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Cutangle shrugged. “When my father died. It's odd, I've never said this to anyone, but-well, there were my brothers, because I am an eighth son of course, and they had children and even grandchildren, and not one of them can hardly write his name. I could have bought the whole village. And they treated me like a king, but- I mean, I've been to places and seen things that would curdle their minds, I've faced down creatures wilder than their nightmares, I know secrets that are known to a very few -”
“You felt left out,” said Granny. “There's nothing strange in that. It happens to all of us. It was our choice.”
“Wizards should never go home,” said Cutangle.
“I don't think they can go home,” agreed Granny. “You can't cross the same river twice, I always say.”
Cutangle gave this some thought.
“I think you're wrong there,” he said. “I must have crossed the same river, oh, thousands of times.”
“Ah, but it wasn't the same river.”
“It wasn't?”
“No.”
Cutangle shrugged. “It looked like the same bloody river.”
“No need to take that tone,” said Granny. “I don't see why I should listen to that sort of language from a wizard who can't even answer letters!”
Cutangle was silent for a moment, except for the castanet chatter of his teeth.
“Oh,” he said. “Oh, I see. They were from you, were they?”
“That's right. I signed them on the bottom. It's supposed to be a sort of clue, isn't it?”
“All right, all right. I just thought they were a joke, that's all,” said Cutangle sullenly.
“A joke?”
“We don't get many applications from women. We don't get any.”
“I wondered why I didn't get a reply,” said Granny.
“I threw them away, if you must know.”
“You could at least have - there it is!”
“Where? Where? Oh, there.”
The fog parted and they now saw it clearly - a fountain of snowflakes, a ornamental pillar of frozen air. And below it....
The staff wasn't locked in ice, but lay peacefully in a seething pool of water.
One of the unusual aspects of a magical universe is the existence of opposites. It has already been remarked that darkness isn't the opposite of light, it is simply the absence of light. In the same way absolute zero is merely the absence of heat. If you want to know what real cold is, the cold so intense that water can't even freeze but anti-boils, look no further than this pool.
They looked in silence for some seconds, their bickering forgotten. Then Cutangle said slowly: “If you stick your hand in that, your fingers'll snap like carrots.”
“Do you think you can lift it out by magic?” said Granny.
Cutangle started to pat his pockets and eventually produced his rollup bag. With expert fingers he shredded the remains of a few dogends into a fresh paper and licked it into shape, without taking his eyes off the staff.
“No,” he said. “but I'll try anyway.”
He looked longingly at the cigarette and then poked it behind his ear. He extended his hands, fingers splayed, and his lips moved soundlessly as he mumbled a few words of power.
The staff spun in its pool and then rose gently away from the ice, where it immediately became the centre of a cocoon of frozen air. Cutangle groaned with the effort - direct levitation is the hardest of the practical magics, because of the ever-present danger of the wellknown principles of action and reaction, which means that a wizard attempting to lift a heavy item by mind power alone faces the prospect of ending up with his brains in his boots.
