Equal Rites (Discworld 3)

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.

But this was no time for respectability. Pausing only to snatch her hat from its hook behind the door she scrambled up on to the staff and perched as best she could, sidesaddle of course, and with her skirts firmly gripped between her knees.

“Right,” she said. “Now wha-aaaaaaaaa -”

Across the forest animals broke and scattered as the shadow passed overhead, crying and cursing. Granny clung on with whitened knuckles, her thin legs kicking wildly as, high above the treetops, she learned important lessons about centres of gravity and air turbulence. The staff shot onwards, heedless of her yells.

By the time it had come out over the upland meadows she had come to terms with it somewhat, which meant that she could just about hang on with knees and hands provided she didn't mind being upside down. Her hat, at least, was useful, being aerodynamically shaped.

The staff plunged between black cliffs and along high bare valleys where, it was said, rivers of ice had once flowed in the days of the ice Giants. The air became thin and sharp in the throat.

They came to an abrupt halt over a snowdrift. Granny fell off, and lay panting in the snow while she tried to remember why she was going through all this.

There was a bundle of feathers under an overhang a few feet away. As Granny approached it a head rose jerkily, and the eagle glared at her with fierce, frightened eyes. It tried to fly, and toppled over. When she reached out to touch it, it took a neat triangle of flesh out of her hand.

“I see,” said Granny quietly, to no one in particular. She looked around, and found a boulder of about the right size. She disappeared behind it for a few seconds, fox the sake of respectability, and reappeared with a petticoat in her hand. The bird thrashed around, ruining several weeks of meticulous petitpoint embroidery, but she managed to bundle it up and hold it so that she could avoid its sporadic lunges.

Granny turned to the staff, which was now upright in the snowdrift.

“I shall walk back,” she told it coldly.

It turned out that they were in a spur valley overlooking a drop of several hundred feet on to sharp black rocks.

“Very well, then,” she conceded, “but you're to fly slowly, d'you understand? And no going high.”

In fact, because she was slightly more experienced and perhaps because the staff was taking more care, too, the ride back was almost sedate. Granny was almost persuaded that, given time, she could come to merely dislike flying, instead of loathing it. What it needed was some way of stopping yourself from having to look at the ground.

The eagle sprawled on the rag rug in front of the empty hearth. It had drunk some water, over which Granny had mumbled a few of the charms she normally said to impress patients, but you never knew, there might be some power in them, and it had also gulped a few strips of raw meat.

What it had not done was display the least sign of intelligence.

She wondered whether she had the right bird. She risked another pecking and stared hard into its evil orange eyes, and tried to convince herself that way down in their depths, almost beyond sight, was a strange little flicker.

She probed around inside its head. The eagle mind was still there right enough, vivid and sharp, but there was something else. Mind, of course, has no colour, but nevertheless the strands of the eagle's mind seemed to be purple. Around them and tangled among them were faint strands of silver.

Esk had learned too late that mind shapes body, that Borrowing is one thing but that the dream of truly taking on another form had its built-in penalty.

Granny sat and rocked. She was at a loss, she knew that. Unravelling the tangled minds was beyond her power, beyond any power in the Ramtops, beyond even

There was no sound, but maybe there was a change in the texture of the air. She looked up at the staff, which had been suffered to come back into the cottage.

“No,” she said firmly.

Then she thought: whose benefit did I say that for? Mine? There's power there, but it's not my kind of power.

There isn't any other kind around, though. And even now I may be too late.

I might never have been early enough.

She reached out again into the bird's head to calm its fears and dispel its panic. It allowed her to pick it up and sat awkwardly on her wrist, its talons gripping tight enough to draw blood.

Granny took the staff and made her way upstairs, to where Esk lay on the narrow bed in the low bedroom with its ancient contoured ceiling.

She made the bird perch on the bedrail and turned her attention to the staff. Once more the carvings shifted under her glare, never quite revealing their true form.

Granny was no stranger to the uses of power, but she knew she relied on gentle pressure subtly to steer the tide of things. She didn't put it like that, of course - she would have said that there was always a lever if you knew where to look. The power in the staff was harsh, fierce, the raw stuff of magic distilled out of the forces that powered the universe itself.

There would be a price. And Granny knew enough about wizardry to be certain that it would be a high one. But if you were worried about the price, then why were you in the shop?