Equal Rites

Granny had mumbled a few of the charms she normally said to impress patients, but you never knew, there might be some power in them, and it had also gulped a few strips of raw meat.
    What it had not done was display the least sign of intelligence.
    She wondered whether she had the right bird. She risked another pecking and stared hard into its evil orange eyes, and tried to convince herself that way down in their depths, almost beyond sight, was a strange little flicker.
    She probed around inside its head. The eagle mind was still there right enough, vivid and sharp, but there was something else. Mind, of course, has no color, but nevertheless the strands of the eagle’s mind seemed to be purple. Around them and tangled among them were faint strands of silver.
    Esk had learned too late that mind shapes body, that Borrowing is one thing but that the dream of truly taking on another form had its built-in penalty.
    Granny sat and rocked. She was at a loss, she knew that. Unraveling the tangled minds was beyond her power, beyond any power in the Ramtops, beyond even—
    There was no sound, but maybe there was a change in the texture of the air. She looked up at the staff, which had been suffered to come back into the cottage.
    “No,” she said firmly.
    Then she thought: whose benefit did I say that for? Mine? There’s power there, but it’s not my kind of power.
    There isn’t any other kind around, though. And even now I may be too late.
    I might never have been early enough.
    She reached out again into the bird’s head to calm its fears and dispel its panic. It allowed her to pick it up and sat awkwardly on her wrist, its talons gripping tight enough to draw blood.
    Granny took the staff and made her way upstairs, to where Esk lay on the narrow bed in the low bedroom with its ancient contoured ceiling.
    She made the bird perch on the bedrail and turned her attention to the staff. Once more the carvings shifted under her glare, never quite revealing their true form.
    Granny was no stranger to the uses of power, but she knew she relied on gentle pressure subtly to steer the tide of things. She didn’t put it like that, of course—she would have said that there was always a lever if you knew where to look. The power in the staff was harsh, fierce, the raw stuff of magic distilled out of the forces that powered the universe itself.
    There would be a price. And Granny knew enough about wizardry to be certain that it would be a high one. But if you were worried about the price, then why were you in the shop?
    She cleared her throat, and wondered what the hell she was supposed to do next. Perhaps if she—
    The power hit her like a halfbrick. She could feel it take her and lift her so that she was amazed to look down and see her feet still firmly on the floorboards. She tried to take a step forward and magical discharges crackled in the air around her. She reached out to steady herself against the wall and the ancient wooden beam under her hand stirred and started to sprout leaves. A cyclone of magic swirled around the room, picking up dust and briefly giving it some very disturbing shapes; the jug and basin on the washstand, with the particularly fetching rosebud pattern, broke into fragments. Under the bed the third member of the traditional china trio turned into something horrible and slunk away.
    Granny opened her mouth to swear and thought better of it when her words blossomed out into rainbow-edged clouds.
    She looked down at Esk and the eagle, which seemed oblivious to all this, and tried to concentrate. She let herself slide inside its head and again she could see the strands of mind, the silver threads bound so closely around the purple that they took on the same shape. But now she could see where the strands ended, and where a judicious tug or push would begin to unravel them. It was so obvious she heard herself laugh, and the sound curved away in shades of orange and red and vanished into the ceiling.
    Time passed. Even with the power throbbing through her head it was a painfully hard task, like threading a needle by moonlight, but eventually she had a handful of silver. In the slow, heavy world in which she now appeared to be she took the hank and threw it slowly toward Esk. It became a cloud, swirled like a whirlpool, and vanished.
    She was aware of a shrill chittering noise, and shadows on the edge of sight. Well, it happened to everyone sooner or later. They had come, drawn as always by a discharge of