Equal Rites

perambulating among the crowds, talking to the sponsoring wizards and examining the prospective students.
    Several of them pushed through the throng to meet Treatle, moving like gold-trimmed galleons under full sail. They bowed gravely to him and looked approvingly at Simon.
    “This is young Simon, is it?” said the fattest of them, beaming at the boy. “We’ve heard great reports of you, young man. Eh? What?”
    “Simon, bow to Archchancellor Cutangle, Archmage of the Wizards of the Silver Star,” said Treatle. Simon bowed apprehensively.
    Cutangle looked at him benevolently. “We’ve heard great things about you, my boy,” he said. “All this mountain air must be good for the brain, eh?”
    He laughed. The wizards around him laughed. Treatle laughed. Which Esk thought was rather funny, because there wasn’t anything particularly amusing happening.
    “I ddddon’t know, ssss—”
    “From what we hear it must be the only thing you don’t know, lad!” said Cutangle, his jowls waggling. There was another carefully timed bout of laughter.
    Cutangle patted Simon on the shoulder.
    “This is the scholarship boy,” he said. “Quite astounding results, never seen better. Self-taught, too. Astonishing, what? Isn’t that so, Treatle?”
    “Superb, Archchancellor.”
    Cutangle looked around at the watching wizards.
    “Perhaps you could give us a sample,” he said. “A little demonstration, perhaps?”
    Simon looked at him in animal panic.
    “A-actually I’m not very g-g-g—”
    “Now, now,” said Cutangle, in what he probably really did think was an encouraging tone of voice. “Do not be afraid. Take your time. When you are ready.”
    Simon licked his dry lips and gave Treatle a look of mute appeal.
    “Um,” he said, “y-you s-s-s-s-.” He stopped and swallowed hard. “The f-f-f-f—”
    His eyes bulged. The tears streamed from his eyes, and his shoulders heaved.
    Treatle patted him reassuringly on the back.
    “Hay fever,” he explained. “Don’t seem to be able to cure it. Tried everything.”
    Simon swallowed, and nodded. He waved Treatle away with his long white hands and closed his eyes.
    For a few seconds nothing happened. He stood with his lips moving soundlessly, and then silence spread out from him like candlelight. Ripples of noiselessness washed across the crowds in the hall, striking the walls with all the force of a blown kiss and then curling back in waves. People watched their companions mouthing silently and then went red with effort when their own laughter was as audible as a gnat’s squeak.
    Tiny motes of light winked into existence around his head. They whirled and spiraled in a complex three-dimensional dance, and then formed a shape.
    In fact it seemed to Esk that the shape had been there all the time, waiting for her eyes to see it, in the same way that a perfectly innocent cloud can suddenly become, without changing in any way, a whale or a ship or a face.
    The shape around Simon’s head was the world.
    That was quite clear, although the glitter and rush of the little lights blurred some of the detail. But there was Great A’Tuin the sky turtle, with the four Elephants on its back, and on them the Disc itself. There was the sparkle of the great waterfall around the edge of the world, and there at the very hub a tiny needle of rock that was the great mountain Cori Celesti, where the gods lived.
    The image expanded and homed in on the Circle Sea and then on Ankh itself, the little lights flowing away from Simon and winking out of existence a few feet from his head. Now they showed the city from the air, rushing toward the watchers. There was the University itself, growing larger. There was the Great Hall—
    —there were the people, watching silent and open-mouthed, and Simon himself, outlined in specks of silver light. And a tiny sparkling image in the air around him, and that image contained an image and another and another—
    There was a feeling that the universe had been turned inside out in all dimensions at once. It was a bloated, swollen sensation. It sounded as though the whole world had said “gloop.”
    The walls faded. So did the floor. The paintings of former great mages, all scrolls and beards and slightly constipated frowns, vanished. The tiles underfoot, a rather nice black and white pattern, evaporated—to be replaced by fine sand, gray as moonlight and cold as ice. Strange and unexpected stars glittered overhead; on the horizon were low hills,