Equal Rites

brothers, because I am an eighth son of course, and they had children and even grandchildren, and not one of them can hardly write his name. I could have bought the whole village. And they treated me like a king, but—I mean, I’ve been to places and seen things that would curdle their minds, I’ve faced down creatures wilder than their nightmares, I know secrets that are known to a very few—”

“You felt left out,” said Granny. “There’s nothing strange in that. It happens to all of us. It was our choice.”

“Wizards should never go home,” said Cutangle.

“I don’t think they can go home,” agreed Granny. “You can’t cross the same river twice, I always say.”

Cutangle gave this some thought.

“I think you’re wrong there,” he said. “I must have crossed the same river, oh, thousands of times.”

“Ah, but it wasn’t the same river.”

“It wasn’t?”

“No.”

Cutangle shrugged. “It looked like the same bloody river.”

“No need to take that tone,” said Granny. “I don’t see why I should listen to that sort of language from a wizard who can’t even answer letters!”

Cutangle was silent for a moment, except for the castanet chatter of his teeth.

“Oh,” he said. “Oh, I see. They were from you, were they?”

“That’s right. I signed them on the bottom. It’s supposed to be a sort of clue, isn’t it?”

“All right, all right. I just thought they were a joke, that’s all,” said Cutangle sullenly.

“A joke?”

“We don’t get many applications from women. We don’t get any”

“I wondered why I didn’t get a reply,” said Granny.

“I threw them away, if you must know.”

“You could at least have—There it is!”

“Where? Where? Oh, there.”

The fog parted and they now saw it clearly—a fountain of snowflakes, an ornamental pillar of frozen air. And below it…

The staff wasn’t locked in ice, but lay peacefully in a seething pool of water.

One of the unusual aspects of a magical universe is the existence of opposites. It has already been remarked that darkness isn’t the opposite of light, it is simply the absence of light. In the same way absolute zero is merely the absence of heat. If you want to know what real cold is, the cold so intense that water can’t even freeze but anti-boils, look no further than this pool.

They looked in silence for some seconds, their bickering forgotten. Then Cutangle said slowly: “If you stick your hand in that, your fingers’ll snap like carrots.”

“Do you think you can lift it out by magic?” said Granny.

Cutangle started to pat his pockets and eventually produced his rollup bag. With expert fingers he shredded the remains of a few dogends into a fresh paper and licked it into shape, without taking his eyes off the staff.

“No,” he said. “but I’ll try anyway.”

He looked longingly at the cigarette and then poked it behind his ear. He extended his hands, fingers splayed, and his lips moved soundlessly as he mumbled a few words of power.

The staff spun in its pool and then rose gently away from the ice, where it immediately became the centre of a cocoon of frozen air. Cutangle groaned with the effort—direct levitation is the hardest of the practical magics, because of the ever-present danger of the well-known principles of action and reaction, which means that a wizard attempting to lift a heavy item by mind power alone faces the prospect of ending up with his brains in his boots.

“Can you stand it upright?” said Granny.

With great delicacy the staff turned slowly in the air until it hung in front of Granny a few inches above the ice. Frost glittered on its carvings, but it seemed to Cutangle—through the red haze of migraine that hovered in front of his eyes—to be watching him. Resentfully.

Granny adjusted her hat and straightened up purposefully.

“Right,” she said. Cutangle swayed. The tone of voice cut through him like a diamond saw. He could dimly remember being scolded by his mother when he was small; well, this was that voice, only refined and concentrated and edged with little bits of carborundum, a tone of command that would have a corpse standing to attention and could probably have marched it halfway across its cemetery before it remembered it was dead.

Granny stood in front of the hovering staff, almost melting its icy covering by the sheer anger in her gaze.

“This is your idea of proper behaviour, is it? Lying around on the sea while people die? Oh, very well done!”

She stomped around in a semicircle. To Cutangle’s bewilderment, the staff turned to follow her.

“So you were thrown away,” snapped Granny. “So what? She’s hardly more than a child, and children throw us all away sooner or later. Is this loyal service? Have you no shame, lying around sulking when you could be of some use at last?”

She leaned forward, her hooked nose a few inches from the staff. Cutangle was almost certain that the staff tried to lean backwards out of her way.

“Shall I tell you what happens to wicked staffs?” she hissed. “If Esk is lost to the world, shall I tell you what I will do to you? You were saved from the fire once, because you could pass on the hurt to her. Next time it won’t be the fire.”

Her voice sank to a whiplash whisper.

“First it’ll be the spokeshave. And then the sandpaper, and the auger, and the whittling knife—”

“I say, steady on,” said Cutangle, his eyes watering.

“—and what’s left I’ll stake out in the woods for the fungus and the woodlice and the beetles. It could take years.”

The carvings writhed. Most of them had moved around the back, out of Granny’s gaze.

“Now,” she said. “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to pick you up and we are all going back to the University, aren’t we? Otherwise it’s blunt saw time.”

She rolled up her sleeves and extended a hand.

“Wizard,” she said, “I shall want you to release it.”

Cutangle nodded miserably.

“When I say now, now! Now!”

* * *

Cutangle opened his eyes again.

Granny was standing with her left arm extended full length in front of her, her hand clamped around the staff.

The ice was exploding off it, in gouts of steam.

“Right,” finished Granny, “and if this happens again I shall be very angry, do I make myself clear?”

Cutangle lowered his hands and hurried towards her.

“Are you hurt?”

She shook her head. “It’s like holding a hot icicle,” she said. “Come on, we haven’t got time to stand around chatting.”

“How are we going to get back?”

“Oh, show some backbone, man, for goodness sake. We’ll fly.”

Granny waved her broomstick. The Archchancellor looked at it doubtfully.

“On that?”

“Of course. Don’t wizards fly on their staffs?”

“It’s rather undignified.”