Terry David John Pratchett. Equal Rites
страница №6
...uldn't be tinkered with, but fortunately good fortune-tellers were rareand anyway people preferred bad fortune-tellers, who could be relied upon
for the correct dose of uplift and optimism.
Granny knew all about bad fortune-telling. It was harder than the real
thing. You needed a good imagination.
She couldn't help wondering if Mrs Whitlow was a born witch who somehow
missed her training. She was certainly laying siege to the future. There was
a crystal ball under a sort of pink frilly tea cosy, and several sets of
divinatory cards, and a pink velvet bag of rune stones, and one of those
little tables on wheels that no prudent witch would touch with a ten-foot
broomstick, and -Granny wasn't sure on this point-either some special dried
monkey turds from a llamassary or some dried llama turds from a monastery,
which apparently could be thrown in such a way as to reveal the sum total of
knowledge and wisdom in the universe. It was all rather sad?
"Or there's the tea-leaves, of course," said Mrs Whitlow, indicating
the big brown pot on the table between them. "Aye know witches often prefer
them, but they always seem so, well, common to me. No offence meant."
There probably wasn't any offence meant, at that, thought Granny. Mrs
Whitlow was giving her the sort of look generally used by puppies when
they're not sure what to expect next, and are beginning to worry that it may
be the rolled-up newspaper.
She picked up Mrs Whitlow's cup and had started to peer into it when
she caught the disappointed expression that floated across the housekeeper's
face like a shadow across a snowfield. Then she remembered what she was
doing, and turned the cup widdershins three times, made a few vague passes
over it and mumbled a charm which she normally used to cure mastitis in
elderly goats, but never mind. This display of obvious magical talent seemed
to cheer up Mrs. Whitlow no end.
Granny wasn't normally very good at tea-leaves, but she squinted at the
sugar-encrusted mess at the bottom of the cup and let her mind wander. What
she really needed now was a handy rat or even a cockroach that happened to
be somewhere near Esk, so that she could Borrow its mind.
What Granny actually found was that the University had a mind of its
own.
It is well known that stone can think, because the whole of electronics
is based on that fact, but in some universes men spend ages looking for
other intelligences in the sky without once looking under their feet. That
is because they've got the time-span all wrong. From stone's point of view
the universe is hardly created and mountain ranges are bouncing up and down
like organ-stops while continents zip backwards and forwards in general high
spirits, crashing into each other from the sheer joy of momentum and getting
their rocks off. It is going to be quite some time before stone notices its
disfiguring little skin disease and starts to scratch, which is just as
well.
The rocks from which Unseen University was built, however, have been
absorbing magic for several thousand years and all that random power has had
to go somewhere.
The University has, in fact, developed a personality.
Granny could sense it like a big and quite friendly animal, just
waiting to roll over on its roof and have its floor scratched. It was paying
no attention to her, however. It was watching Esk.
Granny found the child by following the threads of the University's
attention and watched in fascination as the scenes unfolded in the Great
Hall ?.
"-in there?"
The voice came from a long way away.
"Mmph?"
"Aye said, what do you see in there?" repeated Mrs Whitlow.
"Eh?"
"Aye said, what do-"
"Oh." Granny reeled her mind in, quite confused. The trouble with
Borrowing another mind was, you always felt out of place when you got back
to your own body, and Granny was the first person ever to read the mind of a
building. Now she was feeling big and gritty and full of passages.
"Are you all right?"
Granny nodded, and opened her windows. She extended her east and west
wings and tried to concentrate on the tiny cup held in her pillars.
Fortunately Mrs Whitlow put her plaster complexion and stony silence
down to occult powers at work, while Granny found that a brief exposure to
the vast silicon memory of the University had quite stimulated her
imagination.
In a voice like a draughty corridor, which made the housekeeper very
impressed, she wove a future full of keen young men fighting for Mrs
Whitlow's ample favours. She also spoke very quickly, because what she had
seen in the Great Hall made her anxious to go around to the main gates
again.
"There is another thing," she added.
"Yes? Yes?"
"I see you hiring a new servant-you do hire the servants here, don't
you? Right-and this one is a young girl, very economical, very good worker,
can turn her hand to anything."
"What about her, then?" said Mrs Whitlow, already savouring Granny's
surprisingly graphic descriptions of her future and drunk with curiosity.
"The spirits are a little unclear on this point," said Granny, "But it
is very important that you hire her."
"No problem there," said Mrs Whitlow, "can't keep servants here, you
know, not for long. It's all the magic. It leaks down here, you know.
Especially from the library, where they keep all them magical books. Two of
the top floor maids walked out yesterday, actually, they said they were fed
up going to bed not knowing what shape they would wake up in the morning.
The senior wizards turn them back, you know. But it's not the same."
"Yes, well, the spirits say this young lady won't be any trouble as far
as that is concerned," said Granny grimly.
"If she can sweep and scrub she's welcome, Aye'm sure," said Mrs
Whitlow, looking puzzled.
"She even brings her own broom. According to the spirits, that is."
"How very helpful. When is this young lady going to arrive?"
"Oh, soon, soon-that's what the spirits say."
A faint suspicion clouded the housekeeper's face. "This isn't the sort
of thing spirits normally say. Where do they say that, exactly?"
"Here," said Granny. "Look, the little cluster of tea-leaves between
the sugar and this crack here. Am I right?"
Their eyes met. Mrs Whitlow might have had her weaknesses but she was
quite tough enough to rule the below-stairs world of the University.
However, Granny could outstare a snake; after a few seconds the
housekeeper's eyes began to water.
"Yes, Aye expect you are," she said meekly, and fished a handkerchief
from the recesses of her bosom.
"Well then," said Granny, sitting back and replacing the teacup in its
saucer.
"There are plenty of opportunities here for a young woman willing to
work hard," said Mrs Whitlow. "Aye myself started as a maid, you know."
"We all do," said Granny vaguely. "And now I must be going." She stood
up and reached for her hat.
"But-"
"Must hurry. Urgent appointment," said Granny over her shoulder as she
hurried down the steps.
"There's a bundle of old clothes-"
Granny paused, her instincts battling for mastery.
"Any black velvet?"
"Yes, and some silk."
Granny wasn't sure she approved of silk, she'd heard it came out of a
caterpillar's bottom, but black velvet had a powerful attraction. Loyalty
won.
"Put it on one side, I may call again," she shouted, and ran down the
corridor.
Cooks and scullery maids darted for cover as the old woman pounded
along the slippery flagstones, leapt up the stairs to the courtyard and
skidded out into the lane, her shawl flying out behind her and her boots
striking sparks from the cobbles. Once out into the open she hitched up her
skirts and broke into a full gallop, turning the corner into the main square
in a screeching two-boot drift that left a long white scratch across the
stones.
She was just in time to see Esk come running through the gates, in
tears.
"The magic just wouldn't work! I could feel it there but it just
wouldn't come out!"
"Perhaps you were trying too hard," said Granny. "Magic's like fishing.
Jumping around and splashing never caught any fish, you have to bide quiet
and let it happen natural."
"And then everyone laughed at me! Someone even gave me a sweet!"
"You got some profit out of the day, then," said Granny.
"Granny!" said Esk accusingly.
"Well, what did you expect?" she asked. "At least they only laughed at
you. Laughter don't hurt. You walked up to chief wizard and showed off in
front of everyone and only got laughed at? You're doing well, you are. Have
you eaten the sweet?"
Esk scowled. "Yes."
"What kind was it?"
"Toffee."
"Can't abide toffee."
"Huh," said Esk, "I suppose you want me to get peppermint next time?"
"Don't you sarky me, young-fellow-me-lass. Nothing wrong with
peppermint. Pass me that bowl."
Another advantage of city life, Granny had discovered, was glassware.
Some of her more complicated potions required apparatus which either had to
be bought from the dwarves at extortionate rates or, if ordered from the
nearest human glassblower, arrived in straw and, usually, pieces. She had
tried blowing her own and the effort always made her cough, which produced
some very funny results. But the city's thriving alchemy profession meant
that there were whole shops full of glass for the buying, and a witch could
always arrange bargain prices.
She watched carefully as yellow steam surged along a twisty maze of
tubing and eventually condensed as one large, sticky droplet. She caught it
neatly on the end of a glass spoon and very carefully tipped it into a tiny
glass phial.
Esk watched her through her tears.
"What's that?" she asked.
"It's a neveryoumind," said Granny, sealing the phial's cork with wax.
"A medicine?"
"In a manner of speaking." Granny pulled her writing set towards her
and selected a pen. Her tongue stuck out of the corner of her mouth as she
very carefully wrote out a label, with much scratching and pausing to work
out the spellings.
"Who's it for?"
"Mrs Herapath, the glassblower's wife."
Esk blew her nose. "He's the one who doesn't blow much glass, isn't
he?"
Granny looked at her over the top of the desk.
"How do you mean?"
"When she was talking to you yesterday she called him Old Mister Once A
Fortnight."
"Mmph," said Granny. She carefully finished the sentence: "Dylewt in
won pint warter and won droppe in hys tee and be Shure to wear loose
clowthing allso that no vysitors exspected."
One day, she told herself, I'm going to have to have that talk with
her.
The child seemed curiously dense. She had already assisted at enough
births and taken the goats to old Nanny Annaple's billy without drawing any
obvious conclusions. Granny wasn't quite certain what she should do about
it, but the time never seemed appropriate to bring up the subject. She
wondered whether, in her hearts of hearts, she was too embarrassed; she felt
like a farrier who could shoe horses, cure them, rear them and judge them,
but had only the sketchiest idea about how one rode them.
She pasted the label on to the phial and wrapped it carefully in plain
paper.
Now.
"There is another way into the University," she said, looking sidelong
at Esk, who was making a disgruntled job of mashing herbs in a mortar. "A
witches' way."
Esk looked up. Granny treated herself to a thin smile and started work
on another label; writing labels was always the hard part of magic, as far
as she was concerned.
"But I don't expect you'd be interested," she went on. "It's not very
glamorous."
"They laughed at me," Esk mumbled.
"Yes. You said. So you won't be wanting to try again, then. I quite
understand."
There was silence broken only by the scratching of Granny's pen.
Eventually Esk said: "This way-"
"Mmph?"
"It'll get me into the University?"
"Of course," said Granny haughtily. "I said I'd find a way, didn't I? A
very good way, too. You won't have to bother with lessons, you can go all
over the place, no one will notice you you'll be invisible really-and, well,
you can really clean up. But of course, after all that laughing, you won't
be interested. Will you?"
"Pray have another cup of tea, Mrs Weatherwax?" said Mrs Whitlow.
"Mistress," said Granny.
"Pardon?"
"It's Mistress Weatherwax," said Granny. "Three sugars, please."
Mrs Whitlow pushed the bowl towards her. Much as she looked forward to
Granny's visits it came expensive in sugar. Sugar lumps never seemed to last
long around Granny.
"Very bad for the figure," she said. "And the teeth, so Aye hear."
"I never had a figure to speak of and my teeth take care of
themselves," said Granny. It was true, mores the pity. Granny suffered from
robustly healthy teeth, which she considered a big drawback in a witch. She
really envied Nanny Annaple, the witch over the mountain, who managed to
lose all her teeth by the time she was twenty and had real
crone-credibility. It meant you ate a lot of soup, but you also got a lot of
respect. And then there was warts. Without any effort Nanny managed to get a
face like a sockful of marbles, while Granny had tried every reputable
wart-causer and failed to raise even the obligatory nose wart. Some witches
had all the luck.
"Mmph?" she said, aware of Mrs Whitlow's fluting.
"Aye said," said Mrs Whitlow, "that young Eskarina is a real treasure.
Quate the little find. She keeps the floors spotless, spotless. No task too
big. Aye said to her yesterday, Aye said, that broom of yours might as well
have a life of its own, and do you know what she said?"
"I couldn't even venture a guess," said Granny, weakly.
"She said the dust was afraid of it! Can you imagine?"
"Yes," said Granny.
Mrs Whitlow pushed her teacup towards her and gave her an embarrassed
smile.
Granny sighed inwardly and squinted into the none-too-clean depths of
the future. She was definitely beginning to run out of imagination.
The broom whisked down the corridor raising a great cloud of dust
which, if you looked hard at it, seemed somehow to be sucked back into the
broomstick. If you looked even harder you'd see that the broom handle had
strange markings on it, which were not so much carved as clinging and
somehow changed shape as you watched.
But no one looked.
Esk sat at one of the high deep windows and stared out over the city.
She was feeling angrier than usual, so the broom attacked the dust with
unusual vigour. Spiders ran desperate eight-legged dashes for safety as
ancestral cobwebs disappeared into the void. In the walls mice clung to each
other, legs braced against the inside of their holes. Woodworm scrabbled in
the ceiling beams as they were drawn, inexorably, backwards down their
tunnels.
"'You can really clean up'," said Esk. "Huh!"
There were some good points, she had to admit. The food was simple but
there was plenty of it, and she had a room to herself somewhere in the roof
and it was quite luxurious because here she could lie in until five a. m.,
which to Granny's way of thinking was practically noon. The work certainly
wasn't hard. She just started sweeping until the staff realised what was
expected of it, and then she could amuse herself until it was finished. If
anyone came the staff would immediately lean itself nonchalantly against a
wall.
But she wasn't learning any wizardry. She could wander into empty
classrooms and look at the diagrams chalked on the board, and on the floor
too in the more advanced classes, but the shapes were meaningless. And
unpleasant.
They reminded Esk of the pictures in Simon's book. They looked alive.
She gazed out across the rooftops of Ankh-Morpork and reasoned like
this: writing was only the words that people said, squeezed between layers
of paper until they were fossilized. Fossils were well-known on the
Discworld, great spiralled shells and badly-constructed creatures that were
left over from the time when the Creator hadn't really decided what He
wanted to make and was, as it were, just idly messing around with the
Pleistocene). And the words people said were just shadows of real things.
But some things were too big to be really trapped in words, and even the
words were too powerful to be completely tamed by writing.
So it followed that some writing was actually trying to become things.
Esk's thoughts became confused things at this point, but she was certain
that the really magic words were the ones that pulsed angrily, trying to
escape and become real.
They didn't look very nice.
But then she remembered the previous day.
It had been rather odd. The University classrooms were designed on the
funnel principle, with tiers of seats-polished by the bottoms of the Disc's
greatest mages-looking precipitously down into a central area where there
was a workbench, a couple of blackboards and enough floor space for a
decent-sized instructional octogram. There was a lot of dead space under the
tiers and Esk had found it a quite useful observation post, peering around
between the apprentice wizards' pointy boots at the instructor. It was very
restful, with the droning of the lecturers drifting over her as gently as
the buzzing of the slightly zonked bees in Granny's special herb garden.
There never seemed to be any practical magic, it always seemed to be just
words. Wizards seemed to like words.
But yesterday had been different. Esk had been sitting in the dusty
gloom, trying to do even some very simple magic, when she heard the door
open and boots clump across the floor. That was surprising in itself. Esk
knew the timetable, and the Second Year students who normally occupied this
room were down for Beginners' Dematerialisation with Jeophal the Spry in the
gym. (Students of magic had little use for physical exercise; the gym was a
large room lined with lead and rowan wood, where neophytes could work out at
High magic without seriously unbalancing the universe, although not always
without seriously unbalancing themselves. Magic had no mercy on the
ham-fisted. Some clumsy students were lucky enough to walk out, others were
removed in bottles.)
Esk peeped between the slats. These weren't students, they were
wizards. Quite high ones, to judge by their robes. And there was no
mistaking the figure that climbed on to the lecturer's dais like a
badlystrung puppet, bumping heavily into the lectern and absent-mindedly
apologising to it. It was Simon. No one else had eyes like two raw eggs in
warm water and a dose bright red from blowing. For Simon, the pollen count
always went to infinity.
It occurred to Esk that, minus his general allergy to the whole of
Creation and with a decent haircut and a few lessons in deportment, the boy
could look quite handsome. It was an unusual thought, and she squirrelled it
away for future consideration.
When the wizards had settled down, Simon began to talk. He read from
notes, and every time he stuttered over a word the wizards, as one man,
without being able to stop themselves, chorused it for him.
After a while a stick of chalk rose from the lectern and started to
write on the blackboard behind him. Esk had picked up enough about wizard
magic to know that this was an astounding achievement- Simon had been at the
University for a couple of weeks, and most students hadn't mastered Light
Levitation by the end of their second year.
The little white stub skittered and squeaked across the blackness to
the accompaniment of Simon's voice. Even allowing for the stutter, he was
not a very good speaker. He dropped notes. He corrected himself. He ummed
and ahhed. And as far as Esk was concerned he wasn't saying anything very
much. Phrases filtered down to her hiding place. "Basic fabric of the
universe" was one, and she didn't understand what that was, unless he meant
denim, or maybe flannelette. "Mutability of the possibility matrix" she
couldn't guess at all.
Sometimes he seemed to be saying that nothing existed unless people
thought it did, and the world was really only there at all because people
kept on imagining it. But then he seemed to be saying that there was lots of
worlds, all nearly the same and all sort of occupying the same place but all
separated by the thickness of a shadow, so that everything that ever could
happen would have somewhere to happen in.
(Esk could get to grips with this. She had half-suspected it ever since
she cleaned out the senior wizards' lavatory, or ratherwhile the staff got
on with the job while Esk examined the urinals and, with the assistance of
some half-remembered details of her brothers in the tin bath in front of the
fire at home, formulated her unofficial General Theory of comparative
anatomy. The senior wizards' lavatory was a magical place, with real running
water and interesting tiles and, most importantly, two big silver mirrors
fixed to opposite walls so that someone looking into one could see
themselves repeated again and again until the image was too small to see. It
was Esk's first introduction to the idea of infinity. More to the point, she
had a suspicion that one of the mirror Esks, right on the edge of sight, was
waving at her.)
There was something disturbing about the phrases Simon used. Half the
time he seemed to be saying that the world was about as real as a soap
bubble, or a dream.
The chalk shrieked its way across the board behind him. Sometimes Simon
had to stop and explain symbols to the wizards, who seemed to Esk to be
getting excited at some very silly sentences. Then the chalk would start
again, curving across the darkness like a comet, trailing its dust behind
it.
The light was fading out of the sky outside. As the room grew more
gloomy the chalked words glowed and the blackboard appeared to Esk to be not
so much dark as simply not there at all, but just a square hole cut out of
the world.
Simon talked on, about the world being made up of tiny things whose
presence could only be determined by the fact that they were not there,
little spinning balls of nothingness that magic could shunt together to make
stars and butterflies and diamonds. Everything was made up of emptiness.
The funny thing was, he seemed to find this fascinating.
Esk was only aware that the walls of the room grew as thin and
insubstantial as smoke, as if the emptiness in them was expanding to swallow
whatever it was that defined them as walls, and instead there was nothing
but the familiar cold, empty, glittering plain with its distant worn hills,
and the creatures that stood as still as statues, looking down. There were a
lot more of them now. They seemed for all the world to be clustering like
moths around a light.
One important difference was that a moth's face, even close up, was as
friendly as a bunny rabbit's compared to the things watching Simon.
Then a servant came in to light the lamps and the creatures vanished,
turning into perfectly harmless shadows that lurked in the corners of the
room.
At some time in the recent past someone had decided to brighten the
ancient corridors of the University by painting them, having some vague
notion that Learning Should Be Fun. It hadn't worked. It's a fact known
throughout the universes that no matter how carefully the colours are
chosen, institutional decor ends up as either vomit green, unmentionable
brown, nicotine yellow or surgical appliance pink. By some little understood
process of sympathetic resonance, corridors painted in those colours always
smell slightly of boiled cabbage - even if no cabbage is ever cooked in the
vicinity.
Somewhere in the corridors a bell rang. Esk dropped lightly from her
windowsill, grabbed the staff and started to sweep industriously as doors
were flung open and the corridors filled with students. They streamed past
her on two sides, like water around a rock. For a few minutes there was
utter confusion. Then doors slammed, a few laggard feet pattered away in the
distance, and Esk was by herself again.
Not for the first time, Esk wished that the staff could talk. The other
servants were friendly enough, but you couldn't talk to them. Not about
magic, anyway.
She was also coming to the conclusion that she ought to learn to read.
This reading business seemed to be the key to wizard magic, which was all
about words. Wizards seemed to think that names were the same as things, and
that if you changed the name, you changed the thing. At least, it seemed to
be something like that ?.
Reading. That meant the library. Simon had said there were thousands of
books in it, and amongst all those words there were bound to be one or two
she could read. Esk put the staff over her shoulder and set off resolutely
for Mrs Whitlow's office.
She was nearly there when a wall said "Psst!" When Esk stared at it it
turned out to be Granny. It wasn't that Granny could make herself invisible,
it was just that she had this talent for being able to fade into the
foreground so that she wasn't noticed.
"How are you getting on, then?" asked Granny. "How's the magic coming
along?"
"What are you doing here, Granny?" said Esk.
"Been to tell Mrs Whitlow her fortune," said Granny, holding up a large
bundle of old clothes with some satisfaction. Her smile faded under Esk's
stern gaze.
"Well, things are different in the city," she said. "City people are
always worried about the future, it comes from eating unnatural food.
Anyway," she added, suddenly realising that she was whining, "Why shouldn't
I tell fortunes?"
"You always said Hilta was playing on the foolishness of her sex," said
Esk. "You said that them as tell fortunes should be ashamed of themselves,
and anyway, you don't need old clothes."
"Waste not, want not," said Granny primly. She had spent her entire
life on the old-clothes standard and wasn't about to let temporary
prosperity dislodge her: "Are you getting enough to eat?"
"Yes," said Esk. "Granny, about this wizard magic, it's all words-"
"Always said it was," said Granny.
"No, I mean-" Esk began, but Granny waved a hand irritably.
"Can't be bothered with this at the moment," she said. "I've got some
big orders to fill by tonight, if it goes on like this I'm going to have to
train someone up. Can't you come and see me when you get an afternoon off,
or whatever it is they give you?"
"Train someone up?" said Esk, horrified. "You mean as a witch?"
"No," said Granny. "I mean, perhaps."
"But what about me?"
"Well, you're going your own way," said Granny. "Wherever that is."
"Mmph," said Esk. Granny stared at her.
"I'll be off, then," she said at last. She turned and strode off
towards the kitchen entrance. As she did so her cloak swirled out, and Esk
saw that it was now lined with red. A dark, winy red, but red nevertheless.
On Granny, who had never been known to wear any visible clothing that was
other than a serviceable black, it was quite shocking.
"The library?" said Mrs Whitlow. "Aye don't think anyone cleans the
library!" She looked genuinely puzzled.
"Why?" said Esk, "Doesn't it get dusty?"
"Well," said Mrs Whitlow. She thought for a while. "Aye suppose it must
do, since you come to mention it. Aye never really thought about it."
"You see, I've cleaned everywhere else," said Esk, sweetly.
"Yes," said Mrs Whitlow, "You have, haven't you."
"Well, then."
"It's just that we've never-done it before," said Mrs Whitlow, "but for
the life of me, Aye can't think why."
"Well, then," said Esk.
"Ook?" said the Head Librarian, and backed away from Esk. But she had
heard about him and had come prepared. She offered him a banana.
The orang-outan reached out slowly and then snatched it with a grin of
triumph.
There may be universes where librarianship is considered a peaceful
sort of occupation, and where the risks are limited to large volumes falling
off the shelves on to one's head, but the keeper of a magic library is no
job for the unwary. Spells have power, and merely writing them down and
shoving them between covers doesn't do anything to reduce it. The stuff
leaks. Books tend to react with one another, creating randomised magic with
a mind of its own. Books of magic are usually chained to their shelves, but
not to prevent them being stolen ?.
One such accident had turned the librarian into an ape, since when he
had resisted all attempts to turn him back, explaining in sign language that
life as an orang-outan was considerably better than life as a human being,
because all the big philosophical questions resolved themselves into
wondering where the next banana was coming from. Anyway, long arms and
prehensile feet were ideal for dealing with high shelves.
Esk gave him the whole bunch of bananas and scurried away amongst the
books before he could object.
Esk had never seen more than one book at a time and so the library was,
for all she knew, just like any other library. True, it was a bit odd the
way the floor seemed to become the wall in the distance, and there was
something strange about the way the shelves played tricks on the eyes and
seemed to twist through rather more dimensions than the normal three, and it
was quite surprising to look up and see shelves on the ceiling, with the
occasional student wandering unconcernedly among them.
The truth was that the presence of so much magic distorted the space
around it. Down in the stacks the very denim, or possibly flannelette, of
the universe was tortured into very peculiar shapes. The millions of trapped
words, unable to escape, bent reality around them.
It seemed logical to Esk that among all these books should be one that
told you how to read all the others. She wasn't sure how to find it, but
deep in her soul she felt it would probably have pictures of cheerful
rabbits and happy kittens on the cover.
The library certainly wasn't silent. There was the occasional zip and
sizzle of a magical discharge, and an octarine spark would flash from shelf
to shelf. Chains clinked, faintly. And, of course, there was the faint
rustle of thousands of pages in their leather-bound prisons.
Esk made sure no one was paying her any attention and pulled at the
nearest volume. It sprang open in her hands, and she saw gloomily that there
were the same unpleasant types of diagram that she had noticed in Simon's
book. The writing was entirely unfamiliar, and she was glad about that-it
would be horrible to know what all those letters, which seemed to be made up
of ugly creatures doing complicated things to each other, actually meant.
She forced the cover shut, even though the words seemed to be desperately
pushing back. There was a drawing of a creature on the front; it looked
suspiciously like one of the things from the cold desert. It certainly
didn't look like a happy kitten.
"Hallo! Esk, isn't it? H-how d-did you get h-here?"
It was Simon, standing there with a book under each arm. Esk blushed.
"Granny won't tell me," she said. "I think it's something to do with
men and women."
Simon looked at her blankly. Then he grinned. Esk thought about the
question a second time.
"I work here. I sweep up." She waved the staff in explanation.
"In here?"
Esk stared at him. She felt alone, and lost, and more than a little
betrayed. Everyone seemed to be busy living their own lives, except her. She
would spend the rest of her life cleaning up after wizards. It wasn't fair,
and she'd had enough.
"Actually I don't. Actually I'm learning to read so I can be a wizard."
The boy regarded her through his damp eyes for some seconds. Then he
gently took the book out of Esk's hands and read its title.
"Demonylogie Malyfycorum of Henchanse thee Unsatyfactory. How did you
think you could learn to r-read this?"
"Um," said Esk, "Well, you just keep trying until you can, don't you?
Like milking, or knitting, or . . . ." Her voice faded away.
"I don't know about that. These books can be a bit, well, aggressive.
If you d-don't be careful they start reading you."
"What do you mean?"
"T-they ssss-"
"-say-"said Esk, automatically.
"-that there was once a wwww-"
"-wizard-"
"-who started to r-read the Necrotelecomnicon and let his m-mind
wwwwww-"
"-wander-"
"-and next morning they f-found all his clothes on the chair and hhis
hat on t-top of them and the b-book had-"
Esk put her fingers in her ears, but not too hard in case she missed
anything.
"I don't want to know about it if it's horrid."
"-had a lot more pages."
Esk took her fingers out of her ears. "Was there anything on the
pages?"
Simon nodded solemnly. "Yes. On every sssingle one of ththem there
www-"
"No," said Esk. "I don't even want to imagine it. I thought reading was
more peaceful than that, I mean, Granny read her Almanack every day and
nothing ever happened to her."
"I d-daresay ordinary tame www-"
"-words-"
"-are all right," Simon conceded, magnanimously.
"Are you absolutely certain?" said Esk.
"It's just that words can have power," said Simon, slotting the book
firmly back on its shelf, where it rattled its chains at him. "And they do
say the p-pen is mightier than the sss-"
"-sword," said Esk. "All right, but which would you rather be hit
with?"
"Um, I d-don't think it's any use m-me t-telling you you shouldn't be
in here, is it?" said the young wizard.
Esk gave this due consideration. "No," she said, "I don't think it is."
"I could send for the p-porters and have you t-taken away."
"Yes, but you won't."
"I just d-don't www-"
"-want-"
"-you to get hurt, you see. I r-really don't. This can b-be a
ddddangerou-"
Esk caught a faint swirling in the air above his head. For a moment she
saw them, the great grey shapes from the cold place. Watching. And in the
calm of the Library, when the weight of magic was wearing the Universe
particularly thin, they had decided to Act.
Around her the muted rustling of the books rose to a desperate riffling
of pages. Some of the more powerful books managed to jerk out of their
shelves and swung, flapping madly, from the end of their chains. A huge
grimoire plunged from its eyrie on the topmost shelf-tearing itself free of
its chain in the process-and flopped away like a frightened chicken,
scattering its pages behind it.
A magical wind blew away Esk's headscarf and her hair streamed out
behind her. She saw Simon trying to steady himself against a bookshelf as
books exploded around him. The air was thick and tasted of tin. It buzzed.
"They're trying to get in!" she screamed.
Simon's tortured face turned to her. A fear-crazed incunable hit him
heavily in the small of the back and knocked him to the heaving floor before
it bounced high over the shelves. Esk ducked as a flock of thesauri wheeled
past, towing their shelf behind them, and scuttled on hands and knees
towards him.
"That's what's making the books so frightened!" she shrieked in his
ear. "Can't you see them up there?"
Simon mutely shook his head. A book burst its bindings over them,
showering them in pages.
Horror can steal into the mind via all the senses. There's the sound of
the little meaningful chuckle in the locked dark room, the sight of half a
caterpillar in your forkful of salad, the curious smell from the lodger's
bedroom, the taste of slug in the cauliflower cheese. Touch doesn't normally
get a look-in.
But something happened to the floor under Esk's hands. She looked down,
her face a rictus of horror, because the dusty floorboards suddenly felt
gritty. And dry. And very, very cold.
There was fine silver sand between her fingers.
She grabbed the staff and, sheltering her eyes against the wind, waved
it at the towering figures above her. It would have been nice to report that
a searing flash of pure white fire cleansed the greasy air. It failed to
materialise ?.
The staff twisted like a snake in her hand and caught Simon a crack on
the side of the head.
The grey Things wavered and vanished.
Reality returned, and tried to pretend that it had never left. Silence
settled like thick velvet, wave after wave of it. A heavy, echoing silence.
A few books dropped heavily out of the air, feeling silly.
The floor under Esk's feet was undoubtedly wooden. She kicked it hard
to make sure.
There was blood on the floor, and Simon lay very quietly in the centre
of it. Esk stared down at him, and then up at the still air, and then at the
staff. It looked smug.
She was aware of distant voices and hurrying feet.
A hand like a fine leather glove slipped gently into hers and a voice
behind said "Ook," very softly. She turned, and found herself staring down
into the gentle, inner-tube face of the librarian. He put his finger to his
lips in an unmistakable gesture and tugged gently at her hand.
"I've killed him!" she whispered.
The librarian shook his head, and tugged insistently.
"Ook," he explained, "Ook."
He dragged her reluctantly down a side alley-way in the maze of ancient
shelving a few seconds before a party of senior wizards, drawn by the noise,
rounded the corner.
"The books have been fighting again . . . ."
"Oh, no! It'll take ages to capture all the spells again, you know they
go and find places to hide . . . ."
"Who's that on the floor?"
There was a pause.
"He's knocked out. A shelf caught him, by the looks of it."
"Who is he?"
"That new lad. You know; the one they say has got a whole head full of
brains?"
"If that shelf had been a bit closer we'd be able to see if they were
right."
"You two, get him along to the infirmary. The rest of you better get
these books rounded up. Where's the damn librarian? He ought to know better
than to let a Critical Mass build up."
Esk glanced sideways at the orang-outan, who waggled his eyebrows at
her. He pulled a dusty volume of gardening spells out of the shelves beside
him, extracted a soft brown banana from the recess behind it, and ate it
with the quiet relish of one who knows that whatever the problems are, they
belong firmly to human beings.
She looked the other way, at the staff in her hand, and her lips went
thin. She knew her grip hadn't slipped. The staff had lunged at Simon, with
murder in its heartwood.
The boy lay on a hard bed in a narrow room, a cold towel folded across
his forehead. Treatle and Cutangle watched him carefully.
"How long has it been?" said Cutangle.
Trestle shrugged. "Three days."
"And he hasn't come around once?"
"No."
Cutangle sat down heavily on the edge of the bed, and pinched the
bridge of his nose wearily. Simon had never looked particularly healthy, but
now his face had a horrible sunken look.
"A. brilliant mind, that one," he said. "His explanation of the
fundamental principles of magic and matter-quite astounding."
Trestle nodded.
"The way he just absorbs knowledge," said Cutangle: "I've been a
working wizard all my life, and somehow I never really understood magic
until he explained it. So clear. So, well, obvious."
"Everyone says that," said Trestle gloomily. "They say it's like having
a hoodwink pulled off and seeing the daylight for the first time."
"That's exactly it," said Cutangle, "He's sourcerer material, sure
enough. You were right to bring him here."
There was a thoughtful pause.
"Only-"said Trestle.
"Only what?" asked Cutangle.
"Only what was it you understood?" said Trestle. "That's what's
bothering me. I mean, can you explain it?"
"How do you mean, explain?" Cutangle looked worried.
"What he keeps talking about," said Trestle, a hint of desperation in
his voice. "Oh, it's the genuine stuff, I know. But what exactly is it?"
Cutangle looked at him, his mouth open. Eventually he said, "Oh, that's
easy. Magic fills the universe, you see, and every time the universe
changes, no, I mean every time magic is invoked, the universe changes, only
in every direction at once, d'you see, and-" he moved his hands uncertainly,
trying to recognise a spark of comprehension in Trestle's face. "To put it
another way, any piece of matter, like an orange or the world or, or-"
"-a crocodile?" suggested Trestle.
"Yes, a crocodile, or-whatever, is basically shaped like a carrot."
"I don't remember that bit," said Trestle.
"I'm sure that's what he said," said Cutangle. He was starting to
sweat.
"No, I remember the bit where he seemed to suggest that if you went far
enough in any direction you would see the back of your head," Trestle
insisted.
"You're sure he didn't mean someone else's head?"
Trestle thought for a bit.
"No, I'm pretty sure he said the back of your own head," he said. "I
think he said he could prove it."
They considered this in silence.
Finally Cutangle spoke, very slowly and carefully.
"I look at it all like this," he said. "Before I heard him talk, I was
like everyone else. You know what I mean? I was confused and uncertain about
all the little details of life. But now," he brightened up, "while I'm still
confused and uncertain it's on a much higher plane, d'you see, and at least
I know I'm bewildered about the really fundamental and important facts of
the universe."
Trestle nodded. "I hadn't looked at it like that," he said, "but you're
absolutely right. He's really pushed back the boundaries of ignorance.
There's so much about the universe we don't know."
They both savoured the strange warm glow of being much more ignorant
than ordinary people, who were ignorant of only ordinary things.
Then Trestle said: "I just hope he's all right. He's over the fever but
he just doesn't seem to want to wake up."
A couple of servants came in with a bowl of water and fresh towels. One
of them carried a rather tatty broomstick. As they began to change the
sweat-soaked sheets under the boy the two wizards left, still discussing the
vast vistas of unknowingness that Simon's genius had revealed to the world.
Granny waited until their footsteps had died away and took off her
headscarf.
"Damn thing," she said. "Esk, go and listen at the door." She removed
the towel from Simon's head and felt his temperature.
"It was very good of you to come," said Esk. "And you so busy with your
work, and everything."
"Mmmph." Granny pursed her lips. She pulled up Simon's eyelids and
sought his pulse. She laid an ear on his xylophone chest and listened to his
heart. She sat for some time quite motionless, probing around inside his
head.
She frowned.
"Is he all right?" said Esk anxiously.
Granny looked at the stone walls.
"Drat this place," she said. "It's no place for sick people."
"Yes, but is he all right?"
"What?" Granny was startled out of her thoughts. "Oh. Yes. Probably.
Wherever he is."
Esk stared at her, and then at Simon's body.
"Nobody's home," said Granny, simply.
"What do you mean?"
"Listen to the child," said Granny. "You'd think I taught her nothing.
I mean his mind's Wandering. He's gone Out of his Head."
She looked at Simon's body with something verging on admiration.
"Quite surprisin', really," she added. "I never yet met a wizard who
could Borrow."
She turned to Esk, whose mouth was a horrified O.
"I remember when I was a girl, old Nanny Annaple went Wanderin'. Got
too wrapped up with being a vixen, as I recall. Took us days to find her.
And then there was you, too. I never would have found you if it wasn't for
that staff thing, and what have you done with it, girl?"
"It hit him," Esk muttered. "It tried to kill him. I threw it in the
river."
"Not a nice thing to do to it after it saved you," said Granny.
"It saved me by hitting him?"
"Didn't you realise? He was callin' to-them Things."
"That's not true!"
Granny stared into Esk's defiant eyes and the thought came to her mind:
I've lost her. Three years of work down the privy. She couldn't be a wizard
but she might have been a witch.
"Why isn't it true, Miss Clever?" she said.
"He wouldn't do something like that!" Esk was near to tears. "I heard
him speak, he's-well, he's not evil, he's a brilliant person, he nearly
understands how everything works, he's-"
"I expect he's a very nice boy," said Granny sourly. "I never said he
was a black wizard, did I?"
"They're horrible Things!" Esk sobbed. "He wouldn't call out to them,
he wants everything that they're not, and you're a wicked old-"
The slap rang like a bell. Esk staggered back, white with shock. Granny
stood with her hand upraised, trembling.
She'd struck Esk once before-the blow a baby gets to introduce it to
the world and give it a rough idea of what to expect from life. But that had
been the last time. In three years under the same roof there had been cause
enough, when milk had been left to boil over or the goats had been
carelessly left without water, but a sharp word or a sharper silence had
done more than force ever could and left no bruises.
She grabbed Esk firmly by the shoulders and stared into her eyes.
"Listen to me," she said urgently. "Didn't I always say to you that if
you use magic you should go through the world like a knife goes through
water? Didn't I say that?"
Esk, mesmerised like a cornered rabbit, nodded.
"And you thought that was just old Granny's way, didn't you? But the
fact is that if you use magic you draw attention to yourself. From Them.
They watch the world all the time. Ordinary minds are just vague to them,
they hardly bother with them, but a mind with magic in it shines out, you
see, it's a beacon to them. It's not darkness that calls Them, it's light,
light that creates the shadows!"
"But-but-why are They interested? What do They wwant?"
"Life and shape," said Granny.
She sagged, and let go of Esk.
"They're pathetic, really," she said. "They've got no life or shape
themselves but what they can steal. They could no more survive in this world
than a fish could live in a fire, but that doesn't stop them trying. And
they're just bright enough to hate us because we're alive."
Esk shivered. She remember the gritty feel of the cold sand.
"What are They? I always thought they were just a sort-a sort of
demon?"
"Nah. No one really knows. They're just the Things from the Dungeon
Dimensions outside the universe, that's all. Shadow creatures."
She turned back to the prone form of Simon.
"You wouldn't have any idea where he is, would you?" she said, looking
shrewdly at Esk. "Not gone off flying with the seagulls, has he?"
Esk shook her head.
"No," said Granny, "I didn't think so. They've got him, haven't they."
It wasn't a question. Esk nodded, her face a mask of misery.
"It's not your fault," said Granny, "His mind gave them an opening, and
when he was knocked out they took it back with them. Only. . . ."
She drummed her fingers on the edge of the bed, and appeared to reach a
decision.
"Who's the most important wizard around here?" she demanded.
"Um, Lord Cutangle," said Esk. "He's the Archchancellor. He was one of
the ones who was in here."
"The fat one, or the one like a streak of vinegar?"
Esk dragged her mind from the image of Simon on the cold desert and
found herself saying: "He's an Eighth Level wizard and a 33-degree mage,
actually."
"You mean he's bent?" said Granny. "All this hanging around wizards has
made you take them seriously, my girl. They all call themselves the Lord
High this and the Imperial That, it's all part of the game. Even magicians
do it, you'd think they'd be more sensible at least, but no, they call
around saying they're the Amazing-Bonko-and-Doris. Anyway, where is this
High Rumtiddlypo?"
"They'll be at dinner in the Great Hall," said Esk. "Can he bring Simon
back, then?"
"That's the difficult part," said Granny. "I daresay we could all get
something back easily enough, walking and talking just like anyone. Whether
it would be Simon is quite another sack of ferrets."
She stood up. "Let's find this Great Hall, then. No time to waste."
"Um, women aren't allowed in," said Esk.
Granny stopped in the doorway. Her shoulders rose. She turned around
very slowly.
"What did you say?" she said. "Did these old ears deceive me, and don't
say they did because they didn't."
"Sorry," said Esk. "Force of habit."
"I can see you've been getting ideas below your station," said Granny
coldly. "Go and find someone to watch over the lad, and let's see what's so
great about this hall that I mustn't set foot in it."
And thus it was that while the entire faculty of Unseen University were
dining in the venerable hall the doors were flung back with a dramatic
effect that was rather spoiled when one of them rebounded off a waiter and
caught Granny a crack on the shin. Instead of the defiant strides she had
intended to make across the chequered floor she was forced to half-hop,
half-limp. But she hoped that she hopped with dignity.
Esk hurried along behind her, acutely aware of the hundreds of eyes
that were turned towards them.
The roar of conversation and the clatter of cutlery faded away. A
couple of chairs w...
