faintly whispered conversation before he tiptoed as silently as he could towards the bedhead. The staff slipped sideways as his first cautious grope dislodged it, but he caught it quickly and let his breath out very slowly.
So he hardly had enough left to scream with when the staff
Esk sat bolt upright in time to see Skiller roll backwards down the steep stairladder, still flailing desperately at something quite invisible that coiled around his arms. There was another scream from below as he landed on his wife.
The staff clattered to the floor and lay surrounded by a faint octarine glow.
Esk got out of the bed and padded across the floor. There was a terrible cursing; it sounded unhealthy. She peered around the door and looked down on the face of Mrs Skiller.
“Give me that staff!”
Esk reached down behind her and gripped the polished wood. “No,” she said. “It’s mine.”
“It’s not the right sort of thing for little girls,” snapped the barman’s wife.
“It belongs to me,” said Esk, and quietly closed the door. She listened for a moment to the muttering from below and tried to think of what to do next. Turning the couple into something would probably only cause a fuss and, anyway, she wasn’t quite certain how to do it.
The fact was the magic only really worked when she wasn’t thinking about it. Her mind seemed to get in the way.
She padded across the room and pushed open the tiny window. The strange nighttime smells of civilisation drifted in—the damp smell of streets, the fragrance of garden flowers, the distant hint of an overloaded privy. There were wet tiles outside.
As Skiller started back up the stairs she pushed the staff out on to the roof and crawled after it, steadying herself on the carvings above the window. The roof dipped down to an outhouse and she managed to stay at least vaguely upright as she half-slid, half-scrambled down the uneven tiles. A six-foot drop on to a stack of old barrels, a quick scramble down the slippery wood, and she was trotting easily across the inn yard.
As she kicked up the street mists she could hear the sounds of argument coming from the Riddle.
Skiller rushed past his wife and laid a hand on the tap of the nearest barrel. He paused, and then wrenched it open.
The smell of peach brandy filled the room, sharp as knives. He shut off the flow and relaxed.
“Afraid it would turn into something nasty?” asked his wife. He nodded.
“If you hadn’t been so clumsy—” she began.
“I tell you it bit me!”
“You could have been a wizard and we wouldn’t have to bother with all this. Have you got no
Skiller shook his head. “I reckon it takes more than a staff to make a wizard,” he said. “Anyway, I heard where it said wizards aren’t allowed to get married, they’re not even allowed to—” He hesitated.
“To what? Allowed to what?”
Skiller writhed. “Well. You know. Thing.”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Mrs Skiller briskly.
“No, I suppose not.”
He followed her reluctantly out of the darkened barroom. It seemed to him that perhaps wizards didn’t have such a bad life, at that.
He was proved right when the following morning revealed that the ten barrels of peach brandy had, indeed, turned into something nasty.
Esk wandered aimlessly through the grey streets until she reached Ohulan’s tiny river docks. Broad flat- bottomed barges bobbed gently against the wharves, and one or two of them curled wisps of smoke from friendly stovepipes. Esk clambered easily on to the nearest, and used the staff to lever up the oilcloth that covered most of it.
A warm smell, a mixture of lanolin and midden, drifted up. The barge was laden with wool.
It’s silly to go to sleep on an unknown barge, not knowing what strange cliffs may be drifting past when you awake, not knowing that bargees traditionally get an early start (setting out before the sun is barely up), not knowing what new horizons might greet one on the morrow…
You know that. Esk didn’t.
Esk awoke to the sound of someone whistling. She lay quite still, reeling the evening’s events across her mind until she remembered why she was here, and then rolled over very carefully and raised the oilcloth a fraction.
Here she was, then. But “here” had moved.
“This is what they call sailing, then,” she said, watching the far bank glide past, “It doesn’t seem very special.”
It didn’t occur to her to start worrying. For the first eight years of her life the world had been a particularly boring place and now that it was becoming interesting Esk wasn’t about to act ungrateful.
The distant whistler was joined by a barking dog. Esk lay back in the wool and reached out until she found the animal’s mind, and Borrowed it gently. From its inefficient and disorganised brain she learned that there were at least four people on this barge, and many more on the others that were strung out in line with it on the river. Some of them seemed to be children.
She let the animal go and looked out at the scenery again for a long time—the barge was passing between high orange cliffs now, banded with so many colours of rock it looked as though some hungry god had made the all- time-record club sandwich—and tried to avoid the next thought. But it persisted, arriving in her mind like the unexpected limbo dancer under the lavatory door of Life. Sooner or later she would have to go out. It wasn’t her stomach that was pressing the point, but her bladder brooked no delay.
Perhaps if she—
The oilcloth over her head was pulled aside swiftly and a big bearded head beamed down at her.
“Well, well,” it said. “What have we here, then? A stowaway, yesno?”
Esk gave it a stare. “Yes,” she said. There seemed no sense in denying it. “Could you help me out please?”
“Aren’t you afraid I shall throw you to the—the pike?” said the head. It noticed her perplexed look. “Big freshwater fish,” it added helpfully. “Fast. Lot of teeth. Pike.”
The thought hadn’t occurred to her at all. “No,” she said truthfully. “Why? Will you?”
“No. Not really. There’s no need to be frightened.”
“I’m not.”
“Oh.” A brown arm appeared, attached to the head by the normal arrangements, and helped her out of her nest in the fleeces.
Esk stood on the deck of the barge and looked around. The sky was bluer than a biscuit barrel, fitting neatly over a broad valley through which the river ran as sluggishly as a planning enquiry.
Behind her the Ramtops still acted as a hitching rail for clouds, but they no longer dominated as they had done for as long as Esk had known them. Distance had eroded them.
“Where’s this?” she said, sniffing the new smells of swamp and sedge.
“The Upper Valley of the River Ankh,” said her captor. “What do you think of it?”
Esk looked up and down the river. It was already much wider than it had been at Ohulan.
“I don’t know. There’s certainly a lot of it. Is this your ship?”
“Boat,” he corrected. He was taller than her father, although not quite so old, and dressed like a gypsy. Most of his teeth had turned gold, but Esk decided it wasn’t the time to ask why. He had the kind of real deep tan that rich people spend ages trying to achieve with expensive holidays and bits of tinfoil, when really all you need to do to obtain one is work your arse off in the open air every day. His brow crinkled.
“Yes, it’s mine,” he said, determined to regain the initiative. “And what are you doing on it, I would like to know? Running away from home, yesno? If you were a boy I’d say are you going to seek your fortune?”
