Witches Abroad (Discworld 12)

Granny disapproved of magic for domestic purposes, but she was annoyed. She also wanted her tea.

She threw a couple of logs into the fireplace and glared at them until they burst into flame out of sheer embarrassment.

It was then that her eye was caught by the shrouded mirror.

'Coverin' it over?' she murmured. 'I didn't know old Desiderata was frightened of thunderstorms.'

She twitched aside the cloth.

She stared.

Very few people in the world had more self-control than Granny Weatherwax. It was as rigid as a bar of cast iron. And about as flexible.

She smashed the mirror.

Lilith sat bolt upright in her tower of mirrors. Her?

The face was different, of course. Older. It had been a long time. But eyes don't change, and witches always look at the eyes.

Her!

Magrat Garlick, witch, was also standing in front of a mirror. In her case it was totally unmagical. It was also still in one piece, but there had been one or two close calls.

She frowned at her reflection, and then consulted the small, cheaply-woodcut leaflet that had arrived the previous day.

She mouthed a few words under her breath, straightened up, extended her hands in front of her, punched the air vigorously and said: 'HAAAAiiiiieeeeeeehgh! Um.'

Magrat would be the first to admit that she had an open mind. It was as open as a field, as open as the sky. No mind could be more open widiout special surgical implements. And she was always waiting for something to fill it up.

What it was currently filling up with was the search for inner peace and cosmic harmony and the true essence of Being.

When people say 'An idea came to me' it isn't just a metaphor. Raw inspirations, tiny particles of self-contained thought, are sleeting through the cosmos all the time. They get drawn to heads like Magrat's in the same way that water runs into a hole in the desert.

It was all due to her mother's lack of attention to spelling, she speculated. A caring parent would have spelled Margaret correctly. And then she could have been a Peggy, or a Maggie - big, robust names, full of reliability. There wasn't much you could do with a Magrat. It sounded like something that lived in a hole in a river bank and was always getting flooded out.

She considered changing it, but knew in her secret heart that this would not work. Even if she became a Chloe or an Isobel on top she'd still be a Magrat underneath.

But it would be nice to try. It'd be nice not to be a Magrat, even for a few hours.

It's thoughts like this that start people on the road to Finding Themselves. And one of the earliest things Magrat had learned was that anyone Finding Themselves would be unwise to tell Granny Weatherwax, who thought that female emancipation was a women's complaint that shouldn't be discussed in front of men.

Nanny Ogg was more sympathetic but had a tendency to come out with what Magrat thought of as double-intenders, although in Nanny Ogg's case they were generally single entendres and proud of it.

In short, Magrat had despaired of learning anything at all from her senior witches, and was casting her net further afield. Much further afield. About as far afield as a field could be.

It's a strange thing about determined seekers-after-wisdom that, no matter where they happen to be, they'll always seek that wisdom which is a long way off. Wisdom is one of the few things that looks bigger the further away it is.*

* Hence, for example, the Way of Mrs Cosmopolite, very popular among young people who live in the hidden valleys above the snowline in the high Ramtops. Disdaining the utterances of their own saffron-clad, prayer-wheel-spinning elders, they occasionally travel all the way to No. 3 Quirm Street in flat and foggy Ankh-Morpork, to seek wisdom at the feet of Mrs Marietta Cosmopolite, a seamstress. No-one knows the reason for this apart from the aforesaid attractiveness of distant wisdom, since they can't understand a word she says or, more usually, screams at them. Many a bald young monk returns to his high fastness to meditate on the strange mantra vouchsafed to him, such as 'Push off you!' and 'If I see one more of you little orange devils peering in at me he'll feel the edge of my hand, all right?' and 'Why are you buggers all coming round here staring at my feet?' They have even developed a special branch of martial arts based on their experiences, where they shout incomprehensibly at one another and then hit their opponent with a broom.

Currently Magrat was finding herself through the Path of The Scorpion, which offered cosmic harmony, inner one-ness and the possibility of knocking an attacker's kidneys out through his ears. She'd sent off for it.

There were problems. The author, Grand Master Lobsang Dibbler, had an address in Ankh-Morpork. This did not seem like a likely seat of cosmic wisdom. Also, although he'd put in lots of stuff about the Way not being used for aggression and only to be used for cosmic wisdom, this was in quite small print between enthusiastic drawings of people hitting one another with rice flails and going 'Hai!' Later on you learned how to cut bricks in half with your hand and walk over red hot coals and other cosmic things.

Magrat thought that Ninja was a nice name for a girl.

She squared up to herself in the mirror again.

There was a knock at the door. Magrat went and opened it.