Equal Rites

young, madam,” sighed Cutangle, “hardly young.” He felt drained. It had been decades since he’d dueled in magic, although it was common enough among students. He had a nasty feeling that Granny would have won eventually. Fighting her was like swatting a fly on your own nose. He couldn’t think what had come over him to try it.
    Granny led him out into the passage and around the corner to a window seat. She sat down, leaning her broomstick against the wall. Rain drummed heavily on the roofs outside, and a few zigzags of lightning indicated a storm of Ramtop proportions approaching the city.
    “That was quite an impressive display,” she said: “You nearly won once or twice there.”
    “Oh,” said Cutangle, brightening up. “Do you really think so?”
    Granny nodded.
    Cutangle patted at various bits of his robe until he located a tarry bag of tobacco and a roll of paper. His hands shook as he fumbled a few shreds of secondhand pipeweed into a skinny homemade. He ran the wretched thing across his tongue, and barely moistened it. Then a dim remembrance of propriety welled up in the back of his mind.
    “Um,” he said, “do you mind if I smoke?”
    Granny shrugged. Cutangle struck a match on the wall and tried desperately to navigate the flame and the cigarette into approximately the same position. Granny gently took the match from his trembling hand and lit it for him.
    Cutangle sucked on the tobacco, had a ritual cough and settled back, the glowing end of the rollup the only light in the dim corridor.
    “They’ve gone Wandering,” said Granny at last.
    “I know,” said Cutangle.
    “Your wizards won’t be able to get them back.”
    “I know that, too.”
    “They might get something back, though.”
    “I wish you hadn’t said that.”
    There was a pause while they contemplated what might come back, inhabiting living bodies, acting almost like the original inhabitants.
    “It’s probably my fault—” they said in unison, and stopped in astonishment.
    “You first, madam,” said Cutangle.
    “Them cigaretty things,” asked Granny, “are they good for the nerves?”
    Cutangle opened his mouth to point out very courteously that tobacco was a habit reserved for wizards, but thought better of it. He extended the tobacco pouch toward Granny.
    She told him about Esk’s birth, and the coming of the old wizard, and the staff, and Esk’s forays into magic. By the time she had finished she had succeeded in rolling a tight, thin cylinder that burned with a small blue flame and made her eyes water.
    “I don’t know that shaky nerves wouldn’t be better,” she wheezed.
    Cutangle wasn’t listening.
    “This is quite astonishing,” he said. “You say the child didn’t suffer in any way?”
    “Not that I noticed,” said Granny. “The staff seemed—well, on her side, if you know what I mean.”
    “And where is this staff now?”
    “She said she threw it in the river…”
    The old wizard and the elderly witch stared at each other, their faces illuminated by a flare of lightning outside.
    Cutangle shook his head. “The river’s flooding,” he said. “It’s a million-to-one chance.”
    Granny smiled grimly. It was the sort of smile that wolves ran away from. Granny grasped her broomstick purposefully.
    “Million-to-one chances,” she said, “crop up nine times out of ten.”

    There are storms that are frankly theatrical, all sheet lightning and metallic thunder rolls. There are storms that are tropical and sultry, and incline to hot winds and fireballs. But this was a storm of the Circle Sea plains, and its main ambition was to hit the ground with as much rain as possible. It was the kind of storm that suggests that the whole sky has swallowed a diuretic. The thunder and lightning hung around in the background, supplying a sort of chorus, but the rain was the star of the show. It tap-danced across the land.
    The grounds of the University stretched right down to the river. By day they were a neat formal pattern of gravel paths and hedges, but in the middle of a wet wild night the hedges seemed to have moved and the paths had simply gone off somewhere to stay dry.
    A weak wyrdlight shone inefficiently among the dripping leaves. But most of the rain found its way through anyway.
    “Can you use one of them wizard fireballs?”
    “Have a heart, madam.”
    “Are you sure she would have come this way?”
    “There’s a sort of jetty thing down here somewhere, unless I’m lost.”
    There