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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.
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.