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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.
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.