His name was Amschat B’hal Zoon. He lived on the raft with his three wives and three children. He was a Liar.
   What always annoyed the enemies of the Zoon tribe was not simply their honesty, which was infuriatingly absolute, but their total directness of approach. The Zoons had never heard about a euphemism, and wouldn’t understand what to do with it if they had one, except that they would certainly have called it “a nice way of saying something nasty".
   Their rigid adherence to the truth was apparently not enjoined on them by a god, as is usually the case, but appeared to have a genetic base. The average Zoon could no more tell a lie than breathe underwater and, in fact, the very concept was enough to upset them considerably; telling a Lie meant no less than totally altering the universe.
   This was something of a drawback to a trading race and so, over the millennia, the elders of the Zoon studied this strange power that everyone else had in such abundance and decided that they should possess it too.
   Young men who showed faint signs of having such a talent were encouraged, on special ceremonial occasions, to bend the Truth ever further on a competitive basis. The first recorded Zoon proto-lie was: “Actually my grandfather is quite tall,” but eventually they got the hang of it and the office of tribal Liar was instituted.
   It must be understood that while the majority of Zoon cannot lie they have great respect for any Zoon who can say that the world is other than it is, and the Liar holds a position of considerable eminence. He represents his tribe in all his dealings with the outside world, which the average Zoon long ago gave up trying to understand. Zoon tribes are very proud of their Liars.
   Other races get very annoyed about all this. They feel that the Zoon ought to have adopted more suitable titles, like “diplomat” or “public relations officer". They feel they are poking fun at the whole thing.
   “Is all that true?” said Esk suspiciously, looking around the barge’s crowded cabin.
   “No,” said Amschat firmly. His junior wife, who was cooking porridge over a tiny ornate stove, giggled. His three children watched Esk solemnly over the edge of the table.
   “Don’t you ever tell the truth?”
   “Do you?” Amschat grinned his goldmine grin, but his eyes were not smiling. “Why do I find you on my fleeces? Amschat is no kidnapper. There will be people at home who will worry, yesno?”
   “I expect Granny will come looking for me,” said Esk, “but I don’t think she will worry much. Just be angry, I expect. Anyway, I’m going to Ankh-Morpork. You can put me off the ship—”
   “—boat—”
   “—if you like. I don’t mind about the pike.”
   “I can’t do that,” said Amschat.
   “Was that a lie?”
   “No! There is wild country around us, robbers and—things.”
   Esk nodded brightly. “That’s settled, then,” she said. “I don’t mind sleeping in the fleeces. And I can pay my way. I can do—” She hesitated; her unfinished sentence hung like a little curl of crystal in the air while discretion made a successful bid for control of her tongue. “—helpful things,” she finished lamely.
   She was aware that Amschat was looking slightly sideways at his senior wife, who was sewing by the stove. By Zoon tradition she wore nothing but black. Granny would have thoroughly approved.
   “What sort of helpful things?” he asked. “Washing and sweeping, yesno?”
   “If you like,” said Esk, “or distillation using the bifold or triple alembic, the making of varnishes, glazes, creams, zuumchats and punes, the rendering of waxes, the manufacture of candles, the proper selection of seeds, roots and cuttings, and most preparations from the Eighty Marvellous Herbs; I can spin, card, rett, Hallow and weave on the hand, frame, harp and Noble looms and I can knit if people start the wool on for me, I can read soil and rock, do carpentry up to the three-way mortise and tenon, predict weather by means of beastsign and skyreck, make increase in bees, brew five types of mead, make dyes and mordants and pigments, including a fast blue, I can do most types of whitesmithing, mend boots, cure and fashion most leathers, and if you have any goats I can look after them. I like goats.”
   Amschat looked at her thoughtfully. She felt she was expected to continue.
   “Granny never likes to see people sitting around doing nothing,” she offered. “She always says a girl who is good with her hands will never want for a living,” she added, by way of further explanation.
   “Or a husband, I expect,” nodded Amschat, weakly.
   “Actually, Granny had a lot to say about that—”
   “I bet she did,” said Amschat. He looked at the senior wife, who nodded almost imperceptibly.
   “Very well,” he said. “If you can make yourself useful you can stay. And can you play a musical instrument?”
   Esk returned his steady gaze, not batting an eyelid. “Probably.”

   And so Esk, with the minimum of difficulty and only a little regret, left the Ramtops and their weather and joined the Zoons on their great trading journey down the Ankh.
   There were at least thirty barges with at least one sprawling Zoon family on each, and no two vessels appeared to be carrying the same cargo; most of them were strung together, and the Zoons simply hauled on the cable and stepped on to the next deck if they fancied a bit of socialising.
   Esk set up home in the fleeces. It was warm, smelled slightly of Granny’s cottage and, much more important, meant that she was undisturbed.
   She was getting a bit worried about magic.
   It was definitely getting out of control. She wasn’t doing magic, it was just happening around her. And she sensed that people probably wouldn’t be too happy if they knew.
   It meant that if she washed up she had to clatter and splash at length to conceal the fact that the dishes were cleaning themselves. If she did some darning she had to do it on some private part of the deck to conceal the fact that the edges of the hole ravelled themselves together as if . . . as if by magic. Then she woke up on the second day of her voyage to find that several of the fleeces around the spot where she had hidden the staff had combed, carded and spun themselves into neat skeins during the night.
   She put all thoughts of lighting fires out of her head.
   There were compensations, though. Every sluggish turn of the great brown river brought new scenes. There were dark stretches hemmed in with deep forest, through which the barges traveled in the dead centre of the river with the men armed and the women below—except for Esk, who sat listening with interest to the snortings and sneezings that followed them through the bushes on the banks. There were stretches of farmland. There were several towns much larger than Ohulan. There were even some mountains, although they were old and flat and not young and frisky like her mountains. Not that she was homesick, exactly, but sometimes she felt like a boat herself, drifting on the edge of an infinite rope but always attached to an anchor.
   The barges stopped at some of the towns. By tradition only the men went ashore, and only Amschat, wearing his ceremonial Lying hat, spoke to non-Zoons. Esk usually went with him. He tried hinting that she should obey the unwritten rules of Zoon life and stay afloat, but a hint was to Esk what a mosquito bite was to the average rhino because she was already learning that if you ignore the rules people will, half the time, quietly rewrite them so that they don’t apply to you.
   Anyway, it seemed to Amschat that when Esk was with him he always got a very good price. There was something about a small child squinting determinedly at them from behind his legs that made even market-hardened merchants hastily conclude their business.
   In fact, it began to worry him. When a market broker in the walled town of Zemphis offered him a bag of ultramarines in exchange for a hundred fleeces a voice from the level of his pockets said: “They’re not ultramarines.”
   “Listen to the child!” said the broker, grinning. Amschat solemnly held one of the stones to his eye.
   “I am listening,” he said, “and they do indeed look like ultramarines. They have the glit and shimmy.”
   Esk shook her head. “They’re just spircles,” she said. She said it without thinking, and regretted it immediately as both men turned to stare at her.
   Amschat turned the stone over in his palm. Putting the chameleon spircle stones into a box with some real gems so that they appeared to change their hue was a traditional trick, but these had the true inner blue fire. He looked up sharply at the broker. Amschat had been finely trained in the art of the Lie. He recognised the subtle signs, now that he came to think about it.
   “There seems to be a doubt,” he said, “but ’tis easily resolved, we need only take them to the assayer in Pine Street because the world knows that spircles will dissolve in hypactic fluid, yesno?”
   The broker hesitated. Amschat had changed position slightly, and the set of his muscles suggested that any sudden movement on the broker’s part would see him flat in the dust. And that damn child was squinting at him as though she could see through to the back of his mind. His nerve broke.
   “I regret this unfortunate dispute,” he said. “I had accepted the stones as ultramarines in good faith but rather than cause disharmony between us I will ask you to accept them as—as a gift, and for the fleeces may I offer this roseatte of the first sorting?”
   He took a small red stone from a tiny velvet pouch. Amschat hardly looked at it but, without taking his eyes off the man, passed it down to Esk. She nodded.
   When the merchant had hurried off Amschat took Esk’s hand and half-dragged her to the assayer’s stall, which was little more than a niche in the wall. The old man took the smallest of the blue stones, listened to Amschat’s hurried explanation, poured out a saucerful of hypactic fluid and dropped the stone in. It frothed into nothingness.
   “Very interesting,” he said. He took another stone in a tweezer and examined it under a glass.
   “They are indeed spircles, but remarkably fine specimens in their own right,” he concluded. “They are by no means worthless, and I for example would be prepared to offer you—is there something wrong with the little girl’s eyes?”
   Amschat nudged Esk, who stopped trying out another Look.
   “—I would offer you, shall we say, two zats of silver?”
   “Shall we say five?” said Amschat pleasantly.
   “And I would like to keep one of the stones,” said Esk. The old man threw up his hands.
   “But they are mere curios!” he said. “Of value only to a collector!”
   “A collector may yet sell them to an unsuspecting purchaser as finest roseattes or ultramarines,” said Amschat, “especially if he was the only assayer in town.”
   The assayer grumbled a bit at this, but at last they settled on three zats and one of the spircles on a thin silver chain for Esk.
   When they were out of earshot Amschat handed her the tiny silver coins and said: “These are yours. You have earned them. But—” he hunkered down so that his eyes were on a level with hers, “—you must tell me how you knew the stones were false.”
   He looked worried, but Esk sensed that he wouldn’t really like the truth. Magic made people uncomfortable. He wouldn’t like it if she said simply: spircles are spircles and ultramarines are ultramarines, and though you may think they look the same that is because most people don’t use their eyes in the right way. Nothing can entirely disguise its true nature.
   Instead she said: “The dwarves mine spircles near the village where I was born, and you soon learn to see how they bend light in a funny way.”
   Amschat looked into her eyes for some time. Then he shrugged.
   “Okay,” he said. “Fine. Well, I have some further business here. Why don’t you buy yourself some new clothes, or something? I’d warn you against unscrupulous traders but, somehow, I don’t know, I don’t think you will have any trouble.”
   Esk nodded. Amschat strode off through the market place. At the first corner he turned, looked at her thoughtfully, and then disappeared among the crowds.
   Well, that’s the end of sailing, Esk told herself. He’s not quite sure but he’s going to be watching me now and before I know what’s happening the staff will be taken away and there’ll be all sorts of trouble. Why does everyone get so upset about magic?
   She gave a philosophical sigh and set about exploring the possibilities of the town.
   There was the question of the staff, though. Esk had rammed it deep among the fleeces, which were not going to be unloaded yet. If she went back for it people would start asking questions, and she didn’t know the answers.
   She found a convenient alleyway and scuttled down it until a deep doorway gave her the privacy she required.
   If going back was out of the question then only one thing remained. She held out a hand and closed her eyes.
   She knew exactly what she wanted to do-it lay in front of her eyes. The staff mustn’t come flying through the air, wrecking the barge and drawing attention to itself. All she wanted, she told herself, was for there to be a slight change in the way the world was organised. It shouldn’t be a world where the staff was in the fleeces, it should be a world where it was in her hand. A tiny change, an infinitesimal alteration to the Way Things Were.
   If Esk had been properly trained in wizardry she would have known that this was impossible. All wizards knew how to move things about, starting with protons and working upwards, but the important thing about moving something from A to Z, according to basic physics, was that at some point it should pass through the rest of the alphabet. The only way one could cause something to vanish at A and appear at Z would be to shuffle the whole of Reality sideways. The problems this would cause didn’t bear thinking about.
   Esk, of course, had not been trained, and it is well known that a vital ingredient of success is not knowing that what you’re attempting can’t be done. A person ignorant of the possibility of failure can be a halfbrick in the path of the bicycle of history.
   As Esk tried to work out how to move the staff the ripples spread out in the magical ether, changing the Discworld in thousands of tiny ways. Most went entirely unnoticed. Perhaps a few grains of sand lay on their beaches in a slightly different position, or the occasional leaf hung on its tree in a marginally different way. But then the wavefront of probability struck the edge of Reality and rebounded like the slosh off the side of the pond which, meeting the laggard ripples coming the other way, caused small but important whirlpools in the very fabric of existence. You can have whirlpools in the fabric of existence, because it is a very strange fabric.
   Esk was completely ignorant of all this, of course, but was quite satisfied when the staff dropped out of thin air into her hand.
   It felt warm.
   She looked at it for some time. She felt that she ought to do something about it; it was too big, too distinctive, too inconvenient. It attracted attention.
   “If I’m taking you to Ankh-Morpork,” she said thoughtfully, “You’ve got to go in disguise.”
   A few late flickers of magic played around the staff, and then it went dark.
   Eventually Esk solved the immediate problem by finding a stall in the main Zemphis marketplace that sold broomsticks, buying the largest, carrying it back to her doorway, removing the handle and ramming the staff deep into the birch twigs. It didn’t seem right to treat a noble object in this way, and she silently apologised to it.
   It made a difference, anyway. No one looked twice at a small girl carrying a broom.
   She bought a spice pasty to eat while exploring (the stallholder carelessly shortchanged her, and only realised later that he had inexplicably handed over two silver pieces; also, rats mysteriously got in and ate all his stock during the night, and his grandmother was struck by lightning).
   The town was smaller than Ohulan, and very different because it lay on the junction of three trade routes quite apart from the river itself. It was built around one enormous square which was a cross between a permanent exotic traffic jam and a tent village. Camels kicked mules, mules kicked horses, horses kicked camels and they all kicked humans; there was a riot of colours, a din of noise, a nasal orchestration of smells and the steady, heady sound of hundreds of people working hard at making money.
   One reason for the bustle was that over large parts of the continent other people preferred to make money without working at all, and since the Disc had yet to develop a music recording industry they were forced to fall back on older, more traditional forms of banditry.
   Strangely enough these often involved considerable effort. Rolling heavy rocks to the top of cliffs for a decent ambush, cutting down trees to block the road, and digging a pit lined with spikes while still keeping a wicked edge on a dagger probably involved a much greater expenditure of thought and muscle than more socially-acceptable professions but, nevertheless, there were still people misguided enough to endure all this, plus long nights in uncomfortable surroundings, merely to get their hands on perfectly ordinary large boxes of jewels.
   So a town like Zemphis was the place where caravans split, mingled and came together again, as dozens of merchants and travellers banded together for protection against the socially disadvantaged on the trails ahead. Esk, wandering unregarded amidst the bustle, learned all this by the simple method of finding someone who looked important and tugging on the hem of his coat.
   This particular man was counting bales of tobacco and would have succeeded but for the interruption.
   “What?”
   “I said, what happening here?”
   The man meant to say: “Push off and bother someone else.” He meant to give her a light cuff about the head. So he was astonished to find himself bending down and talking seriously to a small, grubby-faced child holding a large broomstick (which also, it seemed to him later, was in some indefinable way paying attention).
   He explained about the caravans. The child nodded.
   “People all get together to travel?”
   “Precisely.”
   “Where to?”
   “All sorts of places. Sto Lat, Pseudopolis . . . Ankh-Morpork, of course . . . .”
   “But the river goes there,” said Esk, reasonably. “Barges. The Zoons.”
   “Ah, yes,” said the merchant, “but they charge high prices and they can’t carry everything and, anyway, no one trusts them much.”
   “But they’re very honest!”
   “Huh, yes,” he said. “But you know what they say: never trust an honest man.” He smiled knowingly.
   “Who says that?”
   “They do. You know. People,” he said, a certain uneasiness entering his voice.
   “Oh,” said Esk. She thought about it. “They must be very silly,” she said primly. “Thank you, anyway.”
   He watched her wander off and got back to his counting. A moment later there was another tug at his coat.
   “Fiftysevenfiftysevenfiftysevenwell?” he said, trying not to lose his place.
   “Sorry to bother you again,” said Esk, “but those bale things ….”
   “What about them fiftysevenfiftysevenfiftyseven ?”
   “Well, are they supposed to have little white worm things in them?”
   “Fiftysev—what?” The merchant lowered his slate and stared at Esk, “What little worms?”
   “Wriggly ones. White,” added Esk, helpfully. “All sort of burrowing about in the middle of the bales.”
   “You mean tobacco threadworm?” He looked wild-eyed at the stack of bales being unloaded by, now he came to think about it, a vendor with the nervous look of a midnight sprite who wants to get away before you find out what fairy gold turns into in the morning. “But he told me these had been well stored and—how do you know, anyway? ”
   The child had disappeared among the crowds. The merchant looked hard at the spot where she had been. He looked hard at the vendor, who was grinning nervously. He looked hard at the sky. Then took his sampling knife out of his pocket, stared at it for a moment, appeared to reach a decision, and sidled towards the nearest bale.
   Esk, meanwhile, had by random eavesdropping found the caravan being assembled for Ankh-Morpork. The trail boss was sitting at a table made up of a plank across two barrels.
   He was busy.
   He was talking to a wizard.
   Seasoned travellers know that a party setting out to cross possibly hostile country should have a fair number of swords in it but should definitely have a wizard in case there is any need for magic arts and, even if these do not become necessary, for lighting fires. A wizard of the third rank or above does not expect to pay for the privilege of joining the party. Rather, he expects to be paid. Delicate negotiations were even now coming to a conclusion.
   “Fair enough, Master Treatle, but what of the young man?” said the trail boss, one Adab Gander, an impressive figure in a trollhide jerkin, rakishly floppy hat and a leather kilt. “He’s no wizard, I can see.”
   “He is in training,” said Treatle- a tall skinny wizard whose robes declared him to be a mage of the Ancient and Truly Original Brothers of the Silver Star, one of the eight orders of wizardry.
   “Then no wizard he,” said Gander. “I know the rules, and you’re not a wizard unless you’ve got a staff. And he hasn’t.”
   “Even now he travels to the Unseen University for that small detail,” said Treatle loftily. Wizards parted with money slightly less readily than tigers parted with their teeth.
   Gander looked at the lad in question. He had met a good many wizards in his time and considered himself a good judge and he had to admit that this boy looked like good wizard material. In other words, he was thin, gangling, pale from reading disturbing books in unhealthy rooms, and had watery eyes like two lightly-poached eggs. It crossed Gander’s mind that one must speculate in order to accumulate.
   All he needs to get right to the top, he thought, is a bit of a handicap. Wizards are martyrs to things like asthma and flat feet, it somehow seems to give them their drive.
   “What’s your name, lad?” he said, as kindly as possible.
   “Sssssssssssssss” said the boy. His Adam’s apple bobbed like a captive balloon. He turned to his companion, full of mute appeal.
   “Simon,” said Trestle.
   “—imon,” agreed Simon, thankfully.
   “Can you cast fireballs or whirling spells, such as might be hurled against an enemy?”
   Simon looked sideways at Trestle.
   “Nnnnnnnnnn” he ventured.
   “My young friend follows higher magic than the mere hurling of sorceries,” said the wizard.
   “—o,” said Simon.
   Gander nodded.
   “Well,” he said, “maybe you will indeed be a wizard, lad. Maybe when you have your fine staff you’ll consent to travel with me one time, yes? I will make an investment in you, yes?”
   “Just nod,” said Gander, who was not naturally a cruel man.
   Simon nodded gratefully. Treatle and Gander exchanged nods and then the wizard strode off, with his apprentice trailing behind under a weight of baggage.
   Gander looked down at the list in front of him and carefully crossed out “wizard".
   A small shadow fell across the page. He glanced up and gave an involuntary start.
   “Well?” he said coldly.
   “I want to go to Ankh-Morpork,” said Esk, “please. I’ve got some money.”
   “Go home to your mother, child.”
   “No, really. I want to seek my fortune.”
   Gander sighed. “Why are you holding that broomstick?” he said.
   Esk looked at it as though she had never seen it before.
   “Everything’s got to be somewhere,” she said.
   “Just go home, my girl,” said Gander. “I’m not taking any runaways to Ankh-Morpork. Strange things can happen to little girls in big cities.”
   Esk brightened. “What sort of strange things?”
   “Look, I said go home, right? Now!”
   He picked up his chalk and went on ticking off items on his slate, trying to ignore the steady gaze that seemed to be boring through the top of his head.
   “I can be helpful,” said Esk, quietly.
   Gander threw down the chalk and scratched his chin irritably.
   “How old are you?” he said.
   “Nine.”
   “Well, Miss nine-years-old, I’ve got two hundred animals and a hundred people that want to go to Ankh, and half of them hate the other half, and I’ve not got enough people who can fight, and they say the roads are pretty bad and the bandits are getting really cheeky up in the Paps and the trolls are demanding a bigger bridge toll this year and there’s weevils in the supplies and I keep getting these headaches and where, in all this, do I need you?”
   “Oh,” said Esk. She looked around the crowded square. “Which one of these roads goes to Ankh, then?”
   “The one over there, with the gate.”
   “Thank you,” she said gravely. “Goodbye. I hope you don’t have any more trouble and your head gets better.”
   “Right,” said Gander uncertainly. He drummed his fingers on the tabletop as he watched Esk walk away in the direction of the Ankh road. A long, winding road. A road haunted by thieves and gnolls. A road that wheezed through high mountain passes and crawled, panting, over deserts.
   “Oh bugger,” he said, under his breath. “Hey! You!”

Granny Weatherwax was in trouble.
   First of all, she decided, she should never have allowed Hilta to talk her into borrowing her broomstick. It was elderly, erratic, would fly only at night and even then couldn’t manage a speed much above a trot.
   Its lifting spells had worn so thin that it wouldn’t even begin to operate until it was already moving at a fair lick. It was, in fact, the only broomstick ever to need bump-starting.
   And it was while Granny Weatherwax, sweating and cursing, was running along a forest path holding the damn thing at shoulder height for the tenth time that she had found the bear trap.
   The second problem was that a bear had found it first. In fact this hadn’t been too much of a problem because Granny, already in a bad temper, hit it right between the eyes with the broomstick and it was now sitting as far away from her as it was possible to get in a pit, and trying to think happy thoughts.
   It was not a very comfortable night and the morning wasn’t much better for the party of hunters who, around dawn, peered over the edge of the pit.
   “About time, too,” said Granny. “Get me out.”
   The startled heads withdrew and Granny could hear a hasty whispered conversation. They had seen the hat and broomstick.
   Finally a bearded head reappeared, rather reluctantly, as if the body it was attached to was being pushed forward.
   “Um,” it began, “look, mother—”
   “Im not a mother,” snapped Granny. “I’m certainly not your mother, if you ever had mothers, which I doubt. If I was your mother I’d have run away before you were born.”
   “It’s only a figure of speech,” said the head reproachfully.
   “It’s a damned insult is what it is!”
   There was another whispered conversation.
   “If I don’t get out,” said Granny in ringing tones, “there will be Trouble. Do you see my hat, eh? Do you see it?”
   The head reappeared.
   “That’s the whole point, isn’t it?” it said. “I mean, what will there be if we let you out? It seems less risky all round if we just sort of fill the pit in. Nothing personal, you understand.”
   Granny realized what it was that was bothering her about the head.
   “Are you kneeling down?” she said accusingly. “You’re not, are you! You’re dwarves!”
   Whisper, whisper.
   “Well, what about it?” asked the head defiantly. “Nothing wrong with that, is there? What have you got against dwarves?”
   “Do you know how to repair broomsticks?”
   “Magic broomsticks?”
   “Yes!”
   Whisper, whisper.
   “What if we do?”
   “Well, we could come to some arrangement …”

   The dwarf halls rang to the sound of hammers, although mainly for effect. Dwarves found it hard to think without the sound of hammers, which they found soothing, so well-off dwarves in the clerical professions paid goblins to hit small ceremonial anvils, just to maintain the correct dwarvish image.
   The broomstick lay between two trestles. Granny Weatherwax sat on a rock outcrop while a dwarf half her height, wearing an apron that was a mass of pockets, walked around the broom and occasionally poked it.
   Eventually he kicked the bristles and gave a long intake of breath, a sort of reverse whistle, which is the secret sign of craftsmen across the universe and means that something expensive is about to happen.
   “Weellll,” he said. “I could get the apprentices in to look at this, I could. It’s an education in itself. And you say it actually managed to get airborne?”
   “It flew like a bird,” said Granny.
   The dwarf lit a pipe. “I should very much like to see that bird,” he said reflectively. “I should imagine it’s quite something to watch, a bird like that.”
   “Yes, but can you repair it?” said Granny. “I’m in a hurry.”
   The dwarf sat down, slowly and deliberately.
   “As for repair,” he said, “well, I don’t know about repair. Rebuild, maybe. Of course, it’s hard to get the bristles these days even if you can find people to do the proper binding, and the spells need—”
   “I don’t want it rebuilt, I just want it to work properly,” said Granny.
   “It’s an early model, you see,” the dwarf plugged on. “Very tricky, those early models. You can’t get the wood—”
   He was picked up bodily until his eyes were level with Granny’s. Dwarves, being magical in themselves as it were, are quite resistant to magic but her expression looked as though she was trying to weld his eyeballs to the back of his skull.
   “Just repair it,” she hissed. “Please?”
   “What, make a bodge job?” said the dwarf, his pipe clattering to the floor.
   “Yes.”
   “Patch it up, you mean? Betray my training by doing half a job?”
   “Yes,” said Granny. Her pupils were two little black holes.
   “Oh,” said the dwarf. “Right, then.”

   Gander the trail boss was a worried man.
   They were three mornings out from Zemphis, making good time, and were climbing now towards the rocky pass through the mountains known as the Paps of Scilla (there were eight of them; Gander often wondered who Scilla had been, and whether he would have liked her/.
   A party of gnolls had crept up on them during the night. The nasty creatures, a variety of stone goblin, had slit the throat of a guard and must have been poised to slaughter the entire party. Only….
   Only no one knew quite what had happened next. The screams had woken them up, and by the time people had puffed up the fires and Treatle the wizard had cast a blue radiance over the campsite the surviving gnolls were distant, spidery shadows, running as if all the legions of Hell were after them.
   Judging by what had happened to their colleagues, they were probably right. Bits of gnolls hung from the nearby rocks, giving them a sort of jolly, festive air. Gander wasn’t particularly sorry about that—gnolls liked to capture travellers and practise hospitality of the red-hot-knife-and-bludgeon kind—but he was nervous of being in the same area as Something that went through a dozen wiry and wickedly armed gnolls like a spoon through a lightly-boiled egg but left no tracks.
   In fact the ground was swept clean.
   It had been a very long night, and the morning didn’t seem to be an improvement. The only person more than half-awake was Esk, who had slept through the whole thing under one of the wagons and had complained only of odd dreams.
   Still, it was a relief to get away from that macabre sight. Gander considered that gnolls didn’t look any better inside than out. He hated their guts.
   Esk sat on Treatle’s wagon, talking to Simon who was steering inexpertly while the wizard caught up with some sleep behind them.
   Simon did everything inexpertly. He was really good at it. He was one of those tall lads apparently made out of knees, thumbs and elbows. Watching him walk was a strain, you kept waiting for the strings to snap, and when he talked the spasm of agony on his face if he spotted an S or W looming ahead in the sentence made people instinctively say them for him. It was worth it for the grateful look which spread across his acned face like sunrise on the moon.
   At the moment his eyes were streaming with hayfever.
   “Did you want to be a wizard when you were a little boy?”
   Simon shook his head. “I just www—”
   “—wanted—”
   “—tto find out how things www—”
   “—worked?—”
   “Yes. Then someone in my village told the University and Mmaster T-Treatle was sent to bring me. I shall be a www—”
   “—wizard—”
   “—one day. Master Treatle says I have an exceptional grasp of ththeory.” Simon’s damp eyes misted over and an expression almost of bliss drifted across his ravaged face.
   “He t-tells me they’ve got thousands of b-books in the library at Unseen University,” he said, in the voice of a man in love. “More bbooks than anyone could read in a lifetime.”
   “I’m not sure I like books,” said Esk conversationally. “How can paper know things? My granny says books are only good if the paper is thin.”
   “No, that’s not right,” said Simon urgently. “Books are full of www” he gulped air and gave her a pleading look.
   “—words?—”said Esk, after a moment’s thought.
   “—yes, and they can change th-things. Th-that’s wuwuw, that wuwuwwhha-whha—”
   “—what—”
   “—I must f-find. I know it’s th-there, somewhere in all the old books. They ssss—”
   “—say
   “there’s no new spells but I know that it’s there somewhere, hiding, the wwwwwuwu—”
   “—words—”
   “yes, that no wiwiwi—”
   “—Wizard?—”said Esk, her face a frown of concentration.
   “Yes, has ever found.” His eyes closed and he smiled a beatific smile and added, “The Words that Will change the World.”
   “What?”
   “Eh?” said Simon, opening his eyes in time to stop the oxen wandering off the track.
   “You said all those wubbleyous!”
   “Idid?”
   “I heard you! Try again.”
   Simon took a deep breath. “The worworwor—the wuwuw—” he said. “The wowowoo—” he continued.
   “It’s no good, it’s gone,” he said. “It happens sometimes, if I don’t think about it. Master Treatle says I’m allergic to something.”
   “Allergic to double-yous?”
   “No, sisssisi—”
   “—silly—” said Esk, generously.
   “—there’s sososo—”
   “—something—”
   “—in the air, p-pollen maybe, or g-grass dust. Master Treatle has tried to find the cause of it but no magic seems to h-help it.”
   They were passing through a narrow pass of orange rock. Simon looked at it disconsolately.
   “My granny taught me some hayfever cures,” Esk said. “We could try those.”
   Simon shook his head. It looked touch and go whether it would fall off.
   “Tried everything,” he said. “Fine wwiwwi-magician I’d make, eh, can’t even sss-utter the wowo-name.”
   “I could see where that would be a problem,” said Esk. She watched the scenery for a while, marshalling a train of thought.
   “Is it, er, possible for a woman to be, you know, a wizard? " she said eventually.
   Simon stared at her. She gave him a defiant look.
   His throat strained. He was trying to find a sentence that didn’t start with a W. In the end he was forced to make concessions.
   “A curious idea,” he said. He thought some more, and started to laugh until Esk’s expression warned him.
   “Rather funny, really,” he added, but the laughter in his face faded and was replaced by a puzzled look. “Never really tthought about it, before.”
   “Well? Can they?” You could have shaved with Esk’s voice.
   “Of course they can’t. It is self-evident, child. Simon, return to your studies.”
   Treatle pushed aside the curtain that led into the back of the wagon and climbed out on to the seat board.
   The look of mild panic took up its familiar place on Simon’s face. He gave Esk a pleading glance as Treatle took the reins from his hands, but she ignored him.
   “Why not? What’s so self-evident?”
   Treatle turned and looked down at her. He hadn’t really paid much attention before, she was simply just another figure around the campfires.
   He was the Vice-Chancellor of Unseen University, and quite used to seeing vague scurrying figures getting on with essential but unimportant jobs like serving his meals and dusting his rooms. He was stupid, yes, in the particular way that very clever people can be stupid, and maybe he had all the tact of an avalanche and was as selfcentred as a tornado, but it would never have occurred to him that children were important enough to be unkind to.
   From long white hair to curly boots, Treatle was a wizard’s wizard. He had the appropriate long bushy eyebrows, spangled robe and patriarchal beard that was only slightly spoiled by the yellow nicotine stains (wizards are celibate but, nevertheless, enjoy a good cigar.
   “It will all become clear to you when you grow up,” he said. “It’s an amusing idea, of course, a nice play on words. A female wizard! You might as well invent a male witch!”
   “Warlocks,” said Esk.
   “Pardon me?”
   “My granny says men can’t be witches,” said Esk. “She says if men tried to be witches they’d be wizards.”
   “She sounds a very wise woman,” said Treatle.
   “She says women should stick to what they’re good at,” Esk went on.
   “Very sensible of her.”
   “She says if women were as good as men they’d be a lot better!”
   Treatle laughed.
   “She’s a witch,” said Esk, and added in her mind: there, what do you think of that, Mr so-called cleverwizard?
   “My dear good young lady, am I supposed to be shocked? I happen to have a great respect for witches.”
   Esk frowned. He wasn’t supposed to say that.
   “You have?”
   “Yes indeed. I happen to believe that witchcraft is a fine career, for a woman. A very noble calling.”
   “You do? I mean, it is?”
   “Oh yes. Very useful in rural districts for, for people who are -having babies, and so forth. However, witches are not wizards. Witchcraft is Nature’s way of allowing women access to the magical fluxes, but you must remember it is not high magic.”
   “I see. Not high magic,” said Esk grimly.
   “Oh, no. Witchcraft is very suitable for helping people through life, of course, but—”
   “I expect women aren’t really sensible enough to be wizards,” said Esk. “I expect that’s it, really.”
   “I have nothing but the highest respect for women,” said Treatle, who hadn’t noticed the fresh edge to Esk’s tone. “They are without parallel when, when—”
   “For having babies and so forth?”
   “There is that, yes,” the wizard conceded generously. “But they can be a little unsettling at times. A little too excitable. High magic requires great clarity of thought, you see, and women’s talents do not lie in that direction. Their brains tend to overheat. I am sorry to say there is only one door into wizardry and that is the main gate at Unseen University and no woman has ever passed through it.”
   “Tell me,” said Esk, “what good is high magic, exactly?”
   Treatle smiled at her.
   “High magic, my child,” he said, “can give us everything we want.”
   “Oh.”
   “So put all this wizard nonsense out of your head, all right?” Treatle gave her a benevolent smile. “What is your name, child?”
   “Eskarina.”
   “And why do you go to Ankh, my dear?”
   “I thought I might seek my fortune,” muttered Esk, “but I think perhaps girls don’t have fortunes to seek. Are you sure wizards give people what they want?”
   “Of course. That is what high magic is for.”
   “I see.”
   The whole caravan was travelling only a little faster than walking pace. Esk jumped down, pulled the staff from its temporary hiding place among the bags and pails on the side of the wagon, and ran back along the line of carts and animals. Through her tears she caught a glimpse of Simon peering from the back of the wagon, an open book in his hands. He gave her a puzzled smile and started to say something, but she ran on and veered off the track.
   Scrubby whinbushes scratched her legs as she scrambled up a clay bank and then she was running free across a barren plateau, hemmed in by the orange cliffs.
   She didn’t stop until she was good and lost but the anger still burned brightly. She had been angry before, but never like this; normally anger was like the red flame you got when the forge was first lit, all glow and sparks, but this anger was different-it had the bellows behind it, and had narrowed to the tiny bluewhite flame that cuts iron.
   It made her body tingle. She had to do something about it or burst.
   Why was it that, when she heard Granny ramble on about witchcraft she longed for the cutting magic of wizardry, but whenever she heard Treatle speak in his high-pitched voice she would fight to the death for witchcraft? She’d be both, or none at all. And the more they intended to stop her, the more she wanted it.
   She’d be a witch and a wizard too. And she would show them.
   Esk sat down under a low-spreading juniper bush at the foot of a steep, sheer cliff, her mind seething with plans and anger. She could sense doors being slammed before she had barely begun to open them. Treatle was right; they wouldn’t let her inside the University. Having a staff wasn’t enough to be a wizard, there had to be training too, and no one was going to train her.
   The midday sun beat down off the cliff and the air around Esk began to smell of bees and gin. She lay back, looking at the nearpurple dome of the sky through the leaves and, eventually, she fell asleep.
   One side-effect of using magic is that one tends to have realistic and disturbing dreams. There is a reason for this, but even thinking about it is enough to give a wizard nightmares.
   The fact is that the minds of wizards can give thoughts a shape. Witches normally work with what actually exists in the world, but a wizard can, if he’s good enough, put flesh on his imagination. This wouldn’t cause any trouble if it wasn’t for the fact that the little circle of candlelight loosely called “the universe of time and space” is adrift in something much more unpleasant and unpredictable. Strange Things circle and grunt outside the flimsy stockades of normality; there are weird hootings and howlings in the deep crevices at the edge of Time. There are things so horrible that even the dark is afraid of them.
   Most people don’t know this and this is just as well because the world could not really operate if everyone stayed in bed with the blankets over their head, which is what would happen if people knew what horrors lay a shadow’s width away.
   The problem is people interested in magic and mysticism spend a lot of time loitering on the very edge of the light, as it were, which gets them noticed by the creatures from the Dungeon Dimensions who then try to use them in their indefatigable efforts to break into this particular Reality.
   Most people can resist this, but the relentless probing by the Things is never stronger than when the subject is asleep.
   Bel-Shamharoth, C’hulagen, the Insider—the hideous old dark gods of the Necrotelicomnicon, the book known to certain mad adepts by its true name of Liber Paginarum Fulvarum, are always ready to steal into a slumbering mind. The nightmares are often colourful and always unpleasant.
   Esk had got used to them ever since that first dream after her first Borrowing, and familiarity had almost replaced terror. When she found herself sitting on a glittering, dusty plain under unexplained stars she knew it was time for another one.
   “Drat,” she said. “All right, come on then. Bring on the monsters. I just hope it isn’t the one with his winkle on his face.”
   But this time it seemed that the nightmare had changed. Esk looked around and saw, rearing up behind her, a tall black castle. Its turrets disappeared among the stars. Lights and fireworks and interesting music cascaded from its upper battlements. The huge double doors stood invitingly open. There seemed to be quite an amusing party going on in there.
   She stood up, brushed the silver sand off her dress, and set off for the gates.
   She had almost reached them when they slammed. They didn’t appear to move; it was simply that in one instant they were lounging ajar, and the next they were tight shut with a clang that shook the horizons.
   Esk reached out and touched them. They were black, and so cold that ice was beginning to form on them.
   There was a movement behind her. She turned around and saw the staff, without its broomstick disguise, standing upright in the sand. Little worms of light crept around its polished wood and crept around the carvings no one could ever quite identify.
   She picked it up and smashed it against the doors. There was a shower of octarine sparks, but the black metal was unscathed.
   Esk’s eyes narrowed. She held the staff at arm’s length and concentrated until a thin line of fire leapt from the wood and burst against the gate. The ice flashed into steam but the darkness—she was sure now that it wasn’t metal—absorbed the power without so much as glowing. She doubled the energy, letting the staff put all its stored magic into a beam that was now so bright that she had to shut her eyes) and could still see it as a brilliant line in her mind).
   Then it winked out.
   After a few seconds Esk ran forward and touched the doors gingerly. The coldness nearly froze her fingers off.
   And from the battlements above she could hear the sound of sniggering. Laughter wouldn’t have been so bad, especially an impressive demonic laugh with lots of echo, but this was just -sniggering.
   It went on for a long time. It was one of the most unpleasant sounds Esk had ever heard.
   She woke up shivering. It was long after midnight and the stars looked damp and chilly; the air was full of the busy silence of the night, which is created by hundreds of small furry things treading very carefully in the hope of finding dinner while avoiding being the main course.
   A crescent moon was setting and a thin grey glow towards the rim of the world suggested that, against all probability, another day was on the cards.
   Someone had wrapped Esk in a blanket.
   “I know you’re awake,” said the voice of Granny Weatherwax. “You could make yourself useful and light a fire. There’s damn all wood in these parts.”
   Esk sat up, and clutched at the juniper bush. She felt light enough to float away.
   “Fire?” she muttered.
   “Yes. You know. Pointing the finger and whoosh,” said Granny sourly. She was sitting on a rock, trying to find a position that didn’t upset her arthritis.
   “I—I don’t think I can.”
   “You tell me?” said Granny cryptically.
   The old witch leaned forward and put her hand on Esk’s forehead; it was like being caressed by a sock full of warm dice.
   “You’re running a bit of a temperature,” she added. “Too much hot sun and cold ground. That’s forn parts for you.”
   Esk let herself slump forward until her head lay in Granny’s lap, with its familiar smells of camphor, mixed herbs and a trace of goat. Granny patted her in what she hoped was a soothing way.
   After a while Esk said, in a low voice, “They’re not going to allow me into the University. A wizard told me, and I dreamed about it, and it was one of those true dreams. You know, like you told me, a maty-thing.”
   “Metterfor,” said Granny calmly.
   “One of them.”
   “Did you think it would be easy?” asked Granny. “Did you think you’d walk into their gates waving your staff? Here I am, I want to be a wizard, thank you very much?”
   “He told me there’s no women allowed in the University!”
   “He’s wrong.”
   “No, I could tell he was telling the truth. You know, Granny, you can tell how—”
   “Foolish child. All you could tell was that he thought he was telling the truth. The world isn’t always as people see it.”
   “I don’t understand,” said Esk.
   “You’ll learn,” said Granny. “Now tell me. This dream. They wouldn’t let you into their university, right?”
   “Yes, and they laughed!”
   “And then you tried to burn down the doors?”
   Esk turned her head in Granny’s lap and opened a suspicious eye.
   “How did you know?”
   Granny smiled, but as a lizard would smile.
   “I was miles away,” she said. “I was bending my mind towards you, and suddenly you seemed to be everywhere. You shone out like a beacon, so you did. As for the fire—look around.”
   In the halflight of dawn the plateau was a mass of baked clay. In front of Esk the cliff was glassy and must have flowed like tar under the onslaught; there were great gashes across it which had dripped molten rock and slag. When Esk listened she could hear the faint “pink, pink” of cooling rock.
   “Oh,” she said, “did I do that?”
   “So it would appear,” said Granny.
   “But I was asleep! I was only dreaming!”
   “It’s the magic,” said Granny. “It’s trying to find a way out. The witch magic and the wizard magic are, I don’t know, sort of feeding off each other. I think.”
   Esk bit her lip.
   “What can I do?” she asked. “I dream of all sorts of things!”
   “Well, for a start we’re going straight to the University,” decided Granny. “They must be used to apprentices not being able to control magic and having hot dreams, else the place would have burned down years ago.”
   She glanced towards the Rim, and then down at the broomstick beside her.

   We will pass over the running up and down, the tightening of the broomstick’s bindings, the muttered curses against dwarves, the brief moments of hope as the magic flickered fitfully, the horrible black feelings as it died, the tightening of the bindings again, the running again, the sudden catching of the spell, the scrambling aboard, the yelling, the takeoff ….
   Esk clung to Granny with one hand and held her staff in the other as they, frankly, pottered along a few hundred feet above the ground. A few birds flew alongside them, interested in this new flying tree.
   “Bugger off!” screamed Granny, taking off her hat and flapping it.
   “We’re not going very fast, Granny,” said Esk meekly.
   “We’re going quite fast enough for me!”
   Esk looked around. Behind them the Rim was a blaze of gold, barred with cloud.
   “I think we ought to go lower, Granny,” she said urgently. “You said the broomstick won’t fly in sunlight.” She glanced down at the landscape below them. It looked sharp and inhospitable. It also looked expectant.
   “I know what I’m doing, Miss,” snapped Granny, gripping the broomstick hard and trying to make herself as light as possible.
   It has already been revealed that light on the Discworld travels slowly, the result of its passage through the Disc’s vast and ancient magical field.
   So dawn isn’t the sudden affair that it is on other worlds. The new day doesn’t erupt, it sort of sloshes gently across the sleeping landscape in the same way that the tide sneaks in across the beach, melting the sandcastles of the night. It tends to flow around mountains. If the trees are close together it comes out of woods cut to ribbons and sliced with shadows.
   An observer on some suitable high point, let’s say for the sake of argument a wisp of cirro-stratus on the edge of space, would remark on how lovingly the light spreads across the land, how it leaps forward on the plains and slows down when it encounters high ground, how beautifully it ….
   Actually, there are some kinds of observers who, faced with all this beauty, will whine that you can’t have heavy light and certainly wouldn’t be able to see it, even if you could. To which one can only reply, so how come you’re standing on a cloud?
   So much for cynicism. But down on the Disc itself the broomstick barrelled forward on the cusp of dawn, dropping ever backward in the shadow of night.
   “Granny!”
   Day burst upon them. Ahead of the broomstick the rocks seemed to flash into flame as the light washed over them. Granny felt the stick lurch and stared with horrified fascination at the little scudding shadow below them. It was getting closer.
   “What will happen when we hit the ground?”
   “That depends if I can find some soft rocks,” said Granny in a preoccupied voice.
   “The broomstick’s going to crash! Can’t we do anything?”
   “Well, I suppose we could get off.”
   “Granny,” said Esk, in the exasperated and remarkably adult voice children use to berate their wayward elders. “I don’t think you quite understand. I don’t want to hit the ground. It’s never done anything to me.”
   Granny was trying to think of a suitable spell and regretting that headology didn’t work on rocks, and had she detected the diamond edge to Esk’s tone perhaps she wouldn’t have said: “Tell the broomstick that, then.”
   And they would indeed have crashed. But she remembered in time to grab her hat and brace herself. The broomstick gave a shudder, tilted
   - and the landscape blurred.
   It was really quite a short trip but one that Granny knew she would always remember, generally around three o’clock in the morning after eating rich food. She would remember the rainbow colours that hummed in the rushing air, the horrible heavy feeling, the impression that something very big and heavy was sitting on the universe.
   She would remember Esk’s laughter. She would remember, despite her best efforts, the way the ground sped below them, whole mountain ranges flashing past with nasty zipping noises.
   Most of all, she would remember catching up with the night.
   It appeared ahead of her, a ragged line of darkness running ahead of the remorseless morning. She stared in horrified fascination as the line became a blot, a stain, a whole continent of blackness that raced towards them.
   For an instant they were poised on the crest of the dawn as it broke in silent thunder on the land. No surfer ever rode such a wave, but the broomstick broke through the broil of light and shot smoothly through into the coolness beyond.
   Granny let herself breathe out.
   Darkness took some of the terror out of the flight. It also meant that if Esk lost interest the broomstick ought to be able to fly under its own rather rusty magic.
   “.” Granny said, and cleared her bone-dry throat for a second try. “Esk?”
   “This is fun, isn’t it? I wonder how I make it happen?”
   “Yes, fun,” said Granny weakly. “But can I fly the stick, please? I don’t want us to go over the Edge. Please?”
   “Is it true that there’s a giant waterfall all around the edge of the world, and you can look down and see stars?” said Esk.
   “Yes. Can we slow down now?”
   “I’d like to see it.”
   “No! I mean, no, not now.”
   The broomstick slowed. The rainbow bubble around it vanished with an audible pop. Without a jolt, without so much as a shudder, Granny found herself flying at a respectable speed again.
   Granny had built a solid reputation on always knowing the answer to everything. Getting her to admit ignorance, even to herself, was an astonishing achievement. But the worm of curiosity was chewing at the apple of her mind.
   “How,” she said at last, “did you do that?”
   There was a thoughtful silence behind her. Then Esk said: “I don’t know. I just needed it, and it was in my head. Like when you remember something you’ve forgotten.”
   “Yes, but how?”
   “I—I don’t know. I just had a picture of how I wanted things to be, and, and I, sort of—went into the picture.”
   Granny stared into the night. She had never heard of magic like that, but it sounded awfully powerful and probably lethal. Went into the picture! Of course, all magic changed the world in some way, wizards thought there was no other use for it—they didn’t truck with the idea of leaving the world as it was and changing the people -but this sounded more literal. It needed thinking about. On the ground.
   For the first time in her life Granny wondered whether there might be something important in all these books people were setting such store by these days, although she was opposed to books on strict moral grounds, since she had heard that many of them were written by dead people and therefore it stood to reason reading them would be as bad as necromancy. Among the many things in the infinitely varied universe with which Granny did not hold was talking to dead people, who by all accounts had enough troubles of their own.
   But not, she was inclined to feel, as many as her. She looked down bemusedly at the dark ground and wondered vaguely why the stars were below her.
   For a cardiac moment she wondered if they had indeed flown over the edge, and then she realised that the thousands of little pinpoints below her were too yellow, and flickered. Besides, whoever heard of stars arranged in such a neat pattern?
   “It’s very pretty,” said Esk. “Is it a city?”
   Granny scanned the ground wildly. If it was a city, then it was too big. But now she had time to think about it, it certainly smelled like a lot of people.
   The air around them reeked of incense and grain and spices and beer, but mainly of the sort of smell that was caused by a high water table, thousands of people, and a robust approach to drainage.
   She mentally shook herself. The day was hard on their heels. She looked for an area where the torches were dim and widely spaced, reasoning that this would mean a poor district and poor people did not object to witches, and gently pointed the broom handle downwards.
   She managed to get within five feet of the ground before dawn arrived for the second time.

The gates were indeed big and black and looked as if they were made out of solid darkness.
   Granny and Esk stood among the crowds that thronged the square outside the University and stared up at them. Finally Esk said: “I can’t see how people get in.”
   “Magic, I expect,” said Granny sourly. “That’s wizards for you. Anyone else would have bought a doorknocker.”
   She waved her broomstick in the direction of the tall doors.
   “You’ve got to say some hocuspocus word to get in, I shouldn’t wonder,” she added.
   They had been in Ankh-Morpork for three days and Granny was beginning to enjoy herself, much to her surprise. She had found them lodgings in The Shades, an ancient part of the city whose inhabitants were largely nocturnal and never enquired about one another’s business because curiosity not only killed the cat but threw it in the river with weights tied to its feet. The lodgings were on the top floor next to the well-guarded premises of a respectable dealer in stolen property because, as Granny had heard, good fences make good neighbors.
   The Shades, in brief, were an abode of discredited gods and unlicensed thieves, ladies of the night and peddlers in exotic goods, alchemists of the mind and strolling mummers; in short, all the grease on civilization’s axle.
   And yet, despite the fact that these people tend to appreciate the soft magics, there was a remarkable shortage of witches. Within hours the news of Granny’s arrival had seeped through the quarter and a stream of people crept, sidled or strutted towards her door, seeking potions and charms and news of the future and various personal and specialised services that witches traditionally provide for those whose lives are a little clouded or full of stormy weather.
   She was at first annoyed, and then embarrassed, and then flattered; her clients had money, which was useful, but they also paid in respect, and that was a rock-hard currency.
   In short, Granny was even wondering about the possibility of acquiring slightly larger premises with a bit of garden and sending for her goats. The smell might be a problem, but the goats would just have to put up with it.
   They had visited the sights of Ankh-Morpork, its crowded docks, its many bridges, its souks, its casbahs, its streets lined with nothing but temples. Granny had counted the temples with a thoughtful look in her eyes; gods were always demanding that their followers acted other than according to their true natures, and the human fallout this caused made plenty of work for witches.
   The terrors of civilisation had so far failed to materialise, although a cutpurse had tried to make off with Granny’s handbag. To the amazement of passers-by Granny called him back, and back he came, fighting his feet which had totally ceased to obey him. No one quite saw what happened to her eyes when she stared into his face or heard the words she whispered in his cowering ear, but he gave her back all her money plus quite a lot of money belonging to other people, and before she let him go had promised to have a shave, stand up straight, and be a better person for the rest of his life. By nightfall Granny’s description was circulated to all the chapter houses of the Guild of Thieves, Cutpurses, Housebreakers and Allied Trades*, with strict instructions to avoid her at all costs. Thieves, being largely creatures of the night themselves, know trouble when it stares them in the face.
   * A very respectable body which in fact represented the major law enforcement agency in the city. The reason for this is as follows: the Guild was given to an annual quota which represented a socially acceptable level of thefts, muggings and assassinations, an in return saw to it in very definite and final ways that unofficial crime was not only rapidly stamped out but knifed, garrotted, dismembered and left around the city in an assortment of paper bags as well. This was held to be a cheap and enlightened arrangedment, except by thos malcontents who were actually mugged or assassinated and refused to see it as their social duty, and it enabled the city’s thieves to plan a decent career structure, entrace examinations and codes of conduct similar to those adopted by the city’s other professions -- which, the cap not being very wide in any case, they rabidly came to resemble.
   Granny had also written two more letters to the University. There had been no reply.
   “I liked the forest best,” said Esk.
   “I dunno,” said Granny. “This is a bit like the forest, really. Anyway, people certainly appreciate a witch here.”
   “They’re very friendly,” Esk conceded. “You know the house down the street, where that fat lady lives with all those young ladies you said were her relatives?”
   A very respectable body which in fact represented the major law enforcement agency in the city. The reason for this is as follows: the Guild was given an annual quota which represented a socially acceptable level of thefts, muggings and assassinations, and in return saw to it in very definite and final ways that unofficial crime was not only rapidly stamped out but knifed, garrotted, dismembered and left around the city in an assortment of paper bags as well. This was held to be a cheap and enlightened arrangement, except by those malcontents who were actually mugged or assassinated and refused to see it as their social duty, and it enabled the city’s thieves to plan a decent career structure, entrance examinations and codes of conduct similar to those adopted by the city’s other professions- which, the gap not being very wide in any case, they rapidly came to resemble.
   “Mrs Palm,” said Granny cautiously. “Very respectable lady.”
   “People come to visit them all night long. I watched. I’m surprised they get any sleep.”
   “Um,” said Granny.
   “It must be a trial for the poor woman with all those daughters to feed, too. I think people could be more considerate.”
   “Well now,” said Granny, “I’m not sure that—”
   She was rescued by the arrival at the gates of the University of a large, brightly painted wagon. Its driver reined in the oxen a few feet from Granny and said: “Excuse me, my good woman, but would you be so kind as to move, please?”
   Granny stepped aside, affronted by this display of downright politeness and particularly upset at being thought of as anyone’s good woman, and the driver saw Esk.
   It was Treatle. He grinned like a worried snake.
   “I say. It’s the young lady who thinks women should be wizards, isn’t it?”
   “Yes,” said Esk, ignoring a sharp kick on the ankle from Granny.
   “What fun. Come to join us, have you?”
   “Yes,” said Esk, and then because something about Treatle’s manner seemed to demand it, she added, “sir. Only we can’t get in.”
   “We?” said Treatle, and then glanced at Granny, “Oh, yes, of course. This would be your aunt?”
   “My granny. Only not really my granny, just sort of everyone’s granny.”
   Granny gave a stiff nod.
   “Well, we cannot have this,” said Treatle, in a voice as hearty as a plum pudding. “My word, no. Our first lady wizard left on the doorstep? That would be a disgrace. May I accompany you?”
   Granny grasped Esk firmly by the shoulder.
   “If it’s all the same to you—”she began. But Esk twisted out of her grip and ran towards the cart.
   “You can really take me in?” she said, her eyes shining.
   “Of course. I am sure the heads of the Orders will be most gratified to meet you. Most astonished and astounded,” he said, and gave a little laugh.
   “Eskarina Smith—” said Granny, and then stopped. She looked at Treatle.
   “I don’t know what is in your mind, Mr Wizard, but I don’t like it,” she said. “Esk, you know where we live. Be a fool if you must, but you might at least be your own fool.”
   She turned on her heel and strode off across the square.
   “What a remarkable woman,” said Treatle, vaguely. “I see you still have your broomstick. Capital.”
   He let go of the reins for a moment and made a complicated sign in the air with both hands.
   The big doors swung back, revealing a wide courtyard surrounded by lawns. Behind them was a great rambling building, or buildings: it was hard to tell, because it didn’t look so much as if it had been designed as that a lot of buttresses, arches, towers, bridges, domes, cupolas and so forth had huddled together for warmth.
   “Is that it?” said Esk. “It looks sort of—melted.”
   “Yes, that’s it,” said Trestle. “Alma mater, gaudy armours eagle tour and so on. Of course, it’s a lot bigger inside than out, like an iceberg or so I’m given to understand, I’ve never seen the things. Unseen University, only of course a lot of it is unseen. Just go in the back and fetch Simon, will you?”
   Esk pushed aside the heavy curtains and peered into the back of the wagon. Simon was lying on a pile of rugs, reading a very large book and making notes on scraps of paper.
   He looked up, and gave her a worried smile.
   “Is that you?” he said.
   “Yes,” said Esk, with conviction.
   “We thought you’d left us. Everyone thought you were riding with everyone else and then wwwwhen we stopped…”
   “I sort of caught up. I think Mr Trestle wants you to come and look at the University.”
   “We’re here?” he said, and gave her an odd look: “You’re here?”
   “Yes.”
   “How?”
   “Mr Treatle invited me in, he said everyone would be astounded to meet me.” Uncertainty flashed a fin in the depths of her eyes. “Was he right?”
   Simon looked down at his book, and dabbed at his running eyes with a red handkerchief.
   “He has t-these little f-fancies", he muttered, “bbbut he’s not a bad person.”
   Bewildered, Esk looked down at the yellowed pages open in front of the boy. They were full of complicated red and black symbols which in some inexplicable way were as potent and unpleasant as a ticking parcel, but which nevertheless drew the eye in the same way that a really bad accident does. One felt that one would like to know their purpose, while at the same time suspecting that if you found out you would really prefer not to have done.
   Simon saw her expression and hastily shut the book.
   “Just some magic,” he mumbled. “Something I’m wwwww—”
   “—working—”said Esk, automatically.
   “Thank you. On.”
   “It must be quite interesting, reading books,” said Esk.
   “Sort of. Can’t you read, Esk?”
   The astonishment in his voice stung her.
   “I expect so,” she said defiantly. “I’ve never tried.”

   Esk wouldn’t have known what a collective noun was if it had spat in her eye, but she knew there was a herd of goats and a coven of witches. She didn’t know what you called a lot of wizards. An order of wizards? A conspiracy? A circle?
   Whatever it was, it filled the University. Wizards strolled among the cloisters and sat on benches under the trees. Young wizards scuttled along pathways as bells rang, with their arms full of books or—in the case of senior students—with their books flapping through the air after them. The air had the greasy feel of magic and tasted of tin.
   Esk walked along between Trestle and Simon and drank it all in. It wasn’t just that there was magic in the air, but it was tamed and working, like a millrace. It was power, but it was harnessed.
   Simon was as excited as she was, but it showed only because his eyes watered more and his stutter got worse. He kept stopping to point out the various colleges and research buildings.
   One was quite low and brooding, with high narrow windows.
   “T-that’s the l-l-library,” said Simon, his voice bursting with wonder and respect. “Can I have a l-l-look?”
   “Plenty of time for that later,” said Treatle. Simon gave the building a wistful look.
   “All the b-books of magic ever written,” he whispered.
   “Why are the windows barred?” said Esk.
   Simon swallowed. “Um, b-because b-books of m-magic aren’t like other b-books, they lead a—”
   “That’s enough,” snapped Treatle. He looked down at Esk as if he had just noticed her, and frowned.
   “Why are you here?”
   “You invited me in,” said Esk.
   “Me? Oh, yes. Of course. Sorry, mind wandering. The young lady who wants to be a wizard. Let us see, shall we?”
   He led the way up a broad flight of steps to an impressive pair of doors. At least, they were designed to be impressive. The designer had invested deeply in heavy locks, curly hinges, brass studs and an intricately-carved archway to make it absolutely clear to anyone entering that they were not very important people at all.
   He was a wizard. He had forgotten the doorknocker.
   Treatle rapped on the door with his staff. It hesitated for a while, and then slowly slid back its bolts and swung open.
   The hall was full of wizards and boys. And boys’ parents.
   There are two ways of getting into Unseen University (in fact there are three, but at this time wizards hadn’t realised it.
   The first is to achieve some great work of magic, such as the recovery of an ancient and powerful relic or the invention of a totally new spell, but in these times it was seldom done. In the past there had been great wizards capable of forming whole new spells from the chaotic raw magic of the world, wizards from whom as it were all the spells of wizardry had flowed, but those days had gone; there were no more sourcerers.
   So the more typical method was to be sponsored by a senior and respected wizard, after a suitable period of apprenticeship.
   Competition was stiff for a University place and the honour and privileges an Unseen degree could bring. Many of the boys milling around the hall, and launching minor spells at each other, would fail and have to spend their lives as lowly magicians, mere magical technologists with defiant beards and leather patches on their elbows who congregated in small jealous groups at parties.
   Not for them the coveted pointy hat with optional astrological symbols, or the impressive robes, or the staff of authority. But at least they could look down on conjurers, who tended to be jolly and fat and inclined to drop their aitches and drink beer and go around with sad thin women in spangly tights and really infuriate magicians by not realising how lowly they were and kept telling them jokes. Lowliest of all—apart from witches, of course—were thaumaturgists, who never got any schooling at all. A thaumaturgist could just about be trusted to wash out an alembic. Many spells required things like mould from a corpse dead of crushing, or the semen of a living tiger, or the root of a plant that gave an ultrasonic scream when it was uprooted. Who was sent to get them? Right.
   It is a common error to refer to the lower magical ranks as hedge wizards. In fact hedge wizardry is a very honoured and specialised form of magic that attracts silent, thoughtful men of the druidical persuasion and topiaric inclinations. If you invited a hedge wizard to a party he would spend half the evening talking to your potted plant. And he would spend the other half listening.
   Esk noticed that there were some women in the hall, because even young wizards had mothers and sisters. Whole families had turned up to bid the favoured sons farewell. There was a considerable blowing of noses, wiping of tears and the clink of coins as proud fathers tucked a little spending money into their offspring’s hands.
   Very senior wizards were perambulating among the crowds, talking to the sponsoring wizards and examining the prospective students.
   Several of them pushed through the throng to meet Treatle, moving like gold-trimmed galleons under full sail. They bowed gravely to him and looked approvingly at Simon.
   “This is young Simon, is it?” said the fattest of them, beaming at the boy. “We’ve heard great reports of you, young man. Eh? What?”
   “Simon, bow to Archchancellor Cutangle, Archmage of the Wizards of the Silver Star,” said Treatle. Simon bowed apprehensively.
   Cutangle looked at him benevolently. “We’ve heard great things about you, my boy,” he said. “All this mountain air must be good for the brain, eh?”
   He laughed. The wizards around him laughed. Treatle laughed. Which Esk thought was rather funny, because there wasn’t anything particularly amusing happening.
   “I ddddon’t know, ssss—”
   “From what we hear it must be the only thing you don’t know, lad!” said Cutangle, his jowls waggling. There was another carefully timed bout of laughter.
   Cutangle patted Simon on the shoulder.
   “This is the scholarship boy,” he said. “Quite astounding results, never seen better. Self-taught, too. Astonishing, what? Isn’t that so, Treatle?”
   “Superb, Archchancellor.”
   Cutangle looked around at the watching wizards.
   “Perhaps you could give us a sample,” he said. “A little demonstration, perhaps?”
   Simon looked at him in animal panic.
   “A-actually I’m not very g-g-g—”
   “Now, now,” said Cutangle, in what he probably really did think was an encouraging tone of voice. “Do not be afraid. Take your time. When you are ready.”
   Simon licked his dry lips and gave Treatle a look of mute appeal.
   “Um,” he said, “y-you s-s-s-s-.” He stopped and swallowed hard. “The f-f-f-f—”
   His eyes bulged. The tears streamed from his eyes, and his shoulders heaved.
   Treatle patted him reassuringly on the back.
   “Hayfever,” he explained. “Don’t seem to be able to cure it. Tried everything.”
   Simon swallowed, and nodded. He waved Treatle away with his long white hands and closed his eyes.
   For a few seconds nothing happened. He stood with his lips moving soundlessly, and then silence spread out from him like candlelight. Ripples of noiselessness washed across the crowds in the hall, striking the walls with all the force of a blown kiss and then curling back in waves. People watched their companions mouthing silently and then went red with effort when their own laughter was as audible as a gnat’s squeak.
   Tiny motes of light winked into existence around his head. They whirled and spiralled in a complex three-dimensional dance, and then formed a shape.
   In fact it seemed to Esk that the shape had been there all the time, waiting for her eyes to see it, in the same way that a perfectly innocent cloud can suddenly become, without changing in any way, a whale or a ship or a face.
   The shape around Simon’s head was the world.
   That was quite clear, although the glitter and rush of the little lights blurred some of the detail. But there was Great A’Tuin the sky turtle, with the four Elephants on its back, and on them the Disc itself. There was the sparkle of the great waterfall around the edge of the world, and there at the very hub a tiny needle of rock that was the great mountain Cori Celesti, where the gods lived.
   The image expanded and homed in on the Circle Sea and then on Ankh itself, the little lights flowing away from Simon and winking out of existence a few feet from his head. Now they showed the city from the air, rushing towards the watchers. There was the University itself, growing larger. There was the Great Hall
   - there were the people, watching silent and open-mouthed, and Simon himself, outlined in specks of silver light. And a tiny sparkling image in the air around him, and that image contained an image and another and another
   There was a feeling that the universe had been turned inside out in all dimensions at once. It was a bloated, swollen sensation. It sounded as though the whole world had said “gloop".
   The walls faded. So did the floor. The paintings of former great mages, all scrolls and beards and slightly constipated frowns, vanished. The tiles underfoot, a rather nice black and white pattern, evaporated—to be replaced by fine sand, grey as moonlight and cold as ice. Strange and unexpected stars glittered overhead; on the horizon were low hills, eroded not by wind or rain in this weatherless place but by the soft sandpaper of Time itself.
   No one else seemed to have noticed. No one else, in fact, seemed alive. Esk was surrounded by people as still and silent as statues.
   And they weren’t alone. There were other-Things-behind them, and more were appearing all the time. They had no shape, or rather they seemed to be taking their shapes at random from a variety of creatures; they gave the impression that they had heard about arms and legs and jaws and claws and organs but didn’t really know how they all fitted together. Or didn’t care. Or were so hungry they hadn’t bothered to find out.
   They made a sound like a swarm of flies.
   They were the creatures out of her dreams, come to feed on magic. She knew they weren’t interested in her now, except in the nature of an after-dinner mint. Their whole concentration was focused on Simon, who was totally unaware of their presence.
   Esk kicked him smartly on the ankle.
   The cold desert vanished. The real world rushed back. Simon opened his eyes, smiled faintly, and gently fell backwards into Esk’s arms.
   A buzz went up from the wizards, and several of them started to clap. No one seemed to have noticed anything odd, apart from the silver lights.
   Cutangle shook himself, and raised a hand to quell the crowd.
   “Quite—astonishing,” he said to Treatle. “You say he worked it out all by himself?”
   “Indeed, lord.”
   “No one helped him at all?”
   “There was no one to help him,” said Treatle. “He was just wandering from village to village, doing small spells. But only if people paid him in books or paper.”
   Cutangle nodded. “It was no illusion,” he said, “yet he didn’t use his hands. What was he saying to himself? Do you know?”
   “He says it’s just words to make his mind work properly,” said Treatle, and shrugged. “I can’t understand half of what he says and that’s a fact. He says he’s having to invent words because there aren’t any for the things he’s doing.”
   Cutangle glanced sideways at his fellow mages. They nodded.
   “It will be an honour to admit him to the University,” he said. “Perhaps you would tell him so when he wakes up.”
   He felt a tugging at his robe, and looked down.
   “Excuse me,” said Esk.
   “Hallo, young lady,” said Cutangle, in a sugarmouse voice. “Have you come to see your brother enter the University?”
   “He’s not my brother,” said Esk. There were times when the world had seemed to be full of brothers, but this wasn’t one of them.
   “Are you important?” she said.
   Cutangle looked at his colleagues, and beamed. There were fashions in wizardry, just like anything else; sometimes wizards were thin and gaunt and talked to animals (the animals didn’t listen, but it’s the thought that counts) while at other times they tended towards the dark and saturnine, with little black pointed beards. Currently Aldermanic was in. Cutangle swelled with modesty.
   “Quite important,” he said. “One does one’s best in the service of one’s fellow man. Yes. Quite important, I would say.”
   “I want to be a wizard,” said Esk.
   The lesser wizards behind Cutangle stared at her as if she was a new and interesting kind of beetle. Cutangle’s face went red and his eyes bulged. He looked down at Esk and seemed to be holding his breath. Then he started to laugh. It started somewhere down in his extensive stomach regions and worked its way up, echoing from rib to rib and causing minor wizardquakes across his chest until it burst forth in a series of strangled snorts. It was quite fascinating to watch, that laugh. It had a personality all of its own.
   But he stopped when he saw Esk’s stare. If the laugh was a music hall clown then Esk’s determined squint was a whitewash bucket on a fast trajectory.
   “A wizard?” he said; “You want to be a wizard?”
   “Yes,” said Esk, pushing the dazed Simon into Trestle’s reluctant arms. “I’m the eighth son of an eighth son. I mean daughter.”
   The wizards around her were looking at one another and whispering. Esk tried to ignore them.
   “What did she say?”
   “Is she serious?”
   “I always think children are so delightful at that age, don’t you?”
   “You’re the eighth son of an eighth daughter?” said Cutangle. “Really?”
   “The other way around, only not exactly,” said Esk, defiantly.
   Cutangle dabbed his eyes with a handkerchief.
   “This is quite fascinating,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard of something quite like this before. Eh?”
   He looked around at his growing audience. The people at the back couldn’t see Esk and were craning to check if some interesting magic was going on. Cutangle was at a loss.
   “Well, now,” he said. “You want to be a wizard?”
   “I keep telling everyone but no one seems to listen,” said Esk.
   “How old are you, little girl?”
   “Nearly nine.”
   “And you want to be a wizard when you grow up.”
   “I want to be a wizard now,” said Esk firmly. “This is the right place, isn’t it?”
   Cutangle looked at Trestle and winked.
   “I saw that,” said Esk.
   “I don’t think there’s ever been a lady wizard before,” said Cutangle. “I rather think it might be against the lore. Wouldn’t you rather be a witch? I understand it’s a fine career for girls.”
   A minor wizard behind him started to laugh. Esk gave him a look.
   “Being a witch is quite good,” she conceded. “But I think wizards have more fun. What do you think?”
   “I think you are a very singular little girl,” said Cutangle.
   “What does that mean?”
   “It means there’s only one of you,” said Trestle.
   “That’s right,” said Esk, “and I still want to be a wizard.”
   Words failed Cutangle. “Well, you can’t,” he said. “The very idea!”
   He drew himself up to his full width and turned away. Something tugged at his robe.
   “Why not?” said a voice.
   He turned.
   “Because", he said, slowly and deliberately, “because . . . the whole idea is completely laughable, that’s why. And it’s absolutely against the lore!”
   “But I can do wizard magic!” said Esk, the faintest suggestion of a tremble in her voice.
   Cutangle bent down until his face was level with hers.
   “No you can’t,” he hissed. “Because you are not a wizard. Women aren’t wizards, do I make myself clear?”
   “Watch,” said Esk.
   She extended her right hand with the fingers spread and sighted along it until she spotted the statue of Malich the Wise, the founder of the University. Instinctively the wizards between her and it edged out of the way, and then felt rather silly.
   “I mean it,” she said.
   “Go away, little girl,” said Cutangle.
   “Right,” said Esk. She squinted hard at the statue and concentrated ….

The great doors of Unseen University are made of octiron, a metal so unstable that it can only exist in a universe saturated with raw magic. They are impregnable to all force save magic: no fire, no battering ram, no army can breach them.
   Which is why most ordinary visitors to the University use the back door, which is made of perfectly normal wood and doesn’t go around terrorising people, or even stand still terrorising people. It had a proper knocker and everything.
   Granny examined the doorposts carefully and gave a grunt of satisfaction when she spotted what she was looking for. She hadn’t doubted that it would be there, cunningly concealed by the natural grain of the wood.
   She grasped the knocker, which was shaped like a dragon’s head, and rapped smartly, three times. After a while the door was opened by a young woman with her mouth full of clothespegs.
   “Ot oo oo ont?” she enquired.
   Granny bowed, giving the girl a chance to take in the pointy black hat with the batwing hatpins. It had an impressive effect: she blushed and, peering out into the quiet alley-way, hurriedly motioned Granny inside. There was a big mossy courtyard on the other side of the wall, crisscrossed with washing lines. Granny had the chance to become one of the very few women to learn what it really is that wizards wear under their robes, but modestly averted her eyes and followed the girl across the flagstones and down a wide flight of steps.
   They led into a long, high tunnel lined with archways and, currently, full of steam. Granny caught sight of long lines of washtubs in the big rooms off to the sides; the air had the warm fat smell of ironing. A gaggle of girls carrying washbaskets pushed past her and hurried up the steps—then stopped, halfway up, and turned slowly to look at her.
   Granny set her shoulders back and tried to look as mysterious as possible.
   Her guide, who still hadn’t got rid of her clothes-pegs, led her down a side-passage into a room that was a maze of shelves piled with laundry. In the very centre of the maze, sitting at a table, was a very fat woman with a ginger wig. She had been writing in a very large laundry book-it was still open in front of her-but was currently inspecting a large stained vest.
   “Have you tried bleaching?” she asked.
   “Yes, m’m,” said the maid beside her.
   “What about tincture of myrryt?”
   “Yes, m’m. It just turned it blue, m’m.”
   “Well, it’s a new one on me,” said the laundry woman. “And Ay’ve seen brimstone and soot and dragon blood and demon blood and Aye don’t know what else.” She turned the vest over and read the nametape carefully sewn inside. “Hmm. Granpone the White. He’s going to be Granpone the Grey if he doesn’t take better care of his laundry. Aye tell you, girl, a white magician is just a black magician with a good housekeeper. Take it—”
   She caught sight of Granny, and stopped.
   “Ee ocked hat hee oor,” said Granny’s guide, dropping a hurried curtsey. “Oo ed hat—”
   “Yes, yes, thank you, Ksandra, you may go,” said the fat woman. She stood up and beamed at Granny, and with an almost perceptible click wound her voice up several social classes.
   “Pray hexcuse us,” she said. “You find us hall at sixes and sevens, it being washing day and heverything. His this a courtesy call or may I make so bold as to ask—”she lowered her voice—” his there a message from the Hother Sade?”
   Granny looked blank, but only a fraction of a second. The witchmarks on the doorpost had said that the housekeeper welcomed witches and was particularly anxious for news of her four husbands; she was also in random pursuit of a fifth, hence the ginger wig and, if Granny’s ears weren’t deceiving her, the creak of enough whalebone to infuriate an entire ecology movement. Gullible and foolish, the signs had said. Granny withheld judgment, because city witches didn’t seem that bright themselves.
   The housekeeper must have mistaken her expression.
   “Don’t be afraid,” she said. “May staff have distinct instructions to welcome witches, although of course they upstairs don’t approve. No doubt you would like a cup of tea and something to eat?”
   Granny bowed solemnly.
   “And Aye will see if we can’t find a nice bundle of old clothes for you, too,” the housekeeper beamed.
   “Old clothes? Oh. Yes. Thank you, m’m.”
   The housekeeper swept forward with a sound like an elderly tea clipper in a gale, and beckoned Granny to follow her.
   “Aye’ll have the tea brought to my flat. Tea with a lot of tealeaves.”
   Granny stumped along after her. Old clothes? Did this fat woman really mean it? The nerve! Of course, if they were good quality ….
   There seemed to be a whole world under the University. It was a maze of cellars, coldrooms, stillrooms, kitchens and sculleries, and every inhabitant was either carrying something, pumping something, pushing something or just standing around and shouting. Granny caught glimpses of rooms full of ice, and others glowing with the heat from red-hot cooking stoves, wall-sized. Bakeries smelled of new bread and taprooms smelled of old beer. Everything smelled of sweat and woodsmoke:
   The housekeeper led her up an old spiral staircase and unlocked the door with one of the large number of keys that hung from her belt.
   The room inside was pink and frilly. There were frills on things that no one in their right mind would frill. It was like being inside candyfloss.
   “Very nice,” said Granny. And, because she felt it was expected of her, “Tasteful.” She looked around for something unfrilly to sit on, and gave up.
   “Whatever am Aye thinking of?” the housekeeper trilled. “Aye’m Mrs Whitlow but I expect you know, of course. And Aye have the honour to be addressing—?”
   “Eh? Oh, Granny Weatherwax,” said Granny. The frills were getting to her. They gave pink a bad name.
   “Ay’m psychic myself, of course,” said Mrs Whitlow.

   Granny had nothing against fortune-telling provided it was done badly by people with no talent for it. It was a different matter if people who ought to know better did it, though. She considered that the future was a frail enough thing at best, and if people looked at it hard they changed it. Granny had some quite complex theories about space and time and why they shouldn’t be tinkered with, but fortunately good fortune-tellers were rare and anyway people preferred bad fortune-tellers, who could be relied upon for the correct dose of uplift and optimism.
   Granny knew all about bad fortune-telling. It was harder than the real thing. You needed a good imagination.
   She couldn’t help wondering if Mrs Whitlow was a born witch who somehow missed her training. She was certainly laying siege to the future. There was a crystal ball under a sort of pink frilly tea cosy, and several sets of divinatory cards, and a pink velvet bag of rune stones, and one of those little tables on wheels that no prudent witch would touch with a ten-foot broomstick, and -Granny wasn’t sure on this point—either some special dried monkey turds from a llamassary or some dried llama turds from a monastery, which apparently could be thrown in such a way as to reveal the sum total of knowledge and wisdom in the universe. It was all rather sad…
   “Or there’s the tea-leaves, of course,” said Mrs Whitlow, indicating the big brown pot on the table between them. “Aye know witches often prefer them, but they always seem so, well, common to me. No offence meant.”
   There probably wasn’t any offence meant, at that, thought Granny. Mrs Whitlow was giving her the sort of look generally used by puppies when they’re not sure what to expect next, and are beginning to worry that it may be the rolled-up newspaper.
   She picked up Mrs Whitlow’s cup and had started to peer into it when she caught the disappointed expression that floated across the housekeeper’s face like a shadow across a snowfield. Then she remembered what she was doing, and turned the cup widdershins three times, made a few vague passes over it and mumbled a charm which she normally used to cure mastitis in elderly goats, but never mind. This display of obvious magical talent seemed to cheer up Mrs. Whitlow no end.
   Granny wasn’t normally very good at tea-leaves, but she squinted at the sugar-encrusted mess at the bottom of the cup and let her mind wander. What she really needed now was a handy rat or even a cockroach that happened to be somewhere near Esk, so that she could Borrow its mind.
   What Granny actually found was that the University had a mind of its own.

   It is well known that stone can think, because the whole of electronics is based on that fact, but in some universes men spend ages looking for other intelligences in the sky without once looking under their feet. That is because they’ve got the time-span all wrong. From stone’s point of view the universe is hardly created and mountain ranges are bouncing up and down like organ-stops while continents zip backwards and forwards in general high spirits, crashing into each other from the sheer joy of momentum and getting their rocks off. It is going to be quite some time before stone notices its disfiguring little skin disease and starts to scratch, which is just as well.
   The rocks from which Unseen University was built, however, have been absorbing magic for several thousand years and all that random power has had to go somewhere.
   The University has, in fact, developed a personality.
   Granny could sense it like a big and quite friendly animal, just waiting to roll over on its roof and have its floor scratched. It was paying no attention to her, however. It was watching Esk.
   Granny found the child by following the threads of the University’s attention and watched in fascination as the scenes unfolded in the Great Hall ….
   “—in there?”
   The voice came from a long way away.
   “Mmph?”
   “Aye said, what do you see in there?” repeated Mrs Whitlow.
   “Eh?”
   “Aye said, what do—”
   “Oh.” Granny reeled her mind in, quite confused. The trouble with Borrowing another mind was, you always felt out of place when you got back to your own body, and Granny was the first person ever to read the mind of a building. Now she was feeling big and gritty and full of passages.
   “Are you all right?”
   Granny nodded, and opened her windows. She extended her east and west wings and tried to concentrate on the tiny cup held in her pillars.
   Fortunately Mrs Whitlow put her plaster complexion and stony silence down to occult powers at work, while Granny found that a brief exposure to the vast silicon memory of the University had quite stimulated her imagination.
   In a voice like a draughty corridor, which made the housekeeper very impressed, she wove a future full of keen young men fighting for Mrs Whitlow’s ample favours. She also spoke very quickly, because what she had seen in the Great Hall made her anxious to go around to the main gates again.
   “There is another thing,” she added.
   “Yes? Yes?”
   “I see you hiring a new servant—you do hire the servants here, don’t you? Right—and this one is a young girl, very economical, very good worker, can turn her hand to anything.”
   “What about her, then?” said Mrs Whitlow, already savouring Granny’s surprisingly graphic descriptions of her future and drunk with curiosity.
   “The spirits are a little unclear on this point,” said Granny, “But it is very important that you hire her.”
   “No problem there,” said Mrs Whitlow, “can’t keep servants here, you know, not for long. It’s all the magic. It leaks down here, you know. Especially from the library, where they keep all them magical books. Two of the top floor maids walked out yesterday, actually, they said they were fed up going to bed not knowing what shape they would wake up in the morning. The senior wizards turn them back, you know. But it’s not the same.”
   “Yes, well, the spirits say this young lady won’t be any trouble as far as that is concerned,” said Granny grimly.
   “If she can sweep and scrub she’s welcome, Aye’m sure,” said Mrs Whitlow, looking puzzled.
   “She even brings her own broom. According to the spirits, that is.”
   “How very helpful. When is this young lady going to arrive?”
   “Oh, soon, soon—that’s what the spirits say.”
   A faint suspicion clouded the housekeeper’s face. “This isn’t the sort of thing spirits normally say. Where do they say that, exactly?”
   “Here,” said Granny. “Look, the little cluster of tea-leaves between the sugar and this crack here. Am I right?”
   Their eyes met. Mrs Whitlow might have had her weaknesses but she was quite tough enough to rule the below-stairs world of the University. However, Granny could outstare a snake; after a few seconds the housekeeper’s eyes began to water.
   “Yes, Aye expect you are,” she said meekly, and fished a handkerchief from the recesses of her bosom.
   “Well then,” said Granny, sitting back and replacing the teacup in its saucer.
   “There are plenty of opportunities here for a young woman willing to work hard,” said Mrs Whitlow. “Aye myself started as a maid, you know.”
   “We all do,” said Granny vaguely. “And now I must be going.” She stood up and reached for her hat.
   “But—”
   “Must hurry. Urgent appointment,” said Granny over her shoulder as she hurried down the steps.
   “There’s a bundle of old clothes—”
   Granny paused, her instincts battling for mastery.
   “Any black velvet?”
   “Yes, and some silk.”
   Granny wasn’t sure she approved of silk, she’d heard it came out of a caterpillar’s bottom, but black velvet had a powerful attraction. Loyalty won.
   “Put it on one side, I may call again,” she shouted, and ran down the corridor.
   Cooks and scullery maids darted for cover as the old woman pounded along the slippery flagstones, leapt up the stairs to the courtyard and skidded out into the lane, her shawl flying out behind her and her boots striking sparks from the cobbles. Once out into the open she hitched up her skirts and broke into a full gallop, turning the corner into the main square in a screeching two-boot drift that left a long white scratch across the stones.
   She was just in time to see Esk come running through the gates, in tears.

   “The magic just wouldn’t work! I could feel it there but it just wouldn’t come out!”
   “Perhaps you were trying too hard,” said Granny. “Magic’s like fishing. Jumping around and splashing never caught any fish, you have to bide quiet and let it happen natural.”
   “And then everyone laughed at me! Someone even gave me a sweet!”
   “You got some profit out of the day, then,” said Granny.
   “Granny!” said Esk accusingly.
   “Well, what did you expect?” she asked. “At least they only laughed at you. Laughter don’t hurt. You walked up to chief wizard and showed off in front of everyone and only got laughed at? You’re doing well, you are. Have you eaten the sweet?”
   Esk scowled. “Yes.”
   “What kind was it?”
   “Toffee.”
   “Can’t abide toffee.”
   “Huh,” said Esk, “I suppose you want me to get peppermint next time?”
   “Don’t you sarky me, young-fellow-me-lass. Nothing wrong with peppermint. Pass me that bowl.”
   Another advantage of city life, Granny had discovered, was glassware. Some of her more complicated potions required apparatus which either had to be bought from the dwarves at extortionate rates or, if ordered from the nearest human glassblower, arrived in straw and, usually, pieces. She had tried blowing her own and the effort always made her cough, which produced some very funny results. But the city’s thriving alchemy profession meant that there were whole shops full of glass for the buying, and a witch could always arrange bargain prices.
   She watched carefully as yellow steam surged along a twisty maze of tubing and eventually condensed as one large, sticky droplet. She caught it neatly on the end of a glass spoon and very carefully tipped it into a tiny glass phial.
   Esk watched her through her tears.
   “What’s that?” she asked.
   “It’s a neveryoumind,” said Granny, sealing the phial’s cork with wax.
   “A medicine?”
   “In a manner of speaking.” Granny pulled her writing set towards her and selected a pen. Her tongue stuck out of the corner of her mouth as she very carefully wrote out a label, with much scratching and pausing to work out the spellings.
   “Who’s it for?”
   “Mrs Herapath, the glassblower’s wife.”
   Esk blew her nose. “He’s the one who doesn’t blow much glass, isn’t he?”
   Granny looked at her over the top of the desk.
   “How do you mean?”
   “When she was talking to you yesterday she called him Old Mister Once A Fortnight.”
   “Mmph,” said Granny. She carefully finished the sentence: “Dylewt in won pint warter and won droppe in hys tee and be Shure to wear loose clowthing allso that no vysitors exspected.”
   One day, she told herself, I’m going to have to have that talk with her.
   The child seemed curiously dense. She had already assisted at enough births and taken the goats to old Nanny Annaple’s billy without drawing any obvious conclusions. Granny wasn’t quite certain what she should do about it, but the time never seemed appropriate to bring up the subject. She wondered whether, in her hearts of hearts, she was too embarrassed; she felt like a farrier who could shoe horses, cure them, rear them and judge them, but had only the sketchiest idea about how one rode them.
   She pasted the label on to the phial and wrapped it carefully in plain paper.
   Now.
   “There is another way into the University,” she said, looking sidelong at Esk, who was making a disgruntled job of mashing herbs in a mortar. “A witches’ way.”
   Esk looked up. Granny treated herself to a thin smile and started work on another label; writing labels was always the hard part of magic, as far as she was concerned.
   “But I don’t expect you’d be interested,” she went on. “It’s not very glamorous.”
   “They laughed at me,” Esk mumbled.
   “Yes. You said. So you won’t be wanting to try again, then. I quite understand.”
   There was silence broken only by the scratching of Granny’s pen. Eventually Esk said: “This way—”
   “Mmph?”
   “It’ll get me into the University?”
   “Of course,” said Granny haughtily. “I said I’d find a way, didn’t I? A very good way, too. You won’t have to bother with lessons, you can go all over the place, no one will notice you you’ll be invisible really—and, well, you can really clean up. But of course, after all that laughing, you won’t be interested. Will you?”

   “Pray have another cup of tea, Mrs Weatherwax?” said Mrs Whitlow.
   “Mistress,” said Granny.
   “Pardon?”
   “It’s Mistress Weatherwax,” said Granny. “Three sugars, please.”
   Mrs Whitlow pushed the bowl towards her. Much as she looked forward to Granny’s visits it came expensive in sugar. Sugar lumps never seemed to last long around Granny.
   “Very bad for the figure,” she said. “And the teeth, so Aye hear.”
   “I never had a figure to speak of and my teeth take care of themselves,” said Granny. It was true, mores the pity. Granny suffered from robustly healthy teeth, which she considered a big drawback in a witch. She really envied Nanny Annaple, the witch over the mountain, who managed to lose all her teeth by the time she was twenty and had real crone-credibility. It meant you ate a lot of soup, but you also got a lot of respect. And then there was warts. Without any effort Nanny managed to get a face like a sockful of marbles, while Granny had tried every reputable wart-causer and failed to raise even the obligatory nose wart. Some witches had all the luck.
   “Mmph?” she said, aware of Mrs Whitlow’s fluting.
   “Aye said,” said Mrs Whitlow, “that young Eskarina is a real treasure. Quate the little find. She keeps the floors spotless, spotless. No task too big. Aye said to her yesterday, Aye said, that broom of yours might as well have a life of its own, and do you know what she said?”
   “I couldn’t even venture a guess,” said Granny, weakly.
   “She said the dust was afraid of it! Can you imagine?”
   “Yes,” said Granny.
   Mrs Whitlow pushed her teacup towards her and gave her an embarrassed smile.
   Granny sighed inwardly and squinted into the none-too-clean depths of the future. She was definitely beginning to run out of imagination.

   The broom whisked down the corridor raising a great cloud of dust which, if you looked hard at it, seemed somehow to be sucked back into the broomstick. If you looked even harder you’d see that the broom handle had strange markings on it, which were not so much carved as clinging and somehow changed shape as you watched.
   But no one looked.
   Esk sat at one of the high deep windows and stared out over the city. She was feeling angrier than usual, so the broom attacked the dust with unusual vigour. Spiders ran desperate eight-legged dashes for safety as ancestral cobwebs disappeared into the void. In the walls mice clung to each other, legs braced against the inside of their holes. Woodworm scrabbled in the ceiling beams as they were drawn, inexorably, backwards down their tunnels.
   “’You can really clean up’,” said Esk. “Huh!”
   There were some good points, she had to admit. The food was simple but there was plenty of it, and she had a room to herself somewhere in the roof and it was quite luxurious because here she could lie in until five a. m., which to Granny’s way of thinking was practically noon. The work certainly wasn’t hard. She just started sweeping until the staff realised what was expected of it, and then she could amuse herself until it was finished. If anyone came the staff would immediately lean itself nonchalantly against a wall.
   But she wasn’t learning any wizardry. She could wander into empty classrooms and look at the diagrams chalked on the board, and on the floor too in the more advanced classes, but the shapes were meaningless. And unpleasant.
   They reminded Esk of the pictures in Simon’s book. They looked alive.
   She gazed out across the rooftops of Ankh-Morpork and reasoned like this: writing was only the words that people said, squeezed between layers of paper until they were fossilized. Fossils were well-known on the Discworld, great spiralled shells and badly-constructed creatures that were left over from the time when the Creator hadn’t really decided what He wanted to make and was, as it were, just idly messing around with the Pleistocene). And the words people said were just shadows of real things. But some things were too big to be really trapped in words, and even the words were too powerful to be completely tamed by writing.
   So it followed that some writing was actually trying to become things. Esk’s thoughts became confused things at this point, but she was certain that the really magic words were the ones that pulsed angrily, trying to escape and become real.
   They didn’t look very nice.
   But then she remembered the previous day.
   It had been rather odd. The University classrooms were designed on the funnel principle, with tiers of seats—polished by the bottoms of the Disc’s greatest mages—looking precipitously down into a central area where there was a workbench, a couple of blackboards and enough floor space for a decent-sized instructional octogram. There was a lot of dead space under the tiers and Esk had found it a quite useful observation post, peering around between the apprentice wizards’ pointy boots at the instructor. It was very restful, with the droning of the lecturers drifting over her as gently as the buzzing of the slightly zonked bees in Granny’s special herb garden. There never seemed to be any practical magic, it always seemed to be just words. Wizards seemed to like words.
   But yesterday had been different. Esk had been sitting in the dusty gloom, trying to do even some very simple magic, when she heard the door open and boots clump across the floor. That was surprising in itself. Esk knew the timetable, and the Second Year students who normally occupied this room were down for Beginners’ Dematerialisation with Jeophal the Spry in the gym. (Students of magic had little use for physical exercise; the gym was a large room lined with lead and rowan wood, where neophytes could work out at High magic without seriously unbalancing the universe, although not always without seriously unbalancing themselves. Magic had no mercy on the ham-fisted. Some clumsy students were lucky enough to walk out, others were removed in bottles.)
   Esk peeped between the slats. These weren’t students, they were wizards. Quite high ones, to judge by their robes. And there was no mistaking the figure that climbed on to the lecturer’s dais like a badlystrung puppet, bumping heavily into the lectern and absent-mindedly apologising to it. It was Simon. No one else had eyes like two raw eggs in warm water and a dose bright red from blowing. For Simon, the pollen count always went to infinity.
   It occurred to Esk that, minus his general allergy to the whole of Creation and with a decent haircut and a few lessons in deportment, the boy could look quite handsome. It was an unusual thought, and she squirrelled it away for future consideration.
   When the wizards had settled down, Simon began to talk. He read from notes, and every time he stuttered over a word the wizards, as one man, without being able to stop themselves, chorused it for him.
   After a while a stick of chalk rose from the lectern and started to write on the blackboard behind him. Esk had picked up enough about wizard magic to know that this was an astounding achievement- Simon had been at the University for a couple of weeks, and most students hadn’t mastered Light Levitation by the end of their second year.
   The little white stub skittered and squeaked across the blackness to the accompaniment of Simon’s voice. Even allowing for the stutter, he was not a very good speaker. He dropped notes. He corrected himself. He ummed and ahhed. And as far as Esk was concerned he wasn’t saying anything very much. Phrases filtered down to her hiding place. “Basic fabric of the universe” was one, and she didn’t understand what that was, unless he meant denim, or maybe flannelette. “Mutability of the possibility matrix” she couldn’t guess at all.
   Sometimes he seemed to be saying that nothing existed unless people thought it did, and the world was really only there at all because people kept on imagining it. But then he seemed to be saying that there was lots of worlds, all nearly the same and all sort of occupying the same place but all separated by the thickness of a shadow, so that everything that ever could happen would have somewhere to happen in.
   (Esk could get to grips with this. She had half-suspected it ever since she cleaned out the senior wizards’ lavatory, or ratherwhile the staff got on with the job while Esk examined the urinals and, with the assistance of some half-remembered details of her brothers in the tin bath in front of the fire at home, formulated her unofficial General Theory of comparative anatomy. The senior wizards’ lavatory was a magical place, with real running water and interesting tiles and, most importantly, two big silver mirrors fixed to opposite walls so that someone looking into one could see themselves repeated again and again until the image was too small to see. It was Esk’s first introduction to the idea of infinity. More to the point, she had a suspicion that one of the mirror Esks, right on the edge of sight, was waving at her.)
   There was something disturbing about the phrases Simon used. Half the time he seemed to be saying that the world was about as real as a soap bubble, or a dream.
   The chalk shrieked its way across the board behind him. Sometimes Simon had to stop and explain symbols to the wizards, who seemed to Esk to be getting excited at some very silly sentences. Then the chalk would start again, curving across the darkness like a comet, trailing its dust behind it.
   The light was fading out of the sky outside. As the room grew more gloomy the chalked words glowed and the blackboard appeared to Esk to be not so much dark as simply not there at all, but just a square hole cut out of the world.
   Simon talked on, about the world being made up of tiny things whose presence could only be determined by the fact that they were not there, little spinning balls of nothingness that magic could shunt together to make stars and butterflies and diamonds. Everything was made up of emptiness.
   The funny thing was, he seemed to find this fascinating.
   Esk was only aware that the walls of the room grew as thin and insubstantial as smoke, as if the emptiness in them was expanding to swallow whatever it was that defined them as walls, and instead there was nothing but the familiar cold, empty, glittering plain with its distant worn hills, and the creatures that stood as still as statues, looking down. There were a lot more of them now. They seemed for all the world to be clustering like moths around a light.
   One important difference was that a moth’s face, even close up, was as friendly as a bunny rabbit’s compared to the things watching Simon.
   Then a servant came in to light the lamps and the creatures vanished, turning into perfectly harmless shadows that lurked in the corners of the room.

   At some time in the recent past someone had decided to brighten the ancient corridors of the University by painting them, having some vague notion that Learning Should Be Fun. It hadn’t worked. It’s a fact known throughout the universes that no matter how carefully the colours are chosen, institutional decor ends up as either vomit green, unmentionable brown, nicotine yellow or surgical appliance pink. By some little understood process of sympathetic resonance, corridors painted in those colours always smell slightly of boiled cabbage -- even if no cabbage is ever cooked in the vicinity.
   Somewhere in the corridors a bell rang. Esk dropped lightly from her windowsill, grabbed the staff and started to sweep industriously as doors were flung open and the corridors filled with students. They streamed past her on two sides, like water around a rock. For a few minutes there was utter confusion. Then doors slammed, a few laggard feet pattered away in the distance, and Esk was by herself again.
   Not for the first time, Esk wished that the staff could talk. The other servants were friendly enough, but you couldn’t talk to them. Not about magic, anyway.
   She was also coming to the conclusion that she ought to learn to read. This reading business seemed to be the key to wizard magic, which was all about words. Wizards seemed to think that names were the same as things, and that if you changed the name, you changed the thing. At least, it seemed to be something like that ….
   Reading. That meant the library. Simon had said there were thousands of books in it, and amongst all those words there were bound to be one or two she could read. Esk put the staff over her shoulder and set off resolutely for Mrs Whitlow’s office.
   She was nearly there when a wall said “Psst!” When Esk stared at it it turned out to be Granny. It wasn’t that Granny could make herself invisible, it was just that she had this talent for being able to fade into the foreground so that she wasn’t noticed.
   “How are you getting on, then?” asked Granny. “How’s the magic coming along?”
   “What are you doing here, Granny?” said Esk.
   “Been to tell Mrs Whitlow her fortune,” said Granny, holding up a large bundle of old clothes with some satisfaction. Her smile faded under Esk’s stern gaze.
   “Well, things are different in the city,” she said. “City people are always worried about the future, it comes from eating unnatural food. Anyway,” she added, suddenly realising that she was whining, “Why shouldn’t I tell fortunes?”
   “You always said Hilta was playing on the foolishness of her sex,” said Esk. “You said that them as tell fortunes should be ashamed of themselves, and anyway, you don’t need old clothes.”
   “Waste not, want not,” said Granny primly. She had spent her entire life on the old-clothes standard and wasn’t about to let temporary prosperity dislodge her: “Are you getting enough to eat?”
   “Yes,” said Esk. “Granny, about this wizard magic, it’s all words—”
   “Always said it was,” said Granny.
   “No, I mean—” Esk began, but Granny waved a hand irritably.
   “Can’t be bothered with this at the moment,” she said. “I’ve got some big orders to fill by tonight, if it goes on like this I’m going to have to train someone up. Can’t you come and see me when you get an afternoon off, or whatever it is they give you?”
   “Train someone up?” said Esk, horrified. “You mean as a witch?”
   “No,” said Granny. “I mean, perhaps.”
   “But what about me?”
   “Well, you’re going your own way,” said Granny. “Wherever that is.”
   “Mmph,” said Esk. Granny stared at her.
   “I’ll be off, then,” she said at last. She turned and strode off towards the kitchen entrance. As she did so her cloak swirled out, and Esk saw that it was now lined with red. A dark, winy red, but red nevertheless. On Granny, who had never been known to wear any visible clothing that was other than a serviceable black, it was quite shocking.

 “The library?” said Mrs Whitlow. “Aye don’t think anyone cleans the library!” She looked genuinely puzzled.
   “Why?” said Esk, “Doesn’t it get dusty?”
   “Well,” said Mrs Whitlow. She thought for a while. “Aye suppose it must do, since you come to mention it. Aye never really thought about it.”
   “You see, I’ve cleaned everywhere else,” said Esk, sweetly.
   “Yes,” said Mrs Whitlow, “You have, haven’t you.”
   “Well, then.”
   “It’s just that we’ve never—done it before,” said Mrs Whitlow, “but for the life of me, Aye can’t think why.”
   “Well, then,” said Esk.

   “Ook?” said the Head Librarian, and backed away from Esk. But she had heard about him and had come prepared. She offered him a banana.
   The orang-outan reached out slowly and then snatched it with a grin of triumph.
   There may be universes where librarianship is considered a peaceful sort of occupation, and where the risks are limited to large volumes falling off the shelves on to one’s head, but the keeper of a magic library is no job for the unwary. Spells have power, and merely writing them down and shoving them between covers doesn’t do anything to reduce it. The stuff leaks. Books tend to react with one another, creating randomised magic with a mind of its own. Books of magic are usually chained to their shelves, but not to prevent them being stolen ….
   One such accident had turned the librarian into an ape, since when he had resisted all attempts to turn him back, explaining in sign language that life as an orang-outan was considerably better than life as a human being, because all the big philosophical questions resolved themselves into wondering where the next banana was coming from. Anyway, long arms and prehensile feet were ideal for dealing with high shelves.
   Esk gave him the whole bunch of bananas and scurried away amongst the books before he could object.
   Esk had never seen more than one book at a time and so the library was, for all she knew, just like any other library. True, it was a bit odd the way the floor seemed to become the wall in the distance, and there was something strange about the way the shelves played tricks on the eyes and seemed to twist through rather more dimensions than the normal three, and it was quite surprising to look up and see shelves on the ceiling, with the occasional student wandering unconcernedly among them.
   The truth was that the presence of so much magic distorted the space around it. Down in the stacks the very denim, or possibly flannelette, of the universe was tortured into very peculiar shapes. The millions of trapped words, unable to escape, bent reality around them.
   It seemed logical to Esk that among all these books should be one that told you how to read all the others. She wasn’t sure how to find it, but deep in her soul she felt it would probably have pictures of cheerful rabbits and happy kittens on the cover.
   The library certainly wasn’t silent. There was the occasional zip and sizzle of a magical discharge, and an octarine spark would flash from shelf to shelf. Chains clinked, faintly. And, of course, there was the faint rustle of thousands of pages in their leather-bound prisons.
   Esk made sure no one was paying her any attention and pulled at the nearest volume. It sprang open in her hands, and she saw gloomily that there were the same unpleasant types of diagram that she had noticed in Simon’s book. The writing was entirely unfamiliar, and she was glad about that—it would be horrible to know what all those letters, which seemed to be made up of ugly creatures doing complicated things to each other, actually meant. She forced the cover shut, even though the words seemed to be desperately pushing back. There was a drawing of a creature on the front; it looked suspiciously like one of the things from the cold desert. It certainly didn’t look like a happy kitten.
   “Hallo! Esk, isn’t it? H-how d-did you get h-here?”
   It was Simon, standing there with a book under each arm. Esk blushed.
   “Granny won’t tell me,” she said. “I think it’s something to do with men and women.”
   Simon looked at her blankly. Then he grinned. Esk thought about the question a second time.
   “I work here. I sweep up.” She waved the staff in explanation.
   “In here?”
   Esk stared at him. She felt alone, and lost, and more than a little betrayed. Everyone seemed to be busy living their own lives, except her. She would spend the rest of her life cleaning up after wizards. It wasn’t fair, and she’d had enough.
   “Actually I don’t. Actually I’m learning to read so I can be a wizard.”
   The boy regarded her through his damp eyes for some seconds. Then he gently took the book out of Esk’s hands and read its title.
   “Demonylogie Malyfycorum of Henchanse thee Unsatyfactory. How did you think you could learn to r-read this?”
   “Um,” said Esk, “Well, you just keep trying until you can, don’t you? Like milking, or knitting, or . . . .” Her voice faded away.
   “I don’t know about that. These books can be a bit, well, aggressive. If you d-don’t be careful they start reading you.”
   “What do you mean?”
   “T-they ssss—”
   “—say—”said Esk, automatically.
   “—that there was once a wwww—”
   “—wizard—”
   “—who started to r-read the Necrotelecomnicon and let his m-mind wwwwww—”
   “—wander—”
   “—and next morning they f-found all his clothes on the chair and hhis hat on t-top of them and the b-book had—”
   Esk put her fingers in her ears, but not too hard in case she missed anything.
   “I don’t want to know about it if it’s horrid.”
   “—had a lot more pages.”
   Esk took her fingers out of her ears. “Was there anything on the pages?”
   Simon nodded solemnly. “Yes. On every sssingle one of ththem there www—”
   “No,” said Esk. “I don’t even want to imagine it. I thought reading was more peaceful than that, I mean, Granny read her Almanack every day and nothing ever happened to her.”
   “I d-daresay ordinary tame www—”
   “—words—”
   “—are all right,” Simon conceded, magnanimously.
   “Are you absolutely certain?” said Esk.
   “It’s just that words can have power,” said Simon, slotting the book firmly back on its shelf, where it rattled its chains at him. “And they do say the p-pen is mightier than the sss—”
   “—sword,” said Esk. “All right, but which would you rather be hit with?”
   “Um, I d-don’t think it’s any use m-me t-telling you you shouldn’t be in here, is it?” said the young wizard.
   Esk gave this due consideration. “No,” she said, “I don’t think it is.”
   “I could send for the p-porters and have you t-taken away.”
   “Yes, but you won’t.”
   “I just d-don’t www—”
   “—want—”
   “—you to get hurt, you see. I r-really don’t. This can b-be a ddddangerou—”
   Esk caught a faint swirling in the air above his head. For a moment she saw them, the great grey shapes from the cold place. Watching. And in the calm of the Library, when the weight of magic was wearing the Universe particularly thin, they had decided to Act.
   Around her the muted rustling of the books rose to a desperate riffling of pages. Some of the more powerful books managed to jerk out of their shelves and swung, flapping madly, from the end of their chains. A huge grimoire plunged from its eyrie on the topmost shelf—tearing itself free of its chain in the process—and flopped away like a frightened chicken, scattering its pages behind it.
   A magical wind blew away Esk’s headscarf and her hair streamed out behind her. She saw Simon trying to steady himself against a bookshelf as books exploded around him. The air was thick and tasted of tin. It buzzed.
   “They’re trying to get in!” she screamed.
   Simon’s tortured face turned to her. A fear-crazed incunable hit him heavily in the small of the back and knocked him to the heaving floor before it bounced high over the shelves. Esk ducked as a flock of thesauri wheeled past, towing their shelf behind them, and scuttled on hands and knees towards him.
   “That’s what’s making the books so frightened!” she shrieked in his ear. “Can’t you see them up there?”
   Simon mutely shook his head. A book burst its bindings over them, showering them in pages.
   Horror can steal into the mind via all the senses. There’s the sound of the little meaningful chuckle in the locked dark room, the sight of half a caterpillar in your forkful of salad, the curious smell from the lodger’s bedroom, the taste of slug in the cauliflower cheese. Touch doesn’t normally get a look-in.
   But something happened to the floor under Esk’s hands. She looked down, her face a rictus of horror, because the dusty floorboards suddenly felt gritty. And dry. And very, very cold.
   There was fine silver sand between her fingers.
   She grabbed the staff and, sheltering her eyes against the wind, waved it at the towering figures above her. It would have been nice to report that a searing flash of pure white fire cleansed the greasy air. It failed to materialise ….
   The staff twisted like a snake in her hand and caught Simon a crack on the side of the head.
   The grey Things wavered and vanished.
   Reality returned, and tried to pretend that it had never left. Silence settled like thick velvet, wave after wave of it. A heavy, echoing silence. A few books dropped heavily out of the air, feeling silly.
   The floor under Esk’s feet was undoubtedly wooden. She kicked it hard to make sure.
   There was blood on the floor, and Simon lay very quietly in the centre of it. Esk stared down at him, and then up at the still air, and then at the staff. It looked smug.
   She was aware of distant voices and hurrying feet.
   A hand like a fine leather glove slipped gently into hers and a voice behind said “Ook,” very softly. She turned, and found herself staring down into the gentle, inner-tube face of the librarian. He put his finger to his lips in an unmistakable gesture and tugged gently at her hand.
   “I’ve killed him!” she whispered.
   The librarian shook his head, and tugged insistently.
   “Ook,” he explained, “Ook.”
   He dragged her reluctantly down a side alley-way in the maze of ancient shelving a few seconds before a party of senior wizards, drawn by the noise, rounded the corner.
   “The books have been fighting again . . . .”
   “Oh, no! It’ll take ages to capture all the spells again, you know they go and find places to hide . . . .”
   “Who’s that on the floor?”
   There was a pause.
   “He’s knocked out. A shelf caught him, by the looks of it.”
   “Who is he?”
   “That new lad. You know; the one they say has got a whole head full of brains?”
   “If that shelf had been a bit closer we’d be able to see if they were right.”
   “You two, get him along to the infirmary. The rest of you better get these books rounded up. Where’s the damn librarian? He ought to know better than to let a Critical Mass build up.”
   Esk glanced sideways at the orang-outan, who waggled his eyebrows at her. He pulled a dusty volume of gardening spells out of the shelves beside him, extracted a soft brown banana from the recess behind it, and ate it with the quiet relish of one who knows that whatever the problems are, they belong firmly to human beings.
   She looked the other way, at the staff in her hand, and her lips went thin. She knew her grip hadn’t slipped. The staff had lunged at Simon, with murder in its heartwood.

   The boy lay on a hard bed in a narrow room, a cold towel folded across his forehead. Treatle and Cutangle watched him carefully.
   “How long has it been?” said Cutangle.
   Trestle shrugged. “Three days.”
   “And he hasn’t come around once?”
   “No.”
   Cutangle sat down heavily on the edge of the bed, and pinched the bridge of his nose wearily. Simon had never looked particularly healthy, but now his face had a horrible sunken look.
   “A. brilliant mind, that one,” he said. “His explanation of the fundamental principles of magic and matter—quite astounding.”
   Trestle nodded.
   “The way he just absorbs knowledge,” said Cutangle: “I’ve been a working wizard all my life, and somehow I never really understood magic until he explained it. So clear. So, well, obvious.”
   “Everyone says that,” said Trestle gloomily. “They say it’s like having a hoodwink pulled off and seeing the daylight for the first time.”
   “That’s exactly it,” said Cutangle, “He’s sourcerer material, sure enough. You were right to bring him here.”
   There was a thoughtful pause.
   “Only—”said Trestle.
   “Only what?” asked Cutangle.
   “Only what was it you understood?” said Trestle. “That’s what’s bothering me. I mean, can you explain it?”
   “How do you mean, explain?” Cutangle looked worried.
   “What he keeps talking about,” said Trestle, a hint of desperation in his voice. “Oh, it’s the genuine stuff, I know. But what exactly is it?”
   Cutangle looked at him, his mouth open. Eventually he said, “Oh, that’s easy. Magic fills the universe, you see, and every time the universe changes, no, I mean every time magic is invoked, the universe changes, only in every direction at once, d’you see, and—” he moved his hands uncertainly, trying to recognise a spark of comprehension in Trestle’s face. “To put it another way, any piece of matter, like an orange or the world or, or—”
   “—a crocodile?” suggested Trestle.
   “Yes, a crocodile, or—whatever, is basically shaped like a carrot.”
   “I don’t remember that bit,” said Trestle.
   “I’m sure that’s what he said,” said Cutangle. He was starting to sweat.
   “No, I remember the bit where he seemed to suggest that if you went far enough in any direction you would see the back of your head,” Trestle insisted.
   “You’re sure he didn’t mean someone else’s head?”
   Trestle thought for a bit.
   “No, I’m pretty sure he said the back of your own head,” he said. “I think he said he could prove it.”
   They considered this in silence.
   Finally Cutangle spoke, very slowly and carefully.
   “I look at it all like this,” he said. “Before I heard him talk, I was like everyone else. You know what I mean? I was confused and uncertain about all the little details of life. But now,” he brightened up, “while I’m still confused and uncertain it’s on a much higher plane, d’you see, and at least I know I’m bewildered about the really fundamental and important facts of the universe.”
   Trestle nodded. “I hadn’t looked at it like that,” he said, “but you’re absolutely right. He’s really pushed back the boundaries of ignorance. There’s so much about the universe we don’t know.”
   They both savoured the strange warm glow of being much more ignorant than ordinary people, who were ignorant of only ordinary things.
   Then Trestle said: “I just hope he’s all right. He’s over the fever but he just doesn’t seem to want to wake up.”
   A couple of servants came in with a bowl of water and fresh towels. One of them carried a rather tatty broomstick. As they began to change the sweat-soaked sheets under the boy the two wizards left, still discussing the vast vistas of unknowingness that Simon’s genius had revealed to the world.
   Granny waited until their footsteps had died away and took off her headscarf.
   “Damn thing,” she said. “Esk, go and listen at the door.” She removed the towel from Simon’s head and felt his temperature.
   “It was very good of you to come,” said Esk. “And you so busy with your work, and everything.”
   “Mmmph.” Granny pursed her lips. She pulled up Simon’s eyelids and sought his pulse. She laid an ear on his xylophone chest and listened to his heart. She sat for some time quite motionless, probing around inside his head.
   She frowned.
   “Is he all right?” said Esk anxiously.
   Granny looked at the stone walls.
   “Drat this place,” she said. “It’s no place for sick people.”
   “Yes, but is he all right?”
   “What?” Granny was startled out of her thoughts. “Oh. Yes. Probably. Wherever he is.”
   Esk stared at her, and then at Simon’s body.
   “Nobody’s home,” said Granny, simply.
   “What do you mean?”
   “Listen to the child,” said Granny. “You’d think I taught her nothing. I mean his mind’s Wandering. He’s gone Out of his Head.”
   She looked at Simon’s body with something verging on admiration.
   “Quite surprisin’, really,” she added. “I never yet met a wizard who could Borrow.”
   She turned to Esk, whose mouth was a horrified O.
   “I remember when I was a girl, old Nanny Annaple went Wanderin’. Got too wrapped up with being a vixen, as I recall. Took us days to find her. And then there was you, too. I never would have found you if it wasn’t for that staff thing, and what have you done with it, girl?”
   “It hit him,” Esk muttered. “It tried to kill him. I threw it in the river.”
   “Not a nice thing to do to it after it saved you,” said Granny.
   “It saved me by hitting him?”
   “Didn’t you realise? He was callin’ to—them Things.”
   “That’s not true!”
   Granny stared into Esk’s defiant eyes and the thought came to her mind: I’ve lost her. Three years of work down the privy. She couldn’t be a wizard but she might have been a witch.
   “Why isn’t it true, Miss Clever?” she said.
   “He wouldn’t do something like that!” Esk was near to tears. “I heard him speak, he’s—well, he’s not evil, he’s a brilliant person, he nearly understands how everything works, he’s—”
   “I expect he’s a very nice boy,” said Granny sourly. “I never said he was a black wizard, did I?”
   “They’re horrible Things!” Esk sobbed. “He wouldn’t call out to them, he wants everything that they’re not, and you’re a wicked old—”
   The slap rang like a bell. Esk staggered back, white with shock. Granny stood with her hand upraised, trembling.
   She’d struck Esk once before—the blow a baby gets to introduce it to the world and give it a rough idea of what to expect from life. But that had been the last time. In three years under the same roof there had been cause enough, when milk had been left to boil over or the goats had been carelessly left without water, but a sharp word or a sharper silence had done more than force ever could and left no bruises.
   She grabbed Esk firmly by the shoulders and stared into her eyes.
   “Listen to me,” she said urgently. “Didn’t I always say to you that if you use magic you should go through the world like a knife goes through water? Didn’t I say that?”
   Esk, mesmerised like a cornered rabbit, nodded.
   “And you thought that was just old Granny’s way, didn’t you? But the fact is that if you use magic you draw attention to yourself. From Them. They watch the world all the time. Ordinary minds are just vague to them, they hardly bother with them, but a mind with magic in it shines out, you see, it’s a beacon to them. It’s not darkness that calls Them, it’s light, light that creates the shadows!”
   “But—but—why are They interested? What do They wwant?”
   “Life and shape,” said Granny.
   She sagged, and let go of Esk.
   “They’re pathetic, really,” she said. “They’ve got no life or shape themselves but what they can steal. They could no more survive in this world than a fish could live in a fire, but that doesn’t stop them trying. And they’re just bright enough to hate us because we’re alive.”
   Esk shivered. She remember the gritty feel of the cold sand.
   “What are They? I always thought they were just a sort—a sort of demon?”
   “Nah. No one really knows. They’re just the Things from the Dungeon Dimensions outside the universe, that’s all. Shadow creatures.”
   She turned back to the prone form of Simon.
   “You wouldn’t have any idea where he is, would you?” she said, looking shrewdly at Esk. “Not gone off flying with the seagulls, has he?”
   Esk shook her head.
   “No,” said Granny, “I didn’t think so. They’ve got him, haven’t they.”
   It wasn’t a question. Esk nodded, her face a mask of misery.
   “It’s not your fault,” said Granny, “His mind gave them an opening, and when he was knocked out they took it back with them. Only. . . .”
   She drummed her fingers on the edge of the bed, and appeared to reach a decision.
   “Who’s the most important wizard around here?” she demanded.
   “Um, Lord Cutangle,” said Esk. “He’s the Archchancellor. He was one of the ones who was in here.”
   “The fat one, or the one like a streak of vinegar?”
   Esk dragged her mind from the image of Simon on the cold desert and found herself saying: “He’s an Eighth Level wizard and a 33-degree mage, actually.”
   “You mean he’s bent?” said Granny. “All this hanging around wizards has made you take them seriously, my girl. They all call themselves the Lord High this and the Imperial That, it’s all part of the game. Even magicians do it, you’d think they’d be more sensible at least, but no, they call around saying they’re the Amazing-Bonko-and-Doris. Anyway, where is this High Rumtiddlypo?”
   “They’ll be at dinner in the Great Hall,” said Esk. “Can he bring Simon back, then?”
   “That’s the difficult part,” said Granny. “I daresay we could all get something back easily enough, walking and talking just like anyone. Whether it would be Simon is quite another sack of ferrets.”
   She stood up. “Let’s find this Great Hall, then. No time to waste.”
   “Um, women aren’t allowed in,” said Esk.
   Granny stopped in the doorway. Her shoulders rose. She turned around very slowly.
   “What did you say?” she said. “Did these old ears deceive me, and don’t say they did because they didn’t.”
   “Sorry,” said Esk. “Force of habit.”
   “I can see you’ve been getting ideas below your station,” said Granny coldly. “Go and find someone to watch over the lad, and let’s see what’s so great about this hall that I mustn’t set foot in it.”
   And thus it was that while the entire faculty of Unseen University were dining in the venerable hall the doors were flung back with a dramatic effect that was rather spoiled when one of them rebounded off a waiter and caught Granny a crack on the shin. Instead of the defiant strides she had intended to make across the chequered floor she was forced to half-hop, half-limp. But she hoped that she hopped with dignity.
   Esk hurried along behind her, acutely aware of the hundreds of eyes that were turned towards them.
   The roar of conversation and the clatter of cutlery faded away. A couple of chairs were knocked over. At the far end of the hall she could see the most senior wizards at their high table, which in fact bobbed a few feet off the floor. They were staring.
   A medium-grade wizard—Esk recognised him as a lecturer in Applied Astrology—rushed towards them, waving his hands.
   “Nononono,” he shouted. “Wrong door. You must go away.”
   “Don’t mind me,” said Granny calmly, pushing past him.
   “Nonono, it’s against the lore, you must go away now. Ladies are not allowed in here!”
   “I’m not a lady, I’m a witch,” said Granny. She turned to Esk. “Is he very important?”
   “I don’t think so,” said Esk.
   “Right.” Granny turned to the lecturer: “Go and find me an important wizard, please. Quickly.”
   Esk tapped her on the back. A couple of wizards with a rather greater presence of mind had nipped smartly out of the door behind them, and now several college porters were advancing threateningly up the hall, to the cheers and catcalls of the students. Esk had never much liked the porters, who lived a private life in their lodge, but now she felt a pang of sympathy for them.
   Two of them reached out hairy hands and grabbed Granny’s shoulders. Her arm disappeared behind her back and there was a brief flurry of movement that ended with the men hopping away, clutching bits of themselves and swearing.
   “Hatpin,” said Granny. She grabbed Esk with her free hand and swept towards the high table, glaring at anyone who so much as looked as if they were going to get in her way. The younger students, who knew free entertainment when they saw it, stamped and cheered and banged their plates on the long tables. The high table settled on the tiles with a thump and the senior wizards hurriedly lined up behind Cutangle as he tried to summon up his reserves of dignity. His efforts didn’t really work; it is very hard to look dignified with a napkin tucked into one’s collar.
   He raised his hands for silence, and the hall waited expectantly as Granny and Esk approached him. Granny was looking interestedly at the ancient paintings and statues of bygone mages.
   “Who are them buggers?” she said out of the corner of her mouth.
   “They used to be chief wizards,” whispered Esk.
   “They look constipated. I never met a wizard who was regular,” said Granny.
   “They’re a nuisance to dust, that’s all I know,” said Esk.
   Cutangle stood with legs planted wide apart, arms akimbo and stomach giving an impression of a beginners’ ski slope, the whole of him therefore adopting a pose usually associated with Henry VIII but with an option on Henry IX and X as well.
   “Well?” he said, “What is the meaning of this outrage?”
   “Is he important?” said Granny to Esk.
   “I, madam, am the Archchancellor! And I happen to run this University! And you, madam, are trespassing in very dangerous territory indeed! I warn you that—stop looking at me like that!”
   Cutangle staggered backwards, his hands raised to ward off Granny’s gaze. The wizards behind him scattered, turning over tables in their haste to avoid the stare.
   Granny’s eyes had changed.
   Esk had never seen them like this before. They were perfectly silver, like little round mirrors, reflecting all they saw. Cutangle was a vanishingly small dot in their depths, his mouth open, his tiny matchstick arms waving in desperation.
   The Archchancellor backed into a pillar, and the shock made him recover. He shook his head irritably, cupped a hand and sent a stream of white fire streaking towards the witch.
   Without dropping her iridescent stare Granny raised a hand and deflected the flames towards the roof. There was an explosion and a shower of tile fragments.
   Her eyes widened.
   Cutangle vanished. Where he had been standing a huge snake coiled, poised to strike.
   Granny vanished. Where she had been standing was a large wicker basket.
   The snake became a giant reptile from the mists of time.
   The basket became the snow wind of the Ice Giants, coating the struggling monster with ice.
   The reptile became a sabre-toothed tiger, crouched to spring.
   The gale became a bubbling tar pit.
   The tiger managed to become an eagle, stooping.
   The tar pits became a tufted hood.
   Then the images began to flicker as shape replaced shape. Stroboscope shadows danced around the hall. A magical wind sprang up, thick and greasy, striking octarine sparks from beards and fingers. In the middle of it all Esk, peering through streaming eyes, could just make out the two figures of Granny and Cutangle, glossy statues in the midst of the hurtling images.
   She was also aware of something else, a high-pitched sound almost beyond hearing.
   She had heard it before, on the cold plain—a busy chittering noise, a beehive noise, an anthill sound ….
   “They’re coming!” she screamed about the din. “They’re coming now!”
   She scrambled out from behind the table where she had taken refuge from the magical duel and tried to reach Granny. A gust of raw magic lifted her off her feet and bowled her into a chair.
   The buzzing was louder now, so that the air roared like a three-week corpse on a summer’s day. Esk made another attempt to reach Granny and recoiled when green fire roared along her arm and singed her hair.
   She looked around wildly for the other wizards, but those who had fled from the effects of the magic were cowering behind overturned furniture while the occult storm raged over their heads.
   Esk ran down the length of the hall and out into the dark corridor. Shadows curled around her as she hurried, sobbing, up the steps and along the buzzing corridors towards Simon’s narrow room.
   Something would try to enter the body, Granny had said. Something that would walk and talk like Simon, but would be something else ….
   A cluster of students were hovering anxiously outside the door. They turned pale faces towards Esk as she darted towards them, and were sufficiently shaken to draw back nervously in the face of her determined progress.
   “Something’s in there,” said one of them.
   “We can’t open the door!”
   They looked at her expectantly. Then one of them said: “You wouldn’t have a pass key, by any chance?”
   Esk grabbed the doorhandle and turned it. It moved slightly, but then spun back with such force it nearly took the skin off her hands. The chittering inside rose to a crescendo and there was another noise, too, like leather flapping.
   “You’re wizards!” she screamed. “Bloody well wizz!”
   “We haven’t done telekinesis yet,” said one of them.
   “I was ill when we did Firethrowing—”
   “Actually, I’m not very good at Dematerialisation—”
   Esk went to the door, and then stopped with one foot in the air. She remembered Granny talking about how even buildings had a mind, if they were old enough. The University was very old.
   She stepped carefully to one side and ran her hands over the ancient stones. It had to be done carefully, so as not to frighten it—and now she could feel the mind in the stones, slow and simple, but still mind. It pulsed around her; she could feel the little sparkles deep in the rock.
   Something was hooting behind the door.
   The three students watched in astonishment as Esk stood rock still with her hands and forehead pressed against the wall.
   She was almost there. She could feel the weight of herself, the ponderousness of her body, the distant memories of the dawn of time when rock was molten and free. For the first time in her life she knew what it was like to have balconies.
   She moved gently through the building-mind, refining her impressions, looking as fast as she dared for this corridor, this door.
   She stretched out one arm, very carefully. The students watched as she uncurled one finger, very slowly.
   The door hinges began to creak.
   There was a moment of tension and then the nails sprang from the hinges and clattered into the wall behind her. The planks began to bend as the door still tried to force itself open against the strength of -whatever was holding it shut.
   The wood billowed.
   Beams of blue light lanced out into the corridor, moving and dancing as indistinct shapes shuffled through the blinding brilliance inside the room. The light was misty and actinic, the sort of light to make Steven Spielberg reach for his copyright lawyer.
   Esk’s hair leapt from her head so that she looked like an ambulant dandelion. Little firesnakes of magic crackled across her skin as she stepped through the doorway.
   The students outside watched in horror as she disappeared into the light.
   It vanished in a silent explosion.
   When they eventually found enough courage to look inside the room, they saw nothing there but the sleeping body of Simon. And Esk, silent and cold on the floor, breathing very slowly. And the floor was covered with a fine layer of silver sand.

Esk floated through the mists of the world, noticing with a curious impersonal feeling the precise way in which she passed through solid matter.
   There were others with her. She could hear their chittering.
   Fury rose like bile. She turned and set out after the noise, fighting the seductive forces that kept telling her how nice it would be just to relax her grip on her mind and sink into a warm sea of nothingness. Being angry, that was the thing. She knew it was most important to stay really angry.
   The Discworld fell away, and lay below her as it did on the day she had been an eagle. But this time the Circle Sea was below her—it certainly was circular, as if God had run out of ideas—and beyond it lay the arms of the continent, and the long chain of the Ramtops marching all the way to the Hub. There were other continents she had never heard of, and tiny island chains.
   As her point of view changed, the Rim came into sight. It was night time and, since the Disc’s orbiting sun was below the world, it lit up the long waterfall that girdled the Edge.
   It also lit up Great A’Tuin the World Turtle. Esk had often wondered if the Turtle was really a myth. It seemed a lot of trouble to go to just to move a world. But there It was, almost as big as the Disc it carried, frosted with stardust and pocked with meteor craters.
   Its head passed in front of her and she looked directly into an eye big enough to float all the fleets in the world. She had heard it said that if you could look far enough into the direction that Great A’Tuin was staring, you would see the end of the universe. Maybe it was just the set of its beak, but Great A’Tuin looked vaguely hopeful, even optimistic. Perhaps the end of everything wasn’t as bad as all that.
   Dreamlike, she reached out and tried to Borrow the biggest mind in the universe.
   She stopped herself just in time, like a child with a toy toboggan who expected a little gentle slope and suddenly looks out of the magnificent mountains, snow-covered, stretching into the icefields of infinity. No one would ever Borrow that mind, it would be like trying to drink all the sea. The thoughts that moved through it were as big and as slow as glaciers.
   Beyond the Disc were the stars, and there was something wrong with them. They were swirling like snowflakes. Every now and again they would settle down and look as immobile as they always did, and then they’d suddenly take it into their heads to dance.
   Real stars shouldn’t do that, Esk decided. Which meant she wasn’t looking at real stars. Which meant she wasn’t exactly in a real place. But a chittering close at hand reminded her that she could almost certainly really die if she once lost track of those noises. She turned and pursued the sounds through the stellar snowstorm.
   And the stars jumped, and settled, jumped, and settled ….
   As she swooped upward Esk tried to concentrate on everyday things, because if she let her mind dwell on precisely what it was she was following then she knew she would turn back, and she wasn’t sure she knew the way. She tried to remember the eighteen herbs that cured ear-ache, which kept her occupied for a while because she could never recall the last four.
   A star swooped past, and then was violently jerked away; it was about twenty feet across.
   When she ran out of herbs she started on the diseases of goats, which took quite a long time because goats can catch a lot of things that cows can catch plus a lot of things plus that sheep plus catch plus a complete range of horrible ailments of their very own. When she had finished listing wooden udder, ear wilt and the octarine garget she tried to recall the complex code of dots and lines that they used to cut in the trees around Bad Ass, so that lost villagers could find their way home on snowy nights.
   She was only as far as dot dot dot dash dot dash (Hub-byTurnwise, one mile from the village) when the universe around her vanished with a faint pop. She fell forward, hit something hard and gritty and rolled to a halt.
   The grittiness was sand. Fine, dry, cold sand. You could tell that even if you dug down several feet it would be just as cold and just as dry.
   Esk lay with her face in it for a moment, summoning the courage to look up. She could just see, a few feet away from her, the hem of someone’s dress: Something’s dress, she corrected herself. Unless it was a wing. It could be a wing, a particularly tatty and leathery one.
   Her eyes followed it up until she found a face, higher than a house, outlined against the starry sky. Its owner was obviously trying to look nightmarish, but had tried too hard. The basic appearance was that of a chicken that had been dead for about two months, but the unpleasant effect was rather spoiled by warthog tusks, moth antennae, wolf ears and a unicorn spike. The whole thing had a selfassembled look, as if the owner had heard about anatomy but couldn’t quite get to grips with the idea.
   It was staring, but not at her. Something behind her occupied all its interest. Esk turned her head very slowly.
   Simon was sitting cross-legged in the centre of a circle of Things. There were hundreds of them, as still and silent as statues, watching him with reptilian patience.
   There was something small and angular held in his cupped hands. It gave off a fuzzy blue light that made his face look strange.
   Other shapes lay on the ground beside him, each in its little soft glow. They were the regular sort of shapes that Granny dismissed airily as jommetry-cubes, many-sided diamonds, cones, even a globe. Each one was transparent and inside was ….
   Esk edged closer. No one was taking any notice of her.
   Inside a crystal sphere that had been tossed aside on to the sand floated a blue-green ball, crisscrossed with tiny white cloud patterns and what could almost have been continents if anyone was silly enough to try to live on a ball. It might have been a sort of model, except something about its glow told Esk that it was quite real and probably very big and not—in every sense—totally inside the sphere.
   She put it down very gently and sidled over to a ten-sided block in which floated a much more acceptable world. It was properly discshaped, but instead of the Rimfall there was a wall of ice and instead of the Hub there was a gigantic tree, so big that its roots merged into mountain ranges.
   A prism beside it held another slowly-turning disc, surrounded by little stars. But there were no ice walls around this one, just a red-gold thread that turned out on closer inspection to be a snake—a snake big enough to encircle a world. For reasons best known to itself it was biting its own tail.
   Esk turned the prism over and over curiously, noticing how the little disc inside stayed resolutely upright.
   Simon giggled softly. Esk replaced the snake-disc and peered carefully over his shoulder.
   He was holding a small glass pyramid. There were stars in it, and occasionally he would give it a little shake so that the stars swirled up like snow in the wind, and then settled back in their places. Then he would giggle.
   And beyond the stars ….
   It was the Discworld. A Great A’Tuin no bigger than a small saucer toiled along under a world that looked like the work of an obsessive jeweller.
   Jiggle, swirl. Jiggle, swirl, giggle. There were already hairline cracks in the glass.
   Esk looked at Simon’s blank eyes and then up into the hungry faces of the nearest Things, and then she reached across and pulled the pyramid out of his hands and turned and ran.
   The Things didn’t stir as she scurried towards them, bent almost double, with the pyramid clasped tightly to her chest. But suddenly her feet were no longer running over the sand and she was being lifted into the frigid air, and a Thing with a face like a drowned rabbit turned slowly towards her and extended a talon.
   You’re not really here, Esk told herself. It’s only a sort of dream, what Granny calls an annaloggy. You can’t really be hurt, it’s all imagination. There’s absolutely no harm that can come to you, it’s all really inside your mind.
   I wonder if it knows that?
   The talon picked her out of the air and the rabbit face split like a banana skin. There was no mouth, just a dark hole, as if the Thing was itself an opening to an even worse dimension, a place by comparison with which freezing sand and moonless moonlight would be a jolly afternoon at the seaside.
   Esk held the Disc-pyramid and flailed with her free hand at the claw around her. It had no effect. The darkness loomed over her, a gateway to total oblivion.
   She kicked it as hard as she could.
   Which was not, given the circumstances, very hard. But where her foot struck there was an explosion of white sparks and a pop -which would have been a much more satisfying bang if the thin air here didn’t suck the sound away.
   The Thing screeched like a chainsaw encountering, deep inside an unsuspecting sapling, a lurking and long-forgotten nail. The others around it set up a sympathetic buzzing.
   Esk kicked again and the Thing shrieked and dropped her to the sand. She was bright enough to roll, with the tiny world hugged protectively to her, because even in a dream a broken ankle can be painful.
   The Thing lurched uncertainly above her. Esk’s eyes narrowed. She put the world down very carefully, hit the Thing very hard around the point where its shins would be, if there were shins under that cloak, and picked up the world again in one neat movement.
   The creature howled, bent double, and then toppled slowly, like a sackful of coathangers. When it hit the ground it collapsed into a mass of disjointed limbs; the head rolled away and rocked to a standstill.
   Is that all? thought Esk. They can hardly walk, even! When you hit them they just fall over?
   The nearest Things chittered and tried to back away as she marched determinedly towards them, but since their bodies seemed to be held together more or less by wishful thinking they weren’t very good at it. She hit one, which had a face like a small family of squid, and it deflated into a pile of twitching bones and bits of fur and odd ends of tentacle, very much like a Greek meal. Another was slightly more successful and had begun to shamble uncertainly away before Esk caught it a crack on one of its five shins.
   It flailed desperately as it fell and brought down another two.
   By then the others had managed to lurch out of her way and stood watching from a distance.
   Esk took a few steps towards the nearest one. It tried to move away, and fell over.
   They may have been ugly. They may have been evil. But when it came to poetry in motion, the Things had all the grace and coordination of a deck-chair.
   Esk glared at them, and took a look at the Disc in its glass pyramid. All the excitement didn’t seem to have disturbed it a bit.
   She’d been able to get out, if this indeed was out and if the Disc could be said to be in. But how was one supposed to get back?
   Somebody laughed. It was the sort of laugh
   Basically, it was p’ch’zarni’chiwkov. This epiglottis-throttling word is seldom used on the Disc except by highly-paid stunt linguists and, of course, the tiny tribe of the K’turni, who invented it. It has no direct synonym, although the Cumhoolie word “squemt” (’the feeling upon finding that the previous occupant of the privy has used all the paper’) begins to approach it in general depth of feeling. The closest translation is as follows:
   the nasty little sound of a sword being unsheathed right behind one at just the point when one thought one had disposed of one’s enemies
   -- although K’tumi speakers say that this does not convey the cold sweating, heart-stopping, gut-freezing sense of the original.
   It was that kind of laugh.
   Esk turned around slowly. Simon drifted towards her across the sand, with his hands cupped in front of him. His eyes were tight shut.
   “Did you really think it would be as easy as that? " he said. Or something said; it didn’t sound like Simon’s voice, but like dozens of voices speaking’at once.
   “Simon?” she said, uncertainly.
   “He is of no further use to us,” said the Thing with Simon’s shape. “He has shown us the way, child. Now give us our property.”
   Esk backed away.
   “I don’t think it belongs to you,” she said, “whoever you are.”
   The face in front of her opened its eyes. There was nothing there but blackness—not a colour, just holes into some other space.
   “We could say that if you gave it to us we would be merciful. We could say we would let you go from here in your own shape. But there wouldn’t really be much point in us saying that, would there?”
   “I wouldn’t believe you,” said Esk.
   “Well, then.”
   The Simon-thing grinned.
   “You’re only putting off the inevitable,” it said.
   “Suits me.”
   “We could take it anyway.”
   “Take it, then. But I don’t think you can. You can’t take anything unless it’s given to you, can you?”
   They circled round.
   “You’ll give it to us,” said the Simon-thing.
   Some of the other Things were approaching now, striding back across the desert with horrible jerky motions.
   “You’ll get tired,” it continued. “We can wait. We’re very good at waiting.”
   It made a feint to the left, but Esk swung around to face it.
   “That doesn’t matter,” she said. “I’m only dreaming this, and you can’t get hurt in dreams.”
   The Thing paused, and looked at her with its empty eyes.
   “Have you got a word in your world, I think it’s called ’psychosomatic’?”
   “Never heard of it,” snapped Esk.
   “It means you can get hurt in your dreams. And what is so interesting is that if you die in your dreams you stay here. That would be niiiiice.”
   Esk glanced sideways at the distant mountains, sprawled on the chilly horizon like melted mud pies. There were no trees, not even any rocks. Just sand and cold stars and
   She felt the movement rather than heard it and turned with the pyramid held between her hands like a club. It hit the Simon-thing in mid-leap with a satisfying thump, but as soon as it hit the ground it somersaulted forward and bounced upright with unpleasant ease. But it had heard her gasp and had seen the brief pain in her eyes. It paused.
   “Ah, that hurt you, Did it not? You don’t like to see another one suffer, yes? Not this one, it seems.”
   It turned and beckoned, and two of the tall Things lurched over to it and gripped it firmly by the arms.
   Its eyes changed. The darkness faded, and then Simon’s own eyes looked out of his face. He stared up at the Things on either side of him and struggled briefly, but one had several pairs of tentacles wrapped around his wrist and the other was holding his arm in the world’s largest lobster claw.
   Then he saw Esk, and his eyes fell to the little glass pyramid.
   “Run away!” he hissed. “Take it away from here! Don’t let them get it!” He grimaced as the claw tightened on his arm.
   “Is this a trick?” said Esk. “Who are you really?”
   “Don’t you recognise me?” he said wretchedly. “What are you doing in my dream?”
   “If this is a dream then I’d like to wake up, please,” said Esk.
   “Listen. You must run away now, do you understand? Don’t stand there with your mouth open.”
   GIVE IT To us, said a cold voice inside Esk’s head.
   Esk looked down at the glass pyramid with its unconcerned little world and stared up at Simon, her mouth an O of puzzlement.
   “But what is it?”
   “Look hard at it!”
   Esk peered through the glass. If she squinted it seemed that the little Disc was granular, as if it was made up of millions of tiny specks. If she looked hard at the specks
   “It’s just numbers!” she said. “The whole world—it’s all made up of numbers . . . .”
   “It’s not the world, it’s an idea of the world,” said Simon. “I created it for them. They can’t get through to us, do you see, but ideas have got a shape here. Ideas are real!”
   GIVE IT TO US.
   “But ideas can’t hurt anyone!”
   “I turned things into numbers to understand them, but they just want to control,” Simon said bitterly. “They burrowed into my numbers like—”
   He screamed.
   GIVE IT TO US OR WE WILL TAKE HIM TO BITS.
   Esk looked up at the nearest nightmare face.
   “How do I know I can trust you?” she said.
   YOU CAN’T TRUST US. BUT YOU HAVE NO CHOICE.
   Esk looked at the ring of faces that not even a necrophile could love, faces put together from a fishmonger’s midden, faces picked randomly from things that lurked in deep ocean holes and haunted caves, faces that were not human enough to gloat or leer but had all the menace of a suspiciously v-shaped ripple near an incautious bather.
   She couldn’t trust them. But she had no choice.

   Something else was happening, in a place as far away as the thickness of a shadow.
   The student wizards had run back to the Great Hall, where Cutangle and Granny Weatherwax were still locked in the magical equivalent of Indian arm wrestling. The flagstones under Granny were halfmelted and cracked and the table behind Cutangle had taken root and already bore a rich crop of acorns.
   One of the students had earned several awards for bravery by daring to tug at Cutangle’s cloak ….
   And now they were crowded into the narrow room, looking at the two bodies.
   Cutangle summoned doctors of the body and doctors of the mind, and the room buzzed with magic as they got to work.
   Granny tapped him on the shoulder.
   “A word in your ear, young man,” she said.
   “Hardly young, madam,” sighed Cutangle, “hardly young.” He felt drained. It had been decades since he’d duelled in magic, although it was common enough among students. He had a nasty feeling that Granny would have won eventually. Fighting her was like swatting a fly on your own nose. He couldn’t think what had come over him to try it.
   Granny led him out into the passage and around the corner to a window-seat. She sat down, leaning her broomstick against the wall. Rain drummed heavily on the roofs outside, and a few zigzags of lightning indicated a storm of Ramtop proportions approaching the city.
   “That was quite an impressive display,” she said: “You nearly won once or twice there.”
   “Oh,” said Cutangle, brightening up. “Do you really think so?”
   Granny nodded.
   Cutangle patted at various bits of his robe until he located a tarry bag of tobacco and a roll of paper. His hands shook as he fumbled a few shreds of second-hand pipeweed into a skinny homemade. He ran the wretched thing across his tongue, and barely moistened it. Then a dim remembrance of propriety welled up in the back of his mind.
   “Um,” he said, “do you mind if I smoke?”
   Granny shrugged. Cutangle struck a match on the wall and tried desperately to navigate the flame and the cigarette into approximately the same position. Granny gently took the match from his trembling hand and lit it for him.
   Cutangle sucked on the tobacco, had a ritual cough and settled back, the glowing end of the rollup the only light in the dim corridor.
   “They’ve gone Wandering,” said Granny at last.
   “I know,” said Cutangle.
   “Your wizards won’t be able to get them back.”
   “I know that, too.”
   “They might get something back, though.”
   “I wish you hadn’t said that.”
   There was a pause while they contemplated what might come back, inhabiting living bodies, acting almost like the original inhabitants.
   “It’s probably my fault—”they said in unison, and stopped in astonishment.
   “You first, madam,” said Cutangle.
   “Them cigaretty things,” asked Granny, “are they good for the nerves?”
   Cutangle opened his mouth to point out very courteously that tobacco was a habit reserved for wizards, but thought better of it. He extended the tobacco pouch towards Granny.
   She told him about Esk’s birth, and the coming of the old wizard, and the staff, and Esk’s forays into magic. By the time she had finished she had succeeded in rolling a tight, thin cylinder that burned with a small blue flame and made her eyes water.
   “I don’t know that shaky nerves wouldn’t be better,” she wheezed.
   Cutangle wasn’t listening.
   “This is quite astonishing,” he said. “You say the child didn’t suffer in any way?”
   “Not that I noticed,” said Granny. “The staff seemed—well, on her side, if you know what I mean.”
   “And where is this staff now?”
   “She said she threw it in the river . . . .”
   The old wizard and the elderly witch stared at each other, their faces illuminated by a flare of lightning outside.
   Cutangle shook his head. “The river’s flooding,” he said. “It’s a million-to-one chance.”
   Granny smiled grimly. It was the sort of smile that wolves ran away from. Granny grasped her broomstick purposefully.
   “Million-to-one chances,” she said, “crop up nine times out of ten.”

   There are storms that are frankly theatrical, all sheet lightning and metallic thunder rolls. There are storms that are tropical and sultry, and incline to hot winds and fireballs. But this was a storm of the Circle Sea plains, and its main ambition was to hit the ground with as much rain as possible. It was the kind of storm that suggests that the whole sky has swallowed a diuretic. The thunder and lightning hung around in the background, supplying a sort of chorus, but the rain was the star of the show. It tap-danced across the land.
   The grounds of the University stretched right down to the river. By day they were a neat formal pattern of gravel paths and hedges, but in the middle of a wet wild night the hedges seemed to have moved and the paths had simply gone off somewhere to stay dry.
   A weak wyrdlight shone inefficiently among the dripping leaves. But most of the rain found its way through anyway.
   “Can you use one of them wizard fireballs?”
   “Have a heart, madam.”
   “Are you sure she would have come this way?”
   “There’s a sort of jetty thing down here somewhere, unless I’m lost.”
   There was the sound of a heavy body blundering wetly into a bush, and then a splash.
   “I’ve found the river, anyway.”
   Granny Weatherwax peered through the soaking darkness. She could hear a roaring and could dimly make out the white crests of floodwater. There was also the distinctive river smell of the Ankh, which suggested that several armies had used it first as a urinal and then as a sepulchre.
   Cutangle splashed dejectedly towards her.
   “This is foolishness,” he said, “meaning no offence, madam. But it’ll be out to sea on this flood. And I’ll die of cold.”
   “You can’t get any wetter than you are now. Anyway, you walk wrong for rain.”
   “I beg your pardon?”
   “You go all hunched up, you fight it, that’s not the way. You shouldwell, move between the drops.” And, indeed, Granny seemed to be merely damp.
   “I’ll bear that in mind. Come on, madam. It’s me for a roaring fire and a glass of something hot and wicked.”
   Granny sighed. “I don’t know. Somehow I expected to see it sticking out of the mud, or something. Not just all this water.”
   Cutangle patted her gently on the shoulder.
   “There may be something else we can do—” he began, and was interrupted by a zip of lightning and another roll of thunder.
   “I said maybe there’s something—” he began again.
   “What was that I saw?” demanded Granny.
   “What was what?” said Cutangle, bewildered.
   “Give me some light!”
   The wizard sighed wetly, and extended a hand. A bolt of golden fire shot out across the foaming water and hissed into oblivion.
   “There!” said Granny triumphantly.
   “It’s just a boat,” said Cutangle. “The boys use them in the summer—”
   He waded after Granny’s determined figure as fast as he could.
   “You can’t be thinking of taking it out on a night like this,” he said. “It’s madness!”
   Granny slithered along the wet planking of the jetty, which was already nearly under water.
   “You don’t know anything about boats!” Cutangle protested.
   “I shall have to learn quickly, then,” replied Granny calmly.
   “But I haven’t been in a boat since I was a boy!”
   “I wasn’t actually asking you to come. Does the pointy bit go in front?”
   Cutangle moaned.
   “This is all very creditable,” he said, “but perhaps we can wait till morning?”
   A flash of lightning illuminated Granny’s face.
   “Perhaps not,” Cutangle conceded. He lumbered along the jetty and pulled the little rowing boat towards him. Getting in was a matter of luck but he managed it eventually, fumbling with the painter in the darkness.
   The boat swung out into the flood and was carried away, spinning slowly.
   Granny clung to the seat as it rocked in the turbulent waters, and looked expectantly at Cutangle through the murk.
   “Well?” she said.
   “Well what?” said Cutangle.
   “You said you knew all about boats.”
   “No. I said you didn’t.”
   “Oh.”
   They hung on as the boat wallowed heavily, miraculously righted itself, and was carried backwards downstream.
   “When you said you hadn’t been in a boat since you were a boy. . .” Granny began.
   “I was two years old, I think.”
   The boat caught on a whirlpool, spun around, and shot off across the flow.
   “I had you down as the sort of boy who was in and out of boats all day long.”
   “I was born up in the mountains. I get seasick on damp grass, if you must know,” said Cutangle.
   The boat banged heavily against a submerged tree trunk, and a wavelet lapped the prow.
   “I know a spell against drowning,” he added miserably.
   “I’m glad about that.”
   “Only you have to say it while you’re standing on dry land.”
   “Fake your boots off.” Granny commanded.
   “What?”
   “Take your boots off, man!”
   Cutangle shifted uneasily on his bench.
   “What have you in mind?” he said.
   “The water is supposed to be outside the boat, I know that much!” Granny pointed to the dark tide sloshing around the bilges: “Fill your boots with water and tip it over the side!”
   Cutangle nodded. He felt that the last couple of hours had somehow carried him along without him actually touching the sides, and for a moment he nursed the strangely consoling feeling that his life was totally beyond his control and whatever happened no one could blame him. Filling his boots with water while adrift on a flooded river at midnight with what he could only describe as a woman seemed about as logical as anything could be in the circumstances.
   A fine figure of a woman, said a neglected voice at the back of his mind. There was something about the way she used the tattered broomstick to scull the boat across the choppy water that troubled long-forgotten bits of Cutangle’s subconscious.
   Not that he could be certain about the fine figure, of course, what with the rain and the wind and Granny’s habit of wearing her entire wardrobe in one go. Cutangle cleared his throat uncertainly. Metaphorically a fine figure, he decided.

 “Um, look,” he said. “This is all very creditable, but consider the facts, I mean, the rate of drift and so forth, you see? It could be miles out on the ocean by now. It might never come to shore again. It might even go over the Rimfall.”
   Granny, who had been staring out across the water, turned around.
   “Can’t you think of anything else at all helpful that we could be doing?” she demanded.
   Cutangle baled for a few moments.
   “No,” he said.
   “Have you ever heard of anyone coming Back?”
   “No.”
   “Then it’s worth a try, isn’t it?”
   “I never liked the ocean,” said Cutangle. “It ought to be paved over. There’s dreadful things in it, down in the deep bits. Ghastly sea monsters. Or so they say.”
   “Keep baling, my lad, or you’ll be able to see if they’re right.”
   The storm rolled backwards and forwards overhead. It was lost here on the flat river plains; it belonged in the high Ramtops, where they knew how to appreciate a good storm. It grumbled around, looking for even a moderately high hill to throw lightning at.
   The rain settled down to the gentle patter of rain that is quite capable of keeping it up for days. A sea fog also rolled in to assist it.
   “If we had some oars we could row, if we knew where we were going,” said Cutangle. Granny didn’t answer.
   He heaved a few more bootfuls of water over the side, and it occurred to him that the gold braiding on his robe would probably never be the same again. It would be nice to think it might matter, one day.
   “I don’t suppose you do know which way the Hub is, by any chance?” he ventured. “Just making conversation.”
   “Look for the mossy side of trees,” said Granny without turning her head.
   “Ali, " said Cutangle, and nodded.
   He peered down gloomily at the oily waters, and wondered which particular oily waters they were. Judging by the salty smell they were out in the bay now.
   What really terrified him about the sea was that the only thing between him and the horrible things that lived at the bottom of it was water. Of course, he knew that logically the only thing that separated him from, say, the man-eating tigers in the jungles of Klatch was mere distance, but that wasn’t the same thing at all. Tigers didn’t rise up out of the chilly depths, mouths full of needle teeth ….
   He shivered.
   “Can’t you feel it?” asked Granny. “You can taste it in the air. Magic! It’s leaking out from something.”
   “It’s not actually water soluble,” said Cutangle. He smacked his lips once or twice. There was indeed a tinny taste to the fog, he had to admit, and a faint greasiness to the air.
   “You’re a wizard,” said Granny, severely. “Can’t you call it up or something?”
   “The question has never arisen,” said Cutangle. “Wizards never throw their staffs away.”
   “It’s around here somewhere,” snapped Granny. “Help me look for it, man!”
   Cutangle groaned. It had been a busy night, and before he tried any more magic he really needed twelve hours sleep, several good meals, and a quiet afternoon in front of a big fire. He was getting too old, that was the trouble. But he closed his eyes and concentrated.
   There was magic around, all right. There are some places where magic naturally accumulates. It builds up around deposits of the transmundane metal octiron, in the wood of certain trees, in isolated lakes, it sleets through the world and those skilled in such things can catch it and store it. There was a store of magic in the area.
   “It’s potent,” he said. “Very potent.” He raised his hands to his temples.
   “It’s getting bloody cold,” said Granny. The insistent rain had turned to snow.
   There was a sudden change in the world. The boat stopped, not with a jar, but as if the sea had suddenly decided to become solid. Granny looked over the side.
   The sea had become solid. The sound of the waves was coming from a long way away and getting further away all the time.
   She leaned over the side of the boat and tapped on the water.
   “Ice,” she said. The boat was motionless in an ocean of ice. It creaked ominously.
   Cutangle nodded slowly.
   “It makes sense,” he said. “If they are . . . where we think they are, then it’s very cold. As cold as the night between the stars, it is said. So the staff feels it too.”
   “Right,” said Granny, and stepped out of the boat. “All we have to do is find the middle of the ice and there’s the staff, right?”
   “I knew you were going to say that. Can I at least put my boots on?”
   They wandered across the frozen waves, with Cutangle stopping occasionally to try and sense the exact location of the staff. His robes were freezing on him. His teeth chattered.
   “Aren’t you cold?” he said to Granny, whose dress fairly crackled as she walked.
   “I’m cold,” she conceded, “I just ain’t shivering.”
   “We used to have winters like this when I was a lad,” said Cutangle, blowing on his fingers. “It doesn’t snow in Ankh, hardly.”
   “Really,” said Granny, peering ahead through the freezing fog.
   “There was snow on the tops of the mountains all year round, I recall. Oh, you don’t get temperatures like you did when I was a boy.”
   “At least, until now,” he added, stamping his feet on the ice. It creaked menacingly, reminding him that it was all that lay between him and the bottom of the sea. He stamped again, as softly as possible.
   “What mountains were these?” asked Granny.
   “Oh, the Ramtops. Up towards the Hub, in fact. Place called Brass Neck.”
   Granny’s lips moved. “Cutangle, Cutangle,” she said softly. “Any relation to old Acktur Cutangle? Used to live in a big old house under Leaping Mountain, had a lot of sons.”
   “My father. How on disc d’you know that?”
   “I was raised up there,” said Granny, resisting the temptation merely to smile knowingly. “Next valley. Bad Ass. I remember your mother. Nice woman, kept brown and white chickens, I used to go up there to buy eggs for me mam. That was before I was called to witching, of course.”
   “I don’t remember you,” said Cutangle. “Of course, it was a long time ago. There was always a lot of children around our house.” He sighed. “I suppose it’s possible I pulled your hair once. It was the sort of thing I used to do.”
   “Maybe. I remember a fat little boy. Rather unpleasant.”
   “That might have been me. I seem to recall a rather bossy girl, but it was a long time ago. A long time ago.”
   “I didn’t have white hair in those days,” said Granny.
   “Everything was a different colour in those days.”
   “That’s true.”
   “It didn’t rain so much in the summer time.”
   “The sunsets were redder.”
   “There were more old people. The world was full of them,” said the wizard.
   “Yes, I know. And now it’s full of young people. Funny, really. I mean, you’d expect it to be the other way round.”
   “They even had a better kind of air. It was easier to breathe,” said Cutangle. They stamped on through the swirling snow, considering the curious ways of time and Nature.
   “Ever been home again?” said Granny.
   Cutangle shrugged. “When my father died. It’s odd, I’ve never said this to anyone, but-well, there were my brothers, because I am an eighth son of course, and they had children and even grandchildren, and not one of them can hardly write his name. I could have bought the whole village. And they treated me like a king, but- I mean, I’ve been to places and seen things that would curdle their minds, I’ve faced down creatures wilder than their nightmares, I know secrets that are known to a very few—”
   “You felt left out,” said Granny. “There’s nothing strange in that. It happens to all of us. It was our choice.”
   “Wizards should never go home,” said Cutangle.
   “I don’t think they can go home,” agreed Granny. “You can’t cross the same river twice, I always say.”
   Cutangle gave this some thought.
   “I think you’re wrong there,” he said. “I must have crossed the same river, oh, thousands of times.”
   “Ah, but it wasn’t the same river.”
   “It wasn’t?”
   “No.”
   Cutangle shrugged. “It looked like the same bloody river.”
   “No need to take that tone,” said Granny. “I don’t see why I should listen to that sort of language from a wizard who can’t even answer letters!”
   Cutangle was silent for a moment, except for the castanet chatter of his teeth.
   “Oh,” he said. “Oh, I see. They were from you, were they?”
   “That’s right. I signed them on the bottom. It’s supposed to be a sort of clue, isn’t it?”
   “All right, all right. I just thought they were a joke, that’s all,” said Cutangle sullenly.
   “A joke?”
   “We don’t get many applications from women. We don’t get any.”
   “I wondered why I didn’t get a reply,” said Granny.
   “I threw them away, if you must know.”
   “You could at least have—there it is!”
   “Where? Where? Oh, there.”
   The fog parted and they now saw it clearly—a fountain of snowflakes, a ornamental pillar of frozen air. And below it….
   The staff wasn’t locked in ice, but lay peacefully in a seething pool of water.
   One of the unusual aspects of a magical universe is the existence of opposites. It has already been remarked that darkness isn’t the opposite of light, it is simply the absence of light. In the same way absolute zero is merely the absence of heat. If you want to know what real cold is, the cold so intense that water can’t even freeze but anti-boils, look no further than this pool.
   They looked in silence for some seconds, their bickering forgotten. Then Cutangle said slowly: “If you stick your hand in that, your fingers’ll snap like carrots.”
   “Do you think you can lift it out by magic?” said Granny.
   Cutangle started to pat his pockets and eventually produced his rollup bag. With expert fingers he shredded the remains of a few dogends into a fresh paper and licked it into shape, without taking his eyes off the staff.
   “No,” he said. “but I’ll try anyway.”
   He looked longingly at the cigarette and then poked it behind his ear. He extended his hands, fingers splayed, and his lips moved soundlessly as he mumbled a few words of power.
   The staff spun in its pool and then rose gently away from the ice, where it immediately became the centre of a cocoon of frozen air. Cutangle groaned with the effort—direct levitation is the hardest of the practical magics, because of the ever-present danger of the wellknown principles of action and reaction, which means that a wizard attempting to lift a heavy item by mind power alone faces the prospect of ending up with his brains in his boots.
   “Can you stand it upright?” said Granny.
   With great delicacy the staff turned slowly in the air until it hung in front of Granny a few inches above the ice. Frost glittered on its carvings, but it seemed to Cutangle—through the red haze of migraine that hovered in front of his eyes—to be watching him. Resentfully.
   Granny adjusted her hat and straightened up purposefully.
   “Right,” she said. Cutangle swayed. The tone of voice cut through him like a diamond saw. He could dimly remember being scolded by his mother when he was small; well, this was that voice, only refined and concentrated and edged with little bits of carborundum, a tone of command that would have a corpse standing to attention and could probably have marched it halfway across its cemetery before it remembered it was dead.
   Granny stood in front of the hovering staff, almost melting its icy covering by the sheer anger in her gaze.
   “This is your idea of proper behaviour, is it? Lying around on the sea while people die? Oh, very well done!”
   She stomped around in a semi-circle. To Cutangle’s bewilderment, the staff turned to follow her.
   “So you were thrown away,” snapped Granny. “So what? She’s hardly more than a child, and children throw us all away sooner or later. Is this loyal service? Have you no shame, lying around sulking when you could be of some use at last?”
   She leaned forward, her hooked nose a few inches from the staff. Cutangle was almost certain that the staff tried to lean backwards out of her way.
   “Shall I tell you what happens to wicked staffs?” she hissed. “If Esk is lost to the world, shall I tell you what I will do to you? You were saved from the fire once, because you could pass on the hurt to her. Next time it won’t be the fire.”
   Her voice sank to a whiplash whisper.
   “First it’ll be the spokeshave. And then the sandpaper, and the auger, and the whittling knife—”
   “I say, steady on,” said Cutangle, his eyes watering.
   “—and what’s left I’ll stake out in the woods for the fungus and the woodlice and the beetles. It could take years.”
   The carvings writhed. Most of them had moved around the back, out of Granny’s gaze.
   “Now,” she said. “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to pick you up and we are all going back to the University, aren’t we? Otherwise it’s blunt saw time.”
   She rolled up her sleeves and extended a hand.
   “Wizard,” she said, “I shall want you to release it.”
   Cutangle nodded miserably.
   “When I say now, now! Now!”

   Cutangle opened his eyes again.
   Granny was standing with her left arm extended full length in front of her, her hand clamped around the staff.
   The ice was exploding off it, in gouts of steam.
   “Right,” finished Granny, “and if this happens again I shall be very angry, do I make myself clear?”
   Cutangle lowered his hands and hurried towards her.
   “Are you hurt?”
   She shook her head. “It’s like holding a hot icicle,” she said. “Come on, we haven’t got time to stand around chatting.”
   “How are we going to get back?”
   “Oh, show some backbone, man, for goodness sake. We’ll fly,”
   Granny waved her broomstick. The Archchancellor looked at it doubtfully.
   “On that?”
   “Of course. Don’t wizards fly on their staffs?”
   “It’s rather undignified.”
   “If I can put up with that, so can you.”
   “Yes, but is it safe?”
   Granny gave him a withering look.
   “Do you mean in the absolute sense?” she asked. “Or, say, compared with staying behind on a melting ice floe?”

   “This is the first time I have ever ridden on a broomstick,” said Cutangle.
   “Really.”
   “I thought you just had to get on them and they flew,” said the wizard. “I didn’t know you had to do all that running up and down and shouting at them.”
   “It’s a knack,” said Granny.
   “I thought they went faster,” Cutangle continued, “and, to be frank, higher.”
   “What do you mean, higher?” asked Granny, trying to compensate for the wizard’s weight on the pillion as they turned back upriver. Like pillion passengers since the dawn of time, he persisted in leaning the wrong way.
   “Well, more sort of above the trees,” said Cutangle, ducking as a dripping branch swept his hat away.
   “There’s nothing wrong with this broomstick that you losing a few stone wouldn’t cure,” snapped Granny. “Or would you rather get off and walk?”
   “Apart from the fact that half the time my feet are touching the ground anyway,” said Cutangle. “I wouldn’t want to embarrass you. If someone had asked me to list all the perils of flying, you know, it would never have occurred to me to include having one’s legs whipped to death by tall bracken.”
   “Are you smoking?” said Granny, staring grimly ahead. “Something’s burning.”
   “It was just to calm my nerves what with all this headlong plunging through the air, madam.”
   “Well, put it out this minute. And hold on.”
   The broomstick lurched upwards and increased its speed to that of a geriatric jogger.
   “Mr Wizard.”
   “Hallo?”
   “When I said hold on—”
   “Yes?”
   “I didn’t mean there.”
   There was a pause.
   “Oh. Yes. I see. I’m terribly sorry.”
   “That’s all right.”
   “My memory isn’t what it was . . . I assure you . . . no offence meant.”
   “None taken.”
   They flew in silence for a moment.
   “Nevertheless,” said Granny thoughtfully, “I think that, on the whole, I would prefer you to move your hands.”

   Rain gushed across the leads of Unseen University and poured into the gutters where ravens’ nests, abandoned since the summer, floated like very badly-built boats. The water gurgled along ancient, crusted pipes. It found its way under tiles and said hallo to the spiders under the eaves. It leapt from gables and formed secret lakes high amongst the spires.
   Whole ecologies lived in the endless rooftops of the University, which by comparison made Gormenghast look like a toolshed on a railway allotment; birds sang in tiny jungles grown from apple pips and weed seeds, little frogs swam in the upper gutters, and a colony of ants were busily inventing an interesting and complex civilisation.
   One thing the water couldn’t do was gurgle out of the ornamental gargoyles ranged around the roofs. This was because the gargoyles wandered off and sheltered in the attics at the first sign of rain. They held that just because you were ugly it didn’t mean you were stupid.
   It rained streams. It rained rivers. It rained seas. But mainly it rained through the roof of the Great Hall, where the duel between Granny and Cutangle had left a very large hole, and Treatle felt that it was somehow raining on him personally.
   He stood on a table organising the teams of students who were taking down the paintings and ancient tapestries before they got soaked. It had to be a table, because the floor was already several inches deep in water.
   Not rainwater, unfortunately. This was water with real personality, the kind of distinctive character water gets after a long journey through silty countryside. It had the thick texture of authentic Ankh water—too stiff to drink, too runny to plough.
   The river had burst its banks and a million little watercourses were flowing backwards, bursting in through the cellars and playing peekaboo under the flagstones. There was the occasional distant boom as some forgotten magic in a drowned dungeon shorted out and surrendered up its power; Treatle wasn’t at all keen on some of the unpleasant bubblings and hissings that were escaping to the surface.
   He thought again how nice it would be to be the sort of wizard who lived in a little cave somewhere and collected herbs and thought significant thoughts and knew what the owls were saying. But probably the cave would be damp and the herbs would be poisonous and Treatle could never be sure, when all was said and done, exactly what thoughts were really significant.
   He got down awkwardly and paddled through the dark swirling waters. Well, he had done his best. He’d tried to organise the senior wizards into repairing the roof by magic, but there was a general argument over the spells that could be used and a consensus that this was in any case work for artisans.
   That’s wizards for you, he thought gloomily as he waded between the dripping arches, always probing the infinite but never noticing the definite, especially in the matter of household chores. We never had this trouble before that woman came.
   He squelched up the steps, lit by a particularly impressive flash of lightning. He had a cold certainty that while of course no one could possibly blame him for all this, everybody would. He seized the hem of his robe and wrung it out wretchedly, then he reached for his tobacco pouch.
   It was a nice green waterproof one. That meant that all the rain that had got into it couldn’t get out again. It was indescribable.
   He found his little clip of papers. They were fused into one lump, like the legendary pound note found in the back pockets of trousers after they have been washed, spun, dried and ironed.
   “Bugger,” he said, with feeling.
   “I say! Treatle!”
   Treatle looked around. He had been the last to leave the hall, where even now some of the benches were beginning to float. Whirlpools and patches of bubble marked the spots where magic was leaking from the cellars, but there was no one to be seen.
   Unless, of course, one of the statues had spoken. They had been too heavy to move, and Trestle remembered telling the students that a thorough wash would probably do them good.
   He looked at their stern faces and regretted it. The statues of very powerful dead mages were sometimes more lifelike than statues had any right to be. Maybe he should have kept his voice down.
   “Yes?” he ventured, acutely aware of the stony stares.
   “Up here, you fool!”
   He looked up. The broomstick descended heavily through the rain in a series of swoops and jerks. About five feet above the water it lost its few remaining aerial pretensions, and flopped noisily into a whirlpool.
   “Don’t stand there, idiot!”
   Treatle peered nervously into the gloom.
   “I’ve got to stand somewhere,” he said.
   “I mean give us a hand!” snapped Cutangle, rising from the wavelets like a fat and angry Venus. “The lady first, of course.”
   He turned to Granny, who was fishing around in the water.
   “I’ve lost my hat,” she said.
   Cutangle sighed. “Does that really matter at a time like this?”
   “A witch has got to have a hat, otherwise who’s to know?” said Granny. She made a grab as something dark and sodden drifted by, cackled triumphantly, tipped out the water and rammed the hat on her head. It had lost its stiffening and flopped rather rakishly over one eye.
   “Right,” she said, in a tone of voice that suggested the whole universe had just better watch out.
   There was another brilliant flash of lightning, which shows that even the weather gods have a well-developed sense of theatre.
   “It rather suits you,” said Cutangle.
   “Excuse me,” said Trestle, “but isn’t she the w—”
   “Never mind that,” said Cutangle, taking Granny’s hand and helping her up the steps. He flourished the staff.
   “But it’s against the lore to allow w—”
   He stopped and stared as Granny reached out and touched the damp wall by the door. Cutangle tapped him on the chest.
   “Show me where it’s written down,” said Cutangle.
   “They’re in the Library,” Granny interrupted.
   “It was the only dry place,” said Treatle, “but—”
   “This building is frightened of thunderstorms,” said Granny. “It could do with comforting.”
   “But the lore—”repeated Treatle desperately.
   Granny was already striding down the passage, with Cutangle hopping along behind. He turned.
   “You heard the lady,” he said.
   Treatle watched them go, with his mouth hanging open. When their footsteps had died away in the distance he stood silently for a moment, thinking about life and where his could have gone wrong.
   However, he wasn’t going to be accused of disobedience.
   Very carefully, without knowing exactly why, he reached out and gave the wall a friendly pat.
   “There, there,” he said.
   Strangely enough, he felt a lot better.

   It occurred to Cutangle that he ought to lead the way in his own premises, but Granny in a hurry was no match for a nearterminal nicotine addict and he kept up only by a sort of crabwise leaping.
   “It’s this way,” he said, splashing through the puddles.
   “I know. The building told me.”
   “Yes, I was meaning to ask about that,” said Cutangle, “because you see it’s never said anything to me and I’ve lived here for years.”
   “Have you ever listened to it?”
   “Not exactly listened, no,” Cutangle conceded. “Not as such.”
   “Well then,” said Granny, edging past a waterfall where the kitchen steps used to be (Mrs Whitlow’s washing would never be the same again). “I think it’s up here and along the passage, isn’t it?”
   She swept past a trio of astonished wizards, who were surprised by her and completely startled by her hat.
   Cutangle panted after her and caught her arm at the doors to the Library.
   “Look,” he said desperately, “No offence, Miss—um, Mistress—”
   “I think Esmerelda will suffice now. What with us having shared a broomstick and everything.”
   “Can I go in front? It is my Library,” he begged.
   Granny turned around, her face a mask of surprise. Then she smiled.
   “Of course. I’m so sorry.”
   “For the look of the thing, you see,” said Cutangle apologetically. He pushed the door open.
   The Library was full of wizards, who care about their books in the same way that ants care about their eggs and in time of difficulty carry them around in much the same way. The water was getting in even here, and turning up in rather odd places because of the Library’s strange gravitational effects. All the lower shelves had been cleared and relays of wizards and students were piling the volumes on every available table and dry shelf. The air was full of the sound of angry rustling pages, which almost drowned out the distant fury of the storm.
   This was obviously upsetting the librarian, who was scurrying from wizard to wizard, tugging ineffectually at their robes and shouting “ook".
   He spotted Cutangle and knuckled rapidly towards him. Granny had never seen an orang-outan before, but wasn’t about to admit it, and remained quite calm in the face of a small potbellied man with extremely long arms and a size IZ skin on a size 8 body.
   “Ook,” it explained, “ooook.”
   “I expect so,” said Cutangle shortly, and grabbed the nearest wizard, who was tottering under the weight of a dozen grimoires. The man stared at him as if he was a ghost, looked sideways at Granny, and dropped the books on the floor. The librarian winced.
   “Archchancellor?” gasped the wizard, “you’re alive? I mean -we heard you’d been spirited away by—” he looked at Granny again, “—I mean, we thought—Treatle told us—”
   “Oook,” said the librarian, shooing some pages back between their covers.
   “Where are young Simon and the girl? What have you done with them?” Granny demanded.
   “They—we put them over here,” said the wizard, backing away. “Um—”
   “Show us,” said Cutangle. “And stop stuttering, man, you’d think you’d never seen a woman before.”
   The wizard swallowed hard and nodded vigorously.
   “Certainly. And—I mean—please follow me—um—”
   “You weren’t going to say anything about the lore, were you?” asked Cutangle.
   “Um—no, Archchancellor.”
   “Good.”
   They followed hard on his trodden-down heels as he scurried between the toiling wizards, most of whom stopped working to stare as Granny strode past.
   “This is getting embarrassing,” said Cutangle, out of the corner of his mouth. “I shall have to declare you an honorary wizard.”
   Granny stared straight ahead and her lips hardly moved.
   “You do,” she hissed, “and I will declare you an honorary witch.”
   Cutangle’s mouth snapped shut.
   Esk and Simon were lying on a table in one of the side readingrooms, with half a dozen wizards watching over them. They drew back nervously as the trio approached, with the librarian swinging along behind.
   “I’ve been thinking,” said Cutangle. “Surely it would be better to give the staff to Simon? He is a wizard, and—”
   “Over my dead body,” said Granny. “Yours, too. They’re getting their power through him, do you want to give them more?”
   Cutangle sighed. He had been admiring the staff, it was one of the best he had seen.
   “Very well. You’re right, of course.”
   He leaned down and laid the staff on Esk’s sleeping form, and then stood back dramatically.
   Nothing happened.
   One of the wizards coughed nervously.
   Nothing continued to happen.
   The carvings on the staff appeared to be grinning.
   “It’s not working,” said Cutangle, “is it?”
   “Ook.”
   “Give it time,” said Granny.
   They gave it time. Outside the storm strode around the sky, trying to lift the lids off houses.
   Granny sat down on a pile of books and rubbed her eyes. Cutangle’s hands strayed towards his tobacco pocket. The wizard with the nervous cough was helped out of the room by a colleague.
   “Ook,” said the librarian.
   “I know!” said Granny, so that Cutangle’s half-rolled homemade shot out of his nerveless fingers in a shower of tobacco.
   “What?”
   “It’s not finished!”
   “What?”
   “She can’t use the staff, of course,” said Granny, standing up.
   “But you said she swept the floors with it and it protects her and—” Cutangle began.
   “Nonono,” said Granny. “That means the staff uses itself or it uses her, but she’s never been able to use it, d’you see?”
   Cutangle stared at the two quiet bodies. “She should be able to use it. It’s a proper wizard’s staff.”
   “Oh,” said Granny. “So she’s a proper wizard, is she?”
   Cutangle hesitated.
   “Well, of course not. You can’t ask us to declare her a wizard. Where’s the precedent?”
   “The what?” asked Granny, sharply.
   “It’s never happened before.”
   “Lots of things have never happened before. We’re only born once.”
   Cutangle gave her a look of mute appeal. “But it’s against the I—”
   He began to say “lore", but the word mumbled into silence.
   “Where does it say it?” said Granny triumphantly. “Where does it say women can’t be wizards?”
   The following thoughts sped through Cutangle’s mind:
   … It doesn’t say it anywhere, it says it everywhere.
   … But young Simon seemed to say that everywhere is so much like nowhere that you can’t really tell the difference .
   … Do I want to be remembered as the first Archchancellor to allow women into the University? Still . . . I’d be remembered, that’s for sure .
   … She really is a rather impressive woman when she stands in that sort of way .
   … That staff has got ideas of its own .
   … There’s a sort of sense to it .
   … I would be laughed at .
   … It might not work .
   … It might work.

She couldn’t trust them. But she had no choice.
   Esk stared at the terrible faces peering down at her, and the lanky bodies, mercifully cloaked.
   Her hands tingled.
   In the shadow-world, ideas are real. The thought seemed to travel up her arms.
   It was a buoyant sort of thought, a thought full of fizz. She laughed, and moved her hands apart, and the staff sparkled in her hands like solid electricity.
   The Things started to chitter nervously and one or two at the back started to lurch away. Simon fell forward as his captors hastily let go, and he landed on his hands and knees in the sand.
   “Use it!” he shouted. “That’s it! They’re frightened!”
   Esk gave him a smile, and continued to examine the staff. For the first time she could see what the carvings actually were.
   Simon snatched up the pyramid of the world and ran towards her.
   “Come on!” he said. “They hate it!”
   “Pardon?” said Esk.
   “Use the staff,” said Simon urgently, and reached out for it. “Hey! It bit me!”
   “Sorry,” said Esk. “What were we talking about?” She looked up and regarded the keening Things as it were for the first time.
   “Oh, those. They only exist inside our heads. If we didn’t believe in them, they wouldn’t exist at all.”
   Simon looked around at them.
   “I can’t honestly say I believe you,” he said.
   “I think we should go home now,” said Esk. “People will be worrying. ”
   She moved her hands together and the staff vanished, although for a moment her hands glowed as though they were cupped around a candle.
   The Things howled. A few of them fell over.
   “The important thing about magic is how you don’t use it,” said Esk, taking Simon’s arm.
   He stared at the crumbling figures around him, and grinned foolishly.
   “You don’t use it?” he queried.
   “Oh, yes,” said Esk, as they walked towards the Things. “Try it yourself.”
   She extended her hands, brought the staff out of the air, and offered it to him. He went to take it, then drew back his hand.
   “Uh, no,” he said, “I don’t think it likes me much.”
   “I think it’s all right if I give it to you. It can’t really argue with that,” said Esk.
   “Where does it go?”
   “It just becomes an idea of itself, I think.”
   He reached out his hand again and closed his fingers around the shining wood.
   “Right,” he said, and raised it in the classical revengeful wizard’s pose. “I’ll show them!”
   “No, wrong.”
   “What do you mean, wrong? I’ve got the power!”
   “They’re sort of-reflections of us,” said Esk. “You can’t beat your reflections, they’ll always be as strong as you are. That’s why they draw nearer to you when you start using magic. And they don’t get tired. They feed off magic, so you can’t beat them with magic. No, the thing is . . . well, not using magic because you can’t, that’s no use at all. But not using magic because you can, that really upsets them. They hate the idea. If people stopped using magic they’d die.”
   The Things ahead of them fell over each other in their haste to back away.
   Simon looked at the staff, then at Esk, then at the Things, then back at the staff.
   “This needs a lot of thinking about,” he said uncertainly. “I’d really like to work this out.”
   “I expect you’ll do it very well.”
   “Because you’re saying that the real power is when you go right through magic and out the other side.”
   “It works, though, doesn’t it?”
   They were alone on the cold plain now. The Things were distant stick-figures.
   “I wonder if this is what they mean by sourcery?” said Simon.
   I don’t know. It might be.”
   “I’d really like to work this out,” said Simon again, turning the staff over and over in his hands. “We could set up some experiments, you know, into deliberately not using magic. We could carefully not draw an octogram on the floor, and we could deliberately not call up all sorts of things, and—it makes me sweat just to think about it!”
   “I’d like to think about how to get home,” said Esk, looking down at the pyramid.
   “Well, that is supposed to be my idea of the world. I should be able to find a way. How do you do this thing with the hands?”
   He moved his hands together. The staff slid between them, the light glowing through his fingers for a moment, and then vanished. He grinned. “Right. Now all we have to do is look for the University …”

   Cutangle lit his third rollup from the stub of the second. This last cigarette owed a lot to the creative powers of nervous energy, and looked like a camel with the legs cut off.
   He had already watched the staff lift itself gently from Esk and land on Simon.
   Now it had floated up into the air again.
   Other wizards had crowded into the room. The librarian was sitting under the table.
   “If only we had some idea what is going on,” said Cutangle. “It’s the suspense I can’t stand.”
   “Think positively, man,” snapped Granny. “And put out that bloody cigarette, I can’t imagine anyone wanting to come back to a room that smells like a fireplace.”
   As one man the assembled college of wizards turned their faces towards Cutangle, expectantly.
   He took the smouldering mess out of his mouth and, with a glare that none of the assembled wizards cared to meet, trod it underfoot.
   “Probably time I gave it up anyway,” he said. “That goes for the rest of you, too. Worse than an ashpit in this place, sometimes.”
   Then he saw the staff. It was
   The only way Cutangle could describe the effect was that it seemed to be going very fast while staying in exactly the same place.
   Streamers of gas flared away from it and vanished, if they were gas. It blazed like a comet designed by an inept special effects man. Coloured sparks leapt out and disappeared somewhere.
   It was also changing colour, starting with a dull red and then climbing through the spectrum until it was a painful violet. Snakes of white fire coruscated along its length.
   There should be a word for words that sound like things would sound like if they made a noise, he thought. The word “glisten” does indeed gleam oily, and if there was ever a word that sounded exactly the way sparks look as they creep across burned paper, or the way the lights of cities would creep across the world if the whole of human civilisation was crammed into one night, then you couldn’t do better than “coruscate".
   He knew what would happen next.
   “Look out,” he whispered. “It’s going to go—”
   In total silence, in the kind of silence in fact that sucks in sounds and stifles them, the staff flashed into pure octarine along the whole of its length.
   The eighth colour, produced by light falling through a strong magical field, blazed out through bodies and bookshelves and walls. Other colours blurred and ran together, as though the light was a glass of gin poured over the watercolour painting of the world. The clouds over the University glowed, twisted into fascinating and unexpected shapes, and streamed upwards.
   An observer above the Disc would have seen a little patch of land near the Circle Sea sparkle like a jewel for several seconds, then wink out.
   The silence of the room was broken by a wooden clatter as the staff dropped out of the air and bounced on the table.
   Someone said “Ook", very faintly.
   Cutangle eventually remembered how to use his hands and raised them to where he hoped his eyes would be. Everything had gone black.
   “Is—anyone else there?” he said.
   “Gods, you don’t know how glad I am to hear you say that,” said another voice. The silence was suddenly full of babble.
   “Are we still where we were?”
   “I don’t know. Where were we?”
   “Here, I think.”
   “Can you reach out?”
   “Not unless I am quite certain about what I’m going to touch, my good man,” said the unmistakable voice of Granny Weatherwax.
   “Everyone try and reach out,” said Cutangle, and choked down a scream as a hand like a warm leather glove closed around his ankle. There was a satisfied little “ook", which managed to convey relief, comfort and the sheer joy of touching a fellow human being or, in this case, anthropoid.
   There was a scratch and then a blessed flare of red light as a wizard on the far side of the room lit a cigarette.
   “Who did that?”
   “Sorry, Archchancellor, force of habit.”
   “Smoke all you like, that man.”
   “Thank you, Archchancellor.”
   “I think I can see the outline of the door now,” said another voice.
   “Granny?”
   “Yes, I can definitely see—”
   “Esk?”
   “I’m here, Granny.”
   “Can I smoke too, sir?”
   “Is the boy with you?”
   “Yes.”
   “Ook.”
   “I’m here.”
   “What’s happening?”
   “Everyone stop talking!”
   Ordinary light, slow and easy on the eye, sidled back into the Library.
   Esk sat up, dislodging the staff. It rolled under the table. She felt something slip over her eyes, and reached up for it.
   “Just a moment,” said Granny, darting forward. She gripped the girl’s shoulders and peered into her eyes.
   “Welcome back,” she said, and kissed her.
   Esk reached up and patted something hard on her head. She lifted it down to examine it.
   It was a pointed hat, slightly smaller than Granny’s, but bright blue with a couple of silver stars painted on it.
   “A wizard hat?” she said.
   Cutangle stepped forward.
   “Ah, yes,"he said, and cleared his throat: “You see, we thought—it seemed—anyway, when we considered it—”
   “You’re a wizard,” said Granny, simply. “The Archchancellor changed the lore. Quite a simple ceremony, really.”
   “There’s the staff somewhere about here,” said Cutangle. “I saw it fall down—oh.”
   He stood up with the staff in his hand, and showed it to Granny.
   “I thought it had carvings on,” he said. “This looks just like a stick.” And that was a fact. The staff looked as menacing and potent as a piece of kindling.
   Esk turned the hat around in her hands, in the manner of one who, opening the proverbial brightly-wrapped package, finds bath salts.
   “It’s very nice,” she said uncertainly.
   “Is that all you can say?” said Granny.
   “It’s pointed, too.” Somehow being a wizard didn’t feel any different from not being a wizard.
   Simon leaned over.
   “Remember,” he said, “you’ve got to have been a wizard. Then you can start looking on the other side. Like you said.”
   Their eyes met, and they grinned.
   Granny stared at Cutangle. He shrugged.
   “Search me,” he said. “What’s happened to your stutter, boy?”
   “Seems to have gone, sir,” said Simon brightly. “Must have left it behind, somewhere.”

   The river was still brown and swollen but at least it resembled a river again.
   It was unnaturally hot for late autumn, and across the whole of the lower part of Ankh-Morpork the steam rose from thousands of carpets and blankets put out to dry. The streets were filled with silt, which on the whole was an improvement—AnkhMorpork’s impressive civic collection of dead dogs had been washed out to sea.
   The steam also rose from the flagstones of the Archchancellor’s personal verandah, and from the teapot on the table.
   Granny lay back in an ancient cane chair and let the unseasonal warmth creep around her ankles. She idly watched a team of city ants, who had lived under the flagstones of the University for so long that the high levels of background magic had permanently altered their genes, anthandling a damp sugar lump down from the bowl on to a tiny trolley. Another group was erecting a matchstick gantry at the edge of the table.
   Granny may or may not have been interested to learn that one of the ants was Drum Billet, who had finally decided to give Life another chance.
   “They say,” she said, “that if you can find an ant on Hogswatch Day it will be very mild for the rest of the winter.”
   “Who says that?” said Cutangle.
   “Generally people who are wrong,” said Granny. “I makes a note in my Almanack, see. I checks. Most things most people believe are wrong.”
   “Like `red sky at night, the city’s alight’,” said Cutangle. “And you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”
   “I don’t think that’s what old dogs are for,” said Granny. The sugar lump had reached the gantry now, and a couple of ants were attaching it to a microscopic block and tackle.
   “I can’t understand half the things Simon says,” said Cutangle, “although some of the students get very excited about it.
   “I understand what Esk says all right, I just don’t believe it,” said Granny. “Except the bit about wizards needing a heart.”
   “She said that witches need a head, too,” said Cutangle. “Would you like a scone? A bit damp, I’m afraid.”
   “She told me that if magic gives people what they want, then not using magic can give them what they need,” said Granny, her hand hovering over the plate.
   “So Simon tells me. I don’t understand it myself, magic’s for using, not storing up. Go on, spoil yourself.”
   “Magic beyond magic,” snorted Granny. She took the scone and spread jam on it. After a pause she spread cream on it too.
   The sugar lump crashed to the flagstones and was immediately surrounded by another team of ants, ready to harness it to a long line of red ants enslaved from the kitchen garden.
   Cutangle shifted uneasily in his seat, which creaked.
   “Esmerelda,” he began, “I’ve been meaning to ask—”
   “No,” said Granny.
   “Actually I was going to say that we think we might allow a few more girls into the University. On an experimental basis. Once we get the plumbing sorted out,” said Cutangle.
   “That’s up to you, of course.”
   “And, and, it occurred to me that since we seem destined to become a co-educational establishment, as it were, it seemed to me, that is—”
   “Well?”
   “If you might see your way clear to becoming, that is, whether you would accept a Chair.”
   He sat back. The sugar lump passed under his chair on matchstick rollers, the squeaking of the slavedriver ants just at the edge of hearing.
   “Hmm,” said Granny, “I don’t see why not. I’ve always wanted one of those big wicker ones, you know, with the sort of sunshade bit on the top. If that’s not too much trouble.”
   “That isn’t exactly what I meant,” said Cutangle, adding quickly, “although I’m sure that could be arranged. No, I mean, would you come and lecture the students? Once in a while?”
   “What on?”
   Cutangle groped for a subject.
   “Herbs?” he hazarded. “We’re not very good on herbs here. And headology. Esk told me a lot about headology. It sounds fascinating.”
   The sugar lump disappeared through a crack in a nearby wall with a final jerk. Cutangle nodded towards it.
   “They’re very heavy on the sugar,” he said, “but we haven’t got the heart to do anything about it.”
   Granny frowned, and then nodded across the haze over the city to the distant glitter of the snow on the Ramtops.
   “It’s a long way,” she said. “I can’t be keeping on going backwards and forwards at my time of life.”
   “We could buy you a much better broomstick,” said Cutangle. “One you don’t have to bump start. And you, you could have a flat here. And all the old clothes you can carry,” he added, using the secret weapon. He had wisely invested in some conversation with Mrs Whitlow.
   “Mmph,” said Granny, “Silk?”
   “Black and red,” said Cutangle. An image of Granny in black and red silk trotted across his mind, and he bit heavily into his scone.
   “And maybe we can bring some students out to your cottage in the summer,” Cutangle went on, “for extra-mural studies.”
   “Who’s Extra Muriel?”
   “I mean, there’s lots they can learn, I’m sure.”
   Granny considered this. Certainly the privy needed a good seeing-to before the weather got too warm, and the goat shed was ripe for the mucking-out by spring. Digging over the Herb bed was a chore, too. The bedroom ceiling was a disgrace, and some of the tiles needed fixing.
   “Practical things?” she said, thoughtfully.
   “Absolutely,” said Cutangle.
   “Mmph. Well, I’ll think about it,” said Granny, dimly aware that one should never go too far on a first date.
   “Perhaps you would care to dine with me this evening and let me know?” said Cutangle, his eyes agleam.
   “What’s to eat?”
   “Cold meat and potatoes.” Mrs Whitlow had done her work well.
   There was.
   Esk and Simon went on to develop a whole new type of magic that no one could exactly understand but which nevertheless everyone considered very worthwhile and somehow comforting.
   Perhaps more importantly, the ants used all the sugar lumps they could steal to build a small sugar pyramid in one of the hollow walls, in which, with great ceremony, they entombed the mummified body of a dead queen. On the wall of one tiny hidden chamber they inscribed, in insect hieroglyphs, the true secret of longevity.
   They got it absolutely right and it would probably have important implications for the universe if it hadn’t, next time the University flooded, been completely washed away.

 This is the bright candlelit room where the life-timers are stored – shelf upon shelf of them, squat hourglasses, one for every living person, pouring their fine sand from the future into the past. The accumulated hiss of the falling grains makes the room roar like the sea.
   This is the owner of the room, stalking through it with a preoccupied air. His name is Death.
   But not any Death. This is the Death whose particular sphere of operations is, well, not a sphere at all, but the Discworld, which is flat and rides on the back of four giant elephants who stand on the shell of the enormous star turtle Great A'Tuin, and which is bounded by a waterfall that cascades endlessly into space.
   Scientists have calculated that the chance of anything so patently absurd actually existing are millions to one.
   But magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten.
   Death clicks across the black and white tiled floor on toes of bone, muttering inside his cowl as his skeletal fingers count along the rows of busy hourglasses.
   Finally he finds one that seems to satisfy him, lifts it carefully from its shelf and carries it across to the nearest candle. He holds it so that the light glints off it, and stares at the little point of reflected brilliance.
   The steady gaze from those twinkling eye-sockets encompasses the world turtle, sculling through the deeps of space, carapace scarred by comets and pitted by meteors. One day even Great A'Tuin will die, Death knows; now, that would be a challenge.
   But the focus of his gaze dives onwards towards the blue-green magnificence of the Disc itself, turning slowly under its tiny orbiting sun.
   Now it curves away towards the great mountain range called the Ramtops. The Ramtops are full of deep valleys and unexpected crags and considerably more geography than they know what to do with. They have their own peculiar weather, full of shrapnel rain and whiplash winds and permanent thunder-storms. Some people say it's all because the Ramtops are the home of old, wild magic. Mind you, some people will say anything.
   Death blinks, adjusts for depth of vision. Now he sees the grassy country on the turnwise slopes of the mountains.
   Now he sees a particular hillside.
   Now he sees a field.
   Now he sees a boy, running.
   Now he watches.
   Now, in a voice like lead slabs being dropped on granite, he says: YES.

   There was no doubt that there was something magical in the soil of that hilly, broken area which – because of the strange tint that it gave to the local flora – was known as the octarine grass country. For example, it was one of the few places on the Disc where plants produced reannual varieties.
   Reannuals are plants that grow backwards in time. You sow the seed this year and they grow last year.
   Mort's family specialized in distilling the wine from reannual grapes. These were very powerful and much sought after by fortune-tellers, since of course they enabled them to see the future. The only snag was that you got the hangover the morning before, and had to drink a lot to get over it.
   Reannual growers tended to be big, serious men, much given to introspection and close examination of the calendar. A farmer who neglects to sow ordinary seeds only loses the crop, whereas anyone who forgets to sow seeds of a crop that has already been harvested twelve months before risks disturbing the entire fabric of causality, not to mention acute embarrassment.
   It was also acutely embarrassing to Mort's family that the youngest son was not at all serious and had about the same talent for horticulture that you would find in a dead starfish. It wasn't that he was unhelpful, but he had the land of vague, cheerful helpfulness that serious men soon learn to dread. There was something infectious, possibly even fatal, about it. He was tall, red-haired and freckled, with the sort of body that seems to be only marginally under its owner's control; it appeared to have been built out of knees.
   On this particular day it was hurtling across the high fields, waving its hands and yelling.
   Mort's father and uncle watched it disconsolately from the stone wall.
   'What I don't understand,' said father Lezek, 'is that the birds don't even fly away. I'd fly away, if I saw it coining towards me.'
   'Ah. The human body's a wonderful thing. I mean, his legs go all over the place but there's a fair turn of speed there.'
   Mort reached the end of a furrow. An overfull woodpigeon lurched slowly out of his way.
   'His heart's in the right place, mind,' said Lezek, carefully.
   'Ah. 'Course, 'tis the rest of him that isn't.'
   'He's clean about the house. Doesn't eat much,' said Lezek.
   'No, I can see that.'
   Lezek looked sideways at his brother, who was staring fixedly at the sky.
   'I did hear you'd got a place going up at your farm, Hamesh,' he said.
   'Ah. Got an apprentice in, didn't I?'
   'Ah,' said Lezek gloomily, 'when was that, then?'
   'Yesterday,' said his brother, lying with rattlesnake speed. 'All signed and sealed. Sorry. Look, I got nothing against young Mort, see, he's as nice a boy as you could wish to meet, it's just that —'
   'I know, I know,' said Lezek. 'He couldn't find his arse with both hands.'
   They stared at the distant figure. It had fallen over. Some pigeons had waddled over to inspect it.
   'He's not stupid, mind,' said Hamesh. 'Not what you'd call stupid.'
   'There's a brain there all right,' Lezek conceded. 'Sometimes he starts thinking so hard you has to hit him round the head to get his attention. His granny taught him to read, see. I reckon it overheated his mind.'
   Mort had got up and tripped over his robe.
   'You ought to set him to a trade,' said Hamesh, reflectively. 'The priesthood, maybe. Or wizardry. They do a lot of reading, wizards.'
   They looked at each other. Into both their minds stole an inkling of what Mort might be capable of if he got his well-meaning hands on a book of magic.
   'All right,' said Hamesh hurriedly. 'Something else, then. There must be lots of things he could turn his hand to.'
   'He starts thinking too much, that's the trouble,' said Lezek. 'Look at him now. You don't think about how to scare birds, you just does it. A normal boy, I mean.'
   Hamesh scratched his chin thoughtfully.
   'It could be someone else's problem,' he said.
   Lezek's expression did not alter, but there was a subtle change around his eyes.
   'How do you mean?' he said.
   'There's the hiring fair at Sheepridge next week. You set him as a 'prentice, see, and his new master'll have the job of knocking him into shape. 'Tis the law. Get him indentured, and 'tis binding.'
   Lezek looked across the field at his son, who was examining a rock.
   'I wouldn't want anything to happen to him, mind,' he said doubtfully. 'We're quite fond of him, his mother and me. You get used to people.'
   'It'd be for his own good, you'll see. Make a man of him.'
   'Ah. Well. There's certainly plenty of raw material,' sighed Lezek.
   Mort was getting interested in the rock. It had curly shells in it, relics of the early days of the world when the Creator had made creatures out of stone, no-one knew why.
   Mort was interested in lots of things. Why people's teeth fitted together so neatly, for example. He'd given that one a lot of thought. Then there was the puzzle of why the sun came out during the day, instead of at night when the light would come in useful. He knew the standard explanation, which somehow didn't seem satisfying.
   In short, Mort was one of those people who are more dangerous than a bag full of rattlesnakes. He was determined to discover the underlying logic behind the universe.
   Which was going to be hard, because there wasn't one. The Creator had a lot of remarkably good ideas when he put the world together, but making it understandable hadn't been one of them.
   Tragic heroes always moan when the gods take an interest in them, but it's the people the gods ignore who get the really tough deals.
   His father was yelling at him, as usual. Mort threw the rock at a pigeon, which was almost too full to lurch out of the way, and wandered back across the field.

   And that was why Mort and his father walked down through the mountains into Sheepridge on Hogswatch Eve, with Mort's rather sparse possessions in a sack on the back of a donkey. The town wasn't much more than four sides to a cobbled square, lined with shops that provided all the service industry of the farming community.
   After five minutes Mort came out of the tailors wearing a loose fitting brown garment of imprecise function, which had been understandably unclaimed by a previous owner and had plenty of room for him to grow, on the assumption that he would grow into a nineteen-legged elephant.
   His father regarded him critically.
   'Very nice,' he said, 'for the money.'
   'It itches,' said Mort. 'I think there's things in here with me.'
   There's thousands of lads in the world'd be very thankful for a nice warm —' Lezek paused, and gave up – 'garment like that, my lad.'
   'I could share it with them?' Mort said hopefully.
   'You've got to look smart,' said Lezek severely. 'You've got to make an impression, stand out in the crowd.'
   There was no doubt about it. He would. They set out among the throng crowding the square, each listening to his own thoughts. Usually Mort enjoyed visiting the town, with its cosmopolitan atmosphere and strange dialects from villages as far away as five, even ten miles, but this time he felt unpleasantly apprehensive, as if he could remember something that hadn't happened yet.
   The fair seemed to work like this: men looking for work stood in ragged lines in the centre of the square. Many of them sported little symbols in their hats to tell the world the kind of work they were trained in – shepherds wore a wisp of wool, carters a hank of horsehair, interior decorators a strip of rather interesting hessian wallcovering, and so on.
   The boys seeking apprenticeships were clustered on the Hub side of the square.
   'You just go and stand there, and someone comes and offers you an apprenticeship,' said Lezek, his voice trimmed with uncertainty. 'If they like the look of you, that is.'
   'How do they do that?' said Mort.
   'Well,' said Lezek, and paused. Hamesh hadn't explained about this bit. He drew on his limited knowledge of the marketplace, which was restricted to livestock sales, and ventured, 'I suppose they count your teeth and that. And make sure you don't wheeze and your feet are all right. I shouldn't let on about the reading, it unsettles people.'
   'And then what?' said Mort.
   'Then you go and learn a trade,' said Lezek.
   'What trade in particular?'
   'Well ... carpentry is a good one,' Lezek hazarded. 'Or thievery. Someone's got to do it.'
   Mort looked at his feet. He was a dutiful son, when he remembered, and if being an apprentice was what was expected of him then he was determined to be a good one. Carpentry didn't sound very promising, though – wood had a stubborn life of its own, and a tendency to split. And official thieves were rare in the Ramtops, where people weren't rich enough to afford them.
   'All right,' he said eventually, 'I'll go and give it a try. But what happens if I don't get prenticed?'
   Lezek scratched his head.
   'I don't know,' he said. 'I expect you just wait until the end of the fair. At midnight. I suppose.'

   And now midnight approached.
   A light frost began to crisp the cobblestones. In the ornamental clock tower that overlooked the square a couple of delicately-carved little automatons whirred out of trapdoors in the clockface and struck the quarter hour.
   Fifteen minutes to midnight. Mort shivered, but the crimson fires of shame and stubbornness flared up inside him, hotter than the slopes of Hell. He blew on his fingers for something to do and stared up at the freezing sky, trying to avoid the stares of the few stragglers among what remained of the fair.
   Most of the stall keepers had packed up and gone. Even the hot meat pie man had stopped crying his wares and, with no regard for personal safety, was eating one.
   The last of Mort's fellow hopefuls had vanished hours ago. He was a wall-eyed young man with a stoop and a running nose, and Sheepridge's one licensed beggar had pronounced him to be ideal material. The lad on the other side of Mort had gone off to be a toy maker. One by one they had trooped off – the masons, the farriers, the assassins, the mercers, coopers, hoodwinkers and ploughmen. In a few minutes it would be the new year and a hundred boys would be starting out hopefully on their careers, new worthwhile lives of useful service rolling out in front of them.
   Mort wondered miserably why he hadn't been picked. He'd tried to look respectable, and had looked all prospective masters squarely in the eye to impress them with his excellent nature and extremely likeable qualities. This didn't seem to have the right effect.
   'Would you like a hot meat pie?' said his father.
   'No.'
   'He's selling them cheap.'
   'No. Thank you.'
   'Oh.'
   Lezek hesitated.
   'I could ask the man if he wants an apprentice,' he said, helpfully. 'Very reliable, the catering trade.'
   'I don't think he does,' said Mort.
   'No, probably not,' said Lezek. 'Bit of a one-man business, I expect. He's gone now, anyway. Tell you what, I'll save you a bit of mine.'
   'I don't actually feel very hungry, dad.'
   'There's hardly any gristle.'
   'No. But thanks all the same.'
   'Oh.' Lezek deflated a little. He danced about a bit to stamp some life back into his feet, and whistled a few tuneless bars between his teeth. He felt he ought to say something, to offer some kind of advice, to point out that life had its ups and downs, to put his arm around his son's shoulder and talk expansively about the problems of growing up, to indicate – in short – that the world is a funny old lace where one should never, metaphorically speaking, be so proud as to turn down the offer of a perfectly good hot meat pie.
   They were alone now. The frost, the last one of the year, tightened its grip on the stones.
   High in the tower above them a cogged wheel went clonk, tripped a lever, released a ratchet and let a heavy lead weight drop down. There was a dreadful metallic wheezing noise and the trapdoors in the clock face slid open, releasing the clockwork men. Swinging their hammers jerkily, as if they were afflicted with robotic arthritis, they began to ring in the new day.
   'Well, that's it,' said Lezek, hopefully. They'd have to find somewhere to sleep – Hogswatch-night was no time to be walking in the mountains. Perhaps there was a stable somewhere. . . .
   'It's not midnight until the last stroke,' said Mort, distantly.
   Lezek shrugged. The sheer strength of Mort's obstinacy was defeating him.
   'All right,' he said. 'We'll wait, then.'
   And then they heard the clip-clop of hooves, which boomed rather more loudly around the chilly square than common acoustics should really allow. In fact clip-clop was an astonishingly inaccurate word for the kind of noise which rattled around Mort's head; clip-clop suggested a rather jolly little pony, quite possibly wearing a straw hat with holes cut out for its ears. An edge to this sound made it very clear that straw hats weren't an option.
   The horse entered the square by the Hub road, steam curling off its huge damp white flanks and sparks striking up from the cobbles beneath it. It trotted proudly, like a war charger. It was definitely not wearing a straw hat.
   The tall figure on its back was wrapped up against the cold. When the horse reached the centre of the square the rider dismounted, slowly, and fumbled with something behind the saddle. Eventually he – or she – produced a nosebag, fastened it over the horse's ears, and gave it a friendly pat on the neck.
   The air took on a thick, greasy feel, and the deep shadows around Mort became edged with blue and purple rainbows. The rider strode towards him, black cloak billowing and feet making little clicking sounds on the cobbles. They were the only noises – silence clamped down on the square like great drifts of cotton wool.
   The impressive effect was rather spoilt by a patch of ice.
   OH, BUGGER.
   It wasn't exactly a voice. The words were there all right, but they arrived in Mort's head without bothering to pass through his ears.
   He rushed forward to help the fallen figure, and found himself grabbing hold of a hand that was nothing more than polished bone, smooth and rather yellowed like an old billiard ball. The figure's hood fell back, and a naked skull turned its empty eyesockets towards him.
   Not quite empty, though. Deep within them, as though they were windows looking across the gulfs of space, were two tiny blue stars.
   It occurred to Mort that he ought to feel horrified, so he was slightly shocked to find that he wasn't. It was a skeleton sitting in front of him, rubbing its knees and grumbling, but it was a live one, curiously impressive but not, for some strange reason, very frightening.
   THANK YOU, BOY, said the skull. WHAT IS YOUR NAME?
   'Uh,' said Mort, 'Mortimer . . . sir. They call me Mort.'
   WHAT A COINCIDENCE, said the skull. HELP ME UP, PLEASE.
   The figure rose unsteadily, brushing itself down. Now Mort could see there was a heavy belt around its waist, from which was slung a white-handled sword.
   'I hope you are not hurt, sir,' he said politely.
   The skull grinned. Of course, Mort thought, it hasn't much of a choice.
   NO HARM DONE, I AM SURE. The skull looked around and seemed to see Lezek, who appeared to be frozen to the spot, for the first time. Mort thought an explanation was called for.
   'My father,' he said, trying to move protectively in front of Exhibit A without causing any offence. 'Excuse me, sir, but are you Death?'
   CORRECT. FULL MARKS FOR OBSERVATION, THAT BOY.
   Mort swallowed.
   'My father is a good man,' he said. He thought for a while, and added, 'Quite good. I'd rather you left him alone, if it's all the same to you. I don't know what you have done to him, but I'd like you to stop it. No offence meant.'
   Death stepped back, his skull on one side.
   I HAVE MERELY PUT US OUTSIDE TIME FOR A MOMENT, he said. HE WILL SEE AND HEAR NOTHING THAT DISTURBS HIM. NO, BOY, IT WAS YOU I CAME FOR.
   'Me?'
   YOU ARE HERE SEEKING EMPLOYMENT?
   Light dawned on Mort. 'You are looking for an apprentice?' he said.
   The eyesockets turned towards him, their actinic pinpoints flaring.
   OF COURSE.
   Death waved a bony hand. There was a wash of purple light, a sort of visible 'pop', and Lezek unfroze. Above his head the clockwork automatons got on with the job of proclaiming midnight, as Time was allowed to come creeping back.
   Lezek blinked.
   'Didn't see you there for a minute,' he said. 'Sorry – mind must have been elsewhere.'
   I WAS OFFERING YOUR BOY A POSITION, said Death. I TRUST THAT MEETS WITH YOUR APPROVAL?
   'What was your job again?' said Lezek, talking to a black-robed skeleton without showing even a flicker of surprise.
   I USHER SOULS INTO THE NEXT WORLD, said Death.
   'Ah,' said Lezek, 'of course, sorry, should have guessed from the clothes. Very necessary work, very steady. Established business?'
   I HAVE BEEN GOING FOR SOME TIME, YES, said Death.
   'Good. Good. Never really thought of it as a job for Mort, you know, but it's good work, good work, always very reliable. What's your name?'
   DEATH.
   'Dad —' said Mort urgently.
   'Can't say I recognize the firm,' said Lezek. 'Where are you based exactly?'
   FROM THE UTTERMOST DEPTHS OF THE SEA TO THE HEIGHTS WHERE EVEN THE EAGLE MAY NOT GO, said Death.
   'That's fair enough,' nodded Lezek. 'Well, I —'
   'Dad —' said Mort, pulling at his father's coat.
   Death laid a hand on Mort's shoulder.
   WHAT YOUR FATHER SEES AND HEARS IS NOT WHAT YOU SEE AND HEAR, he said. DO NOT WORRY HIM. DO YOU THINK HE WOULD WANT TO SEE ME – IN THE FLESH, AS IT WERE?
   'But you're Death,' said Mort. 'You go around killing people!'
   I? KILL? said Death, obviously offended. CERTAINLY NOT. PEOPLE GET KILLED, BUT THAT'S THEIR BUSINESS. I JUST TAKE OVER FROM THEN ON. AFTER ALL, IT'D BE A BLOODY STUPID WORLD IF PEOPLE GOT KILLED WITHOUT DYING, WOULDN'T IT?
   'Well, yes —' said Mort, doubtfully.
   Mort had never heard the word 'intrigued'. It was not in regular use in the family vocabulary. But a spark in his soul told him that here was something weird and fascinating and not entirely horrible, and that if he let this moment go he'd spend the rest of his life regretting it. And he remembered the humiliations of the day, and the long walk back home. . . .
   'Er,' he began, 'I don't have to die to get the job, do I?'
   BEING DEAD IS NOT COMPULSORY.
   'And ... the bones ...?'
   NOT IF YOU DON'T WANT TO.
   Mort breathed out again. It had been starting to prey on his mind.
   'If father says it's all right,' he said.
   They looked at Lezek, who was scratching his beard.
   'How do you feel about this, Mort?' he said, with the brittle brightness of a fever victim. 'It's not everyone's idea of an occupation. It's not what I had in mind, I admit. But they do say that undertaking is an honoured profession. It's your choice.'
   'Undertaking?' said Mort. Death nodded, and raised his finger to his lips in a conspiratorial gesture.
   'It's interesting,' said Mort slowly. 'I think I'd like to try it.'
   'Where did you say your business was?' said Lezek. 'Is it far?'
   NO FURTHER THAN THE THICKNESS OF A SHADOW, said Death. WHERE THE FIRST PRIMAL CELL WAS, THERE WAS I ALSO. WHERE MAN IS, THERE AM I. WHEN THE LAST LIFE CRAWLS UNDER FREEZING STARS, THERE WILL I BE.
   'Ah,' said Lezek, 'you get about a bit, then.' He looked puzzled, like a man struggling to remember something important, and then obviously gave up.
   Death patted him on the shoulder in a friendly fashion and turned to Mort.
   HAVE YOU ANY POSSESSIONS, BOY?
   'Yes,' said Mort, and then remembered. 'Only I think I left them in the shop. Dad, we left the sack in the clothes shop!'
   'It'll be shut,' said Lezek. 'Shops don't open on Hogswatch Day. You'll have to go back the day after tomorrow – well, tomorrow now.'
   IT IS OF LITTLE ACCOUNT, said Death. WE WILL LEAVE NOW. NO DOUBT I WILL HAVE BUSINESS HERE SOON ENOUGH.
   'I hope you'll be able to drop in and see us soon,' said Lezek. He seemed to be struggling with his thoughts.
   'I'm not sure that will be a good idea,' said Mort.
   'Well, goodbye, lad,' said Lezek. 'You're to do what you're told, you understand? And – excuse me, sir, do you have a son?'
   Death looked rather taken aback.
   NO, he said, I HAVE NO SONS.
   'I'll just have a last word with my boy, if you've no objection.'
   THEN I WILL GO AND SEE TO THE HORSE, said Death, with more than normal tact.
   Lezek put his arm around his son's shoulders, with some difficulty in view of their difference in height, and gently propelled him across the square.
   'Mort, you know your uncle Hemesh told me about this prenticing business?' he whispered.
   'Yes?'
   'Well, he told me something else,' the old man confided. 'He said it's not unknown for an apprentice to inherit his master's business. What do you think of that, then?'
   'Uh. I'm not sure,' said Mort.
   'It's worth thinking about,' said Lezek.
   'I am thinking about it, father.'
   'Many a young lad has started out that way, Hemesh said. He makes himself useful, earns his master's confidence, and, well, if there's any daughters in the house . . . did Mr, er, Mr say anything about daughters?'
   'Mr who?' said Mort.
   'Mr . . . your new master.'
   'Oh. Him. No. No, I don't think so,' said Mort slowly. 'I don't think he's the marrying type.'
   'Many a keen young man owes his advancement to his nuptials,' said Lezek.
   'He does?'
   'Mort, I don't think you're really listening.'
   'What?'
   Lezek came to a halt on the frosty cobbles and spun the boy around to face him.
   'You're really going to have to do better than this,' he said. 'Don't you understand, boy? If you're going to amount to anything in this world then you've got to listen. I'm your father telling you these things.'
   Mort looked down at his father's face. He wanted to say a lot of things: he wanted to say how much he loved him, how worried he was; he wanted to ask what his father really thought he'd just seen and heard. He wanted to say that he felt as though he stepped on a molehill and found that it was really a volcano. He wanted to ask what 'nuptials' meant.
   What he actually said was, 'Yes. Thank you. I'd better be going. I'll try and write you a letter.'
   'There's bound to be someone passing who can read it to us,' said Lezek. 'Goodbye, Mort.' He blew his nose.
   'Goodbye, dad. I'll come back to visit,' said Mort. Death coughed tactfully, although it sounded like the pistol-crack of an ancient beam full of death-watch beetle.
   WE HAD BETTER BE GOING, he said. HOP UP, MORT.
   As Mort scrambled behind the ornate silver saddle Death leaned down and shook Lezek's hand.
   THANK YOU, he said.
   'He's a good lad at heart,' said Lezek. 'A bit dreamy, that's all. I suppose we were all young once.'
   Death considered this.
   No, he said, I DON'T THINK SO.
   He gathered up the reins and turned the horse towards the Rim road. From his perch behind the black-robed figure Mort waved desperately.
   Lezek waved back. Then, as the horse and its two riders disappeared from view, he lowered his hand and looked at it. The handshake . . . it had felt strange. But, somehow, he couldn't remember exactly why.