I Shall Wear Midnight

Tiffany’s mouth clamped shut, and then sprang open again. A penny had dropped and it felt as if it had dropped from the moon.

‘You’re her, aren’t you? You must be, you’re her! Eskarina Smith, right? The only woman who ever became a wizard!’

‘Somewhere inside, I suppose so, yes, but it seems such a long time ago, and you know, I never really felt like a wizard, so I never really worried about what anyone said. And anyway, I had the staff, and no one could take that away from me.’ Eskarina hesitated for a moment, and then went on, ‘That’s what I learned at university: to be me, just what I am, and not worry about it. That knowledge is an invisible magical staff, all by itself. Look, I don’t really want to talk about this. It brings back bad memories.’

‘Please forgive me,’ said Tiffany. ‘I just couldn’t stop myself. I’m very sorry if I have dredged up any scary recollections.’

Eskarina smiled. ‘Oh, the scary ones are never a problem. It’s good ones that can be difficult to deal with.’ There was a click from the shambles. Eskarina stood up and walked over to it. ‘Oh dear, of course, only the witch that makes it can read her own shambles, but trust me when I say that the way the skull has turned and the position of the pincushion along the axis of the spinning wheel mean that he is very close. Almost right on top of us, in fact. Or the random magic in this place may be confusing him, and you seem to be everywhere and nowhere, so he’ll go away soon and try to pick up the trail somewhere else. And, as I mentioned, somewhere on the trail he will eat. He’ll get into some fool’s head, and some old lady or some girl who is wearing quite dangerous cult symbols without an inkling of what they really mean will suddenly find herself hounded. Let us hope she can run.’

Tiffany looked around, bewildered. ‘And what happens will be my fault?’

‘Is that the sarcastic whine of a little girl or the rhetorical question of a witch with her own steading?’

Tiffany began to reply, and then stopped. ‘You can travel in time, can’t you?’ she said.

‘Yes.’

‘Then you know what I’m going to answer?’

‘Well, it’s not quite as simple as that,’ said Eskarina, and looked slightly uncomfortable for a moment, much to Tiffany’s surprise and, it has be said, delight. ‘I know, let me see, there are fifteen different replies you might make, but I don’t know which one it will be until you make it, because of the elasticated string theory.’

‘Then all I will say,’ said Tiffany, ‘is thank you very much. I am sorry to have taken up your time. But I need to be getting on; I have so many things to do. Do you know what the time is?’

‘Yes,’ said Eskarina. ‘It is a way of describing one of the notional dimensions of four-dimensional space. But for your purposes, it’s about ten forty-five.’

That seemed to Tiffany to be a bafflingly complicated way of answering the question, but as she opened her mouth to say so, the shambles collapsed and the door opened to let in a stampede of chickens — which did not, however, explode.

Eskarina grabbed Tiffany’s hand, shouting, ‘He has found you! I don’t know how!’

A chicken half jumped, half flapped and half tumbled onto the wreck of the shambles and crowed! Cock-a-doodle-crivens!

Then the chickens exploded; they exploded into Feegles.

On the whole there wasn’t a great deal of difference between the chickens and the Feegles, since both run around in circles making a noise. An important distinction, however, is that chickens are seldom armed. The Feegles, on the other hand, are armed all the time, and once they had shaken off the last of their feathers they fell to fighting one another out of embarrassment — and for something to do.

Eskarina took one look at them and kicked at the wall behind her, revealing a hole which a person might just be able to crawl through, and snapped at Tiffany: ‘Go! Get him away from here! Get on the stick as soon as you can and go! Don’t worry about me! Don’t be afraid, you will be all right! You just have to help yourself.’

Heavy, nasty smoke was filling the room. ‘What do you mean?’ Tiffany managed, struggling with the stick.

‘Go!’

Not even Granny Weatherwax could command Tiffany’s legs so thoroughly.

She went.

Chapter 9 THE DUCHESS AND THE COOK

Tiffany liked flying. What she objected to was being in the air, at least at a height greater than her own head. She did it anyway, because it was ridiculous and unbecoming to witchcraft in general to be seen flying so low that her boots scraped the tops off ant hills. People laughed, and sometimes pointed. But now, navigating the stick through the ruined houses and gloomy, bubbling pools, she ached for the open sky. It was a relief when she slid out from behind a stack of broken mirrors to see good clean daylight, despite the fact that she had emerged next to a sign which said: IF YOU ARE CLOSE ENOUGH TO READ THIS SIGN, YOU REALLY, REALLY, SHOULDN’T BE.