Their world, bounded by an encircling ocean that falls forever into space in one long waterfall, is as round and flat as a geological pizza, although without the anchovies.

It was, in fact, one of those places that exist merely so that people can have come from them.

The idea was right up there in the front of her mind. But she didn’t know how to say it in words, even to herself. It was a horrible feeling to find things in your head and not know how they fitted.

“You could light it much better.” “If a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly,” said Granny, fleeing into aphorisms, the last refuge of an adult under siege.

Magic’s easy, you just find the place where everything is balanced and push.

“Exactly correct. That’s one form of magic, of course.” “What, just knowing things?” “Knowing things that other people don’t know,” said Granny.

“Listen,” said Granny, “If you give someone a bottle of red jollop for their wind it may work, right, but if you want it to work for sure then you let their mind make it work for them. Tell ’em it’s moonbeams bottled in fairy wine or something. Mumble over it a bit. It’s the same with cursing.”

Granny was no stranger to the uses of power, but she knew she relied on gentle pressure subtly to steer the tide of things. She didn’t put it like that, of course—she would have said that there was always a lever if you knew where to look. The power in the staff was harsh, fierce, the raw stuff of magic distilled out of the forces that powered the universe itself.

“—headology. How your mind works. Men’s minds work different from ours, see. Their magic’s all numbers and angles and edges and what the stars are doing, as if that really mattered. It’s all power. It’s all—” Granny paused, and dredged up her favorite word to describe all she despised in wizardry, “—jommetry.”

Witches and wizards were objects of awe, but sisters weren’t. Somehow, knowing your own sister was learning to be a witch sort of devalued the whole profession.

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.

He tried hinting that she should obey the unwritten rules of Zoon life and stay afloat, but a hint was to Esk what a mosquito bite was to the average rhino because she was already learning that if you ignore the rules people will, half the time, quietly rewrite

Esk, of course, had not been trained, and it is well known that a vital ingredient of success is not knowing that what you’re attempting can’t be done. A person ignorant of the possibility of failure can be a halfbrick in the path of the bicycle of history.

He was stupid, yes, in the particular way that very clever people can be stupid, and maybe he had all the tact of an avalanche and was as self-centered as a tornado, but it would never have occurred to him that children were important enough to be unkind to.

Sometimes he seemed to be saying that nothing existed unless people thought it did, and the world was really only there at all because people kept on imagining it. But then he seemed to be saying that there was lots of worlds, all nearly the same and all sort of occupying the same place but all separated by the thickness of a shadow, so that everything that ever could happen would have somewhere to happen in.

It’s a fact known throughout the universes that no matter how carefully the colors are chosen, institutional decor ends up as either vomit green, unmentionable brown, nicotine yellow or surgical appliance pink.

while I’m still confused and uncertain it’s on a much higher plane, d’you see, and at least I know I’m bewildered about the really fundamental and important facts of the universe.

“It’s just numbers!” she said. “The whole world—it’s all made up of numbers…” “It’s not the world, it’s an idea of the world,” said Simon. “I created it for them. They can’t get through to us, do you see, but ideas have got a shape here. Ideas are real!”

“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.”

“What do you mean, wrong? I’ve got the power!” “They’re sort of—reflections of us,” said Esk. “You can’t beat your reflections, they’ll always be as strong as you are. That’s why they draw nearer to you when you start using magic. And they don’t get tired. They feed off magic, so you can’t beat them with magic. No, the thing is…well, not using magic because you can’t, that’s no use at all. But not using magic because you can, that really upsets them. They hate the idea. If people stopped using magic they’d die.”

“She told me that if magic gives people what they want, then not using magic can give them what they need,” said Granny, her hand hovering over the plate. “So Simon tells me. I don’t understand it myself, magic’s for using, not storing up. Go on, spoil yourself.”