Equal Rites

Terry Pratchett

Summary

"There's no such thing as a female wizard!"

But on the Discworld, a flat realm carried by four elephants riding on the back of a giant turtle, there's also no such thing as impossible. And so, a wizard on the brink of death tries to pass on his staff and powers to an eighth son of an eighth son who is just at that moment being born in the little town of Bad Ass. The fact that the son is actually a daughter is discovered just a little too late.

Granny Weatherwax, the town witch, insists on turning Eskarina into a perfectly normal witch, thus mending the magical damage of the wizard's mistake. But the wizard's staff has a whole different future in mind for Esk -- a future which requires the young female wizard/witch to penetrate the inner sanctum of the Unseen University.

Having accomplished this, she can then attempt to save the world with one well-placed kick in some enchanted shins...

Quotes

I would like it to be clearly understood that this book is not wacky. Only dumb redheads in Fifties' sitcoms are wacky.

-- The author makes his intentions clear

...this is also a story about sex, although probably not in the athletic, tumbling, count-the-number-of-legs-and-divide-by-two sense unless the characters get totally beyond the author's control. They might.

It wasn't a large village, and wouldn't have shown up on a map of the mountains. It barely showed up on a map of the village.

Often there is no more than a little plaque to reveal that, against all gynaecological probability, someone very famous was born halfway up a wall.

The midwife's name was Granny Weatherwax. She was a witch. That was quite acceptable in the Ramtops, and no one had a bad word to say about witches. At least, not if he wanted to wake up in the morning the same shape as he went to bed.

Smith: "Do you know how wizards like to be buried?"
Granny Weatherwax: "Yes!"
Smith: "Well, how?"
Granny Weatherwax: "Reluctantly."

It was true that the girl spent more time climbing trees and running around shouting than little girls normally did, but a girl with four older brothers still at home can be excused a lot of things.

"If you don't want me to come then I'll come," [Esk] said. This sort of thing passes for logic among siblings.

In the summer [the cottage] was surrounded by dense beds of what Granny loosely called "the Herbs" ... Only Granny knew what they were all for, and any wood-pigeon hungry enough to attack them generally emerged giggling to itself and bumping into things (or, sometimes, never emerged at all).

...an ordinary privy held minor terrors like wasps' nests, large spiders, mysterious rustling things in the roof and, one very bad winter, a small hibernating bear that caused acute constipation in the family until it was persuaded to bed down in the haybarn.

"Is she dead?" asked Gulta, as if Esk was an expert in these things.

[Granny] understood babies. You put milk in one and and kept the other end as clean as possible. Adults were even easier, because they did the feeding and cleaning themselves.

"Um," said Smith, not quite aware of how to begin a conversation with someone who was supposed to be dead.

"If a thing's worth doing, it's worth doing badly," said Granny, fleeing into aphorisms, the last refuge of an adult under siege.

Well? Who says women can't be wizards?

Granny hesitated. The tree might as well have asked why fish couldn't be birds. ... She knew a cutting, incisive, withering and above all a self-evident answer existed. It was just that, to her extreme annoyance, she couldn't quite bring it to mind.

Esk: "But they've got to have names! Everything's got a name."
Granny Weatherwax: "I daresay they've got names in Goat. What do they want names in Human for?"

Goats did have names for themselves, she well knew; there was "goat who is my kid," "goat who is my mother," "goat who is herd leader," and half a dozen other names not least of which was "goat who is this goat." They had a complicated herd system and four stomachs and a digestive system that sounded very busy on still nights, and Granny had always felt that calling all this names like Buttercup was an insult to a noble animal.

In the Ramtops witches were accorded a status similar to that which other cultures gave to nuns, or tax collectors, or cesspit cleaners. That is to say, they were respected, sometimes admired, generally applauded for doing a job which logically had to be done, but people never felt quite comfortable in the same room with them.

"Magic can be a sort of door, and there are unpleasant Things on the other side. Do you understand?"

The smith nodded. He didn't really understand, but he correctly surmised that if he revealed this fact Granny would start going into horrible details.

"If you can't learn to ride an elephant, you can at least learn to ride a horse."

"What's an elephant?"

"A kind of badger," said Granny. She hadn't maintained forest-credibility for forty years by ever admitting ignorance.

Granny Weatherwax: "That's one form of magic, of course."
Esk: "What, just knowing things?"
Granny Weatherwax: "Knowing things that other people don't know."

Esk: "It's a witch's hat because you wear it. But you're a witch because you wear the hat. Um."
Granny Weatherwax: "So--"
Esk: "So people see you coming in the hat and the cloak and they know you're a witch and that's why your magic works?"
Granny Weatherwax: "That's right. It's called headology."

"You're a bit young for this," she said, "but as you grow older you'll find most people don't set foot outside their own heads much."

"Hoki?"

Granny chewed a crustless sandwich. "Oh, he's a nature god," she said. "Sometimes he manifests himself as an oak tree, or half a man and half a goat, but mainly I see him in his aspect as a bloody nuisance."

On the way home Granny met a hungry bear. Granny's back was giving her gyp, and she was in no mood to be growled at. She muttered a few words under her breath and the bear, to its brief amazement, walked heavily into a tree and didn't regain consciousness for several hours.

"Men's minds work different from ours, see. Their magic's all numbers and angles and edges and what the stars are doing, as if that really mattered. It's all power. It's all--" Granny paused, and dredged up her favourite word to describe all she despised in wizardry, "--jommetry."

"I command you to take me to her!"

The staff regarded her woodenly.

"By--" Granny paused, her invocations were a little rusty, "--by stock and stone I order it!"

Activity, movement, liveliness -- all these words would be completely inaccurate descriptions of the staff's response.

Granny had heard that broomsticks were once again very much the fashion among younger witches, but she didn't hold with it. There was no way a body could look respectable while hurtling through the air aboard a household implement. Besides, it looked decidedly draughty.

"They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it is not; one half so bad as a lot of ignorance."

They peered up at their sister with a mixture of fascination and scorn. Witches and wizards were objects of awe, but sisters weren't. Somehow, knowing your own sister was learning to be a witch sort of devalued the whole profession.

[Esk] loved her brothers, when she reminded herself to, in a dutiful sort of way, although she generally remembered them as a collection of loud noises in trousers.

Esk gazed down defiantly. Granny glared up sternly. Their wills clanged like cymbals and the air between them thickened. But Granny had spent a lifetime bending recalcitrant creatures to her bidding and, while Esk was a surprisingly strong opponent, it was obvious that she would give in before the end of the paragraph.

"You said there was some sort of teaching place?" he hazarded.

"The Unseen University, yes. It's for training wizards."

"And you know where it is?"

"Yes," lied Granny, whose grasp of geography was slightly worse than her knowledge of subatomic physics.

Unlike Granny, who dressed like a very respectable raven, Hilta Goatfounder was all lace and shawls and colours and earrings and so many bangles that a mere movement of her arms sounded like a percussion section falling off a cliff.

Hilta: "...it will be a very strange journey. You'll go a long way while staying in the same place. And the direction will be a strange one. It will be an exploration."
Esk: "You can tell all that from my hand?"
Hilta: "Well, mainly I'm just guessing."

Granny had warned [Esk] at length about the unspeakable things that lurked in cities, which showed that the old woman was lacking in a complete understanding of headology, since Esk was now determined to see one or two of them for herself.

There was, for example, the man with three upturned cups who was inviting a small crowd to explore with him the exciting world of chance and probability as it related to the position of a small dried pea. He was vaguely aware of a small figure watching him solemnly for a few moments, and then a sackful of peas cascaded out of every cup he picked up. Within seconds he was knee-deep in legumes. He was a lot deeper in trouble as he suddenly owed everyone a lot of money.

Esk, in fact, moved through the fair more like an arsonist moves through a hayfield or a neutron bounces through a reactor, poets notwithstanding, and the hypothetical watcher could have detected her random passage by tracing the outbreaks of hysteria and violence.

"What?" he said.

"Milk," said the child, still focusing furiously. "You get it out of goats. You know?"

Skiller sold only beer, which his customers claimed he got out of cats.

...[Esk] could recall something which everyone in Bad Ass reckoned was much better than beer. It was one of Granny's most guarded recipes. It was good for you, because there was only fruit in it, plus lots of freezing and boiling and careful testing of little drops with a lighted flame.

Granny would put a very small spoonful in her milk if it was a really cold night. It had to be a wooden spoon, on account of what it did to metal.

In a private paradise for two they soundlessly calculated the selling price of six hundred gallons of triple-distilled white mountain peach brandy and ran out of numbers.

"How did you get here, little girl?" she said, in a voice that suggested gingerbread cottages and the slamming of big stove doors.

The whole panoply of the universe has been neatly expressed to [animals] as things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks.

To a telepath the human head is a din. It is a railway terminus with all the Tannoys talking at once. It is a complete FM waveband - and some of those stations aren't reputable, they're outlawed pirates on forbidden seas who play late-night records with limbic lyrics.

Granny Weatherwax: "All we need to do is go back to your place and wait."
Hilta: "What for?"
Granny Weatherwax: "The screams or the bangs or the fireballs or whatever."

If broomsticks were cars, this one would be a splitwindow Morris Minor.

She couldn't seem to get the hang of fire spells, no matter how carefully she experimented. They either didn't work at all or worked only too well. The woods around the cottage were becoming treacherous with the holes left by disappearing fireballs; at least, if the wizardry thing didn't work then Granny said she'd have a fine future as a privy builder or well sinker.

She padded across the room and pushed open the tiny window. The strange night-time smells of civilization drifted in -- the damp smell of streets, the fragrance of garden flowers, the distant hint of an overloaded privy.

It didn't occur to her to start worrying. For the first eight years of her life the world had been a particularly boring place and now that it was becoming interesting Esk wasn't about to act ungrateful.

He had the kind of real deep tan that rich people spend ages trying to achieve with expensive holidays and bits of tinfoil, when really all you need to do to obtain one is work your arse off in the open air every day.

"If you were a boy I'd say are you going to seek your fortune?"

"Can't girls seek their fortune?"

"I think they're supposed to seek a boy with a fortune."

"I'd actually like to use your privy," she said. His mouth dropped open.

"This is a barge, yesno?"

"Yes?"

"That means there's only the river." He patted her hand. "Don't worry," he added. "It's quite used to it."

Hilta: "You're going to walk after her? But there's forests and wild animals!"
Granny Weatherwax: "Good. I could do with getting back to civilisation."

The Zoons had neverheard about a euphemism, and wouldn't understand what to do with it if they had one, except that they would certainly have called it "a nice way of saying something nasty."

It must be understood that while the majority of Zoon cannot lie they have great respect for any Zoon who can say that the world is other than it is, and the Liar holds a position of considerable eminence. He represents his tribe in all his dealings with the outside world, which the average Zoon long ago gave up trying to understand. Zoon tribes are very proud of their Liars.

Other races get very annoyed about all this. They feel the Zoon ought to have adopted more suitable titles, like "diplomat" or "public relations officer."

...[Esk] was already learning that if you ignore the rules people will, half the time, quietly rewrite them so that they don't apply to you.

...it is well known that a vital ingredient of success is not knowing that what you're attempting can't be done.

One reason for the bustle was that over large parts of the continent other people preferred to make money without working at all, and since the Disc had yet to develop a music recording industry they were forced to fall back on older, more traditional forms of banditry.

Wizards parted with money slightly less readily than tigers parted with their teeth.

...[Gander] had to admit that this boy looked like good wizard material. In other words, he was thin, gangling, pale from reading disturbing books in unhealthy rooms, and had watery eyes like two lightly-poached eggs.

Gander: "Why are you holding that broomstick?"
Esk: "Everything's got to be somewhere."

The dwarf halls rang to the sound of hammers, although mainly for effect. Dwarves found it hard to think without the sound of hammers, which they found soothing, so well-off dwarves in the clerical professions paid goblins to hit small ceremonial anvils, just to maintain the correct dwarvish image.

Eventually he kicked the bristles and gave a long intake of breath, a sort of reverse whistle, which is the secret sign of craftsmen across the universe and means that something expensive is about to happen.

Still, it was a relief to get away from that macabre sight. Gander considered that gnolls didn't look any better inside than out. He hated their guts.

[Simon] was one of those tall lads apparently made out of knees, thumbs and elbows. Watching him walk was a strain, you kept waiting for the strings to snap, and when he talked the spasm of agony on his face if he spotted an S or W looming ahead in the sentence made people instinctively say them for him. It was worth it for the grateful look which spread across his acned face like sunrise on the moon.

Simon shook his head. It looked touch and go whether it would fall off.

[Treatle] was the Vice-Chancellor of Unseen University, and quite used to seeing vague scurrying figures getting on with essential but unimportant jobs like serving his meals and dusting his rooms.

There are things so horrible that even the dark is afraid of them.

Most people don't know this and this is just as well because the world could not really operate if everyone stayed in bed with the blankets over their head...

"Granny," said Esk, in the exasperated and remarkably adult voice children use to berate their wayward elders. "I don't think you quite understand. I don't want to hit the ground. It's never done anything to me."

It was really quite a short trip but one that Granny knew she would always remember, generally around three o'clock in the morning after eating rich food.

...[Granny] was opposed to books on strict moral grounds, since she had heard that many of them were written by dead people and therefore it stood to reason reading them would be as bad as necromancy.

The air around them reeked of incense and grain and spices and beer, but mainly of the sort of smell that was caused by a high water-table, thousands of people, and a robust approach to sewage.

Esk: "I can't see how people get in."
Granny Weatherwax: "Magic, I expect. That's wizards for you. Anyone else would have bought a doorknocker."

[Granny] had found them lodgings in The Shades, an ancient part of the city whose inhabitants were largely nocturnal and never enquired about one another's business because curiousity not only killed the cat but threw it in the river with weights tied to its feet.

The lodgings were on the top floor next to the well-guarded premises of a respectable dealer in stolen property because, as Granny had heard, good fences make good neighbors.

...Granny was even wondering about the possibility of acquiring slightly larger premises with a bit of garden and sending for her goats. The smell might be a problem, but the goats would just have to put up with it.

...the [Thieves'] Guild was given an annual quota which represented a socially acceptable level of thefts, muggings and assassinations, and in return saw to it in very definite and final ways that unofficial crime was not only rapidly stamped out but knifed, garrotted, dismembered and left around the city in an assortment of paper bags as well.

Simon: "Can't you read, Esk?"
Esk: "I expect so. I've never tried."

He led the way up a broad flight of steps to an impressive pair of doors. At least, they were designed to be impressive. The designer had invested deeply in heavy locks, curly hinges, brass studs and an intricately-carved archway to make it absolutely clear to anyone entering that they were not very important people at all.

There were other-Things-behind them, and more were appearing all the time. They had no shape, or rather they seemed to be taking their shapes at random from a variety of creatures; they gave the impression that they had heard about arms and legs and jaws and claws and organs but didn't really know how they all fitted together. Or didn't care.

Sometimes wizards were thin and gaunt and talked to animals (the animals didn't listen, but it's the thought that counts)

The great doors of Unseen University are made of octiron, a metal so unstable that it can only exist in a universe saturated with raw magic. They are impregnable to all force save magic: no fire, no battering ram, no army can breach them.

Which is why most ordinary visitors to the University use the back door, which is made of perfectly normal wood and doesn't go around terrorising people, or even stand still terrorising people.

"Hmmm. Granpone the White. He's going to be Granpone the Grey if he doesn't take better care of his laundry."

The witchmarks on the doorpost had said that the housekeeper welcomed witches and was particularly anxious for news of her four husbands; she was also in random pursuit of a fifth, hence the ginger wig and, if Granny's ears weren't deceiving her, the creak of enough whalebone to infuriate an entire ecology movement.

The room inside was pink and frilly. There were frills on things that no one in their right mind would frill.

Granny had some quite complex theories about space and time and why they shouldn't be tinkered with, but fortunately good fortune-tellers were rare and anyway people preferred bad fortune-tellers, who could be relied upon for the correct dose of uplift and optimism.

Mrs. Whitlow was giving her the sort of look generally used by puppies when they're not sure what to expect next, and are beginning to worry that it may be the rolled-up newspaper.

From stone's point of view the universe is hardly created and mountain ranges are bouncing up and down like organ-stops while continents zip backwards and forwards in general high spirits, crashing into each other from the sheer joy of momentum and getting their rocks off. It is going to be quite some time before stone notices its disfiguring little skin disease and starts to scratch, which is just as well.

The trouble with Borrowing another mind was, you always felt out of place when you got back to your own body, and Granny was the first person ever to read the mind of a building. Now she was feeling big and gritty and full of passages.

Granny wasn't sure she approved of silk, she'd heard it came out of a caterpillar's bottom...

Esk: "Who's [the potion] for?"
Granny Weatherwax: "Mrs. Herapath, the glassblower's wife."
Esk: "He's the one who doesn't blow much glass, isn't he?"
Granny Weatherwax: "How do you mean?"
Esk: "When she was talking to you yesterday she called him Old Mister Once A Fortnight."

Granny suffered from robustly healthy teeth, which she considered a big drawback in a witch. She really envied Nanny Annaple, the witch over the mountain, who managed to lose all her teeth by the time she was twenty and had real crone-credibility.

[F]ossils were well-known on the Discworld, great spiralled shells and badly-constructed creatures that were left over from the time when the Creator hadn't really decided what He wanted to make and was, as it were, just idly messing around with the Pleistocene.

Magic had no mercy on the ham-fisted. Some clumsy students were lucky enough to walk out, others were removed in bottles.

Phrases filtered down to her hiding place. "Basic fabric of the universe" was one, and she didn't understand what that was, unless he meant denim, or maybe flanelette.

It's a fact known throughout the universes that no matter how carefully the colours are chosen, institutional decor ends up as either vomit green, unmentionable brown, nicotine yellow or surgical appliance pink.

"City folks are always worried about the future, it comes from eating unnatural food."

One such accident had turned the librarian into an ape; since then he had hresisted all attempts to turn him back, explaining in sign language that life as an orang-outan was considerably better than life as a human being, because all the big philosophical questions resolved themselves into wondering where the next banana was coming from.

It seemed logical to Esk that among all these books should be one that told you how to read all the others. She wasn't sure how to find it, but deep in her soul she felt it would probably have pictures of cheerful rabbits and happy kittens on the cover.

Simon: "Hallo! Esk, isn't it? H-how d-did you get h-here?"
Esk: "Granny won't tell me. I think it's something to do with men and women."

Esk put her fingers in her ears, but not too hard in case she missed anything.

Simon: "They do say the pen is mightier than the sss--"
Esk: "--sword. All right, but which would you rather be hit with?"

"I look at it all like this," [Cutangle] said. "Before I heard him talk, I was like everyone else. You know what I mean? I was confused and uncertain about all the little details in life. But now," he brightened up, "while I'm still confused and uncertain, it's on a much higher plane, d'you see, and at least I know I'm bewildered about the really fundamental and important facts of the universe."

Treatle nodded. "I hadn't looked at it like that," he said, "But you're absolutely right. He's really pushed back the boundaries of ignorance."

They both savoured the strange warm glow of being much more ignorant than ordinary people, who were only ignorant of ordinary things.

And thus it was that while the entire faculty of Unseen University were dining in the venerable hall the doors were flung back with a dramatic effect that was rather spoiled when one of them rebounded off a waiter and caught Granny a crack on the shin.

Two of them reached out hairy hands and grabbed Granny's shoulders. Her arm disappeared behind her back and there was a brief flurry of movement that ended with the men hopping away, clutching bits of themselves and swearing.

"Hatpin," said Granny.

Cutangle stood with legs planted wide apart, arms akimbo and stomach giving the impression of a beginners' ski slope, the whole of him therefore adopting a pose usually associated with Henry VII but with an option on Henry IX and X as well.

"You're wizards!" she screamed. "Bloody well wizz!"

Beams of blue light lanced out into the corridor, moving and dancing as indistinct shapes shuffled through the blinding brilliance inside the room. The light was misty and actinic, the sort of light to make Steven Spielberg reach for his copyright lawyer.

She had heard it said that if you could look far enough into the direction that Great A'Tuin was staring, you would see the end of the universe. Maybe it was just the set of its beak, but Great A'Tuin looked vaguely hopeful, even optimistic. Perhaps the end of everything wasn't as bad as all that.

The whole thing had a selfassembled look, as if the owner had heard about anatomy but couldn't quite get to grips with the idea.

You're not really here, Esk told herself. It's only a sort of dream, what Granny calls an annaloggy. You can't really be hurt, it's all imagination. There is absolutely no harm that can come to you, it's all really inside your mind.

I wonder if it knows that?

The Thing lurched uncertainly above her. Esk's eyes narrowed. She put the world down very carefully, hit the Thing very hard around the point where its shins would be, if there were shins under that cloak, and picked up the world again in one neat movement.

She hit one, which had a face like a small family of squid, and it deflated into a pile of twitching bones and bits of fur and odd ends of tentacle, very much like a Greek meal.

They may have been ugly. they may have been evil. But when it came to poetry in motion, the Things had all the grace and coordination of a deck-chair.

Somebody laughed. It was the sort of laugh--

Basically, it was p'ch'zarni'chiwkov. This epiglottis-throttling word is seldom used on the Disc except by highly-paid stunt linguists and, of course, the tiny tribe of the K'turni, who invented it. It has no direct synonym, although the Cumhoolie word "squernt" ("the feeling upon finding that the previous occupant of the privy has used all the paper") begins to approach it in general depth of feeling.

"We could say that if you gave it to us we would be merciful. We could say we would let you go from here in your own shape. But there wouldn't really be much point in us saying that, would there?"

"I wouldn't believe you," said Esk.

"Well, then."

Esk looked at the ring of faces that not even a necrophile could love, faces put together from a fishmonger's midden, faces picked randomly from things that lurked in deep ocean holes and haunted caves, faces that were not human enough to gloat or leer but had all the menace of a suspiciously v-shaped ripple near an incautious bather.

"And where is this staff now?"

"She said she threw it in the river..."

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 gripped her brookstick purposefully.

"Million-to-one chances," she said, "crop up nine times out of ten."

There was the sound of a heavy body blundering wetly into a bush, and then a splash.

"I've found the river, anyway."

Cutangle: "You don't know anything about boats!"
Granny Weatherwax: "I shall have to learn quickly, then."

Cutangle: "I never liked the ocean. It ought to be paved over. There's dreadful things in it, down in the deep bits. Ghastly sea monsters. Or so they say."
Granny Weatherwax: "Keep baling, my lad, or you'll be able to see if they're right."

[Cutangle's] robes were freezing on him. His teeth chattered.

"Aren't you cold?" he said to Granny, whose dress fairly crackled as she walked.

"I'm cold," she conceded, "I just ain't shivering."

...direct levitation is the hardest of the practical magics because of the ever-present danger of the well-known principles of action and reaction, which means that a wizard attempting to lift a heavy item by mind power alone faces the prospects of ending up with his brains in his boots.

Cutangle: "This is the first time I have ever ridden on a broomstick."
Granny Weatherwax: "Really."
Cutangle: "I thought you just had to get on them and they flew. I didn't know you had to do all that running up and down and shouting at them."
Granny Weatherwax: "It's a knack."
Cutangle: "I thought they went faster. And, to be frank, higher."
Granny Weatherwax: "What do you mean, higher?"
Cutangle: "Well, more sort of above the trees."

Granny Weatherwax: "When I said hold on--"
Cutangle: "Yes?"
Granny Weatherwax: "I didn't mean there."
Cutangle: "Oh. Yes. I see. I'm terribly sorry."
Granny Weatherwax: "That's all right."
Cutangle: "My memory isn't what it was... I assure you... no offence meant."
Granny Weatherwax: "None taken. ...Nevertheless, I think that, on the whole, I would prefer you to move your hands."

It had the distinct texture of authentic Aknh water -- too stiff to drink, too runny to plough.

Cutangle: "Don't stand there, idiot!" Treatle: "I've got to stand somewhere."

There was another brilliant flash of lightning, which shows that even the weather gods have a well-developed sense of theatre.

The Library was full of wizards, who care about their books in the same way that ants care about their eggs and in time of difficulty carry them around in much the same way.

Granny had never seen an orang-outan before, but wasn't about to admit it, and remained quite calm in the face of a small potbellied man with extremely long arms and a size 12 skin on a size 8 body.

Cutangle: "I've been thinking. Surely it would be better to give the staff to Simon? He is a wizard, and--"
Granny Weatherwax: "Over my dead body. Yours, too."

Cutangle: "It's never happened before."
Granny Weatherwax: "Lots of things have never happened before. We're only born once."

...Do I want to be remembered as the first Archchancellor to allow women into the University? Still... I'd be remembered, that's for sure .

"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!"

It blazed like a comet designed by an inept special effects man.

"They say," she said, "that if you can find an ant on Hogswatch Day it will be very mild for the rest of the winter."

"Who says that?" said Cutangle.

"Generally people who are wrong," said Granny.

Esk and Simon went on to develop a whole new type of magic that no one could exactly understand but which nevertheless everyone considered very worthwhile and somehow comforting.