaginable horrors up there!’
   ‘You always said I didn’t have any imagination.’
   ‘It’s a point, yes,’ Rincewind conceded, ‘but —’
   Twoflower sat down.
   ‘Look,’ he said. ‘I’ve been looking forward to something like this ever since I came here. I mean, this is an adventure, isn’t it? Alone against the gods, that sort of thing?’
   Rincewind opened and shut his mouth for a few seconds before the right words managed to come out.
   ‘Can you use a sword?’ he said weakly.
   ‘I don’t know. I’ve never tried.’
   ‘You’re mad!’
   Twoflower looked at him with his head on one side. ‘You’re a fine one to talk,’ he said. ‘I’m here because I don’t know any better, but what about you?’ He pointed downwards, to where the other wizards were toiling up the stairs. ‘What about them?’
   Blue light speared down the inside of the tower. There was a peal of thunder.
   The wizards reached them, coughing horribly and fighting for breath.
   ‘What’s the plan?’ said Rincewind.
   ‘There isn’t one,’ said Wert.
   ‘Right. Fine,’ said Rincewind. ‘I’ll leave you to get on with it, then.’
   ‘You’ll come with us,’ said Panter.
   ‘But I’m not even a proper wizard. You threw me out, remember?’
   ‘I can’t think of any student less able,’ said the old wizard, ‘but you’re here, and that’s the only qualification you need. Come on.’
   The light flared and went out. The terrible noises died as if strangled.
   Silence filled the tower; one of those heavy, pressing silences.
   ‘It’s stopped,’ said Twoflower.
   Something moved, high up against the circle of red sky. It fell slowly, turning over and over and drifting from side to side. It hit the stairs a turn above them.
   Rincewind was first to it.
   It was the Octavo. But it lay on the stone as limp and lifeless as any other book, its pages fluttering in the breeze that blew up the tower.
   Twoflower panted up behind Rincewind, and looked down.
   ‘They’re blank,’ he whispered. ‘Every page is completely blank.’
   ‘Then he did it,’ said Wert. ‘He’s read the spells. Successfully, too. I wouldn’t have believed it.’
   ‘There was all that noise,’ said Rincewind doubtfully. ‘The light, too. Those shapes. That didn’t sound so successful to me.’
   ‘Oh, you always get a certain amount of extradimen-sional attention in any great work of magic,’ said Panter dismissively. ‘It impresses people, nothing more.’
   ‘It looked like monsters up there,’ said Twoflower, standing closer to Rincewind.
   ‘Monsters? Show me some monsters!’ said Wert.
   Instinctively they looked up. There was no sound. Nothing moved against the circle of light.
   ‘I think we should go up and, er, congratulate him,’ said Wert.
   ‘Congratulate?’ exploded Rincewind. ‘He stole the Octavo! He locked you up!’
   The wizards exchanged knowing looks.
   ‘Yes, well,’ said one of them. ‘When you’ve advanced in the craft, lad, you’ll know that there are times when the important thing is success.’
   ‘It’s getting there that matters,’ said Wert bluntly. ‘Not how you travel.’
   They set off up the spiral.
   Rincewind sat down, scowling at the darkness.
   He felt a hand on his shoulder. It was Twoflower, who was holding the Octavo.
   ‘This is no way to treat a book,’ he said. ‘Look, he’s bent the spine right back. People always do that, they’ve got no idea of how to treat them.’
   ‘Yah,’ said Rincewind vaguely.
   ‘Don’t worry,’ said Twoflower.
   ‘I’m not worried, I’m just angry,’ snapped Rincewind. ‘Give me the bloody thing!’
   He snatched the book and snapped it open viciously.
   He rummaged around in the back of his mind, where the Spell hung out.
   ‘All right,’ he snarled. You’ve had your fun, you’ve ruined my life, now get back to where you belong!’
   ‘But I—’ protested Twoflower.
   ‘The Spell, I mean the Spell,’ said Rincewind. ‘Go on, get back on the page!’
   He glared at the ancient parchment until his eyes crossed.
   ‘Then I’ll say you!’ he shouted, his voice echoing up the tower. ‘You can join the rest of them and much good may it do you!’
   He shoved the book back into Twoflower’s arms and staggered off up the steps.
   The wizards had reached the top and disappeared from view. Rincewind climbed after them.
   ‘Lad, am I?’ he muttered. ‘When I’m advanced in the craft, eh? I just managed to go around with one of the Great Spells in my head for years without going totally insane, didn’t I?’ He considered the last question from all angles. Yes, you did,’ he reassured himself. ‘You didn’t start talking to trees, even when trees started talking to you.’
   His head emerged into the sultry air at the top of the tower.
   He had expected to see fire-blackened stones criss-crossed with talon marks, or perhaps something even worse.
   Instead he saw the seven senior wizards standing by Trymon, who seemed totally unscathed. He turned and smiled pleasantly at Rincewind.
   ‘Ah, Rincewind. Come and join us, won’t you?’
   So this is it, Rincewind thought. All that drama for nothing. Maybe I really am not cut out to be a wizard, maybe —
   He looked up and into Trymon’s eyes.
   Perhaps it was the Spell, in its years of living in Rincewind’s head, that had affected his eyes. Perhaps his time with Twoflower, who only saw things as they ought to be, had taught him to see things as they are.
   But what was certain was that by far the most difficult thing Rincewind did in his whole life was look at Trymon without running in terror or being very violently sick.
   The others didn’t seem to have noticed.
   They also seemed to be standing very still.
   Trymon had tried to contain the seven Spells in his mind and it had broken, and the Dungeon Dimensions had found their hole, all right. Silly to have imagined that the Things would have come marching out of a sort of rip in the sky, waving mandibles and tentacles. That was old-fashioned stuff, far too risky. Even nameless terrors learned to move with the times. All they really needed to enter was one head.
   His eyes were empty holes.
   Knowledge speared into Rincewind’s mind like a knife of ice. The Dungeon Dimensions would be a playgroup compared to what the Things could do in a universe of order. People were craving order, and order they would get—the order of the turning screw, the immutable law of straight lines and numbers. They would beg for the harrow...
   Trymon was looking at him. Something was looking at him. And still the others hadn’t noticed. Could he even explain it? Trymon looked the same as he had always done, except for the eyes, and a slight sheen to his skin.
   Rincewind stared, and knew that there were far worse things than Evil. All the demons in Hell would torture your very soul, but that was precisely because they valued souls very highly; evil would always try to steal the universe, but at least it considered the universe worth stealing. But the grey world behind those empty eyes would trample and destroy without even according its victims the dignity of hatred. It wouldn’t even notice them.
   Trymon held out his hand.
   ‘The eighth spell,’ he said. ‘Give it to me.’
   Rincewind backed away.
   ‘This is disobedience, Rincewind. I am your superior, after all. In fact, I have been voted the supreme head of all the Orders.’
   ‘Really?’ said Rincewind hoarsely. He looked at the other wizards. They were immobile, like statues.
   ‘Oh yes,’ said Trymon pleasantly. ‘Quite without prompting, too. Very democratic.’
   ‘I preferred tradition,’ said Rincewind. ‘That way even the dead get the vote.’
   ‘You will give me the spell voluntarily,’ said Trymon. ‘Do I have to show you what I will do otherwise? And in the end you will still yield it. You will scream for the opportunity to give it to me.’
   If it stops anywhere, it stops here, thought Rincewind.
   ‘You’ll have to take it,’ he said. 1 won’t give it to you.’
   ‘I remember you,’ said Trymon. ‘Not much good as a student, as I recall. You never really trusted magic, you kept on saying there should be a better way to run a universe. Well, you’ll see. I have plans. We can —’
   ‘Not we,’ said Rincewind firmly.
   ‘Give me the Spell!’
   ‘Try and take it,’ said Rincewind, backing away. 1 don’t think you can.’
   ‘Oh?’
   Rincewind jumped aside as octarine fire flashed from Trymon’s fingers and left a bubbling rock puddle on the stones.
   He could sense the Spell lurking in the back of his mind. He could sense its fear.
   In the silent caverns of his head he reached out for it. It retreated in astonishment, like a dog faced with a maddened sheep. He followed, stamping angrily through the disused lots and inner-city disaster areas of his subconscious, until he found it cowering behind a heap of condemned memories. It roared silent defiance at him, but Rincewind wasn’t having any.
   Is this it? he shouted at it. When it’s time for the showdown, you go and hide? You’re frightened?
   The Spell said, that’s nonsense, you can’t possibly believe that, I’m one of the Eight Spells. But Rincewind advanced on it angrily, shouting, Maybe, but the fact is I do believe it and you’d better remember whose head you’re in, right? I can believe anything I like in here!
   Rincewind jumped aside again as another bolt of fire lanced through the hot night. Trymon grinned, and made nother complicated motion with his hands.
   Pressure gripped Rincewind. Every inch of his skin felt as though it was being used as an anvil. He flopped onto his knees.
   ‘There are much worse things,’ said Trymon pleasantly. ‘I can make your flesh burn on the bones, or fill your body with ants. I have the power to —’
   ‘I have a sword, you know.’
   The voice was squeaky with defiance.
   Rincewind raised his head. Through a purple haze of pain he saw Twoflower standing behind Trymon, holding a sword in exactly the wrong way.
   Trymon laughed, and flexed his fingers. For a moment his attention was diverted.
   Rincewind was angry. He was angry at the Spell, at the world, at the unfairness of everything, at the fact that he hadn’t had much sleep lately, at the fact that he wasn’t thinking quite straight. But most of all he was angry with Trymon, standing there full of the magic Rincewind had always wanted but had never achieved, and doing nothing worthwhile with it.
   He sprang, striking Trymon in the stomach with his head and flinging his arms around him in desperation. Twoflower was knocked aside as they slid along the stones.
   Trymon snarled, and got out the first syllable of a spell before Rincewind’s wildly flailing elbow caught him in the neck. A blast of randomised magic singed Rincewind’s hair.
   Rincewind fought as he always fought, without skill or fairness or tactics but with a great deal of whirlwind effort. The strategy was to prevent an opponent getting enough time to realise that in fact Rincewind wasn’t a very good or strong fighter, and it often worked.
   It was working now, because Trymon had spent rather too much time reading ancient manuscripts and not getting enough healthy exercise and vitamins. He managed to get several blows in, which Rincewind was far too high on rage to notice, but he only used his hands while Rincewind employed knees, feet and teeth as well.
   He was, in fact, winning.
   This came as a shock.
   It came as more of a shock when, as he knelt on Trymon’s chest hitting him repeatedly about the head, the other man’s face changed. The skin crawled and waved like something seen through a heat haze, and Trymon spoke.
   ‘Help me!’
   For a moment his eyes looked up at Rincewind in fear, pain and entreaty. Then they weren’t eyes at all, but multi-faceted things on a head that could be called a head only by stretching the definition to its limits. Tentacles and saw-edged legs and talons unfolded to rip Rincewind’s rather sparse flesh from his body.
   Twoflower, the tower and the red sky all vanished. Time ran slowly, and stopped.
   Rincewind bit hard on a tentacle that was trying to pull his face off. As it uncoiled in agony he thrust out a hand and felt it break something hot and squishy.
   They were watching. He turned his head, and saw that now he was fighting on the floor of an enormous amphitheatre. On each side tier upon tier of creatures stared down at him, creatures with bodies and faces that appeared to have been made by crossbreeding nightmares. He caught a glimpse of even worse things behind him, huge shadows that stretched into the overcast sky, before the Trymon-monster lunged at him with a barbed sting the size of a spear.
   Rincewind dodged sideways, and then swung around with both hands clasped together into one fist that caught the thing in the stomach, or possibly the thorax, with a blow that ended in the satisfying crunch of chitin.
   He plunged forward, fighting now out of terror of what would happen if he stopped. The ghostly arena was full of the cluttering of the Dungeon creatures, a wall of rustling sound that hammered at his ears as he struggled. He imagined that sound filling the Disc, and he flung blow after blow to save the world of men, to preserve the little circle of firelight in the dark night of chaos and to lose the gap through which the nightmare was advancing. But mainly he hit it to stop it hitting back.

Claws or talons drew white-hotlines across his back, and something bit his shoulder, but he found a nest of soft tubes among all the hairs and scales and squeezed it hard.
   An arm barbed with spikes swept him away, and he rolled over in the gritty black dust.
   Instinctively he curled into a ball, but nothing happened. Instead of the onslaught of fury he expected he opened his eyes to see the creature limping away from him, various liquids leaking from it.
   It was the first time anything had ever run away from Rincewind.
   He dived after it, caught a scaly leg, and wrenched. The creature chittered at him and flailed desperately with such appendages as were still working, but Rincewind’s grip was unshakeable. He pulled himself up and planted one last satisfying blow into its remaining eye. It screamed, and ran. And there was only one place for it to run to.
   The tower and the red sky came back with the click of restored time.
   As soon as he felt the press of the flagstones under his feet Rincewind flung his weight to one side and rolled on his back with the frantic creature at arms’ length.
   ‘Now!’ he yelled.
   ‘Now what?’ said Twoflower. ‘Oh. Yes. Right!’
   He swung the sword inexpertly but with some force, missing Rincewind by inches and burying it deeply in the Thing. There was a shrill buzzing, as though he had smashed a wasp’s nest, and the melee of arms and legs and tentacles flailed in agony. It rolled again, screaming and thrashing at the flagstones, and then it was thrashing at nothing at all because it had rolled over the edge of the stairway, taking Rincewind with it.
   There was a squelching noise as it bounced off a few of the stone steps, and then a distant and disappearing shriek as it tumbled the depth of the tower.
   Finally there was a dull explosion and a flash of octarine light.
   Then Twoflower was alone on the top of the tower—alone, that is, except for seven wizards who still seemed to be frozen to the spot.
   He sat bewildered as seven fireballs rose out of the blackness and plunged into the discarded Octavo, which suddenly looked its old self and far more interesting.
   ‘Oh dear,’ he said. ‘I suppose they’re the Spells.’
   ‘Twoflower.’ The voice was hollow and echoing, and just recognisable as Rincewind’s.
   Twoflower stopped with his hand halfway to the book.
   ‘Yes?’ he said. ‘Is that—is that you, Rincewind?’
   ‘Yes,’ said the voice, resonant with the tones of the grave. ‘And there is something very important I want you to do for me, Twoflower.’
   Twofiower looked around. He pulled himself together. So the fate of the Disc would depend on him, after all.
   ‘I’m ready,’ he said, his voice vibrating with pride. ‘What is it you want me to do?’
   ‘First, I want you to listen very carefully,’ said Rincewind’s disembodied voice patiently.
   ‘I’m listening.’
   It’s very important that when I tell you what to do you don’t say "What do you mean?" or argue or anything, understand?’
   Twoflower stood to attention. At least, his rnind stood to attention, his body really couldn’t. He stuck out several of his chins.
   ‘I’m ready,’ he said.
   ‘Good. Now, what I want you to do is —’
   ‘Yes?’
   Rincewind’s voice rose from the depths of the stairwell.
   ‘I want you to come and help me up before I lose my grip on this stone,’ it said.
   Twoflower opened his mouth, then shut it quickly. He ran to the square hole and peered down. By the ruddy light of the star he could just make out Rincewind’s eyes looking up at him.
   Twoflower lay down on his stomach and reached out. Rincewind’s hand gripped his wrist in the sort of grip that told Twoflower that if he, Rincewind, wasn’t pulled up then there was no possible way in which that grip was going to be relaxed.
   ‘I’m glad you’re alive,’ he said.
   ‘Good. So am I,’ said Rincewind.
   He hung around in the darkness for a bit. After the past few minutes it was almost enjoyable, but only almost.
   ‘Pull me up, then,’ he hinted.
   ‘I think that might be sort of difficult,’ grunted Twoflower. ‘I don’t actually think I can do it, in fact.’
   ‘What are you holding on to, then?’
   ‘You.’
   ‘I mean besides me.’
   ‘What do you mean, besides you?’ said Twoflower.
   Rincewind said a word.
   ‘Well, look,’ said Twoflower. The steps go around in a spiral, right? If I sort of swing you and then you let go —’
   ‘If you’re going to suggest I try dropping twenty feet down a pitch dark tower in the hope of hitting a couple of greasy little steps which might not even still be there, you can forget it,’ said Rincewind sharply.
   ‘There is an alternative, then.’
   ‘Out with it, man.’
   ‘You could drop five hundred feet down a pitch black tower and hit stones which certainly are there,’ said Twoflower.
   Dead silence came from below him. Then Rincewind said, accusingly, ‘That was sarcasm.’
   ‘I thought it was just stating the obvious.’
   Rincewind grunted.
   ‘I suppose you couldn’t do some magic—’ Twoflower began.
   ‘No.’
   ‘Just a thought.’
   There was a flare of light far below, and a confused shouting, and then more lights, more shouting, and a line f torches starting up the long spiral.
   ‘There’s some people coming up the stairs,’ said Twoflower, always keen to inform.
   ‘I hope they’re running,’ said Rincewind. ‘I can’t feel my arm.’
   ‘You’re lucky,’ said Twoflower. ‘I can feel mine.’
   The leading torch stopped its climb and a voice rang out, filling the hollow tower with indecipherable echoes.
   ‘I think,’ said Twoflower, aware that he was gradually sliding further over the hole, ‘that was someone telling us to hold on.’
   Rincewind said another word.
   Then he said, in a lower and more urgent tone, ‘Actually, I don’t think I can hang on any longer.’
   ‘Try.’
   ‘It’s no good, I can feel my hand slipping!’
   Twoflower sighed. It was time for harsh measures. ‘All right, then,’ he said. ‘Drop, then. See if I care.’
   ‘What?’ said Rincewind, so astonished he forgot to let go.
   ‘Go on, die. Take the easy way out.’
   ‘Easy?’.
   ‘All you have to do is plummet screaming through the air and break every bone in your body,’ said Twoflower. ‘Anybody can do it. Go on. I wouldn’t want you to think that perhaps you ought to stay alive because we need you to say the Spells and save the Disc. Oh, no. Who cares if we all get burned up? Go on, just think of yourself. Drop.’
   There was a long, embarrassed silence.
   ‘I don’t know why it is,’ said Rincewind eventually, in a voice rather louder than necessary, ‘but ever since I met you I seem to have spent a lot of time hanging by my fingers over certain depth, have you noticed?’
   ‘Death,’ corrected Twoflower.
   ‘Death what?’ said Rincewind.
   ‘Certain death,’ said Twoflower helpfully, trying to ignore the slow but inexorable slide of his body across the flagstones. ‘Hanging over certain death. You don’t like heights.’
   ‘Heights I don’t mind,’ said Rincewind’s voice from the darkness. ‘Heights I can live with. It’s depths that are occupying my attention at the moment. Do you know what I’m going to do when we get out of this?’
   ‘No?’ said Twoflower, wedging his toes into a gap in the flagstones and trying to make himself immobile by sheer force of will.
   ‘I’m going to build a house in the flattest country I can find and it’s only going to have a ground floor and I’m not even going to wear sandals with thick soles —’
   The leading torch came around the last turn of the spiral and Twoflower looked down on the grinning face of Cohen. Behind him, still hopping awkwardly up the stones, he could make out the reassuring bulk of the Luggage.
   ‘Everything all right?’ said Cohen. ‘Can I do anything?’
   Rincewind took a deep breath.
   Twoflower recognised the signs. Rincewind was about to say something like, ‘Yes, I’ve got this itch on the back of my neck, you couldn’t scratch it, could you, on your way past?’ or ‘No, I enjoy hanging over bottomless drops’ and he decided he couldn’t possibly face that. He spoke very quickly.
   ‘Pull Rincewind back onto the stairs,’ he snapped. Rincewind deflated in mid-snarl.
   Cohen caught him around the waist and jerked him unceremoniously onto the stones.
   ‘Nasty mess down on the floor down there,’ he said conversationally. ‘Who was it?’
   ‘Did it—’ Rincewind swallowed, ‘did it have—you know—tentacles and things?’
   ‘No,’ said Cohen. ‘Just the normal bits. Spread out a bit, of course.’
   Rincewind looked at Twoflower, who shook his head.
   ‘Just a wizard who let things get on top of him,’ he said.
   Unsteadily, with his arms screaming at him, Rincewind let himself be helped back onto the roof of the tower.
   ‘How did you get here?’ he added.
   Cohen pointed to the Luggage, which had trotted over 203 to Twoflower and opened its lid like a dog that knows it’s been bad and is hoping that a quick display of affection may avert the rolled-up newspaper of authority.
   ‘Bumpy but fast,’ he said admiringly. ‘I’ll tell you this, no-one tries to stop you.’
   Rincewind looked up at the sky. It was indeed full of moons, huge cratered discs now ten times bigger than the Disc’s tiny satellite. He looked at them without much interest. He felt washed out and stretched well beyond breaking point, as fragile as ancient elastic.
   He noticed that Twoflower was trying to set up his picture box.
   Cohen was looking at the seven senior wizards.
   ‘Funny place to put statues,’ he said. ‘No-one can see them. Mind you, I can’t say they’re up to much. Very poor work.’
   Rincewind staggered across and tapped Wert gingerly on the chest. He was solid stone.
   This is it, he thought. I just want to go home.
   Hang on, I am home. More or less. So I just want a good sleep, and perhaps it will all be better in the morning.
   His gaze fell on the Octavo, which was outlined in tiny flashes of octarine fire. Oh yes, he thought.
   He picked it up and thumbed idly through its pages. They were thick with complex and swirling script that changed and reformed even as he looked at it. It seemed undecided as to what it should be; one moment it was an orderly, matter-of-fact printing; the next a series of angular runes. Then it would be curly Kythian spellscript. Then it would be pictograms in some ancient, evil and forgotten writing that seemed to consist exclusively of unpleasant reptilian beings doing complicated and painful things to one another...
   The last page was empty. Rincewind sighed, and looked in the back of his mind. The Spell looked back.
   He had dreamed of this moment, how he would finally evict the Spell and take vacant possession of his own head and learn all those lesser spells which had, up until hen, been too frightened to stay in his mind. Somehow he had expected it to be far more exciting.
   Instead, in utter exhaustion and in a mood to brook no argument, he stared coldly at the Spell and jerked a metaphorical thumb over his shoulder. You. Out.
   It looked for a moment as though the Spell was going to argue, but it wisely thought better of it.
   There was a tingling sensation, a blue flash behind his eyes, and a sudden feeling of emptiness.
   When he looked down at the page it was full of words. They were runes again. He was glad about that, the reptilian pictures were not only unspeakable but probably unpronounceable too, and reminded him of things he would have great difficulty in forgetting.
   He looked blankly at the book while Twoflower bustled around unheeded and Cohen tried in vain to lever the rings off the stone wizards.
   He had to do something, he reminded himself. What was it, now?
   He opened the book at the first page and began to read, his lips moving and his forefinger tracing the outline of each letter. As he mumbled each word it appeared soundlessly in the air beside him, in bright colours that streamed away in the night wind. He turned over the page.
   Other people were coming up the steps now—star people, citizens, even some of the Patrician’s personal guard. A couple of star people made a half-hearted attempt to approach Rincewind, who was surrounded now by a rainbow swirl of letters and took absolutely no notice of them, but Cohen drew his sword and looked nonchalantly at them and they thought better of it.
   Silence spread out from Rincewind’s bent form like ripples in a puddle. It cascaded down the tower and spread out through the milling crowds below, flowed over the walls, gushed darkly through the city, and engulfed the lands beyond.
   The bulk of the star loomed silently over the Disc. In the sky around it the new moons turned slowly and noiselessly.
   The only sound was Rincewind’s hoarse whispering as he turned page after page.
   ‘Isn’t this exciting!’ said Twoflower. Cohen, who was rolling a cigarette from the tarry remnants of its ancestors, looked at him blankly, paper halfway to his lips.
   ‘Isn’t what exciting?’ he said.
   ‘All this magic!’
   ‘It’s only lights,’ said Cohen critically. ‘He hasn’t even produced doves out of his sleeves.’
   ‘Yes, but can’t you sense the occult potentiality?’ said Twoflower.
   Cohen produced a big yellow match from somewhere in his tobacco bag, looked at Wert for a moment, and with great deliberation struck the match on his fossilised nose.
   ‘Look,’ he said to Twoflower, as kindly as he could manage. ‘What do you expect? I’ve been around a long time, I’ve seen the whole magical thing, and I can tell you that if you go around with your jaw dropping all the time people hit it. Anyway, wizard’s die just like anyone else when you stick a —’
   There was a loud snap as Rincewind shut the book. He stood up, and looked around.
   What happened next was this:
   Nothing.
   It took a little while for people to realise it. Everyone had ducked instinctively, waiting for the explosion of white light or scintillating fireball or, in the case of Cohen, who had fairly low expectations, a few white pigeons, possibly a slightly crumpled rabbit.
   It wasn’t even an interesting nothing. Sometimes things can fail to happen in quite impressive ways, but as far as non-events went this one just couldn’t compete.
   ‘Is that it?’ said Cohen. There was a general muttering from the crowd, and several of the star people were looking angrily at Rincewind.
   The wizard stared Wearily at Cohen.
   ‘I suppose so,’ he said.
   ‘But nothing’s happened.’
   Rincewind looked blankly at the Octavo.
   ‘Maybe it has a subtle effect?’ he said hopefully. ‘After all, we don’t know exactly what is supposed to happen.’
   ‘We knew it!’ shouted one of the star people. ‘Magic doesn’t work! It’s all illusion!’
   A stone looped over the roof and hit Rincewind on the shoulder.
   ‘Yeah,’ said another star person. ‘Let’s get him!’
   ‘Let’s throw him off the tower!’
   ‘Yeah, let’s get him and throw him off the tower!’
   The crowd surged forward. Twoflower held up his hands.
   ‘I’m sure there’s just been a slight mistake—’ he began, before his legs were kicked from underneath him.
   ‘Oh bugger,’ said Cohen, dropping his dogend and grinding it under a sandalled foot. He drew his sword and looked around for the Luggage.
   It hadn’t rushed to Twoflower’s aid. It was standing in front of Rincewind, who was clutching the Octavo to his chest like a hot-water bottle and looking frantic.
   A star man lunged at him. The Luggage raised its lid threateningly.
   ‘I know why it hasn’t worked,’ said a voice from the back of the crowd. It was Bethan.
   ‘Oh yeah?’ said the nearest citizen. ‘And why should we listen to you?’
   A mere fraction of a second later Cohen’s sword was pressed against his neck.
   ‘On the other hand,’ said the man evenly, ‘perhaps we should pay attention to what this young lady has got to say.’
   As Cohen swung around slowly with his sword at the ready Bethan stepped forward and pointed to the swirling shapes of the spells, which still hung in the air around Rincewind.
   ‘That one can’t be right,’ she said, indicating a smudge of dirty brown amidst the pulsing, brightly coloured flares.
   You must have mispronounced a word. Let’s have a look.’
   Rincewind passed her the Octavo without a word.
   She opened it and peered the pages.
   ‘What funny writing,’ she said. ‘It keeps changing. What’s that crocodile thing doing to the octopus?’
   Rincewind looked over her shoulder and, without thinking, told her. She was silent for a moment.
   ‘Oh,’ she said levelly. ‘I didn’t know crocodiles could do that.’
   ‘It’s just ancient picture writing,’ said Rincewind hurriedly. ‘It’ll change if you wait. The Spells can appear in every known language.’
   ‘Can you remember what you said when the wrong colour appeared?’
   Rincewind ran a finger down the page.
   ‘There, I think. Where the two-headed lizard is doing—whatever it’s doing.’
   Twoflower appeared at her other shoulder. The Spell flowed into another script.
   ‘I can’t even pronounce it,’ said Bethan. ‘Squiggle, squiggle, dot, dash.’
   ‘That’s Cupumuguk snow runes,’ said Rincewind. ‘I think it should be pronounced "zph".’
   ‘It didn’t work, though. How about "sph"?’
   They looked at the word. It remained resolutely off-colour.
   ‘Or "sff"?’ said Bethan.
   ‘It might be "tsff",’ said Rincewind doubtfully. If anything the colour became a dirtier shade of brown.
   ‘How about "zsff"?’ said Twoflower.
   ‘Don’t be silly,’ said Rincewind. ‘With snow runes the —’
   Bethan elbowed him in the stomach and pointed.
   The brown shape in the air was now a brilliant red.
   The book trembled in her hands. Rincewind grabbed her around the waist, snatched Twoflower by the collar, and jumped backwards.
   Bethan lost her grip on the Octavo, which tumbled towards the floor. And didn’t reach it.
 
   The air around the Octavo glowed. It rose slowly, flapping its pages like wings.
   Then there was a plangent, sweet twanging noise and it seemed to explode in a complicated silent flower of light which rushed outwards, faded, and was gone.
   But something was happening much further up in the sky...
 
   Down in the geological depths of Great A’Tuin’s huge brain new thoughts surged along neural pathways the size of arterial roads. It was impossible for a sky turtle to change its expression, but in some indefinable way its scaly, meteor-pocked face looked quite expectant.
   It was staring fixedly at the eight spheres endlessly orbiting around the star, on the very beaches of space.
   The spheres were cracking.
   Huge segments of rock broke away and began the long spiral down to the star. The sky filled with glittering shards.
   From the wreakage of one hollow shell a very small sky turtle paddled its way into the red light. It was barely bigger than an asteroid, its shell still shiny with molten yolk.
   There were four small world-elephant calves on there, too. And on their backs was a discworld, tiny as yet, covered in smoke and volcanoes.
   Great A’Tuin waited until all eight baby turtles had freed themselves from their shells and were treading space and looking bewildered. Then, carefully, so as not to dislodge anything, the old turtle turned and with considerable relief set out on the long swim to the blessedly cool, bottomless depths of space.
   The young turtles followed, orbiting their parent.
 
   Twoflower stared raptly at the display overhead. He probably had the best view of anyone on the Disc.
   Then a terrible thought occurred to him.
   ‘Where’s the picture box?’ he asked urgently.
   ‘What?’ said Rincewind, eyes fixed on the sky.
   ‘The picture box,’ said Twoflower. ‘I must get a picture of this!’
   ‘Can’t you just remember it?’ said Bethan, not looking at him.
   ‘I might forget.’
   ‘I won’t ever forget,’ she said. ‘It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.’
   ‘Much better than pigeons and billiard balls,’ agreed Cohen. ‘I’ll give you that, Rincewind. How’s it done?’
   ‘I dunno,’ said Rincewind.
   ‘The star’s getting smaller,’ said Bethan.
   Rincewind was vaguely aware of Twoflower’s voice arguing with the demon who lived in the box and painted the pictures. It was quite a technical argument, about field depths and whether or not the demon still had enough red paint.
   It should be pointed out that currently Great A’Tuin was very pleased and contented, and feelings like that in a brain the size of several large cities are bound to radiate out. In fact most people on the Disc were currently in a state of mind normally achievable only by a lifetime of dedicated meditation or about thirty seconds of illegal herbage.
   That’s old Twoflower, Rincewind thought. It’s not that he doesn’t appreciate beauty, he just appreciates it in his own way. I mean, if a poet sees a daffodil he stares at it and writes a long poem about it, but Twoflower wanders off to find a book on botany. And treads on it. It’s right what Cohen said. He just looks at things, but nothing he looks at is ever the same again. Including me, I suspect.
   The Disc’s own sun rose. The star was already dwindling, and it wasn’t quite so much competition. Good reliable Disc light poured across the enraptured landscape, like a sea of gold.
   Or, as the more reliable observers generally held, like golden syrup.
 
   That is a nice dramatic ending, but life doesn’t work like that and there were other things that had to happen.
   There was the Octavo, for example.
   As the sunlight hit it the book snapped shut and started to fall back to the tower. And many of the observers realised that dropping towards them was the single most magical thing on the Discworld.
   The feeling of bliss and brotherhood evaporated along with the morning dew. Rincewind and Twoflower were elbowed aside as the crowd surged forward, struggling and trying to climb up one another, hands outstretched.
   The Octavo dropped into the centre of the shouting mass. There was a snap. A decisive snap, the sort of snap made by a lid that doesn’t intend to be opening in a hurry.
   Rincewind peered between someone’s legs at Twoflower.
   ‘Do you know what I think’s going to happen?’ he said, grinning.
   ‘What?’
   ‘I think that when you open the Luggage there’s just going to be your laundry in there, that’s what I think.’
   ‘Oh dear.’
   ‘I think the Octavo knows how to look after itself. Best place for it, really.’
   ‘I suppose so. You know, sometimes I get the feeling that the Luggage knows exactly what it’s doing.’
   ‘I know what you mean.’
   They crawled to the edge of the milling crowd, stood up, dusted themselves off and headed for the steps. No-one paid them any attention.
   ‘What are they doing now?’ said Twoflower, trying to see over the heads of the throng.
   ‘It looks as though they’re trying to lever it open,’ said Rincewind.
   There was a snap and a scream.
   ‘I think the Luggage rather enjoys the attention,’ said Twoflower, as they began their cautious descent.
   ‘Yes, it probably does it good to get out and meet people,’ said Rincewind, ‘and now I think it’d do me good to go and order a couple of drinks.’
   ‘Good idea,’ said Twoflower. ‘I’ll have a couple of drinks too.’
 
   It was nearly noon when Twoflower awoke. He couldn’t remember why he was in a hayloft, or why he was wearing someone else’s coat, but he did wake up with one idea right in the forefront of his mind.
   He decided it was vitally important to tell Rincewind about it.
   He fell out of the hay and landed on the Luggage.
   ‘Oh, you’re here, are you?’ he said. ‘I hope you’re ashamed of yourself.’
   The Luggage looked bewildered.
   ‘Anyway, I want to comb my hair. Open up,’ said Twoflower.
   The Luggage obligingly flipped its lid. Twoflower rooted around among the bags and boxes inside until he found a comb and mirror and repaired some of the damage of the night. Then he looked hard at the Luggage.
   ‘I suppose you wouldn’t like to tell me what you’ve done with the Octavo?’
   The Luggage’s expression could only be described as wooden.
   ‘All right. Come on, then.’
   Twoflower stepped out into the sunlight, which was slightly too bright for his current tastes, and wandered aimlessly along the street. Everything seemed fresh and new, even the smells, but there didn’t seem to be many people up yet. It had been a long night.
   He found Rincewind at the foot of the Tower of Art, upervising a team of workmen who had rigged up a gantry of sorts on the roof and were lowering the stone wizards to the ground. He seemed to be assisted by a monkey, but Twoflower was in no mood to be surprised at anything.
   ‘Will they be able to be turned back?’ he said.
   Rincewind looked around. ‘What? Oh, it’s you. No, probably not. I’m afraid they dropped poor old Wert, anyway. Five hundred feet onto cobbles.’
   ‘Will you be able to do anything about that?’
   ‘Make a nice rockery.’ Rincewind turned and waved at the workmen.
   ‘You’re very cheerful,’ said Twoflower, a shade reproachfully. ‘Didn’t you go to bed?’
   ‘Funny thing, I couldn’t sleep,’ said Rincewind. ‘I came out for a breath of fresh air, and no-one seemed to have any idea what to do, so I just sort of got people together,’ he indicated the librarian, who tried to hold his hand, ‘and started organising things. Nice day, isn’t it? Air like wine.’
   ‘Rincewind, I’ve decided that —’
   ‘You know, I think I might re-enroll,’ said Rincewind cheerfully. ‘I think I could really make a go of things this time. I can really see myself getting to grips with magic and graduating really well. They do say if it’s summa cum laude, then the living is easy—.’
   ‘Good, because —’
   There’s plenty of room at the top, too, now all the big boys will be doing doorstop duty, and —’
   ‘I’m going home.’
   ‘– a sharp lad with a bit of experience of the world could—what?’
   ‘Oook?’
   ‘I said I’m going home,’ repeated Twoflower, making polite little attempts to shake off the librarian, who was trying to pick lice off him.
   ‘What home?’ said Rincewind, astonished.
   ‘Home home. My home. Where I live,’ Twoflower explained sheepishly. ‘Back across the sea. You know.
   Where I came from. Will you please stop doing that?’
   ‘Oh.’
   ‘Oook?’
   There was a pause. Then Twoflower said, ‘You see, last night it occurred to me, I thought, well, the thing is, all this travelling and seeing things is fine but there’s also a lot of fun to be had from having been. You know, sticking all your pictures in a book and remembering things.’
   ‘There is?’
   ‘Oook?’
   ‘Oh, yes. The important thing about having lots of things to remember is that you’ve got to go somewhere afterwards where you can remember them, you see? You’ve got to stop. You haven’t really been anywhere until you’ve got back home. I think that’s what I mean.’
   Rincewind ran the sentence across his mind again. It didn’t seem any better second time around.
   ‘Oh,’ he said again. Well, good. If that’s the way you look at it. When are you going, then?’
   ‘Today, I think. There’s bound to be a ship going part of the way.’
   ‘I expect so,’ said Rincewind awkwardly. He looked at his feet. He looked at the sky. He cleared his throat.
   ‘We’ve been through some times together, eh?’ said Twoflower, nudging him in the ribs.
   ‘Yeah,’ said Rincewind, contorting his face into something like a grin.
   ‘You’re not upset, are you?’
   ‘Who, me?’ said Rincewind. ‘Gosh, no. Hundred and one things to do.’
   That’s all right, then. Listen, let’s go and have breakfast and then we can go down to the docks.’
   Rincewind nodded dismally, turned to his assistant, and took a banana out of his pocket.
   ‘You’ve got the hang of it now, you take over,’ he muttered.
   ‘Oook.’
 
   In fact there wasn’t any ship going anywhere near the Agatean Empire, but that was an academic point because Twoflower simply counted gold pieces into the hand of the first captain with a halfway clean ship until the man suddenly saw the merits of changing his plans.
   Rincewind waited on the quayside until Twoflower had finished paying the man about forty times more than his ship was worth.
   ‘That’s settled, then,’ said Twoflower. ‘He’ll drop me at the Brown Islands and I can easily get a ship from there.’
   ‘Great,’ said Rincewind.
   Twoflower looked thoughtful for a moment. Then he opened the Luggage and pulled out a bag of gold.
   ‘Have you seen Cohen and Bethan?’ he said.
   ‘I think they went off to get married,’ said Rincewind. ‘I heard Bethan say it was now or never.’
   ‘Well, when you see them give them this,’ said Twoflower, handing him the bag. ‘I know it’s expensive, setting up home for the first time.’
   Twoflower had never fully understood the gulf in the exchange rate. The bag could quite easily set Cohen up with a small kingdom.
   ‘I’ll hand it over first chance I get,’ he said, and to his own surprise realised that he meant it.
   ‘Good. I’ve thought about something to give you, too.’
   ‘Oh, there’s no —’
   Twoflower rummaged in the Luggage and produced a large sack. He began to fill it with clothes and money and the picture box until finally the Luggage was completely empty. The last thing he put in was his souvenir musical cigarette box with the shell-encrusted lid, carefully wrapped in soft paper.
   ‘It’s all yours,’ he said, shutting the Luggage’s lid. ‘I shan’t really need it any more, and it won’t fit on my wardrobe anyway.’
   ‘What?’
   ‘Don’t you want it?’
   ‘Well, I—of course, but—it’s yours. It follows you, not me.’
   ‘Luggage,’ said Twoflower, ‘this is Rincewind. You’re his, right?’
   The Luggage slowly extended its legs, turned very deliberately and looked at Rincewind.
   ‘I don’t think it belongs to anyone but itself, really,’ said Twoflower.
   ‘Yes,’ said Rincewind uncertainly.
   ‘Well, that’s about it, then,’ said Twoflower. He held out his hand.
   ‘Goodbye, Rincewind. I’ll send you a postcard when I get home. Or something.’
   ‘Yes. Any time you’re passing, there’s bound to be someone here who knows where I am.’
   ‘Yes. Well. That’s it, then.’
   ‘That’s it, right enough.’
   ‘Right.’
   ‘Yep.’
   Twoflower walked up the gangplank, which the impatient crew hauled up behind him.
   The rowing drum started its beat and the ship was propelled slowly out onto the turbid waters of the Ankh, now back to their old level, where it caught the tide and turned towards the open sea.
   Rincewind watched it until it was a dot. Then he looked down at the Luggage. It stared back at him.
   ‘Look,’ he said. ‘Go away. I’m giving you to yourself, do you understand?’
   He turned his back on it and stalked away. After a few seconds he was aware of the little footsteps behind him. He spun around.
   ‘I said I don’t want you!’ he snapped, and gave it a kick.
   The Luggage sagged. Rincewind stalked away.
   After he had gone a few yards he stopped and listened. There was no sound. When he turned the Luggage was where he had left it. It looked sort of huddled. Rincewind hought for a while.
   ‘All right, then,’ he said. ‘Come on.’
   He turned his back and strode off to the University. After a few minutes the Luggage appeared to make up its mind, extended its legs again and padded after him. It didn’t see that it had a lot of choice.
   They headed along the quay and into the city, two dots on a dwindling landscape which, as the perspective broadened, included a tiny ship starting out across a wide green sea that was but a part of a bright circling ocean on a cloud-swirled Disc on the back of four giant elephants that themselves stood on the shell of an enormous turtle.
   Which soon became a glint among the stars, and disappeared.
 
The End

Сноски
1
   They won’t be described, since even the pretty ones looked like the offspring of an octopus and a bicycle. It is well known that things from undesirable universes are always seeking an entrance into this one, which is the psychic equivalent of handy for the buses and closer to the shops.
2
   A Thaum is the basic unit of magical strength. It has been universally established as the amount of magic needed to create one small white pigeon or three normal sized billiard balls.
3
   An interesting metaphor. To nocturnal trolls, of course, the dawn of time lies in the future.
4
   Not precisely, of course. Trees didn’t burst into flame, people didn’t suddenly become very rich and extremely dead, and the seas didn’t flash into steam. A better simile, in fact, would be ‘not like molten gold’.
5
   No-one knows why, but all the most truly mysterious and magical items are bought from shops that appear and, after a trading life even briefer than a double-glazing company, vanish like smoke. There had been various attempts to explain this, all of which don’t fully account for the observed facts. These shops turn up anywhere in the universe, and their immediate non-existence in any particular city can normally be deduced from crowds of people wandering the streets clutching defunct magical items, ornate guarantee cards, and looking very suspiciously at brick walls.

This is a story about magic and where it goes and perhaps more importantly where it comes from and why, although it doesn’t pretend to answer all or any of these questions.
   It may, however, help to explain why Gandalf never got married and why Merlin was a man. Because this is also a story about sex, although probably not in the athletic, tumbling, count-the-legs-and-divide-by-two sense unless the characters get totally beyond the author’s control. They might.
   However, it is primarily a story about a world. Here it comes now. Watch closely, the special effects are quite expensive.
   A bass note sounds. It is a deep, vibrating chord that hints that the brass section may break in at any moment with a fanfare for the cosmos, because the scene is the blackness of deep space with a few stars glittering like the dandruff on the shoulders of God.
   Then it comes into view overhead, bigger than the biggest, most unpleasantly armed starcruiser in the imagination of a three-ring film-maker: a turtle, ten thousand miles long. It is Great A’Tuin, one of the rare astrochelonians from a universe where things are less as they are and more like people imagine them to be, and it carries on its meteor-pocked shell four giant elephants who bear on their enormous shoulders the great round wheel of the Discworld.
   As the viewpoint swings around, the whole of the world can be seen by the light of its tiny orbiting sun. There are continents, archipelagos, seas, deserts, mountain ranges and even a tiny central ice cap. The inhabitants of this place, it is obvious, won’t have any truck with global theories. Their world, bounded by an encircling ocean that falls forever into space in one long waterfall, is as round and flat as a geological pizza, although without the anchovies.
   A world like that, which exists only because the gods enjoy a joke, must be a place where magic can survive. And sex too, of course.

   He came walking through the thunderstorm and you could tell he was a wizard, partly because of the long cloak and careen staff but mainly because the raindrops were stopping several feet from his head, and steaming.
   It was good thunderstorm country, up here in the Ramtop Mountains, a country of jagged peaks, dense forests and little river valleys so deep the daylight had no sooner reached the bottom than it was time to leave again. Ragged wisps of cloud clung to the lesser peaks below the mountain trail along which the wizard slithered and slid. A few slot-eyed goats watched him with mild interest. It doesn’t take a lot to interest goats.
   Sometimes he would stop and throw his heavy staff into the air. It always came down pointing the same way and the wizard would sigh, pick it up, and continue his squelchy progress.
   The storm walked around the hills on legs of lightning, shouting and grumbling.
   The wizard disappeared around the bend in the track and the goats went back to their damp grazing.
   Until something else caused them to look up. They stiffened, their eyes widening, their nostrils flaring.
   This was strange, because there was nothing on the path. But the goats still watched it pass by until it was out of sight.

   There was a village tucked in a narrow valley between steep woods. It wasn’t a large village, and wouldn’t have shown up on a map of the mountains. It barely showed up on a map of the village.
   It was, in fact, one of those places that exist merely so that people can have come from them. The universe is littered with them: hidden villages, windswept little towns under wide skies, isolated cabins on chilly mountains, whose only mark on history is to be the incredibly ordinary place where something extraordinary started to happen. Often there is no more than a little plaque to reveal that, against all ecological probability, someone very famous was born halfway up a wall.
   Mist curled between the houses as the wizard crossed a narrow bridge over the swollen stream and made his way to the village smithy, although the two facts had nothing to do with one another. The mist would have curled anyway: it was experienced mist and had got curling down to a fine art.
   The smithy was fairly crowded, of course. A smithy is one place where you can depend on finding a good fire and someone to talk to. Several villagers were lounging in the warm shadows but, as the wizard approached, they sat up expectantly and tried to look intelligent, generally with indifferent success.
   The smith didn’t feel the need to be quite so subservient. He nodded at the wizard, but it was a greeting between equals, or at least between equals as far as the smith was concerned. After all, any halfway competent blacksmith has more than a nodding acquaintance with magic, or at least likes to think he has.
   The wizard bowed. A white cat that had been sleeping by the furnace woke up and watched him carefully.
   “What is the name of this place, sir?” said the wizard.
   The blacksmith shrugged.
   “Bad Ass,” he said.
   “Bad—?”
   “Ass,” repeated the blacksmith, his tone defying anyone to make something of it.
   The wizard considered this.
   “A name with a story behind it,” he said at last, “which were circumstances otherwise I would be pleased to hear. But I would like to speak to you, smith, about your son.”
   “Which one?” said the smith, and the hangers-on sniggered. The wizard smiled.
   “You have seven sons, do you not? And you yourself were an eighth son?”
   The smith’s face stiffened. He turned to the other villagers.
   “All right, the rain’s stopping,” he said. “Piss off, the lot of you. Me and—” he looked at the wizard with raised eyebrows.
   “Drum Billet,” said the wizard.
   “Me and Mr. Billet have things to talk about.” He waved his hammer vaguely and, one after another, craning over their shoulders in case the wizard did anything interesting, the audience departed.
   The smith drew a couple of stools from under a bench. He took a bottle out of a cupboard by the water tank and poured a couple of very small glasses of clear liquid.
   The two men sat and watched the rain and the mist rolling over the bridge. Then the smith said: “I know what son you mean. Old Granny is up with my wife now. Eighth son of an eighth son, of course. It did cross my mind but I never gave it much thought, to be honest. Well, well. A wizard in the family, eh?”
   “You catch on very quickly,” said Billet. The white cat jumped down from its perch, sauntered across the floor and vaulted into the wizard’s lap, where it curled up. His thin fingers stroked it absentmindedly.
   “Well, well,” said the smith again. “A wizard in Bad Ass, eh?”
   “Possibly, possibly,” said Billet. “Of course, he’ll have to go to University first. He may do very well, of course.”
   The smith considered the idea from all angles, and decided he liked it a lot. A thought struck him.
   “Hang on,” he said. “I’m trying to remember what my father told me. A wizard who knows he’s going to die can sort of pass on his sort of wizardness to a sort of successor, right?”
   “I have never heard it put so succinctly, yes,” said the wizard.
   “So you’re going to sort of die?”
   “Oh yes.” The cat purred as the fingers tickled it behind the ear.
   The smith looked embarrassed. “When?”
   The wizard thought for a moment. “In about six minutes’ time.”
   “Oh.”
   “Don’t worry,” said the wizard. “I’m quite looking forward to it, to tell you the truth. I’ve heard it’s quite painless.”
   The blacksmith considered this. “Who told you?” he said at last.
   The wizard pretended not to hear him. He was watching the bridge, looking for tell-tale turbulence in the mist.
   “Look,” said the smith. “You’d better tell me how we go about bringing up a wizard, you see, because there isn’t a wizard in these parts and—” .
   “It will all sort itself out,” said Billet pleasantly. “The magic has guided me to you and the magic will take care of everything. It usually does. Did I hear a cry?”
   The blacksmith looked at the ceiling. Above the splash of the rain he could make out the sound of a pair of new lungs at full bore.
   The wizard smiled. “Have him brought down here,” he said.
   The cat sat up and looked interestedly at the forge’s wide doorway. As the smith called excitedly up the stairs it jumped down and padded slowly across the floor, purring like a bandsaw.
   A tall white-haired woman appeared at the bottom of the stairs, clutching a bundle in a blanket. The smith hurried her over to where the wizard sat.
   “But—”she began.
   “This is very important,” said the smith importantly. “What do we do now, sir?”
   The wizard held up his staff. It was man-high and nearly as thick as his wrist, and covered with carvings that seemed to change as the smith looked at them, exactly as if they didn’t want him to see what they were.
   “The child must hold it,” said Drum Billet. The smith nodded, and fumbled in the blanket until he located a tiny pink hand. He guided it gently to the wood. It gripped it tightly.
   “But—”said the midwife.
   “It’s all right, Granny, I know what I’m about. She’s a witch, sir, don’t mind her. Right,” said the smith. “Now what?”
   The wizard was silent.
   “What do we don—”the smith began, and stopped. He leaned down to look at the old wizard’s face. Billet was smiling, but it was anyone’s guess what the joke was.
   The smith pushed the baby back into the arms of the frantic midwife. Then, as respectfully as possible, he unpried the thin, pale fingers from the staff.
   It had a strange, greasy feel, like static electricity. The wood itself was almost black, but the carvings were slightly lighter, and hurt the eyes if you tried to make out precisely what they were supposed to be.
   “Are you pleased with yourself?” said the midwife.
   “Eh? Oh. Yes. As a matter of fact, yes. Why?”
   She twitched aside a fold of the blanket. The smith looked down, and swallowed.
   “No,” he whispered. “He said—”
   “And what would he know about it?” sneered Granny.
   “But he said it would be a son!”
   “Doesn’t look like a son to me, laddie.”
   The smith flopped down on his stool, his head in his hands.
   “What have I done?” he moaned.
   “You’ve given the world its first female wizard,” said the midwife. “Whosa itsywitsy, den?”
   “What?”
   “I was talking to the baby.”
   The white cat purred and arched its back as if it was rubbing up against the legs of an old friend. Which was odd, because there was no one there.

   “I was foolish,” said a voice in tones no mortal could hear. “I assumed the magic would know what it was doing.”
   PERHAPS IT DOES.
   “If only I could do something . . . .”
   THERE IS NO GOING BACK. THERE IS NO GOING BACK, said the deep, heavy voice like the closing of crypt doors.
   The wisp of nothingness that was Drum Billet thought for a while.
   “But she’s going to have a lot of problems.”
   THAT’S WHAT LIFE IS ALL ABOUT. SO I’M TOLD. I WOULDN’T KNOW, OF COURSE.
   “What about reincarnation?”
   Death hesitated.
   YOU WOULDN’T LIKE IT, he said. TAKE IT FROM ME.
   “I’ve heard that some people do it all the time.”
   YOU’VE GOT TO BE TRAINED TO IT. YOU’VE GOT TO START OFF SMALL AND WORK UP. YOU’VE NO IDEA HOW HORRIBLE IT IS TO BE AN ANT.
   “It’s bad?”
   YOU WOULDN’T BELIEVE IT. AND WITH YOUR KARMA AN ANT IS TOO MUCH TO EXPECT.
   The baby had been taken back to its mother and the smith sat disconsolately watching the rain.
   Drum Billet scratched the cat behind its ears and thought about his life. It had been a long one, that was one of the advantages of being a wizard, and he’d done a lot of things he hadn’t always felt good about. It was about time that ….
   I HAVEN’T GOT ALL DAY, YOU KNOW, said Death, reproachfully.
   The wizard looked down at the cat and realized for the first time how odd it looked now.
   The living often don’t appreciate how complicated the world looks when you are dead, because while death frees the mind from the straitjacket of three dimensions it also cuts it away from Time, which is only another dimension. So while the cat that rubbed up against his invisible legs was undoubtedly the same cat that he had seen a few minutes before, it was also quite clearly a tiny kitten and a fat, half-blind old moggy and every stage in between. All at once. Since it had started off small it looked like a white, catshaped carrot, a description that will have to do until people invent proper four-dimensional adjectives.
   Death’s skeletal hand tapped Billet gently on the shoulder.
   COME AWAY, MY SON.
   “There’s nothing I can do?”
   LIFE IS FOR THE LIVING. ANYWAY, YOU’VE GIVEN HER YOUR STAFF.
   “Yes. There is that.”

   The midwife’s name was Granny Weatherwax. She was a witch. That was quite acceptable in the Ramtops, and no one had a bad word to say about witches. At least, not if he wanted to wake up in the morning the same shape as he went to bed.
   The smith was still staring gloomily at the rain when she came back down the stairs and clapped a warty hand on his shoulder.
   He looked up at her.
   “What shall I do, Granny?” he said, unable to keep the pleading out of his voice.
   “What have you done with the wizard?”
   “I put him out in the fuel store. Was that right?”
   “It’ll do for now,” she said briskly. “And now you must burn the staff.”
   They both turned to stare at the heavy staff, which the smith had propped in the forge’s darkest corner. It almost appeared to be looking back at them.
   “But it’s magical,” he whispered.
   “Well?”
   “Will it burn?”
   “Never knew wood that didn’t.”
   “It doesn’t seem right!”
   Granny Weatherwax swung shut the big doors and turned to him angrily.
   “Now you listen to me, Gordo Smith!” she said. “Female wizards aren’t right either! It’s the wrong kind of magic for women, is wizard magic, it’s all books and stars and jommetry. She’d never grasp it. Whoever heard of a female wizard?”
   “There’s witches,” said the smith uncertainly. “And enchantresses too, I’ve heard.”
   “Witches is a different thing altogether,” snapped Granny Weatherwax. “It’s magic out of the ground, not out of the sky, and men never could get the hang of it. As for enchantresses,” she added. “They’re no better than they should be. You take it from me, just burn the staff, bury the body and don’t let on it ever happened.”
   Smith nodded reluctantly, crossed over to the forge, and pumped the bellows until the sparks flew. He went back for the staff.
   It wouldn’t move.
   “It won’t move!”
   Sweat stood out of his brow as he tugged at the wood. It remained unco-operatively immobile.
   “Here, let me try,” said Granny, and reached past him. There was a snap and a smell of scorched tin.
   Smith ran across the forge, whimpering slightly, to where Granny had landed upside down against the opposite wall.
   “Are you all right?”
   She opened two eyes like angry diamonds and said, “I see. That’s the way of it, is it?”
   “The way of what?” said Smith, totally bewildered.
   “Help me up, you fool. And fetch me a chopper.”
   The tone of her voice suggested that it would be a very good idea not to disobey. Smith rummaged desperately among the junk at the back of the forge until he found an old double-headed axe.
   “Right. Now take off your apron.”
   “Why? What do you intend to do?” said the smith, who was beginning to lose his grip on events. Granny gave an exasperated sigh.
   “It’s leather, you idiot. I’m going to wrap it around the handle. It’ll not catch me the same way twice!”
   Smith struggled out of the heavy leather apron and handed it to her very gingerly. She wrapped it around the axe and made one or two passes in the air. Then, a spiderlike figure in the glow of the nearly incandescent furnace, she stalked across the room and with a grunt of triumph and effort brought the heavy blade sweeping down right in the center of the staff.
   There was a click. There was a noise like a partridge. There was a thud.
   There was silence.
   Smith reached up very slowly, without moving his head, and touched the axe blade. It wasn’t on the axe any more. It had buried itself in the door by his head, taking a tiny nick out of his ear.
   Granny stood looking slightly blurred from hitting an absolutely immovable object, and stared at the stub of wood in her hands.
   “Rrrrightttt,” she stuttered: “Iiiinnn tthhatttt cccasseee—”
   “No,” said Smith firmly, rubbing his ear. “Whatever it is you’re going to suggest, no. Leave it. I’ll pile some stuff around it. No one’ll notice. Leave it. It’s just a stick.”
   “Just a stick?”
   “Have you got any better ideas? Ones that won’t take my head off?”
   She glared at the staff, which appeared not to notice.
   “Not right now,” she admitted. “But you just give me time—”
   “All right, all right. Anyway, I’ve got things to do, wizards to bury, you know how it is.”
   Smith took a spade from beside the back door and hesitated.
   “Granny.”
   “What?”
   “Do you know how wizards like to be buried?”
   “Yes! ”
   “Well, how?”
   Granny Weatherwax paused at the bottom of the stairs.
   “Reluctantly.”
   Later, night fell gently as the last of the world’s slow light flowed out of the valley, and a pale, rain-washed moon shone down in a night studded with stars. And in a shadowy orchard behind the forge there was the occasional clink of a spade or a muffled curse.
   In the cradle upstairs the world’s first female wizard dreamed of nothing much.
   The white cat lay half-asleep on its private ledge near the furnace. The only sound in the warm dark forge was the crackle of the coals as they settled down under the ash.
   The staff stood in the corner, where it wanted to be, wrapped in shadows that were slightly blacker than shadows normally are.
   Time passed, which, basically, is its job.
   There was a faint tinkle, and a swish of air. After a while the cat sat up and watched with interest.

   Dawn came. Up here in the Ramtops dawn was always impressive, especially when a storm had cleared the air. The valley occupied by Bad Ass overlooked a panorama of lesser mountains and foothills, coloured purple and orange in the early morning light that flowed gently over them (because light travels at a dilatory pace in the Disc’s vast magical field) and far off the great plains were still a puddle of shadows. Even further off the sea gave an occasional distant sparkle.
   In fact, from here you could see right to the edge of the world.
   That wasn’t poetic imagery but plain fact, since the world was quite definitely flat and was, furthermore, known to be carried through space on the backs of four elephants that in turn stood on the shell of Great A’Tuin, the Great Sky Turtle.
   Back down there in Bad Ass the village is waking up. The smith has just gone into the forge and found it tidier than it has been for the last hundred years, with all the tools back in their right places, the floor swept and a new fire laid in the furnace. He is sitting on the anvil, which has been moved right across the room, and is watching the staff and is trying to think.

   Nothing much happened for seven years, except that one of the apple trees in the smithy orchard grew perceptibly taller than the others and was frequently climbed by a small girl with brown hair, a gap in her front teeth, and the sort of features that promised to become, if not beautiful, then at least attractively interesting.
   She was named Eskarina, for no particular reason other than that her mother liked the sound of the word, and although Granny Weatherwax kept a careful watch on her she failed to spot any signs of magic whatsoever. It was true that the girl spent more time climbing trees and running around shouting than little girls normally did, but a girl with four older brothers still at home can be excused a lot of things. In fact, the witch began to relax and started to think the magic had not taken hold after all.
   But magic has a habit of lying low, like a rake in the grass.

   Winter came round again, and it was a bad one. The clouds hung around the Ramtops like big fat sheep, filling the gulleys with snow and turning the forests into silent, gloomy caverns. The high passes were closed and the caravans wouldn’t come again until spring. Bad Ass became a little island of heat and light.
   Over breakfast Esk’s mother said: “I’m worried about Granny Weatherwax. She hasn’t been around lately.”
   Smith looked at her over his porridge spoon.
   “I’m not complaining,” he said. “She—”
   “She’s got a long nose,” said Esk.
   Her parents glared at her.
   “There’s no call to make that kind of remark,” said her mother sternly.
   “But father said she’s always poking her—”
   “Eskarina!”
   “But he said—”
   “I said—”
   “Yes, but, he did say that she had—”
   Smith reached down and slapped her. It wasn’t very hard, and he regretted it instantly. The boys got the flat of his hand and occasionally the length of his belt whenever they deserved it. The trouble with his daughter, though, was not ordinary naughtiness but the infuriating way she had of relentlessly pursuing the thread of an argument long after she should have put it down. It always flustered him.
   She burst into tears. Smith stood up, angry and embarrassed at himself, and stumped off to the forge.
   There was a loud crack, and a thud.
   They found him out cold on the floor. Afterwards he always maintained that he’d hit his head on the doorway. Which was odd, because he wasn’t very tall and there had always been plenty of room before, but he was certain that whatever happened had nothing to do with the blur of movement from the forge’s darkest corner.
   Somehow the events set the seal on the day. It became a broken crockery day, a day of people getting under each other’s feet and being peevish. Esk’s mother dropped a jug that had belonged to her grandmother and a whole box of apples in the loft turned out to be moldy. In the forge the furnace went sullen and refused to draw. Jaims, the oldest son, slipped on the packed ice in the road and hurt his arm. The white cat, or possibly one of its descendants, since the cats led a private and complicated life of their own in the hayloft next to the forge, went and climbed up the chimney in the scullery and refused to come down. Even the sky pressed in like an old mattress, and the air felt stuffy, despite the snow.
   Frayed nerves and boredom and bad temper made the air hum like thunderstorm weather.
   “Right! That’s it. That’s just about enough!” shouted Esk’s mother. “Cern, you and Gulta and Esk can go and see how Granny is and -where’s Esk?”
   The two youngest boys looked up from where they were halfheartedly fighting under the table.
   “She went out to the orchard,” said Gulta. “Again.”
   “Go and fetch her in, then, and be off.”
   “But it’s cold!”
   “It’s going to snow again!”
   “It’s only a mile and the road is clear enough and who was so keen to be out in it when we had the first snowfall? Go on with you, and don’t come back till you’re in a better temper.”
   They found Esk sitting in a fork of the big apple tree. The boys didn’t like the tree much. For one thing, it was so covered in mistletoe that it looked green even in midwinter, its fruit was small and went from stomach-twisting sourness to wasp-filled rottenness overnight, and although it looked easy enough to climb it had a habit of breaking twigs and dislodging feet at inconvenient moments. Cern once swore that a branch had twisted just to spill him off. But it tolerated Esk, who used to go and sit in it if she was annoyed or fed up or just wanted to be by herself, and the boys sensed that every brother’s right to gently torture his sister ended at the foot of its trunk. So they threw a snowball at her. It missed.
   “We’re going to see old Weatherwax.”
   “But you don’t have to come.”
   “Because you’ll just slow us down and probably cry anyway.”
   Esk looked down at them solemnly. She didn’t cry a lot, it never seemed to achieve much.
   “If you don’t want me to come then I’ll come,” she said. This sort of thing passes for logic among siblings.
   “Oh, we want you to come,” said Gulta quickly.
   “Very pleased to hear it,” said Esk, dropping on to the packed snow.
   They had a basket containing smoked sausages, preserved eggs and—because their mother was prudent as well as generous—a large jar of peach preserve that no one in the family liked very much. She still made it every year when the little wild peaches were ripe, anyway.
   The people of Bad Ass had learned to live with the long winter snows and the roads out of the village were lined with boards to reduce drifting and, more important, stop travellers from straying. If they lived locally it wouldn’t matter too much if they did, because an unsung genius on the village council several generations previously had come up with the idea of carving markers in every tenth tree in the forest around the village, out to a distance of nearly two miles. It had taken ages, and re-cutting markers was always a job for any man with spare time, but in winters where a blizzard could lose a man within yards of his home many a life had been saved by the pattern of notches found by probing fingers under the clinging snow.
   It was snowing again when they left the road and started up the track where, in summer, the witch’s house nestled in a riot of raspberry thickets and weird witch-growth.
   “No footprints,” said Cern.
   “Except for foxes,” said Gulta. “They say she can turn herself into a fox. Or anything. A bird, even. Anything. That’s how she always knows what’s going on.”
   They looked around cautiously. A scruffy crow was indeed watching them from a distant tree stump.
   “They say there’s a whole family over Crack Peak way that can turn themselves into wolves,” said Gulta, who wasn’t one to leave a promising subject, “because one night someone shot a wolf and next day their auntie was limping with an arrow wound in her leg, and ….
   “I don’t think people can turn themselves into animals,” said Esk, slowly.
   “Oh yes, Miss Clever?”
   “Granny is quite big. If she turned herself into a fox what would happen to all the bits that wouldn’t fit?”
   “She’d just magic them away,” said Cern.
   “I don’t think magic works like that,” said Esk. “You can’t just make things happen, there’s a sort of—like a seesaw thing, if you push one end down, the other end goes up . . . .” Her voice trailed off.
   They gave her a look.
   “I can’t see Granny on a seesaw,” said Gulta. Cern giggled.
   “No, I mean every time something happens, something else has to happen too—I think,” said Esk uncertainly, picking her way around a deeper than usual snowdrift. “Only in the . . . opposite direction.”
   “That’s silly,” said Gulta, “because, look, you remember when that fair came last summer and there was a wizard with it and he made all those birds and things appear out of nothing? I mean it just happened, he just said these words and waved his hands, and it just happened. There weren’t any seesaws.”
   “There was a swing,” said Cern. “And a thing where you had to throw things at things to win things.”
   “And you didn’t hit anything, Gul.”
   “Nor did you, you said the things were stuck to the things so you couldn’t knock them off, you said . . . .”
   Their conversation wandered away like a couple of puppies. Esk listened with half an ear. I know what I mean, she told herself. Magic’s easy, you just find the place where everything is balanced and push. Anyone could do it. There’s nothing magical about it. All the funny words and waving the hands is just . . . it’s only for….
   She stopped, surprised at herself. She knew what she meant. The idea was right up there in the front of her mind. But she didn’t know how to say it in words, even to herself.
   It was a horrible feeling to find things in your head and not know how they fitted. It….
   “Come on, we’ll be all day.”
   She shook her head and hurried after her brothers.
   The witch’s cottage consisted of so many extensions and lean-tos that it was difficult to see what the original building had looked like, or even if there had ever been one. In the summer it was surrounded by dense beds of what Granny loosely called “the Herbs”—strange plants, hairy or squat or twining, with curious flowers or vivid fruits or unpleasantly bulging pods. Only Granny knew what they were all for, and any woodpigeon hungry enough to attack them generally emerged giggling to itself and bumping into things (or, sometimes, never emerged at all.
   Now everything was deep under the snow. A forlorn windsock flapped against its pole. Granny didn’t hold with flying but some of her friends still used broomsticks.
   “It looks deserted,” said Cem.
   “No smoke,” said Gulta.
   The windows look like eyes, thought Esk, but kept it to herself.
   “It’s only Granny’s house,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong.”
   The cottage radiated emptiness. They could feel it. The windows did look like eyes, black and menacing against the snow. And no one in the Ramtops let their fire go out in the winter, as a matter of pride.
   Esk wanted to say “Let’s go home,” but she knew that if she did the boys would run for it. Instead she said, “Mother says there’s a key on a nail in the privy,” and that was nearly as bad. Even an ordinary unknown privy held minor terrors like wasps’ nests, large spiders, mysterious rustling things in the roof and, one very bad winter, a small hibernating bear that caused acute constipation in the family until it was persuaded to bed down in the haybam. A witch’s privy could contain anything.
   “I’ll go and look, shall I?” she added.
   “If you like,” said Gulta airily, almost successfully concealing his relief.
   In fact, when she managed to get the door open against the piled snow, it was neat and clean and contained nothing more sinister than an old almanac, or more precisely about half an old almanac, carefully hung on a nail. Granny had a philosophical objection to reading, but she’d be the last to say that books, especially books with nice thin pages, didn’t have their uses.
   The key shared a ledge by the door with a chrysalis and the stump of a candle. Esk took it gingerly, trying not to disturb the chrysalis, and hurried back to the boys.
   It was no use trying the front door. Front doors in Bad Ass were used only by brides and corpses, and Granny had always avoided becoming either. Around the back the snow was piled in front of the door and no one had broken the ice on the water butt.
   The light was starting to pour out of the sky by the time they dug through to the door and managed to persuade the key to turn.
   Inside, the big kitchen was dark and chilly and smelled only of snow. It was always dark, but they were used to seeing a big fire in the wide chimney and smelling the thick fumes of whatever it was she was boiling up this time, which sometimes gave you a headache or made you see things.
   They wandered around uncertainly, calling, until Esk decided they couldn’t put off going upstairs any longer. The clonk of the thumb-latch on the door to the cramped staircase sounded a lot louder than it ought to.
   Granny was on the bed, with her arms tightly folded across her chest. The tiny window had blown open. Fine snow had blown in across the floor and over the bed.
   Esk stared at the patchwork quilt under the old woman, because there were times when a little detail could expand and fill the whole world. She barely heard Cern start to cry: she remembered lien father, strangely enough, making the quilt two winters before when the snow was almost as bad and there wasn’t much to do in the forge, and how he’d used all kinds of rags that had found their way to Bad Ass from every part of the world, like silk, dilemma leather, water cotton and tharga wool and, of course, since he wasn’t much good at sewing either, the result was a rather strange lumpy thing more like a flat tortoise than a quilt, and her mother had generously decided to give it to Granny last Hogswatchnight, and ….
   “Is she dead?” asked Gulta, as if Esk was an expert in these things.
   Esk stared up at Granny Weatherwax. The old woman’s face looked thin and grey. Was that how dead people looked? Shouldn’t her chest be going up and down?
   Gulta pulled himself together.
   “We ought to go and get someone and we ought to go now because it will get dark in a minute,” he said flatly. “But Cern will stay here.”
   His brother looked at him in horror.
   “What for?” he said.
   “Someone has got to stay with dead people,” said Gulta. “Remember when old Uncle Derghart died and Father had to go and sit up with all the candles and things all night? Otherwise something nasty comes and takes your soul off to . . . to somewhere,” he ended lamely. “And then people come back and haunt you.”
   Cern opened his mouth to start to cry again. Esk said hurriedly, “I’ll stay. I don’t mind. It’s only Granny.”
   Gulta looked at her in relief.
   “Light some candles or something,” he said. “I think that’s what you’re supposed to do. And then—”
   There was a scratching from the windowsill. A crow had landed, and stood there blinking suspiciously at them. Gulta shouted and threw his hat at it. It flew off with a reproachful caw and he shut the window.
   “I’ve seen it around here before,” he said. “I think Granny feeds it. Fed it,” he corrected himself. “Anyway, we’ll be back with people, we’ll be hardly any time. Come on, Ce.”
   They clattered down the dark stairs. Esk saw them out of the house and bolted the door behind them.
   The sun was a red ball above the mountains, and there were already a few early stars out.
   She wandered around the dark kitchen until she found a scrap of dip candle and a tinderbox. After a great deal of effort she managed to light the candle and stood it on the table, although it didn’t really light the room, it simply peopled the darkness with shadows. Then she found Granny’s rocking chair by the cold fireplace, and settled down to wait.
   Time passed. Nothing happened.
   Then there was a tapping at the window. Esk took up the candle stub and peered through the thick round panes.
   A beady yellow eye blinked back at her.
   The candle guttered, and went out.
   She stood stock still, hardly breathing. The tapping started again, and then stopped. There was a short silence, and then the doorlatch rattled.
   Something nasty comes, the boys had said.
   She felt her way back across the room until she nearly tripped over the rocking chair, and dragged it back and wedged it as best she could in front of the door. The latch gave a final clonk and went silent.
   Esk waited, listening until the silence roared in her ears. Then something started to bang against the little window in the scullery, softly but insistently. After a while it stopped. A moment later it started again in the bedroom above her- a faint scrabbling noise, a claw kind of noise.
   Esk felt that bravery was called for, but on a night like this bravery lasted only as long as a candle stayed alight. She felt her way back across the dark kitchen, eyes tightly shut, until she reached the door.
   There was a thump from the fireplace as a big lump of soot fell down, and when she heard the desperate scratchings coming from the chimney she slipped the bolts, threw open the door and darted out into the night.
   The cold struck like a knife. Frost had put a crust on the snow. She didn’t care where she was going, but quiet terror gave her a burning determination to get there as fast as she could.

   Inside the cottage the crow landed heavily in the fireplace, surrounded by soot and muttering irritably to itself. It hopped into the shadows, and a moment later there was the bang of the latch of the stairway door and the sound of fluttering on the stairs.

   Esk reached up as high as she could and felt around the tree for the marker. This time she was lucky, but the pattern of dots and grooves told her she was over a mile from the village and had been running in the wrong direction.

There was a cheese-rind moon and a sprinkling of stars, small and bright and pitiless. The forest around her was a pattern of black shadows and pale snow and, she was aware, not all the shadows were standing still.
   Everyone knew there were wolves in the mountains, because on some nights their howls echoed down from the high Tops, but they seldom came near the village—the modern wolves were the offspring of ancestors that had survived because they had learned that human meat had sharp edges.
   But the weather was hard, and this pack was hungry enough to forget all about natural selection.
   Esk remembered what all the children were told. Climb a tree. Light a fire. When all else fails, find a stick and at least hurt them. Never try to outrun them.
   The tree behind her was a beech, smooth and unclimbable.
   Esk watched a long shadow detach itself from a pool of darkness in front of her, and move a little closer. She knelt down, tired, frightened, unable to think, and scrabbled under the burning-cold snow for a stick.

   Granny Weatherwax opened her eyes and stared at the ceiling, which was cracked and bulged like a tent.
   She concentrated on remembering that she had arms, not wings, and didn’t need to hop. It was always wise to lie down for a bit after a borrow, to let one’s mind get used to one’s body, but she knew she didn’t have the time.
   “Drat the child,” she muttered, and tried to fly on to the bedrail. The crow, who had been through all this dozens of times before and who considered, insofar as birds can consider anything, which is a very short distance indeed, that a steady diet of bacon rinds and choice kitchen scraps and a warm roost for the night was well worth the occasional inconvenience of letting Granny share its head, watched her with mild interest.
   Granny found her boots and thumped down the stairs, sternly resisting the urge to glide. The door was wide open and there was already a drift of fine snow on the floor.
   “Oh, bugger,” she said. She wondered if it was worth trying to find Esk’s mind, but human minds were never so sharp and clear as animal minds and anyway the overmind of the forest itself made impromptu searching as hard as listening for a waterfall in a thunderstorm. But even without looking she could feel the packmind of the wolves, a sharp, rank feeling that filled the mouth with the taste of blood.
   She could just make out the small footprints in the crust, half filled with fresh snow. Cursing and muttering, Granny Weatherwax pulled her shawl around her and set out.

   The white cat awoke from its private ledge in the forge when it heard the sounds coming from the darkest corner. Smith had carefully shut the big doors behind him when he went off with the nearly-hysterical boys, and the cat watched with interest as a thin shadow prodded at the lock and tested the hinges.
   The doors were oak, hardened by heat and time, but that didn’t prevent them being blown right across the street.
   Smith heard a sound in the sky as he hurried along the track. So did Granny. It was a determined whirring sound, like the flight of geese, and the snowclouds boiled and twisted as it passed.
   The wolves heard it, too, as it spun low over the treetops and hurtled down into the clearing. But they heard it far too late.
   Granny Weatherwax didn’t have to follow the footprints now. She aimed herself for the distant flashes of weird light, the strange swishing and thumping, and the howls of pain and terror. A couple of wolves bolted past her with their ears flattened in grim determination to have it away on their paws no matter what stood in their way.
   There was the crackle of breaking branches. Something big and heavy landed in a fir tree by Granny and crashed, whimpering, into the snow. Another wolf passed her in a flat trajectory at about head height and bounced off a tree-trunk.
   There was silence.
   Granny pushed her way between the snow-covered branches.
   She could see that the snow was flattened in a white circle. A few wolves lay at its edges, either dead or wisely deciding to make no move.
   The staff stood upright in the snow and Granny got the feeling it was turning to face her as she walked carefully past it.
   There was also a small heap in the centre of the circle, curled tightly up inside itself. Granny knelt down with some effort and reached out gently.
   The staff moved. It was little more than a tremble, but her hand stopped just before it touched Esk’s shoulder. Granny glared up at the wooden carvings, and dared it to move again.
   The air thickened. Then the staff seemed to back away while not moving, while at the same time something quite indefinable made it absolutely clear to the old witch that as far as the staff was concerned this -wasn’t a defeat, it was merely a tactical consideration, and it wouldn’t like her to think she had won in any way, because she hadn’t.
   Esk gave a shudder. Granny patted her vaguely.
   “It’s me, little one. It’s only old Granny.”
   The hump didn’t uncurl.
   Granny bit her lip. She was never quite certain about children, thinking of them—when she thought about them at all—as coming somewhere between animals and people. She understood babies. You put milk in one end and kept the other end as clean as possible. Adults were even easier, because they did the feeding and cleaning themselves. But in between was a world of experience that she had never really enquired about. As far as she was aware, you just tried to stop them catching anything fatal and hoped that it would all turn out all right.
   Granny, in fact, was at a loss, but she knew she had to do something.
   “Didda nasty wolfie fwiten us, den?” she hazarded.
   For quite the wrong reasons, this seemed to work. From the depths of the ball a muffled voice said: “I am eight, you know.”
   “People who are eight don’t curl up in the middle of the snow,” said Granny, feeling her way through the intricacies of adult-child conversation.
   The ball didn’t answer.
   “I’ve probably got some milk and biscuits at home,” Granny ventured.
   There was no perceptible effect.
   “Eskarina Smith, if you don’t behave this minute I will give you such a smack!”
   Esk poked her head out cautiously.
   “There’s no need to be like that,” she said.
   When Smith reached the cottage Granny had just arrived, leading Esk by the hand. The boys peered around from behind him.
   “Um,” said Smith, not quite aware of how to begin a conversation with someone who was supposed to be dead. “They, um, told me you were—ill.” He turned and glared at his sons.
   “I was just having a rest and I must have dozed off. I sleeps very sound.”
   “Yes,” said Smith, uncertainly. “Well. All’s well, then. What’s up with Esk? ”
   “She took a bit of a fright,” said Granny, squeezing the girl’s hand. “Shadows and whatnot. She needs a good warm. I was going to put her in my bed, she’s a bit mazed, if that’s all right with you.”
   Smith wasn’t absolutely sure that it was all right with him. But he was quite sure that his wife, like every other woman in the village, held Granny Weatherwax in solemn regard, even in awe, and that if he started to object he would rapidly get out of his depth.
   “Fine, fine,” he said, “if it’s no trouble. I’ll send along for her in the morning, shall I?”
   “That’s right,” said Granny. “I’d invite you in, but there’s me without a fire—”
   “No, no, that’s all right,” said Smith hurriedly. “I’ve got my supper waiting. Drying up,” he added, looking down at Gulta, who opened his mouth to say something and wisely thought better of it.
   When they had gone, with the sound of the two boys’ protests ringing out among the trees, Granny opened the door, pushed Esk inside, and bolted it behind them. She took a couple of candles from her store above the dresser and lit them. Then she pulled some old but serviceable wool blankets, still smelling of anti-moth herbs, from an old chest, wrapped Esk in them and sat her in the rocking chair.
   She got down on her knees, to an accompaniment of clicks and grunts, and started to lay the fire. It was a complicated business involving dry fungus punk, wood shavings, bits of split twig and much puffing and swearing.
   Esk said: “You don’t have to do it like that, Granny.”
   Granny stiffened, and looked at the fireback. It was a rather nice one Smith had cast for her, years ago, with an owl-and-bat motif. Currently, though, she wasn’t interested in the design.
   “Oh yes?” she said, her voice dead-level. “You know of a better way, do you?”
   “You could magic it alight.”
   Granny paid great attention to arranging bits of twig on the reluctant flames.
   “How would I do that, pray?” she said, apparently addressing her remarks to the fireback.
   “Er,” said Esk, “I … I can’t remember. But you must know anyway, don’t you? Everyone knows you can do magic.”
   “There’s magic,” said Granny, “and then again, there’s magic. The important thing, my girl, is to know what magic is for and what it isn’t for. And you can take it from me, it was never intended for lighting fires, you can be absolutely certain of that. If the Creator had meant us to use magic for lighting fires, then he wouldn’t have given us—er, matches.”
   “But could you light a fire with magic?” said Esk, as Granny slung an ancient black kettle on its hook. “I mean, if you wanted to. If it was allowed.”
   “Maybe,” said Granny, who couldn’t: fire had no mind, it wasn’t alive, and they were two of the three reasons.
   “You could light it much better.”
   “If a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly,” said Granny, fleeing into aphorisms, the last refuge of an adult under siege.
   “Yes, but—”
   “But me no buts.”
   Granny rummaged in a dark wooden box on the dresser. She prided herself on her unrivalled knowledge of the properties of Ramtops herbage—none knew better than she the many uses of Earwort, Maiden’s Wish and Love-Lies-Oozing—but there were times when she had to resort to her small stock of jealously traded and carefully hoarded medicines from Forn Parts (which as far as she was concerned was anywhere further than a day’s journey) to achieve the desired effect.
   She shredded some dry red leaves into a mug, topped it up with honey and hot water from the kettle, and pushed it into Esk’s hands. Then she put a large round stone under the grate later on, wrapped in a scrap of blanket, it would make a bedwarmer and, with a stern injunction to the girl not to stir from the chair, went out into the scullery.
   Esk drummed her heels on the chair legs and sipped the drink. It had a strange, peppery taste. She wondered what it was. She’d tasted Granny’s brews before, of course, with a greater or lesser amount of honey in them depending on whether she thought you were making too much of a fuss, and Esk knew that she was famous throughout the mountains for special potions for illnesses that her mother—and some young women too, once in a while -just hinted at with raised eyebrows and lowered voices ….
   When Granny came back she was asleep. She didn’t remember being put to bed, or Granny bolting the windows.
   Granny Weatherwax went back downstairs and pulled her rocking chair closer to the fire.
   There was something there, she told herself, lurking away in the child’s mind. She didn’t like to think about what it was, but she remembered what had happened to the wolves. And all that about lighting fires with magic. Wizards did that, it was one of the first things they learned.
   Granny sighed. There was only one way to be sure, and she was getting rather old for this sort of thing.
   She picked up the candle and went out through the scullery into the lean-to that housed her goats. They watched her without fear, each sitting in its pen like a furry blob, three mouths working rhythmically on the day’s hay. The air smelled warm and slightly flatulent.
   Up in the rafters was a small owl, one of a number of creatures who found that living with Granny was worth the occasional inconvenience. It came to her hand at a word, and she stroked its bullet head thoughtfully as she looked for somewhere comfortable to lie. A pile of hay it would have to be.
   She blew out the candle and lay back, with the owl perched on her finger.
   The goats chewed, burped and swallowed their way through their cozy night. They made the only sound in the building.
   Granny’s body stilled. The owl felt her enter its mind, and graciously made room. Granny knew she would regret this, Borrowing twice in one day would leave her good for nothing in the morning, and with a terrible desire to eat mice. Of course, when she was younger she thought nothing of it, running with the stags, hunting with the foxes, learning the strange dark ways of the moles, hardly spending a night in her own body. But it was getting harder now, especially coming back. Maybe the time would come when she couldn’t get back, maybe the body back home would be so much dead flesh, and maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad way of it, at that.
   This was the sort of thing wizards could never know. If it occurred to them to enter a creature’s mind they’d do it like a thief, not out of wickedness but because it simply wouldn’t occur to them to do it any other way, the daft buggers. And what good would it do to take over an owl’s body? You couldn’t fly, you needed to spend a lifetime learning. But the gentle way was to ride in its mind, steering it as gently as a breeze stirs a leaf.
   The owl stirred, fluttered up on to the little windowsill, and glided silently into the night.
   The clouds had cleared and the thin moon made the mountains gleam. Granny peered out through owl eyes as she sped silently between the ranks of trees. This was the only way to travel, once a body had the way of it! She liked Borrowing birds best of all, using them to explore the high, hidden valleys where no one went, the secret lakes between black cliffs, the tiny walled fields on the scraps of flat ground, tucked on the sheer rock faces, that were the property of hidden and secretive beings. Once she had ridden with the geese that passed over the mountains every spring and autumn, and had got the shock of her life when she nearly went beyond range of returning.
   The owl broke out of the forest and skimmed across the rooftops of the village, alighting in a shower of snow on the biggest apple tree in Smith’s orchard. It was heavy with mistletoe.
   She knew she was right as soon as her claws touched the bark. The tree resented her, she could feel it trying to push her away.
   I’m not going, she thought.
   In the silence of the night the tree said, Bully me, then, just because I’m a tree. Typical woman.
   At least you’re useful now, thought Granny. Better a tree than a wizard, eh?
   It’s not such a bad life, thought the tree. Sun. Fresh air. Time to think. Bees, too, in the spring.
   There was something lascivious about the way the tree said “bees” that quite put Granny, who had several hives, off the idea of honey. It was like being reminded that eggs were unborn chickens.
   I’ve come about the girl, Esk, she hissed.
   A promising child, thought the tree, I’m watching her with interest. She likes apples, too.
   You beast, said Granny, shocked.
   What did I say? Pardon me for not breathing, I’m sure.
   Granny sidled closer to the trunk.
   You must let her go, she thought. The magic is starting to come through.
   Already? I’m impressed, said the tree.
   It’s the wrong sort of magic! screeched Granny. It’s wizard magic, not women’s magic! She doesn’t know what it is yet, but it killed a dozen wolves tonight!
   Great! said the tree. Granny hooted with rage.
   Great? Supposing she had been arguing with her brothers, and lost her temper, eh?
   The tree shrugged. Snowflakes cascaded from its branches.
   Then you must train her, it said.
   Train? What do I know from training wizards!
   Then send her to university.
   She’s female! hooted Granny, bouncing up and down on her branch.
   Well? Who says women can’t be wizards?
   Granny hesitated. The tree might as well have asked why fish couldn’t be birds. She drew a deep breath, and started to speak. And stopped. She knew a cutting, incisive, withering and above all a self-evident answer existed. It was just that, to her extreme annoyance, she couldn’t quite bring it to mind.
   Women have never been wizards. It’s against nature. You might as well say that witches can be men.
   If you define a witch as one who worships the pancreative urge, that is, venerates the basic—the tree began, and continued for several minutes. Granny Weatherwax listened in impatient annoyance to phrases like Mother Goddesses and primitive moon worship and told herself that she was well aware of what being a witch was all about, it was about herbs and curses and flying around of nights and generally keeping on the right side of tradition, and it certainly didn’t involve mixing with goddesses, mothers or otherwise, who apparently got up to some very questionable tricks. And when the tree started talking about dancing naked she tried not to listen, because although she was aware that somewhere under her complicated strata of vests and petticoats there was some skin, that didn’t mean to say she approved of it.
   The tree finished its monologue.
   Granny waited until she was quite sure that it wasn’t going to add anything, and said, That’s witchcraft, is it?
   Its theoretical basis, yes.
   You wizards certainly get some funny ideas.
   The tree said, Not a wizard anymore, just a tree.
   Granny ruffled her feathers.
   Well, just you listen to me, Mr. so-called Theoretical Basis Tree, if women were meant to be wizards they’d be able to grow long white beards and she is not going to be a wizard, is that quite clear, wizardry is not the way to use magic, do you hear, it’s nothing but lights and fire and meddling with power and she’ll be having no part of it and good night to you.
   The owl swooped away from the branch. It was only because it would interfere with the flying that Granny wasn’t shaking with rage. Wizards! They talked too much and pinned spells down in books like butterflies but, worst of all, they thought theirs was the only magic worth practicing.
   Granny was absolutely certain of one thing. Women had never been wizards, and they weren’t about to start now.

   She arrived back at the cottage in the pale shank of the night. Her body, at least, was rested after its slumber in the hay, and Granny had hoped to spend a few hours in the rocking chair, putting her thoughts in order. This was the time, when night wasn’t quite over but day hadn’t quite begun, when thoughts stood out bright and clear and without disguise. She….
   The staff was leaning against the wall, by the dresser.
   Granny stood quite still.
   “I see", she said at last. “So that’s the way of it, is it? In my own house, too?”
   Moving very slowly, she walked over to the inglenook, threw a couple of split logs on to the embers of the fire, and pumped the bellows until the flames roared up the chimney.
   When she was satisfied she turned, muttered a few precautionary protective spells under her breath, and grabbed the staff. It didn’t resist; she nearly fell over. But now she had it in her hands, and felt the tingle of it, the distinctive thunderstorm crackle of the magic in it, and she laughed.
   It was as simple as this, then. There was no fight in it now.
   Calling down a curse upon wizards and all their works she raised the staff above her head and brought it down with a clang across the firedogs, over the hottest part of the fire.
   Esk screamed. The sound bounced down through the bedroom floorboards and scythed through the dark cottage.
   Granny was old and tired and not entirely clear about things after a long day, but to survive as a witch requires an ability to jump to very large conclusions and as she stared at the staff in the flames and heard the scream her hands were already reaching for the big black kettle. She upended it over the fire, dragged the staff out of the cloud of steam, and ran upstairs, dreading what she might see.
   Esk was sitting up in the narrow bed, unsinged but shrieking. Granny took the child in her arms and tried to comfort her; she wasn’t sure how one went about it, but a distracted patting on the back and vague reassuring noises seemed to work, and the screams became wails and, eventually, sobs. Here and there Granny could pick out words like “fire” and “hot", and her mouth set in a thin, bitter line.
   Finally she settled the child down, tucked her in, and crept quietly down stairs.
   The staff was back against the wall. She was not surprised to see that the fire hadn’t marked it at all.
   Granny turned her rocking chair to face it, and sat down with her chin in her hand and an expression of grim determination.
   Presently the chair began to rock, of its own accord. It was the only sound in a silence that thickened and spread and filled the room like a terrible dark fog

Next morning, before Esk got up, Granny hid the staff in the thatch, well out of harm’s way.
   Esk ate her breakfast and drank a pint of goat’s milk without the least sign of the events of the last twenty-four hours. It was the first time she had been inside Granny’s cottage for more than a brief visit, and while the old woman washed the dishes and milked the goats she made the most of her implied license to explore.
   She found that life in the cottage wasn’t entirely straightforward. There was the matter of the goats’ names, for example.
   “But they’ve got to have names!” she said. “Everything’s got a name.”
   Granny looked at her around the pear-shaped flanks of the head nanny, while the milk squirted into the low pail.
   “I daresay they’ve got names in Goat,” she said vaguely. “What do they want names in Human for?”
   “Well,” said Esk, and stopped. She thought for a bit. “How do you make them do what you want, then?”
   “They just do, and when they want me they holler.”
   Esk gravely gave the head goat a wisp of hay. Granny watched her thoughtfully. Goats did have names for themselves, she well knew: there was “goat who is my kid", “goat who is my mother", “goat who is herd leader", and half a dozen other names not least of which was “goat who is this goat". They had a complicated herd system and four stomachs and a digestive system that sounded very busy on still nights, and Granny had always felt that calling all this names like Buttercup was an insult to a noble animal.
   “Esk? " she said, making up her mind.
   “Yes?”
   “What would you like to be when you grow up?”
   Esk looked blank. “Don’t know.”
   “Well,” said Granny, her hands still milking, “what do you think you will do when you are grown up?”
   “Don’t know. Get married, I suppose.”
   “Do you want to?”
   Esk’s lips started to shape themselves around the D, but she caught Granny’s eye and stopped, and thought.
   “All the grown ups I know are married,” she said at last, and thought some more. “Except you,” she added, cautiously.
   “That’s true,” said Granny.
   “Didn’t you want to get married?”
   It was Granny’s turn to think.
   “Never got around to it,” she said at last. “Too many other things to do, you see.”
   “Father says you’re a witch,” said Esk, chancing her arm.
   “I am that.”
   Esk nodded. In the Ramtops witches were accorded a status similar to that which other cultures gave to nuns, or tax collectors, or cesspit cleaners. That is to say, they were respected, sometimes admired, generally applauded for doing a job which logically had to be-done, but people never felt quite comfortable in the same room with them.
   Granny said, “Would you like to learn the witching?”
   “Magic, you mean?” asked Esk, her eyes lighting up.
   “Yes, magic. But not firework magic. Real magic.”
   “Can you fly?”
   “There’s better things than flying.”
   “And I can learn them?”
   “If your parents say yes.”
   Esk sighed. “My father won’t.”
   “Then I shall have a word with him,” said Granny.

   “Now you just listen to me, Gordo Smith!”
   Smith backed away across his forge, hands half-raised to ward off the old woman’s fury. She advanced on him, one finger stabbing the air righteously.
   “I brought you into the world, you stupid man, and you’ve got no more sense in you now than you had then—”
   “But—” Smith tried, dodging around the anvil.
   “The magic’s found her! Wizard magic! Wrong magic, do you understand? It was never intended for her!”
   “Yes, but—”
   “Have you any idea of what it can do?”
   Smith sagged. “No.”
   Granny paused, and deflated a little.
   “No,” she repeated, more softly. “No, you wouldn’t.”
   She sat down on the anvil and tried to think calm thoughts.
   “Look. Magic has a sort of—life of its own. That doesn’t matter, because—anyway, you see, wizard magic—” she looked up at his big, blank expression and tried again. “Well, you know cider?”
   Smith nodded. He felt he was on firmer ground here, but he wasn’t certain of where it was going to lead.
   “And then there’s the ticker. Applejack,” said the witch. The smith nodded. Everyone in Bad Ass made applejack in the winter, by leaving cider tubs outside overnight and taking out the ice until a tiny core of alcohol was left.
   “Well, you can drink lots of cider and you just feel better and that’s it, isn’t it?”
   The smith nodded again.
   “But applejack, you drink that in little mugs and you don’t drink a lot and you don’t drink it often, because it goes right to your head?”
   The smith nodded again and, aware that he wasn’t making a major contribution to the dialogue, added, “That’s right.”
   “That’s the difference,” said Granny.
   “The difference from what?”
   Granny sighed. “The difference between witch magic and wizard magic,” she said. “And it’s found her, and if she doesn’t control it, then there are those who will control her. Magic can be a sort of door, and there are unpleasant things on the other side. Do you understand?”
   The smith nodded. He didn’t really understand, but he correctly surmised that if he revealed this fact Granny would start going into horrible details.
   “She’s strong in her mind and it might take a while,” said Granny. “But sooner or later they’ll challenge her.”
   Smith picked up a hammer from his bench, looked at it as though he had never seen it before, and put it down again.
   “But,” he said, “if it’s wizard magic she’s got, learning witchery won’t be any good, will it? You said they’re different.”
   “They’re both magic. If you can’t learn to ride an elephant, you can at least learn to ride a horse.”
   “What’s an elephant?”
   “A kind of badger,” said Granny. She hadn’t maintained forest credibility for forty years by ever admitting ignorance.
   The blacksmith sighed. He knew he was beaten. His wife had made it clear that she favored the idea and, now that he came to think about it, there were some advantages. After all, Granny wouldn’t last forever, and being father to the area’s only witch might not be too bad, at that.
   “All right,” he said.

   And so, as the winter turned and started the long, reluctant climb towards spring, Esk spent days at a time with Granny Weatherwax, learning witch craft.
   It seemed to consist mainly of things to remember.
   The lessons were quite practical. There was cleaning the kitchen table and Basic Herbalism. There was mucking out the goats and The Uses of Fungi. There was doing the washing and The Summoning of the Small Gods. And there was always tending the big copper still in the scullery and The Theory and Practice of Distillation. By the time the warm Rim winds were blowing, and the snow remained only as little streaks of slush on the Hub side of trees, Esk knew how to prepare a range of ointments, several medicinal brandies, a score of special infusions, and a number of mysterious potions that Granny said she might learn the use of in good time.
   What she hadn’t done was any magic at all.
   “All in good time,” repeated Granny vaguely.
   “But I’m supposed to be a witch!”
   “You’re not a witch yet. Name me three herbs good for the bowels.”
   Esk put her hands behind her back, closed her eyes, and said: “The flowering tops of Greater Peahane, the root pith of Old Man’s Trousers, the stems of the Bloodwater Lily, the seedcases of—”
   “All right. Where may water gherkins be found?”
   “Peat bogs and stagnant pools, from the months of—”
   “Good. You’re learning.”
   “But it’s not magic!”
   Granny sat down at the kitchen table.
   “Most magic isn’t,” she said. “It’s just knowing the right herbs, and learning to watch the weather, and finding out the ways of animals. And the ways of people, too.”
   “That’s all it is!” said Esk, horrified.
   “All? It’s a pretty big all,” said Granny, “But no, it isn’t all. There’s other stuff.”
   “Can’t you teach me?”
   “All in good time. There’s no call to go showing yourself yet.”
   “Showing myself? Who to?”
   Granny’s eyes darted towards the shadows in the corners of the room.
   “Never you mind.”
   Then even the last lingering tails of snow had gone and the spring gales roared around the mountains. The air in the forest began to smell of leaf mould and turpentine. A few early flowers braved the night frosts, and the bees started to fly.
   “Now bees,” said Granny Weatherwax, “is real magic.”
   She carefully lifted the lid of the first hive.
   “Your bees,” she went on, “is your mead, your wax, your bee gum, your honey. A wonderful thing is your bee. Ruled by a queen, too,” she added, with a touch of approval.
   “Don’t they sting you?” said Esk, standing back a little. Bees boiled out of the comb and overflowed the rough wooden sides of the box.
   “Hardly ever,” said Granny. “You wanted magic. Watch.”
   She put a hand into the struggling mass of insects and made a shrill, faint piping noise at the back of her throat. There was a movement in the mass, and a large bee, longer and fatter than the others, crawled on to her hand. A few workers followed it, stroking it and generally ministering to it.
   “How did you do that?” said Esk.
   “Ah,” said Granny, “Wouldn’t you like to know?”
   “Yes. I would. That’s why I asked, Granny,” said Esk, severely.
   “Do you think I used magic?”
   Esk looked down at the queen bee. She looked up at the witch. “No,” she said, “I think you just know a lot about bees.”
   Granny grinned.
   “Exactly correct. That’s one form of magic, of course.”
   “What, just knowing things?”
   “Knowing things that other people don’t know,” said Granny. She carefully dropped the queen back among her subjects and closed the lid of the hive.
   “And I think it’s time you learned a few secrets,” she added.
   At last, thought Esk.
   “But first, we must pay our respects to the Hive,” said Granny. She managed to sound the capital H.
   Without thinking, Esk bobbed a curtsey.
   Granny’s hand clipped the back of her head.
   “Bow, I told you,” she said, without rancor. “Witches bow.” She demonstrated.
   “But why?” complained Esk.
   “Because witches have got to be different, and that’s part of the secret,” said Granny.
   They sat on a bleached bench in front of the rimward wall of the cottage. In front of them the Herbs were already a foot high, a sinister collection of pale green leaves.
   “Right,” said Granny, settling herself down. “You know the hat on the hook by the door? Go and fetch it.”
   Esk obediently went inside and unhooked Granny’s hat. It was tall, pointed and, of course, black.
   Granny turned it over in her hands and regarded it carefully.
   “Inside this hat,” she said solemnly, “is one of the secrets of witchcraft. If you cannot tell me what it is, then I might as well teach you no more, because once you learn the secret of the hat there is no going back. Tell me what you know about the hat.”
   “Can I hold it?”
   “Be my guest.”
   Esk peered inside the hat. There was some wire stiffening to give it a shape, and a couple of hatpins. That was all.
   There was nothing particularly strange about it, except that no one in the village had one like it. But that didn’t make it magical. Esk bit her lip; she had a vision of herself being sent home in disgrace.
   It didn’t feel strange, and there were no hidden pockets. It was just a typical witch’s hat. Granny always wore it when she went into the village, but in the forest she just wore a leather hood.
   She tried to recall the bits of lessons that Granny grudgingly doled out. It isn’t what you know, it’s what other people don’t know. Magic can be something right in the wrong place, or something wrong in the right place. It can be --
   Granny always wore it to the village. And the big black cloak, which certainly wasn’t magical, because for most of the winter it had been a goat blanket and Granny washed it in the spring.
   Esk began to feel the shape of the answer and she didn’t like it much. It was like a lot of Granny’s answers. Just a word trick. She just said things you knew all the time, but in a different way so they sounded important.
   “I think I know,” she said at last.
   “Out with it, then.”
   “It’s in sort of two parts.”
   “Well?”
   “It’s a witch’s hat because you wear it. But you’re a witch because you wear the hat. Um.”
   “So—”prompted Granny.
   “So people see you coming in the hat and the cloak and they know you’re a witch and that’s why your magic works?” said Esk.
   “That’s right,” said Granny. “It’s called headology.” She tapped her silver hair, which was drawn into a tight bun that could crack rocks.
   “But it’s not real!” Esk protested. “That’s not magic, it’s it’s—”
   “Listen,” said Granny, “If you give someone a bottle of red jollop for their wind it may work, right, but if you want it to work for sure then you let their mind make it work for them. Tell ’em it’s moonbeams bottled in fairy wine or something. Mumble over it a bit. It’s the same with cursing.”
   “Cursing?” said Esk, weakly.
   “Aye, cursing, my girl, and no need to look so shocked! You’ll curse, when the need comes. When you’re alone, and there’s no help to hand, and—”
   She hesitated and, uncomfortably aware of Esk’s questioning eyes, finished lamely: “—and people aren’t showing respect. Make it loud, make it complicated, make it long, and make it up if you have to, but it’ll work all right. Next day, when they hit their thumb or they fall off a ladder or their dog drops dead, they’ll remember you. They’ll behave better next time.”
   “But it still doesn’t seem like magic,” said Esk, scuffing the dust with her feet.
   “I saved a man’s life once,” said Granny. “Special medicine, twice a day. Boiled water with a bit of berry juice in it. Told him I’d bought it from the dwarves. That’s the biggest part of doct’rin, really. Most people’ll get over most things if they put their minds to it, you just have to give them an interest.”
   She patted Esk’s hand as nicely as possible. “You’re a bit young for this,” she said, “but as you grow older you’ll find most people don’t set foot outside their own heads much. You too,” she added gnomically.
   “I don’t understand.”
   “I’d be very surprised if you did,” said Granny briskly, “but you can tell me five herbs suitable for dry coughs.”
   Spring began to unfold in earnest. Granny started taking Esk on long walks that took all day, to hidden ponds or high on to the mountain scree to collect rare plants. Esk enjoyed that, high on the hills where the sun beat down strongly but the air was nevertheless freezing cold. Plants grew thickly and hugged the ground. From some of the highest peaks she could see all the way to the Rim Ocean that ran around the edge of the world; in the other direction the Ramtops marched into the distance, wrapped in eternal winter. They went all the way to the hub of the world where, it was generally agreed, the Gods lived on a ten-mile high mountain of rock and ice.
   “Gods are all right,” said Granny, as they ate their lunch and looked at the view. “You don’t bother gods, and gods don’t come bothering you.”
   “Do you know many gods?”
   “I’ve seen the thundergods a few times,” said Granny, “and Hoki, of course.”
   “Hold? ”
   Granny chewed a crustless sandwich. “Oh, he’s a nature god,” she said. “Sometimes he manifests himself as an oak tree, or half a man and half a goat, but mainly I see him in his aspect as a bloody nuisance. You only find him in the deep woods, of course. He plays the flute. Very badly, if you must know.”
   Esk lay on her stomach and looked out across the lands below while a few hardy, self-employed bumblebees patrolled the thyme clusters. The sun was warm on her back but, up here, there were still drifts of snow on the hubside of rocks.
   “Tell me about the lands down there,” she said lazily.
   Granny peered disapprovingly at ten thousand miles of landscape.
   “They’re just other places,” she said. “Just like here, only different.”
   “Are there cities and things?”
   “Idaresay.”
   “Haven’t you ever been to look?”
   Granny sat back, gingerly arranging her skirt to expose several inches of respectable flannelette to the sun, and let the heat caress her old bones.
   “No,” she said. “There’s quite enough troubles around here without going to look for them in forn parts.”
   “I dreamed of a city once,” said Esk. “It had hundreds of people in it, and there was this building with big gates, and they were magical gates—”
   A sound like tearing cloth came from behind her. Granny had fallen asleep.
   “Granny! ”
   “Mhnf?”
   Esk thought for a moment. “Are you having a good time?” she said artfully.
   “Mnph.”
   “You said you’d show me some real magic, all in good time,” said Esk, “and this is a good time.”
   “Mnph.”
   Granny Weatherwax opened her eyes and looked straight up at the sky; it was darker up here, more purple than blue. She thought: why not? She’s a quick learner. She knows more herblore than I do. At her age old Gammer Tumult had me Borrowing and Shifting and Sending all the hours of the day. Maybe I’m being too cautious.
   “Just a bit?” pleaded Esk.
   Granny turned it over in her mind. She couldn’t think of any more excuses. I’m surely going to regret this, she told herself, displaying considerable foresight.
   “All right,” she said shortly.
   “Real magic?” said Esk. “Not more herbs or headology?”
   “Real magic, as you call it, yes.”
   “A spell?”
   “No. A Borrowing.”
   Esk’s face was a picture of expectation. She looked more alive, it seemed to Granny, than she had ever been before.

Granny looked over the valleys stretching out before them until she found what she was after. A grey eagle was circling lazily over a distant blue-hazed patch of forest. Its mind was currently at ease. It would do nicely.
   She Called it gently, and it began to circle towards them.
   “The first thing to remember about Borrowing is that you must be comfortable and somewhere safe,” she said, smoothing out the grass behind her. “Bed’s best.”
   “But what is Borrowing?”
   “Lie down and hold my hand. Do you see the eagle up there?”
   Esk squinted into the dark, hot sky.
   There were … two doll figures on the grass below as she pivoted on the wind ….
   She could feel the whip and wire of the air through her feathers. Because the eagle was not hunting, but simply enjoying the feel of the sun on its wings, the land below was a mere unimportant shape. But the air, the air was a complex, changing three-dimensional thing, an interlocked pattern of spirals and curves that stretched away into the distance, a switchback of currents built around thermal pillars. She …
   … felt a gentle pressure restraining her.
   “The next thing to remember, " said Granny’s voice, very close, “is not to upset the owner. If you let it know you’re there it’ll either fight you or panic, and you won’t stand a chance either way. It’s had a lifetime of being an eagle, and you haven’t.”
   Esk said nothing.
   “You’re not frightened, are you?” said Granny. “It can take you that way the first time, and—”
   “I’m not frightened,” said Esk, and “How do I control it?”
   “You don’t. Not yet. Anyway, controlling a truly wild creature isn’t easily learned. You have to—sort of suggest to it that it might feel inclined to do things. With a tame animal, of course, it’s all different. But you can’t make any creature do anything that is totally against its nature. Now try and find the eagle’s mind.”
   Esk could sense Granny as a diffuse silver cloud at the back of her own mind. After some searching she found the eagle. She almost missed it. Its mind was small, sharp and purple, like an arrowhead. It was concentrating entirely on flying, and took no notice of her.
   “Good,” said Granny approvingly. “We’re not going to go far. If you want to make it turn, you must—”
   “Yes, yes,” said Esk. She flexed her fingers, wherever they were, and the bird leaned against the air and turned.
   “Very good,” said Granny, taken aback. “How did you do that?”
   “I—don’t know. It just seemed obvious.”
   “Hmph.” Granny gently tested the tiny eagle mind. It was still totally oblivious of its passengers. She was genuinely impressed, a very rare occurrence.
   They floated over the mountain, while Esk excitedly explored the eagle’s senses. Granny’s voice droned through her consciousness, giving instructions and guidance and warnings. She listened with half an ear. It sounded far too complicated. Why couldn’t she take over the eagle’s mind? It wouldn’t hurt it.
   She could see how to do it, it was just a knack, like snapping your fingers—which in fact she had never managed to achieve—and then she’d be able to experience flying for real, not at second hand.
   Then she could
   “Don’t,” said Granny calmly. “No good will come of it.”
   “What?”
   “Do you really think you’re the first, my girl? Do you think we haven’t all thought what a fine thing it would be, to take on another body and tread the wind or breathe the water? And do you really think it would be as easy as that?”
   Esk glowered at her.
   “No need to look like that,” said Granny. “You’ll thank me one day. Don’t you start playing around before you know what you’re about, eh? Before you get up to tricks you’ve got to learn what to do if things go wrong. Don’t try to walk before you can run.”
   “I can feel how to do it, Granny.”
   “That’s as maybe. It’s harder than it seems, is Borrowing, although I’ll grant you’ve got a knack. That’s enough for today, bring us in over ourselves and I’ll show you how to Return.”
   The eagle beat the air over the two recumbent forms and Esk saw, in her mind’s eye, two channels open for them. Granny’s mindshape vanished.
   Now
   Granny had been wrong. The eagle mind barely fought, and didn’t have time to panic. Esk held it wrapped in her own mind It writhed for an instant, and then melted into leer.
   Granny opened her eyes in time to see the bird give a hoarse cry of triumph, curve down low over the grass-grown scree, and skim away down the mountainside. For a moment it was a vanishing dot and then it had gone, leaving only another echoing shriek.
   Granny looked down at Esk’s silent form. The girl was light enough, but it was a long way home and the afternoon was dwindling.
   “Drat,” she said, with no particular emphasis. She stood up, brushed herself down and, with a grunt of effort, hauled Esk’s inert body over her shoulder.
   High in the crystal sunset air above the mountains the eagle Esk sought more height, drunk with the sheer vitality of flight.
   On the way home Granny met a hungry bear. Granny’s back was giving her gyp, and she was in no mood to be growled at. She muttered a few words under her breath and the bear, to its brief amazement, walked heavily into a tree and didn’t regain consciousness for several hours.

   When she reached the cottage Granny put Esk’s body to bed and drew up the fire. She brought the goats in and milked them, and finished the chores of the evening.
   She made sure all the windows were open and, when it began to grow dark, lit a lantern and put it on the windowsill.
   Granny Weatherwax didn’t sleep more than a few hours a night, as a rule, and woke again at midnight. The room hadn’t changed, although the lantern had its own little solar system of very stupid moths.
   When she woke again at dawn the candle had long burned down and Esk was still sleeping the shallow, unwakable sleep of the Borrower.
   When she took the goats out to their paddock she looked intently at the sky.
   Noon came, and gradually the light drained out of another day. She paced the floor of the kitchen aimlessly. Occasionally she would throw herself into frantic bouts of housework; ancient crusts were unceremoniously dug out of the cracks in the flagstones, and the fireback was scraped free of the winter’s soot and blackleaded to within an inch of its life. A nest of mice in the back of the dresser were kindly but firmly ejected into the goatshed.
   Sunset came.
   The light of the Discworld was old and slow and heavy. From the cottage door Granny watched as it drained off the mountains, flowing in golden rivers through the forest. Here and there it pooled in hollows until it faded and vanished.
   She drummed her fingers sharply on the doorpost, humming a small and bitter little tune.
   Dawn came, and the cottage was empty except for Esk’s body, silent and unmoving on the bed.

   But as the golden light flowed slowly across the Discworld like the first freshing of the tide over mudflats the eagle circled higher into the dome of heaven, beating the air down with slow and powerful wingbeats.
   The whole of the world was spread out beneath Esk—all the continents, all the islands, all the rivers and especially the great ring of the Rim Ocean.
   There was nothing else up here, not even sound.
   Esk gloried in the feel of it, willing her flagging muscles into greater effort. But something was wrong. Her thoughts seemed to be chasing around beyond her control, and disappearing. Pain and exhilaration and weariness poured into her mind, but it was as if other things were spilling out at the same time. Memories dwindled away on the wind. As fast as she could latch on to a thought it evaporated, leaving nothing behind.
   She was losing chunks of herself, and she couldn’t remember. what she was losing. She panicked, burrowing back to the things she was sure of ….
   I am Esk, and I have stolen the body of an eagle and the feel of wind in feathers, the hunger, the search of the not-sky below ….
   She tried again. I am Esk and seeking the windpath, the pain of muscle, the cut of the air, the cold of it ….
   I am Esk high over air-damp-wet-white, above everything, the sky is thin ….
   I am I am.

   Granny was in the garden, among the beehives, the early morning wind whipping at her skirts. She went from hive to hive, tapping on their roofs. Then, in the thickets of borage and beebalm that she had planted around them, she stood with her arms outstretched in front of her and sang something in tones so high that no normal person could have heard them.
   But a roar went up from the hives, and then the air was suddenly thick with the heavy, big-eyed, deep-voiced shapes of drone bees. They circled over her head, adding their own bass humming to her chant.
   Then they were gone, soaring into the growing light over the clearing and streaming away over the trees.
   It is well known- at least, it is well known to witches—that all colonies of bees are, as it were, just one part of the creature called the Swarm, in the same way that individual bees are component cells of the hivemind. Granny didn’t mingle her thoughts with the bees very often, partly because insect minds were strange, alien things that tasted of tin, but mostly because she suspected that the Swarm was a good deal more intelligent than she was.
   She knew that the drones would soon reach the wild bee colonies in the deep forest, and within hours every corner of the mountain meadows would be under very close scrutiny indeed. All she could do was wait.
   At noon the drones returned, and Granny read in the sharp acid thoughts of the hivemind that there was no sign of Esk.
   She went back into the cool of the cottage and sat down in the rocking chair, staring at the doorway.
   She knew what the next step was. She hated the very idea of it. But she fetched a short ladder, climbed up creakily on to the roof, and pulled the staff from its hiding place in the thatch.
   It was icy cold. It steamed.
   “Above the snowline, then,” said Granny.
   She climbed down, and rammed the staff into a flowerbed. She glared at it. She had a nasty feeling that it was glaring back.
   “Don’t think you’ve won, because you haven’t,” she snapped. “It’s just that I haven’t got the time to mess around. You must know where she is. I command you to take me to her!”
   The staff regarded her woodenly.
   “By—” Granny paused, her invocations were a little rusty, “—by stock and stone I order it!”
   Activity, movement, liveliness—all these words would be completely inaccurate descriptions of the staff’s response.
   Granny scratched her chin. She remembered the little lesson all children get taught: what’s the magic word?
   “Please?” she suggested.
   The staff trembled, rose a little way out of the ground, and turned in the air so that it hung invitingly at waist height.
   Granny had heard that broomsticks were once again very much the fashion among younger witches, but she didn’t hold with it. There was no way a body could look respectable while hurtling through the air aboard a household implement. Besides, it looked decidedly draughty.
   But this was no time for respectability. Pausing only to snatch her hat from its hook behind the door she scrambled up on to the staff and perched as best she could, sidesaddle of course, and with her skirts firmly gripped between her knees.
   “Right,” she said. “Now wha-aaaaaaaaa—”
   Across the forest animals broke and scattered as the shadow passed overhead, crying and cursing. Granny clung on with whitened knuckles, her thin legs kicking wildly as, high above the treetops, she learned important lessons about centres of gravity and air turbulence. The staff shot onwards, heedless of her yells.
   By the time it had come out over the upland meadows she had come to terms with it somewhat, which meant that she could just about hang on with knees and hands provided she didn’t mind being upside down. Her hat, at least, was useful, being aerodynamically shaped.
   The staff plunged between black cliffs and along high bare valleys where, it was said, rivers of ice had once flowed in the days of the ice Giants. The air became thin and sharp in the throat.
   They came to an abrupt halt over a snowdrift. Granny fell off, and lay panting in the snow while she tried to remember why she was going through all this.
   There was a bundle of feathers under an overhang a few feet away. As Granny approached it a head rose jerkily, and the eagle glared at her with fierce, frightened eyes. It tried to fly, and toppled over. When she reached out to touch it, it took a neat triangle of flesh out of her hand.
   “I see,” said Granny quietly, to no one in particular. She looked around, and found a boulder of about the right size. She disappeared behind it for a few seconds, fox the sake of respectability, and reappeared with a petticoat in her hand. The bird thrashed around, ruining several weeks of meticulous petitpoint embroidery, but she managed to bundle it up and hold it so that she could avoid its sporadic lunges.
   Granny turned to the staff, which was now upright in the snowdrift.
   “I shall walk back,” she told it coldly.
   It turned out that they were in a spur valley overlooking a drop of several hundred feet on to sharp black rocks.
   “Very well, then,” she conceded, “but you’re to fly slowly, d’you understand? And no going high.”
   In fact, because she was slightly more experienced and perhaps because the staff was taking more care, too, the ride back was almost sedate. Granny was almost persuaded that, given time, she could come to merely dislike flying, instead of loathing it. What it needed was some way of stopping yourself from having to look at the ground.

   The eagle sprawled on the rag rug in front of the empty hearth. It had drunk some water, over which Granny had mumbled a few of the charms she normally said to impress patients, but you never knew, there might be some power in them, and it had also gulped a few strips of raw meat.
   What it had not done was display the least sign of intelligence.
   She wondered whether she had the right bird. She risked another pecking and stared hard into its evil orange eyes, and tried to convince herself that way down in their depths, almost beyond sight, was a strange little flicker.
   She probed around inside its head. The eagle mind was still there right enough, vivid and sharp, but there was something else. Mind, of course, has no colour, but nevertheless the strands of the eagle’s mind seemed to be purple. Around them and tangled among them were faint strands of silver.
   Esk had learned too late that mind shapes body, that Borrowing is one thing but that the dream of truly taking on another form had its built-in penalty.
   Granny sat and rocked. She was at a loss, she knew that. Unravelling the tangled minds was beyond her power, beyond any power in the Ramtops, beyond even
   There was no sound, but maybe there was a change in the texture of the air. She looked up at the staff, which had been suffered to come back into the cottage.
   “No,” she said firmly.
   Then she thought: whose benefit did I say that for? Mine? There’s power there, but it’s not my kind of power.
   There isn’t any other kind around, though. And even now I may be too late.
   I might never have been early enough.
   She reached out again into the bird’s head to calm its fears and dispel its panic. It allowed her to pick it up and sat awkwardly on her wrist, its talons gripping tight enough to draw blood.
   Granny took the staff and made her way upstairs, to where Esk lay on the narrow bed in the low bedroom with its ancient contoured ceiling.
   She made the bird perch on the bedrail and turned her attention to the staff. Once more the carvings shifted under her glare, never quite revealing their true form.
   Granny was no stranger to the uses of power, but she knew she relied on gentle pressure subtly to steer the tide of things. She didn’t put it like that, of course—she would have said that there was always a lever if you knew where to look. The power in the staff was harsh, fierce, the raw stuff of magic distilled out of the forces that powered the universe itself.
   There would be a price. And Granny knew enough about wizardry to be certain that it would be a high one. But if you were worried about the price, then why were you in the shop?
   She cleared her throat, and wondered what the hell she was supposed to do next. Perhaps if she
   The power hit her like a half-brick. She could feel it take her and lift her so that she was amazed to look down and see her feet still firmly on the floorboards. She tried to take a step forward and magical discharges crackled in the air around her. She reached out to steady herself against the wall and the ancient wooden beam under her hand stirred and started to sprout leaves. A cyclone of magic swirled around the room, picking up dust and briefly giving it some very disturbing shapes; the jug and basin on the washstand, with the particularly fetching rosebud pattern, broke into fragments. Under the bed the third member of the traditional china trio turned into something horrible and slunk away.
   Granny opened her mouth to swear and thought better of it when her words blossomed out into rainbow-edged clouds.
   She looked down at Esk and the eagle, which seemed oblivious to all this, and tried to concentrate. She let herself slide inside its head and again she could see the strands of mind, the silver threads bound so closely around the purple that they took on the same shape. But now she could see where the strands ended, and where a judicious tug or push would begin to unravel them. It was so obvious she heard herself laugh, and the sound curved away in shades of orange and red and vanished into the ceiling.
   Time passed. Even with the power throbbing through hey head it was a painfully hard task, like threading a needle by moonlight, but eventually she had a handful of silver. In the slow, heavy world in which she now appeared to be she took the hank and threw it slowly towards Esk. It became a cloud, swirled like a whirlpool, and vanished.
   She was aware of a shrill chittering noise, and shadows on the edge of sight. Well, it happened to everyone sooner or later. They had come, drawn as always by a discharge of magic. You just had to learn to ignore them.

   Granny woke with bright sunlight skewering into her eyes. She was slumped against the door, and her whole body felt as though it had toothache.
   She reached out blindly with one hand, found the edge of the washstand, and pulled herself into a sitting position. She was not really surprised to see that the jug and basin looked just the same as they had always done; in fact sheer curiosity overcame her aches and she gave a quick glance under the bed to check that, yes, things were as normal.
   The eagle was still hunched on the bedpost. In the bed Esk was asleep, and Granny saw that it was a true sleep and not the stillness of a vacant body.
   All she had to do now was hope that Esk wouldn’t wake up with an irresistible urge to pounce on rabbits.
   She carried the unresisting bird downstairs and let it free outside the back door. It flew heavily up into the nearest tree, where it settled to rest. It had a feeling it ought to have a grudge against somebody, but for the life of it, it couldn’t remember why.

   Esk opened her eyes and stared for a long time at the ceiling. Over the months she had grown familiar with every lump and crack of the plaster, which created a fantastic upside-down landscape that she had peopled with a private and complex civilization.
   Her mind thronged with dreams. She pulled an arm out from under the sheets and stared at it, wondering why it wasn’t covered with feathers. It was all very puzzling.
   She pushed the covers back, swung her legs to the edge of the bed, spread her wings into the rush of the wind and glided out into the world ….
   The thump on the bedroom floor brought Granny scurrying up the stairs, to take her in her arms and hold her tight as the terror hit her. She rocked back and forth on her heels, making meaningless soothing noises.
   Esk looked up at her through a mask of horror.
   “I could feel myself vanishing!”
   “Yes, yes. Better now,” murmured Granny.
   “You don’t understand! I couldn’t even remember my name!” Esk shrieked.
   “But you can remember now.”
   Esk hesitated, checking. “Yes,” she said, “Yes, of course. Now.”
   “So no harm done.”
   “But—”
   Granny sighed. “You have learned something,” she said, and thought it safe to insert a touch of sternness into her voice. “They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it is not; one half so bad as a lot of ignorance.”
   “But what happened?”
   “You thought that Borrowing wasn’t enough. You thought it would be a fine thing to steal another’s body. But you must know that a body is like—like a jelly mould. It sets a shape on its contents, d’you see? You can’t have a girl’s mind in an eagle’s body. Not for long, at any rate.”
   “I became an eagle?”
   “Yes.”
   “Not me at all?”
   Granny thought for a while. She always had to pause when conversations with Esk led her beyond the reaches of a decent person’s vocabulary.
   “No,” she said at last, “not in the way you mean. Just an eagle with maybe some strange dreams sometimes. Like when you dream you’re flying, perhaps it would remember walking and talking.”
   “Urgh.”
   “But it’s all over now,” said Granny, treating her to a thin smile. “You’re your true self again and the eagle has got its mind back. It’s sitting in the big beech by the privy; I should like you to put out some food for it.”
   Esk sat back on her heels, staring at a point past Granny’s head.
   “There were some strange things,” she said conversationally. Granny spun around.
   “I meant, in a sort of dream I saw things,” said Esk. The old woman’s shock was so visible that she hesitated, frightened that she had said something wrong.
   “What kind of things?” said Granny flatly.
   “Sort of big creatures, all sorts of shapes. Just sitting around.”
   “Was it dark? I mean, these Things, were they in the dark?”
   “There were stars, I think. Granny?”
   Granny Weatherwax was staring at the wall.
   “Granny?” Esk repeated.
   “Mmph? Yes? Oh.” Granny shook herself. “Yes. I see. Now I would like you to go downstairs and get the bacon that is in the pantry and put it out for the bird, do you understand? It would be a good idea to thank it, too. You never know.”
   When Esk returned Granny was buttering bread. She pulled her stool up to the table, but the old woman waved the breadknife at her.
   “First things first. Stand up. Face me.”
   Esk did so, puzzled. Granny stuck the knife in the breadboard and shook her head.
   “Drat it,” she said to the world at large. “I don’t know what way they have of it, there should be some kind of ceremony if I know wizards, they always have to complicate things . . . .”
   “What do you mean?”
   Granny seemed to ignore her, but crossed to the dark corner by the dresser.
   “Probably you should have one foot in a bucket of cold porridge and one glove on and all that kind of stuff,” she went on. “I didn’t want to do this, but They’re forcing my hand.”
   “What are you talking about, Granny?”
   The old witch yanked the staff out of its shadow and waved it vaguely at Esk.
   “Here. It’s yours. Take it. I just hope this is the right thing to do.”
   In fact the presentation of a staff to an apprentice wizard is usually a very impressive ceremony, especially if the staff has been inherited from an elder wage; by ancient lore there is a long and frightening ordeal involving masks and hoods and swords and fearful oaths about people’s tongues being cut out and their entrails torn by wild birds and their ashes scattered to the eight winds and so on. After some hours of this sort of thing the apprentice can be admitted to the brotherhood of the Wise and Enlightened.
   There is also a long speech. By sheer coincidence Granny got the essence of it in a nutshell.
   Esk took the staff and peered at it.
   “It’s very nice,” she said uncertainly. “The carvings are pretty. What’s it for?”
   “Sit down now. And listen properly for once. On the day you were born …”

   “… and that’s the shape of it.”
   Esk looked hard at the staff, then at Granny.
   “I’ve got to be a wizard?”
   “Yes. No. I don’t know.”
   “That isn’t really an answer, Granny,” Esk said reproachfully. “Am I or aren’t I?”
   “Women can’t be wizards,” said Granny bluntly. “It’s agin nature. You might as well have a female blacksmith.”
   “Actually I’ve watched dad at work and I don’t see why—”
   “Look,” said Granny hurriedly, “you can’t have a female wizard any more than you can have a male witch, because—”
   “I’ve heard of male witches,” said Esk meekly.
   “Warlocks!”
   “I think so.”
   “I mean there’s no male witches, only silly men,” said Granny hotly. “If men were witches, they’d be wizards. It’s all down to—”she tapped her head “—headology. How your mind works. Men’s minds work different from ours, see. Their magic’s all numbers and angles and edges and what the stars are doing, as if that really mattered. It’s all power. It’s all—” Granny paused, and dredged up her favourite word to describe all she despised in wizardry, “—jommetry.”
   “That’s all right, then,” said Esk, relieved. “I’ll stay here and learn witchery.”
   “Ali,” said Granny gloomily, “that’s all very well for you to say. I don’t think it will be as easy as that.”
   “But you said that men can be wizards and women can be witches and it can’t be the other way around.”
   “That’s right.”
   “Well, then,” said Esk triumphantly, “it’s all solved, isn’t it? I can’t help but be a witch.”
   Granny pointed to the staff. Esk shrugged.
   “It’s just an old stick.”
   Granny shook her head. Esk blinked.
   “No?”
   “No.”
   “And I can’t be a witch?”
   “I don’t know what you can be. Hold the staff.”
   “What?”
   “Hold the staff. Now, I’ve laid the fire in the grate. Light it.”
   “The tinderbox is—” Esk began.
   “You once told me there were better ways of lighting fires. Show me.”
   Granny stood up. In the dimness of the kitchen she seemed to grow until she filled it with shifting, ragged shadows, shot with menace. Her eyes glared down at Esk.
   “Show me,” she commanded, and her voice had ice in it.
   “But—”said Esk desperately, clutching the heavy staff to her and knocking her stool over in her haste to back away.
   “Show me.”
   With a scream Esk spun around. Fire flared from her fingertips and arced across the room. The kindling exploded with a force that hurled the furniture around the room and a ball of fierce green light spluttered on the hearth.
   Changing patterns sped across it as it spun sizzling on the stones, which cracked and then flowed. The iron fireback resisted bravely for a few seconds before melting like wax; it made a final appearance as a red smear across the fireball and then vanished. A moment later the kettle went the same way.
   Just when it seemed that the chimney would follow them the ancient hearthstone gave up, and with a final splutter the fireball sank from view.
   The occasional crackle or puff of steam signaled its passage through the earth. Apart from that there was silence, the loud hissing silence that comes after an ear-splattering noise, and after the actinic glare the room seemed pitch dark.
   Eventually Granny crawled out from behind the table and crept as closely as she dared to the hole, which was still surrounded by a crust of lava. She jerked back as another cloud of superheated steam mushroomed up.
   “They say there’s dwarf mines under the Ramtops,” she said inconsequentially. “My, but them little buggers is in for a surprise.”
   She prodded the little puddle of cooling iron where the kettle had been, and added, “Shame about the fireback. It had owls on it, you know.”
   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 ther 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 Almanack, 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.

   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.
   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.

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.