Equal Rites

“They are indeed spircles, but remarkably fine specimens in their own right,” he concluded. “They are by no means worthless, and I for example would be prepared to offer you—is there something wrong with the little girl’s eyes?”

Amschat nudged Esk, who stopped trying out another Look.

“—I would offer you, shall we say, two zats of silver?”

“Shall we say five?” said Amschat pleasantly.

“And I would like to keep one of the stones,” said Esk. The old man threw up his hands.

“But they are mere curios!” he said. “Of value only to a collector!”

“A collector may yet sell them to an unsuspecting purchaser as finest roseattes or ultramarines,” said Amschat, “especially if he was the only assayer in town.”

The assayer grumbled a bit at this, but at last they settled on three zats and one of the spircles on a thin silver chain for Esk.

When they were out of earshot Amschat handed her the tiny silver coins and said: “These are yours. You have earned them. But—” he hunkered down so that his eyes were on a level with hers, “—you must tell me how you knew the stones were false.”

He looked worried, but Esk sensed that he wouldn’t really like the truth. Magic made people uncomfortable. He wouldn’t like it if she said simply: spircles are spircles and ultramarines are ultramarines, and though you may think they look the same that is because most people don’t use their eyes in the right way. Nothing can entirely disguise its true nature.

Instead she said: “The dwarves mine spircles near the village where I was born, and you soon learn to see how they bend light in a funny way.”

Amschat looked into her eyes for some time. Then he shrugged.

“Okay,” he said. “Fine. Well, I have some further business here. Why don’t you buy yourself some new clothes, or something? I’d warn you against unscrupulous traders but, somehow, I don’t know, I don’t think you will have any trouble.”

Esk nodded. Amschat strode off through the market place. At the first corner he turned, looked at her thoughtfully, and then disappeared among the crowds.

Well, that’s the end of sailing, Esk told herself. He’s not quite sure but he’s going to be watching me now and before I know what’s happening the staff will be taken away and there’ll be all sorts of trouble. Why does everyone get so upset about magic?

She gave a philosophical sigh and set about exploring the possibilities of the town.

There was the question of the staff, though. Esk had rammed it deep among the fleeces, which were not going to be unloaded yet. If she went back for it people would start asking questions, and she didn’t know the answers.

She found a convenient alleyway and scuttled down it until a deep doorway gave her the privacy she required.

If going back was out of the question then only one thing remained. She held out a hand and closed her eyes.

She knew exactly what she wanted to do-it lay in front of her eyes. The staff mustn’t come flying through the air, wrecking the barge and drawing attention to itself. All she wanted, she told herself, was for there to be a slight change in the way the world was organised. It shouldn’t be a world where the staff was in the fleeces, it should be a world where it was in her hand. A tiny change, an infinitesimal alteration to the Way Things Were.

If Esk had been properly trained in wizardry she would have known that this was impossible. All wizards knew how to move things about, starting with protons and working upwards, but the important thing about moving something from A to Z, according to basic physics, was that at some point it should pass through the rest of the alphabet. The only way one could cause something to vanish at A and appear at Z would be to shuffle the whole of Reality sideways. The problems this would cause didn’t bear thinking about.

Esk, of course, had not been trained, and it is well known that a vital ingredient of success is not knowing that what you’re attempting can’t be done. A person ignorant of the possibility of failure can be a halfbrick in the path of the bicycle of history.

As Esk tried to work out how to move the staff the ripples spread out in the magical ether, changing the Discworld in thousands of tiny ways. Most went entirely unnoticed. Perhaps a few grains of sand lay on their beaches in a slightly different position, or the occasional leaf hung on its tree in a marginally different way. But then the wavefront of probability struck the edge of Reality and rebounded like the slosh off the side of the pond which, meeting the laggard ripples coming the other way, caused small but important whirlpools in the very fabric of existence. You can have whirlpools in the fabric of existence, because it is a very strange fabric.

Esk was completely ignorant of all this, of course, but was quite satisfied when the staff dropped out of thin air into her hand.

It felt warm.

She looked at it for some time. She felt that she ought to do something about it; it was too big, too distinctive, too inconvenient. It attracted attention.