Sourcery

thoughts you could use it as an ice tray, not one he was going to spend much time worrying about.
    Mere household geography wasn’t the only difficulty, though. Sheer pressure of thaumaturgical inflow was even affecting the food. What was a forkful of kedgeree when you lifted it off the plate might well have turned into something else by the time it entered your mouth. If you were lucky, it was inedible. If you were unlucky , it was edible but probably not something you liked to think you were about to eat or, worse, had already eaten half of.
    Spelter found Coin in what had been, late last night, a broom cupboard. It was a lot bigger now. It was only because Spelter had never heard of aircraft hangars that he didn’t know what to compare it with, although, to be fair, very few aircraft hangars have marble floors and a lot of statuary around the place. A couple of brooms and a small battered bucket in one corner looked distinctly out of place, but not as out of place as the crushed tables in the former Great Hall which, owing to the surging tides of magic now flowing through the place, had shrunk to the approximate size of what Spelter, if he had ever seen one, would have called a small telephone booth.
    He sidled into the room with extreme caution and took his place among the council of wizards. The air was greasy with the feel of power.
    Spelter created a chair beside Carding and leaned across to him.
    “You’ll never believe—” he began.
    “Quiet!” hissed Carding. “This is amazing!”
    Coin was sitting on his stool in the middle of the circle, one hand on his staff, the other extended and holding something small, white and egg-like. It was strangely fuzzy. In fact, Spelter thought, it wasn’t something small seen close to. It was something huge , but a long way off. And the boy was holding it in his hand.
    “What’s he doing?” Spelter whispered.
    “I’m not exactly sure,” murmured Carding. “As far as we can understand it, he’s creating a new home for wizardry.”
    Streamers of colored light flashed about the indistinct ovoid, like a distant thunderstorm. The glow lit Coin’s preoccupied face from below, giving it the semblance of a mask.
    “I don’t see how we will all fit in,” the bursar said. “Carding, last night I saw—”
    “It is finished,” said Coin. He held up the egg, which flashed occasionally from some inner light and gave off tiny white prominences. Not only was it a long way off, Spelter thought, it was also extremely heavy; it went right through heaviness and out the other side, into that strange negative realism where lead would be a vacuum. He grabbed Carding’s sleeve again.
    “Carding, listen, it’s important, listen, when I looked in—”
    “I really wish you’d stop doing that.”
    “But the staff, his staff, it’s not—”
    Coin stood up and pointed the staff at the wall, where a doorway instantly appeared. He marched out through it, leaving the wizards to follow him.
    He went through the Archchancellor’s garden, followed by a gaggle of wizards in the same way that a comet is followed by its tail, and didn’t stop until he reached the banks of the Ankh. There were some hoary old willows here, and the river flowed, or at any rate moved, in a horseshoe bend around a small newthaunted meadow known rather optimistically as Wizards Pleasaunce. On summer evenings, if the wind was blowing toward the river, it was a nice area for an afternoon stroll.
    The warm silver haze still hung over the city as Coin padded through the damp grass until he reached the center. He tossed the egg, which drifted in a gentle arc and landed with a squelch.
    He turned to the wizards as they hurried up.
    “Stand well back,” he commanded. “And be prepared to run.”
    He pointed the octiron staff at the half-sunken thing. A bolt of octarine light shot from its tip and struck the egg, exploding into a shower of sparks that left blue and purple after-images.
    There was a pause. A dozen wizards watched the egg expectantly.
    A breeze shook the willow trees in a totally unmysterious way.
    Nothing else happened.
    “Er—” Spelter began.
    And then came the first tremor. A few leaves fell out of the trees and some distant water bird took off in fright.
    The sound started as a low groaning, experienced rather than heard, as though everyone’s feet had suddenly become their ears. The trees trembled, and so did one or two wizards.
    The mud around the egg began to bubble.
    And