Equal Rites

said Simon urgently, and reached out for it. “Hey! It bit me!”
    “Sorry,” said Esk. “What were we talking about?” She looked up and regarded the keening Things as it were for the first time. “Oh, those . They only exist inside our heads. If we didn’t believe in them, they wouldn’t exist at all.”
    Simon looked around at them.
    “I can’t honestly say I believe you,” he said.
    “I think we should go home now,” said Esk. “People will be worrying.”
    She moved her hands together and the staff vanished, although for a moment her hands glowed as though they were cupped around a candle.
    The Things howled. A few of them fell over.
    “The important thing about magic is how you don’t use it,” said Esk, taking Simon’s arm.
    He stared at the crumbling figures around him, and grinned foolishly.
    “You don’t use it?” he queried.
    “Oh yes,” said Esk, as they walked toward the Things. “Try it yourself.”
    She extended her hands, brought the staff out of the air, and offered it to him. He went to take it, then drew back his hand.
    “Uh, no,” he said, “I don’t think it likes me much.”
    “I think it’s all right if I give it to you. It can’t really argue with that,” said Esk.
    “Where does it go ?”
    “It just becomes an idea of itself, I think.”
    He reached out his hand again and closed his fingers around the shining wood.
    “Right,” he said, and raised it in the classical revengeful wizard’s pose. “I’ll show them!”
    “No, wrong.”
    “What do you mean, wrong? I’ve got the power!”
    “They’re sort of—reflections of us,” said Esk. “You can’t beat your reflections, they’ll always be as strong as you are. That’s why they draw nearer to you when you start using magic. And they don’t get tired. They feed off magic, so you can’t beat them with magic. No, the thing is…well, not using magic because you can’t, that’s no use at all. But not using magic because you can , that really upsets them. They hate the idea. If people stopped using magic they’d die.”
    The Things ahead of them fell over each other in their haste to back away.
    Simon looked at the staff, then at Esk, then at the Things then back at the staff.
    “This needs a lot of thinking about,” he said uncertainly “I’d really like to work this out.”
    “I expect you’ll do it very well.”
    “Because you’re saying that the real power is when you go right through magic and out the other side.”
    “It works, though, doesn’t it?”
    They were alone on the cold plain now. The Things were distant stick-figures.
    “I wonder if this is what they mean by sorcery?” said Simon.
    “I don’t know. It might be.”
    “I’d really like to work this out,” said Simon again, turning the staff over and over in his hands. “We could set up some experiments, you know, into deliberately not using magic. We could carefully not draw an octogram on the floor, and we could deliberately not call up all sorts of things, and—it makes me sweat just to think about it!”
    “I’d like to think about how to get home,” said Esk, looking down at the pyramid.
    “Well, that is supposed to be my idea of the world. I should be able to find a way. How do you do this thing with the hands?”
    He moved his hands together. The staff slid between them, the light glowing through his fingers for a moment, and then vanished. He grinned. “Right. Now all we have to do is look for the University…”

    Cutangle lit his third rollup from the stub of the second. This last cigarette owed a lot to the creative powers of nervous energy, and looked like a camel with the legs cut off.
    He had already watched the staff lift itself gently from Esk and land on Simon.
    Now it had floated up into the air again.
    Other wizards had crowded into the room. The librarian was sitting under the table.
    “If only we had some idea what is going on,” said Cutangle. “It’s the suspense I can’t stand.”
    “Think positively, man,” snapped Granny. “And put out that bloody cigarette, I can’t imagine anyone wanting to come back to a room that smells like a fireplace.”
    As one man the assembled college of wizards turned their faces toward Cutangle, expectantly.
    He took the smoldering mess out of his mouth and, with a glare that none of the assembled wizards cared to meet, trod it underfoot.
    “Probably time I gave it up anyway,” he said. “That goes for the rest of you, too. Worse than an