Equal Rites Part 10

Perhaps he would would be dead first. be dead first.

He very carefully wiped a nearly clean mug with his thumb and filled it from the tap. He was aware that a large number of his guests were quietly leaving. No one liked magic, especially in the hands of a woman. You never could tell what they might take it into their heads to do next.

"Your milk," he said, adding, "Miss."

"I've got some money," Esk said. Granny had always told her: always be ready to pay and you won't have to, people always like you to feel good about them, it's all headology.

"No, wouldn't dream of it," said Skiller hastily. He leaned over the bar. "If you could see, er, your way clear to turning the rest back, though? Not much call for milk in these parts."

He sidled along a little way. Esk had leaned the staff against the bar while she drank her milk, and it was making him uncomfortable.

Esk looked at him over a mustache of cream.

"I didn't turn it into milk, I just knew it would be milk because I wanted milk," she said. "What did you think it was?"

"Er. Beer."

Esk thought about this. She vaguely remembered trying beer once, and it had tasted sort of secondhand. But she could recall something which everyone in Bad a.s.s 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.

She concentrated. She could picture the taste in her mind, and with the little skills that she was beginning to accept but couldn't understand she found she could take the taste apart into little colored shapes...

Skiller's thin wife came out of their back room to see why it had all gone so quiet, and he waved her into shocked silence as Esk stood swaying very slightly with her eyes closed and her lips moving.

...little shapes that you didn't need went back into the great pool of shapes, and then you found the extra ones you needed and put them together, and then there was a sort of hook thing which meant that they would turn anything suitable into something just like them, and then...

Skiller turned very carefully and regarded the barrel behind him. The smell of the room had changed, he could feel the pure gold sweating gently out of that ancient woodwork.

With some care he took a small gla.s.s from his store under the counter and let a few splashes of the dark golden liquid escape from the tap. He looked at it thoughtfully in the lamplight, turned the gla.s.s around methodically, sniffed it a few times, and tossed its contents back in one swallow.

His face remained unchanged, although his eyes went moist and his throat wobbled somewhat. His wife and Esk watched him as a thin beading of sweat broke out on his forehead. Ten seconds pa.s.sed, and he was obviously out to break some heroic record. There may have been steam curling out of his ears, but that could have been a rumor. His fingers drummed a strange tattoo on the bartop.

At last he swallowed, appeared to reach a decision, turned solemnly to Esk, and said, "Hwarl, ish gnish saaarghs ishghs oorgsh?"

His brow wrinkled as he ran the sentence past his mind again and made a second attempt.

"Aargh argh shaah gok?"

He gave up.

"Bharrgsh nargh!"

His wife snorted and took the gla.s.s out of his unprotesting hand. She sniffed it. She looked at the barrels, all ten of them. She met his unsteady eye. 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.

Mrs. Skiller was quicker on the uptake than her husband. She bent down and smiled at Esk, who was too tired to squint back. It wasn't a particularly good smile, because Mrs. Skiller didn't get much practice.

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

"I got lost from Granny."

"And where's Granny now, dear?" Clang went the oven doors again; it was going to be a tough night for all wanderers in metaphorical forests.

"Just somewhere, I expect."

"Would you like to go to sleep in a big feather bed, all nice and warm?"

Esk looked at her gratefully, even while vaguely realizing that the woman had a face just like an eager ferret, and nodded.

You're right. It's going to take more than a pa.s.sing wood-chopper to sort this this out. out.

Granny, meanwhile, was two streets away. She was also, by the standards of other people, lost. She would not see it like that. She knew where she was, it was just that everywhere else didn't.

It has already been mentioned that it is much harder to detect a human mind than, say, the mind of a fox. The human mind, seeing this as some kind of a slur, wants to know why. This is why.

Animal minds are simple, and therefore sharp. Animals never spend time dividing experience into little bits and speculating about all the bits they've missed. The whole panoply of the universe has been neatly expressed to them as things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks. This frees the mind from unnecessary thoughts and gives it a cutting edge where it matters. Your normal animal, in fact, never tries to walk and chew gum at the same time.

The average human, on the other hand, thinks about all sorts of things around the clock, on all sorts of levels, with interruptions from dozens of biological calendars and time-pieces. There's thoughts about to be said, and private thoughts, and real thoughts, and thoughts about thoughts, and a whole gamut of subconscious thoughts. 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, trying to locate Esk by mind magic alone, was trying to find a straw in a haystack.

She was not succeeding, but enough blips of sense reached her through the heterodyne wails of a thousand brains all thinking at once to convince her that the world was, indeed, as silly as she had always believed it was.

She met Hilta at the corner of the street. She was carrying her broomstick, the better to conduct an aerial search (with great stealth, however; the men of Ohulan were right behind Stay Long Ointment but drew the line at flying women). She was distraught.

"Not so much as a hint of her," said Granny.

"Have you been down to the river? She might have fallen in!"

"Then she'd have just fallen out again. Anyway, she can swim. I think she's hiding, drat her."

"What are we going to do?"

Granny gave her a withering look. "Hilta Goatfounder, I'm ashamed of you, acting like a cowin. Do I look worried?"

Hilta peered at her.

"You do. A bit. Your lips have gone all thin."

"I'm just angry, that's all."

"Gypsies always come here for the fair, they might have taken her."

Granny was prepared to believe anything about city folk but here she was on firmer ground.

"Then they're a lot dafter than I'd give them credit for," she snapped. "Look, she's got the staff."

"What good would that do?" said Hilta, who was close to tears.

"I don't think you've understood anything I've told you," said Granny severely. "All we need to do is go back to your place and wait."

"What for?"

"The screams or the bangs or the fireb.a.l.l.s or whatever," Granny said vaguely.

"That's heartless!"

"Oh, I expect they've got it coming to them. Come on, you go on ahead and put the kettle on."

Hilta gave her a mystified look, then climbed on her broom and rose slowly and erratically into the shadows among the chimneys. If broomsticks were cars, this one would be a split-window Morris Minor.

Granny watched her go, then stumped along the wet streets after her. She was determined that they wouldn't get her up in one of those things.

Esk lay in the big, fluffy and slightly damp sheets of the spare bed in the attic room of the Riddle. She was tired, but couldn't sleep. The bed was too chilly, for one thing. She wondered uneasily if she dared try to warm it up, but thought better of it. 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 fireb.a.l.l.s; 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 turned over and tried to ignore the bed's faint smell of mushrooms. Then she reached out in the darkness until her hand found the staff, propped against the bedhead. Mrs. Skiller had been quite insistent about taking it downstairs, but Esk had hung on like grim death. It was the only thing in the world she was absolutely certain belonged to her.

The varnished surface with its strange carvings felt oddly comforting. Esk went to sleep, and dreamed bangles, and strange packages, and mountains. And distant stars above the mountains, and a cold desert where strange creatures lurched across the dry sand and stared at her through insect eyes...

There was a creak on the stairs. Then another. Then a silence, the sort of choking, furry silence made by someone standing as still as possible.

The door swung open. Skiller made a blacker shadow against the candlelight on the stairs, and there was a faintly whispered conversation before he tiptoed as silently as he could toward the bedhead. The staff slipped sideways as his first cautious grope dislodged it, but he caught it quickly and let his breath out very slowly.

So he hardly had enough left to scream with when the staff moved moved in his hands. He felt the scaliness, the coil and muscle of it... in his hands. He felt the scaliness, the coil and muscle of it...

Esk sat bolt upright in time to see Skiller roll backward down the steep stairladder, still flailing desperately at something quite invisible that coiled around his arms. There was another scream from below as he landed on his wife.

The staff clattered to the floor and lay surrounded by a faint octarine glow.

Esk got out of the bed and padded across the floor. There was a terrible cursing; it sounded unhealthy. She peered around the door and looked down on the face of Mrs. Skiller.

"Give me that staff!"

Esk reached down behind her and gripped the polished wood. "No," she said. "It's mine."

"It's not the right sort of thing for little girls," snapped the barman's wife.

"It belongs to me," said Esk, and quietly closed the door. She listened for a moment to the muttering from below and tried to think of what to do next. Turning the couple into something would probably only cause a fuss and, anyway, she wasn't quite certain how to do it.

The fact was the magic only really worked when she wasn't thinking about it. Her mind seemed to get in the way.

She padded across the room and pushed open the tiny window. The strange nighttime smells of civilization drifted in-the damp smell of streets, the fragrance of garden flowers, the distant hint of an overloaded privy. There were wet tiles outside.

As Skiller started back up the stairs she pushed the staff out on to the roof and crawled after it, steadying herself on the carvings above the window. The roof dipped down to an outhouse and she managed to stay at least vaguely upright as she half-slid, half-scrambled down the uneven tiles. A six-foot drop on to a stack of old barrels, a quick scramble down the slippery wood, and she was trotting easily across the inn yard.

As she kicked up the street mists she could hear the sounds of argument coming from the Riddle.

Skiller rushed past his wife and laid a hand on the tap of the nearest barrel. He paused, and then wrenched it open.

The smell of peach brandy filled the room, sharp as knives. He shut off the flow and relaxed.

"Afraid it would turn into something nasty?" asked his wife. He nodded.

"If you hadn't been so clumsy-" she began.

"I tell you it bit me!"

"You could have been a wizard and we wouldn't have to bother with all this. Have you got no ambition ambition?"

Skiller shook his head. "I reckon it takes more than a staff to make a wizard," he said. "Anyway, I heard where it said wizards aren't allowed to get married, they're not even allowed to-" He hesitated.

"To what? Allowed to what?"

Skiller writhed. "Well. You know. Thing."

"I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about," said Mrs. Skiller briskly.

"No, I suppose not."

He followed her reluctantly out of the darkened barroom. It seemed to him that perhaps wizards didn't have such a bad life, at that.

He was proved right when the following morning revealed that the ten barrels of peach brandy had, indeed, turned into something nasty.

Esk wandered aimlessly through the gray streets until she reached Ohulan's tiny river docks. Broad flat-bottomed barges bobbed gently against the wharves, and one or two of them curled wisps of smoke from friendly stovepipes. Esk clambered easily on to the nearest, and used the staff to lever up the oilcloth that covered most of it.

A warm smell, a mixture of lanolin and midden, drifted up. The barge was laden with wool.

It's silly to go to sleep on an unknown barge, not knowing what strange cliffs may be drifting past when you awake, not knowing that bargees traditionally get an early start (setting out before the sun is barely up), not knowing what new horizons might greet one on the morrow...

You know that. Esk didn't.