Equal Rites

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 nothinness 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.