AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The air around them reeked of incense and grain and spices and beer, but mainly of the sort of smell that was caused by a high water table, thousands of people, and a robust approach to drainage.
She mentally shook herself. The day was hard on their heels. She looked for an area where the torches were dim and widely spaced, reasoning that this would mean a poor district and poor people did not object to witches, and gently pointed the broom handle downwards.
She managed to get within five feet of the ground before dawn arrived for the second time.
The gates were indeed big and black and looked as if they were made out of solid darkness.
Granny and Esk stood among the crowds that thronged the square outside the University and stared up at them. Finally Esk said: “I can't see how people get in.”
“Magic, I expect,” said Granny sourly. “That's wizards for you. Anyone else would have bought a doorknocker.”
She waved her broomstick in the direction of the tall doors.
“You've got to say some hocuspocus word to get in, I shouldn't wonder,” she added.
They had been in Ankh-Morpork for three days and Granny was beginning to enjoy herself, much to her surprise. She had found them lodgings in The Shades, an ancient part of the city whose inhabitants were largely nocturnal and never enquired about one another's business because curiosity not only killed the cat but threw it in the river with weights tied to its feet. The lodgings were on the top floor next to the well-guarded premises of a respectable dealer in stolen property because, as Granny had heard, good fences make good neighbors.
o;Metterfor,” said Granny calmly.
“One of them.”
“Did you think it would be easy?” asked Granny. “Did you think you'd walk into their gates waving your staff? Here I am, I want to be a wizard, thank you very much?”
“He told me there's no women allowed in the University!”
“He's wrong.”
“No, I could tell he was telling the truth. You know, Granny, you can tell how -”
“Foolish child. All you could tell was that he thought he was telling the truth. The world isn't always as people see it.”
“I don't understand,” said Esk.
“You'll learn,” said Granny. “Now tell me. This dream. They wouldn't let you into their university, right?”
“Yes, and they laughed!”
“And then you tried to burn down the doors?”
Esk turned her head in Granny's lap and opened a suspicious eye.
“How did you know?”
Granny smiled, but as a lizard would smile.
“I was miles away,” she said. “I was bending my mind towards you, and suddenly you seemed to be everywhere. You shone out like a beacon, so you did. As for the fire - look around.”
In the halflight of dawn the plateau was a mass of baked clay. In front of Esk the cliff was glassy and must have flowed like tar under the onslaught; there were great gashes across it which had dripped molten rock and slag. When Esk listened she could hear the faint “pink, pink” of cooling rock.
“Oh,” she said, “did I do that?”
“So it would appear,” said Granny.
“But I was asleep! I was only dreaming!”
“It's the magic,” said Granny. “It's trying to find a way out. The witch magic and the wizard magic are, I don't know, sort of feeding off each other. I think.”
Esk bit her lip.
