Equal Rites

ice was beginning to form on them.
    There was a movement behind her. She turned around and saw the staff, without its broomstick disguise, standing upright in the sand. Little worms of light crept around its polished wood and crept around the carvings no one could ever quite identify.
    She picked it up and smashed it against the doors. There was a shower of octarine sparks, but the black metal was unscathed.
    Esk’s eyes narrowed. She held the staff at arm’s length and concentrated until a thin line of fire leapt from the wood and burst against the gate. The ice flashed into steam but the darkness—she was sure now that it wasn’t metal—absorbed the power without so much as glowing. She doubled the energy, letting the staff put all its stored magic into a beam that was now so bright that she had to shut her eyes (and could still see it as a brilliant line in her mind).
    Then it winked out.
    After a few seconds Esk ran forward and touched the doors gingerly. The coldness nearly froze her fingers off.
    And from the battlements above she could hear the sound of sniggering. Laughter wouldn’t have been so bad, especially an impressive demonic laugh with lots of echo, but this was just—sniggering.
    It went on for a long time. It was one of the most unpleasant sounds Esk had ever heard.

    She woke up shivering. It was long after midnight and the stars looked damp and chilly; the air was full of the busy silence of the night, which is created by hundreds of small furry things treading very carefully in the hope of finding dinner while avoiding being the main course.
    A crescent moon was setting and a thin gray glow toward the rim of the world suggested that, against all probability, another day was on the cards.
    Someone had wrapped Esk in a blanket.
    “I know you’re awake,” said the voice of Granny Weatherwax. “You could make yourself useful and light a fire. There’s damn all wood in these parts.”
    Esk sat up, and clutched at the juniper bush. She felt light enough to float away.
    “Fire?” she muttered.
    “Yes. You know. Pointing the finger and whoosh,” said Granny sourly. She was sitting on a rock, trying to find a position that didn’t upset her arthritis.
    “I—I don’t think I can.”
    “You tell me?” said Granny cryptically.
    The old witch leaned forward and put her hand on Esk’s forehead; it was like being caressed by a sock full of warm dice.
    “You’re running a bit of a temperature,” she added. “Too much hot sun and cold ground. That’s forn parts for you.”
    Esk let herself slump forward until her head lay in Granny’s lap, with its familiar smells of camphor, mixed herbs and a trace of goat. Granny patted her in what she hoped was a soothing way.
    After a while Esk said, in a low voice, “They’re not going to allow me into the University. A wizard told me, and I dreamed about it, and it was one of those true dreams. You know, like you told me, a maty-thing.”
    “Metterfor,” said Granny calmly.
    “One of them.”
    “Did you think it would be easy?” asked Granny. “Did you think you’d walk into their gates waving your staff? Here I am, I want to be a wizard, thank you very much?”
    “He told me there’s no women allowed in the University!”
    “He’s wrong.”
    “No, I could tell he was telling the truth. You know, Granny, you can tell how—”
    “Foolish child. All you could tell was that he thought he was telling the truth. The world isn’t always as people see it.”
    “I don’t understand,” said Esk.
    “You’ll learn,” said Granny. “Now tell me. This dream. They wouldn’t let you into their university, right?”
    “Yes, and they laughed!”
    “And then you tried to burn down the doors?”
    Esk turned her head in Granny’s lap and opened a suspicious eye.
    “How did you know?”
    Granny smiled, but as a lizard would smile.
    “I was miles away,” she said. “I was bending my mind toward you, and suddenly you seemed to be everywhere. You shone out like a beacon, so you did. As for the fire—look around.”
    In the halflight of dawn the plateau was a mass of baked clay. In front of Esk the cliff was glassy and must have flowed like tar under the onslaught; there were great gashes across it which had dripped molten rock and slag. When Esk listened she could hear the faint “pink, pink” of cooling rock.
    “Oh,” she said, “did I do that?”
    “So it would appear,” said Granny.
    “But I was asleep! I was only