Cutangle hesitated.
‘Well, of course not. You can’t ask us to declare her a wizard. Where’s the precedent?’
‘The what?’ asked Granny, sharply.
‘It’s never happened before.’
‘Lots of things have never happened before. We’re only born once.’
Cutangle gave her a look of mute appeal. ‘But it’s against the l—’
He began to say ‘lore’, but the word mumbled into silence.
‘Where does it say it?’ said Granny triumphantly. ‘Where does it say women can’t be wizards?’
The following thoughts sped through Cutangle’s mind:
… It doesn’t say it anywhere, it says it everywhere.
… But young Simon seemed to say that everywhere is so much like nowhere that you can’t really tell the difference.
… 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.
… She really is a rather impressive woman when she stands in that sort of way.
… That staff has got ideas of its own.
… There’s a sort of sense to it.
… I would be laughed at.
… It might not work.
… It might work.
She couldn’t trust them. But she had no choice.
Esk stared at the terrible faces peering down at her, and the lanky bodies, mercifully cloaked.
Her hands tingled.
In the shadow world, ideas are real. The thought seemed to travel up her arms.
It was a buoyant sort of thought, a thought full of fizz. She laughed, and moved her hands apart, and the staff sparkled in her hands like solid electricity.
The Things started to chitter nervously and one or two at the back started to lurch away. Simon fell forward as his captors hastily let go, and he landed on his hands and knees in the sand.
‘Use it!’ he shouted. ‘That’s it! They’re frightened!’
Esk gave him a smile, and continued to examine the staff. For the first time she could see what the carvings actually were.
Simon snatched up the pyramid of the world and ran towards her.
‘Come on!’ he said. ‘They hate it!’
‘Pardon?’ said Esk.
‘Use the staff,’ 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 towards 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 sourcery?’ 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 towards Cutangle, expectantly.
He took the smouldering 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 ashpit in this place, sometimes.’
Then he saw the staff. It was—
The only way Cutangle could describe the effect was that it seemed to be going very fast while staying in exactly the same place.
Streamers of gas flared away from it and vanished, if they were gas. It blazed like a comet designed by an inept special effects man. Coloured sparks leapt out and disappeared somewhere.
It was also changing colour, starting with a dull red and then climbing through the spectrum until it was a painful violet. Snakes of white fire coruscated along its length.
(There should be a word for words that sound like things would sound like if they made a noise, he thought. The word ‘glisten’ does indeed gleam oilily, and if there was ever a word that sounded exactly the way sparks look as they creep across burned paper, or the way lights of cities would creep across the world if the whole of human civilization was crammed into one night, then you couldn’t do better than ‘coruscate’.)