A shape moved in the stall’s dim recesses and a brown wrinkled hand slid lightly on to hers.

“Can I assist you, missy?” said a cracked voice, in tones of syrup of figs, “Is it your fortune you want telling, or is it your future you want changing, maybe?”

“She’s with me,” snapped Granny, spinning around, “and your eyes are betraying you, Hilta Goatfounder, if you can’t tell her age.”

The shape in front of Esk bent forward.

“Esme Weatherwax?” it asked.

“The very same,” said Granny. “Still selling thunder drops and penny wishes, Hilta? How goes it?”

“All the better for seeing you,” said the shape. “What brings you down from the mountains, Esme? And this child—your assistant, perhaps?”

“What’s it you’re selling, please?” asked Esk. The shape laughed.

“Oh, things to stop things that shouldn’t be and help things that should, love,” it said. “Let me just close up, my dears, and I will be right with you.”

The shape bustled past Esk in a nasal kaleidoscope of fragrances and buttoned up the curtains at the front of the stall. Then the drapes at the back were thrown up, letting in the afternoon sunlight.

“Can’t stand the dark and fug myself,” said Hilta Goatfounder, “but the customers expect it. You know how it is.”

“Yes,” Esk nodded sagely. “Headology.”

Hilts, a small fat woman wearing an enormous hat with fruit on it, glanced from her to Granny and grinned.

“That’s the way of it,” she agreed. “Will you take some tea?”

They sat on bales of unknown herbs in the private corner made by the stall between the angled walls of the houses, and drank something fragrant and green out of surprisingly delicate cups. Unlike Granny, who dressed like a very respectable raven, Hilts 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. But Esk could see the likeness.

It was hard to describe. You couldn’t imagine them curtseying to anyone.

“So,” said Granny, “how goes the life?”

The other witch shrugged, causing the drummers to lose their grip again, just when they had nearly climbed back up.

“Like the hurried lover, it comes and goe—” she began, and stopped at Granny’s meaningful glance at Esk.

“Not bad, not bad,” she amended hurriedly. “The council have tried to run me out once or twice, you know, but they all have wives and somehow it never quite happens. They say I’m not the right sort, but I say there’d be many a family in this town a good deal bigger and poorer if it wasn’t for Madame Goatfounder’s Pennyroyal Preventives. I know who comes into my shop, I do. I remember who buys buckeroo drops and ShoNuff Ointment, I do. Life isn’t bad. And how is it up in your village with the funny name?”

“Bad Ass,” said Esk helpfully. She picked a small clay pot off the counter and sniffed at its contents.

“It is well enough,” conceded Granny. “The handmaidens of nature are ever in demand.”

Esk sniffed again at the powder, which seemed to be pennyroyal with a base she couldn’t quite identify, and carefully replaced the lid. While the two women exchanged gossip in a kind of feminine code, full of eye contact and unspoken adjectives, she examined the other exotic potions on display. Or rather, not on display. In some strange way they appeared to be artfully half-hidden, as if Hilts wasn’t entirely keen to sell.

“I don’t recognise any of these,” she said, half to herself. “What do they give to people?”

“Freedom,” said Hilts, who had good hearing. She turned back to Granny. “How much have you taught her?”

“Not that much,” said Granny. “There’s power there, but what kind I’m not sure. Wizard power, it might be.”

Hilts turned around very slowly and looked Esk up and down.

“Ah,” she said, “That explains the staff. I wondered what the bees were talking about. Well, well. Give me your hand, child.”

Esk held out her hand. Hilta’s fingers were so heavy with rings it was like dipping into a sack of walnuts.

Granny sat upright, radiating disapproval, as Hilts began to inspect Esk’s palm.

“I really don’t think that is necessary,” she said sternly. “Not between us.”

“You do it, Granny,” said Esk, “in the village. I’ve seen you. And teacups. And cards.”

Granny shifted uneasily. “Yes, well,” she said. “It’s all according. You just hold their hand and people do their own fortune-telling. But there’s no need to go around believing it, we’d all be in trouble if we went around believing everything.”

“The Powers That Be have many strange qualities, and puzzling and varied are the ways in which they make their desires known in this circle of firelight we call the physical world,” said Hilts solemnly. She winked at Esk.

“Well, really,” snapped Granny.

“No, straight up,” said Hilts. “It’s true.”

“Hmph.”

“I see you going upon a long journey,” said Hilts.

“Will I meet a tall dark stranger?” said Esk, examining her palm. “Granny always says that to women, she says—”

“No,” said Hilts, while Granny snorted. “But 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.”

“You can tell all that from my hand?”

“Well, mainly I’m just guessing,” said Hilts, sitting back and reaching for the teapot (the lead drummer, who had climbed halfway back, fell on to the toiling cymbalists). She looked carefully at Esk and added, “A female wizard, eh?”

“Granny is taking me to Unseen University,” said Esk.

Hilta raised her eyebrows. “Do you know where it is?”

Granny frowned. “Not in so many words,” she admitted. “I was hoping you could give me more explicit directions, you being more familiar with bricks and things.”

“They say it has many doors, but the ones in this world are in the city of Ankh-Morpork,” said Hilta. Granny looked blank. “On the Circle Sea,” Hilta added. Granny’s look of polite enquiry persisted. “Five hundred miles away,” said Hilta.

“Oh,” said Granny.

She stood up and brushed an imaginary speck of dust off her dress.

“We’d better be going, then,” she added.

Hilta laughed. Esk quite liked the sound. Granny never laughed, she merely let the corners of her mouth turn up, but Hilta laughed like someone who had thought hard about Life and had seen the joke.

“Start tomorrow, anyway,” she said. “I’ve got room at home, you can stay with me, and tomorrow you’ll have the light.”

“We wouldn’t want to presume,” said Granny.

“Nonsense. Why not have a look around while I pack up the stall?”

Ohulan was the market town for a wide sprawling countryside and the market day didn’t end at sunset. Instead, torches flared at every booth and stall and light blared forth from the open doorways of the inns. Even the temples put out coloured lamps to attract nocturnal worshippers.

Hilta moved through the crowd like a slim snake through dry grass, her entire stall and stock reduced to a surprisingly small bundle on her back, and her jewellery rattling like a sackful of flamenco dancers. Granny stumped along behind her, her feet aching from the unaccustomed prodding of the cobbles.

And Esk got lost.

It took some effort, but she managed it. It involved ducking between two stalls and then scurrying down a side alley. Granny had warned her 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.

In fact, since Ohulan was quite barbaric and uncivilised the only things that went on after dark to any degree were a little thievery, some amateurish trading in the courts of lust, and drinking until you fell over or started singing or both.

According to the standard poetic instructions one should move through a fair like the white swan at evening moves o’er the bay, but because of certain practical difficulties Esk settled for moving through the crowds like a small dodgem car, bumping from body to body with the tip of the staff waving a yard above her head. It caused some heads to turn, and not only because it had hit them; wizards occasionally passed through the town and it was the first time anyone had seen one four feet tall with long hair.

Anyone watching closely would have noticed strange things happening as she passed by.

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 he suddenly owed everyone a lot of money.

There was a small and wretched monkey that for years had shuffled vaguely at the end of a chain while its owner played something dreadful on a pipe-organ. It suddenly turned, narrowed its little red eyes, bit its keeper sharply in the leg, snapped its chain and had it away over the rooftops with the night’s takings in a tin cup. History is silent about what they were spent on.

A boxful of marzipan ducks on a nearby stall came to life and whirred past the stallholder to land, quacking happily, in the river (where, by dawn, they had all melted: that’s natural selection for your.

The stall itself sidled off down an alley and was never seen again.

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. But, like all good catalysts, she wasn’t actually involved in the processes she initiated, and by the time all the non-hypothetical potential watchers took their eyes off them she had been buffeted somewhere else.

She was also beginning to tire. While Granny Weatherwax approved of night on general principles, she certainly didn’t hold with promiscuous candlelight—if she had any reading to do after dark she generally persuaded the owl to come and sit on the back of her chair, and read through its eyes. So Esk expected to go to bed around sunset, and that was long past.

There was a doorway ahead of her that looked friendly. Cheerful sounds were sliding out on the yellow light, and pooling on the cobbles. With the staff still radiating random magic like a demon lighthouse she headed for it, weary but determined.

The landlord of The Fiddler’s Riddle considered himself to be a man of the world, and this was right, because he was too stupid to be really cruel, and too lazy to be really mean and although his body had been around quite a lot his mind had never gone further than the inside of his own head.

He wasn’t used to being addressed by sticks. Especially when they spoke in a small piping voice, and asked for goat’s milk.

Cautiously, aware that everyone in the inn was looking at him and grinning, he pulled himself across the bar top until he could see down. Esk stared up at him. Look ’em right in the eye, Granny had always said: focus your power on ’em, stare ’em out, no one can outstare a witch, ’cept a goat, of course.

The landlord, whose name was Skiller, found himself looking directly down at a small child who seemed to be squinting.

“What?” he said.

“Milk,” said the child, still focussing furiously. “You get it out of goats. You know?”

Skiller sold only beer, which his customers claimed he got out of cats. No self-respecting goat would have endured the smell in the Fiddler’s Riddle.

“We haven’t got any,” he said. He looked hard at the staff and his eyebrows met conspiratorially over his nose.

“You could have a look,” said Esk.

Skiller eased himself back across the bar, partly to avoid the gaze, which was causing his eyes to water in sympathy, and partly because a horrible suspicion was congealing in his mind.

Even second-rate barmen tend to resonate with the beer they serve, and the vibrations coming from the big barrels behind him no longer had the twang of hop and head. They were broadcasting an altogether more lactic note.

He turned a tap experimentally, and watched a thin stream of milk curdle in the drip bucket.

The staff still poked up over the edge of the counter, like a periscope. He could swear that it was staring at him too.

“Don’t waste it,” said a voice. “You’ll be grateful for it one day.”

It was the same tone of voice Granny used when Esk was less than enthusiastic about a plateful of nourishing sallet greens, boiled yellow until the last few vitamins gave in, but to Skiller’s hypersensitive ears it wasn’t an injunction but a prediction. He shivered. He didn’t know where he would have to be to make him grateful for a drink of ancient beer and curdled milk. He’d rather be dead first.

Perhaps he would 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 n 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 moustache 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 second-hand. But she 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.

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 coloured 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 glass 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 glass 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 passed, 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 rumour. 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 finish 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 glass 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 passing woodchopper to sort this 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 timepieces. 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 fireballs 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 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 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 towards 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 in his hands. He felt the scaliness, the coil and muscle of it ….

Esk sat bolt upright in time to see Skiller roll backwards 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 night-time 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?”

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 bar-room. 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 grey 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.

Esk awoke to the sound of someone whistling. She lay quite still, reeling the evening’s events across her mind until she remembered why she was here, and then rolled over very carefully and raised the oilcloth a fraction.

Here she was, then. But “here” had moved.

“This is what they call sailing, then,” she said, watching the far bank glide past, “It doesn’t seem very special.”

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.

The distant whistler was joined by a barking dog. Esk lay back in the wool and reached out until she found the animal’s mind, and Borrowed it gently. From its inefficient and disorganised brain she learned that there were at least four people on this barge, and many more on the others that were strung out in line with it on the river. Some of them seemed to be children.

She let the animal go and looked out at the scenery again for a long time—the barge was passing between high orange cliffs now, banded with so many colours of rock it looked as though some hungry God had made the all-time record club sandwich—and tried to avoid the next thought. But it persisted, arriving in her mind like the unexpected limbo dancer under the lavatory door of Life. Sooner or later she would have to go out. It wasn’t her stomach that was pressing the point, but her bladder brooked no delay.

Perhaps if she

The oilcloth over her head was pulled aside swiftly and a big bearded head beamed down at her.

“Well, well,” it said. “What have we here, then? A stowaway, yesno?”

Esk gave it a stare. “Yes,” she said. There seemed no sense in denying it. “Could you help me out please?”

“Aren’t you afraid I shall throw you to the—the pike?” said the head. It noticed her perplexed look. “Big freshwater fish,” it added helpfully. “Fast. Lot of teeth. Pike.”

The thought hadn’t occurred to her at all. “No,” she said truthfully. “Why? Will you?”

“No. Not really. There’s no need to be frightened.”

“I’m not.”

“Oh.” A brown arm appeared, attached to the head by the normal arrangements, and helped her out of her nest in the fleeces.

Esk stood on the deck of the barge and looked around. The sky was bluer than a biscuit barrel, fitting neatly over a broad valley through which the river ran as sluggishly as a planning inquiry.