A Hat Full Of Sky

glass by the light of a taper made from red cotton, thus….”
    Tiffany squinted. The letters were small and hard to read.
    “‘May contain Nut’?” she ventured. “But it’s a nutshell. Of course it’ll contain a nut. Er…won’t it?”
    “Not necessarily,” said Miss Level. “It may, for example, contain an exquisite miniature scene wrought from gold and many colored precious stones depicting a strange and interesting temple set in a far-off land. Well, it might ,” she added, catching Tiffany’s expression. “There’s no actual law against it. As such. The world is full of surprises.”
    That night Tiffany had a lot more to put in her diary. She kept it on top of her chest of drawers with a large stone on it. Oswald seemed to get the message about this, but he had started to polish the stone.

    And pull back, and rise above the cottage, and fly the eye across the nighttime….
    Miles away, pass invisibly across something that is itself invisible, but which buzzes like a swarm on flies as it drags itself over the ground….
    Continue, the roads and towns and trees rushing behind you with zip-zip noises, until you come to the big city, and near the center of the city the high old tower, and beneath the tower the ancient magical university, and in the university the library, and in the library the bookshelves, and…the journey has hardly begun.
    Bookshelves stream past. The books are on chains. Some snap at you as you pass.
    And here is the section of the more dangerous books, the ones that are kept chained in cages or in vats of iced water or simply clamped between lead plates.
    But here is a book, faintly transparent and glowing with thaumic radiation, under a glass dome. Young wizards about to engage in research are encouraged to go and read it.
    The title is Hivers: A Dissertation Upon a Device of Amazing Cunning by Sensibility Bustle, D.M. Phil., B. El L., Patricius Professor of Magic. Most of the handwritten book is about how to construct a large and powerful magical apparatus to capture a hiver without harm to the user, but on the very last pages Dr. Bustle writes, or wrote:
According to the ancient and famous volume Res Centum et Una Quas Magus Facere Potet, * hivers are a type of demon (indeed, Professor Poledread classifies them as such in I Spy Demons, and Cuvee gives them a section under “wandering spirits” in Liber Immanis Monstrorum. ** However, ancient texts discovered in the Cave of Jars by the ill-fated First Expedition to the Loko Region give quite a different story, which bears out my own not inconsiderable research.
Hivers were formed in the first seconds of Creation. They are not alive but they have, as it were, the shape of life. They have no body, brain, or thoughts of their own, and a naked hiver is a sluggish thing indeed, tumbling gently though the endless night between the worlds. According to Poledread, most end up at the bottoms of deep seas, or in the bellies of volcanoes, or drifting through the hearts of stars. Poledread was a very inferior thinker compared to myself, but in this case he is right.
Yet a hiver does have the ability to fear and to crave. We cannot guess what frightens a hiver, but they seem to take refuge in bodies that have power of some sort—great strength, great intellect, great prowess with magic. In this sense they are like the common hermit elephant of Howondaland, Elephas solitariu, which will always seek the strongest mud hut as its shell.
There is no doubt in my mind that hivers have advanced the cause of life. Why did fish crawl out of the sea? Why did humanity grasp such a dangerous thing as fire? Hivers, I believe, have been behind this, firing outstanding creatures of various species with the flame of necessary ambition, which drove them onward and upward! What is it that a hiver seeks? What is it that drives them forward? What is it they want? This I shall find out!
Oh, lesser wizards warn us that a hiver distorts the mind of its host, curdling it and inevitably causing an early death through brain fever. I say poppycock! People have always been afraid of what they do not understand!
But I have understanding!
This morning, at two o’clock, I captured a hiver with my device! And now it is locked inside my head. I can sense its memories, the memories of every creature it has inhabited. Yet because of my superior intellect, I control the hiver. It does not control me. I do not feel that it has changed me in any way. My mind is as