Equal Rites
Chapters - Terry Pratchett
Section: The Dying Wizard's Gift
On the Discworld, a world carried through space on the backs of four elephants standing on a giant turtle, an elderly wizard named Drum Billet arrives at the mountain village of Bad Ass in the Ramtops, seeking the eighth son of an eighth son to whom he can pass his wizard's staff before dying. He finds Gordo Smith the blacksmith, whose wife is in labour with their eighth child, attended by the local witch and midwife Granny Weatherwax.
The dying wizard has the newborn grasp his staff, passing on his power, and then expires. But when Granny reveals the blanket, the eighth child is a girl - Eskarina Smith. The smith is horrified. Death himself appears to collect Billet's spirit, and the old wizard's ghost realises his mistake but cannot undo what has been done.
Granny orders the staff burned, but it refuses to be destroyed - hurling the axe blade into the wall and throwing Granny across the forge. The smith hides it in the corner. Meanwhile, Billet's spirit reincarnates into the apple tree in the smithy orchard, which grows noticeably taller than the others. Seven years pass. Esk grows into a gap-toothed, tree-climbing girl, and Granny watches her carefully for signs of magic but sees none - until the day the staff, apparently of its own accord, knocks out her father when he slaps her.
On page: Drum Billet, Gordo Smith, Esmerelda Weatherwax, Eskarina Smith, Death
Section: The Magic Awakens
When Esk's mother sends her and her brothers Cern and Gulta to check on Granny Weatherwax during a bitter winter, they find the old witch apparently dead in her bed - stiff, cold, with no fire lit. Esk stays behind while the boys go for help. Terrified by something scratching at the windows and chimney, she flees into the frozen forest.
She is cornered by a pack of wolves, but the wizard's staff breaks free from the forge, flies through the sky, and annihilates the pack with devastating magical force. Granny arrives - she had only been Borrowing, inhabiting a crow's mind - and carries the exhausted child home. Granny then confronts the staff, which has followed them to her cottage, and visits Billet's tree-spirit. The tree insists Esk must be trained.
Granny attempts to destroy the staff by burning it, but Esk screams in agony upstairs - she is magically linked to it. Using the staff's own wizard power, Granny manages to untangle Esk's silver-threaded mind from the eagle-purple of the bird she later takes over. Through the night Granny sits watching the staff, which has returned itself to the cottage wall, beginning to accept that the girl carries wizard magic and the staff will not be denied.
POV: Eskarina Smith·On page: Esmerelda Weatherwax, Gordo Smith, Cern, Gulta
Section: Granny's Apprentice
Granny Weatherwax reluctantly gives Esk the wizard's staff and tells her the truth about her birth, then persuades Gordo Smith to let her take the girl as an apprentice witch. Through spring and summer Granny teaches Esk herbalism, headology, and the practical craft of witchery - cleaning, distilling, tending goats, and learning plants.
Granny teaches Esk the secret of the witch's hat - that magic is largely about what people believe you can do. She demonstrates Borrowing, the art of riding in an animal's mind, using an eagle. Esk takes to it instantly, but disobeys Granny by seizing the eagle's mind entirely. She soars to the edge of the world, but her human identity begins dissolving into the eagle's nature. Granny uses the bee swarm to search for her, then grudgingly uses the staff to fly to a remote mountain valley, where she finds the eagle exhausted and Esk's mind nearly lost.
Using the staff's raw power, Granny untangles Esk's silver mind-threads from the eagle's and restores her. The experience terrifies Esk - she remembers feeling herself vanish. Worse, she glimpsed the Things from the Dungeon Dimensions watching from their cold desert. Granny formally presents Esk with the staff, acknowledges that witchcraft alone cannot contain her wizard magic, and decides the girl must go to Unseen University.
POV: Eskarina Smith·On page: Esmerelda Weatherwax, Gordo Smith
Section: The Journey Begins
Esk demonstrates uncontrolled wizard magic by turning her brother Gulta into a pig when he taunts her, then reluctantly turns him back. This convinces her father that she truly must be trained. Granny writes a letter to Unseen University and they set out for the market town of Ohulan Cutash, where they meet Hilta Goatfounder, a fellow witch who runs a discreet market stall selling potions and remedies.
Hilta reads Esk's palm and predicts a strange journey. She reveals that the University is in Ankh-Morpork, five hundred miles away. While exploring the evening market, Esk gets separated from Granny. Her staff-enhanced magic runs wild through the fair - peas cascade from a cheater's cups, a chained monkey frees itself, marzipan ducks come alive and fly to the river.
Esk wanders into the Fiddler's Riddle inn, where she accidentally transforms all the beer into goat's milk and then into powerful peach brandy. The innkeeper Skiller and his wife try to steal the staff while she sleeps, but it transforms into a biting snake in his hands. Esk escapes across the rooftops and stows away on a wool barge belonging to the Zoons, a river-trading tribe famous for their absolute honesty.
POV: Eskarina Smith·On page: Esmerelda Weatherwax, Gordo Smith, Gulta, Cern, Hilta Goatfounder, Skiller
Section: Esk on Her Own
Esk travels downriver with Amschat B'hal Zoon, the tribe's official Liar, and his family. She proves useful by identifying fake gemstones at a market in Zemphis, earning silver and a spircle necklace. Meanwhile, Granny Weatherwax watches through Hilta's crystal ball and sees the staff drawing a great spiral of magical energy down onto the barge.
When Amschat grows suspicious of her abilities, Esk slips away in Zemphis. She uses her magic to summon the staff from the barge - inadvertently sending ripples through reality itself - and disguises it inside a broomstick. She encounters the caravan being assembled for Ankh-Morpork and meets Treatle, a senior wizard, and his apprentice Simon, a brilliant but stammering young man who speaks of finding words that will change the world.
Treatle lectures Esk that women cannot be wizards, explaining that wizard magic is 'high magic' of books, stars and geometry, not suited to female minds. Esk is furious and runs off into the wilderness. She falls asleep under a juniper bush and dreams of the black gates of Unseen University slamming in her face, while creatures snigger from the battlements. In her sleep, her rage melts the cliff face behind her into glass.
POV: Eskarina Smith·On page: Amschat B'hal Zoon, Esmerelda Weatherwax, Hilta Goatfounder, Treatle, Simon
Section: The Caravan
Granny Weatherwax catches up with Esk by borrowing Hilta's ancient broomstick, falling into a bear trap along the way and negotiating repairs from dwarves. She finds Esk on the scorched plateau and they rejoin the caravan. During the journey through the Paps of Scilla, gnolls attack the camp at night but are slaughtered by an unseen force - the staff defending Esk in her sleep.
Esk befriends Simon, helping him finish his stuttered words, and he tells her about his search for fundamental truths about magic. She asks Treatle directly whether women can be wizards and is told it is 'self-evident' they cannot. Treatle explains that witchcraft is 'Nature's way of allowing women access to magical fluxes' but is not 'high magic'. Esk resolves to be both witch and wizard.
Granny is nearly killed when their broomstick fails at dawn and Esk, in desperate need, somehow accelerates it to impossible speeds, overtaking the sunrise and racing across the continent in a rainbow bubble. They arrive in Ankh-Morpork. Granny finds them lodgings in the Shades and begins a thriving witchcraft practice among the city's nocturnal residents, even reforming a cutpurse with nothing but the force of her personality.
POV: Eskarina Smith·On page: Esmerelda Weatherwax, Simon, Treatle·Mentioned: Hilta Goatfounder
Section: Granny and Esk Reunited
Granny and Esk approach Unseen University but find the great black doors impenetrable. Treatle arrives with Simon and mockingly invites Esk inside. In the Great Hall, Simon performs an astonishing demonstration for Archchancellor Cutangle - creating a three-dimensional model of the Discworld from tiny motes of light, without moving his hands. Only Esk sees the frightening consequence: the walls thin to nothing and the Things from the Dungeon Dimensions appear, clustering like moths around Simon's magical light.
Esk kicks Simon's ankle, breaking his concentration and banishing the Things. She then approaches Cutangle directly and tells him she wants to be a wizard. The Archchancellor laughs, the wizards laugh, and when Esk tries to demonstrate her magic in front of them, it refuses to work. She is given a sweet and sent away in tears.
Meanwhile, Granny sneaks in through the servants' entrance, reads the mind of the University building itself, and manipulates the housekeeper Mrs Whitlow through fortune-telling to hire Esk as a cleaning girl. The plan works - Esk enters the University not through the great gates but through the back door, armed with her disguised staff-broomstick.
POV: Eskarina Smith·On page: Esmerelda Weatherwax, Treatle, Simon, Archchancellor Cutangle, Mrs Whitlow
Section: The Servant's Way In
Esk works as a servant in Unseen University, sweeping floors while the staff does the actual cleaning with supernatural efficiency. She observes classes from hiding spots under lecture hall seats, but cannot understand the magical diagrams or symbols. She watches Simon lecture senior wizards about the nature of reality - that the world is made of tiny spinning particles of nothingness - and sees the Things gathering around him again, unnoticed by anyone else.
Granny visits regularly, ostensibly to tell Mrs Whitlow's fortune but actually to check on Esk. Granny has settled comfortably into city life, acquiring new clothes and considering taking on a witchcraft apprentice. Esk is frustrated - she is inside the University but learning nothing about wizardry.
Esk decides she must learn to read and persuades Mrs Whitlow to let her clean the Library, which has never been cleaned before. She meets the Librarian, an orangutan transformed by a magical accident who prefers his new form. She bribes him with bananas and explores the stacks, finding that magical books pulse with disturbing energy. Simon finds her there and warns her about the dangers of the books - one wizard had his mind absorbed into the Necrotelicomnicon.
POV: Eskarina Smith·On page: Esmerelda Weatherwax, Simon, Mrs Whitlow, The Librarian
Section: The Library
While Esk and Simon talk in the Library, the Things from the Dungeon Dimensions make their move. The books go berserk - flying off shelves, breaking chains, flapping through the air like frightened birds. A magical wind tears through the stacks and the floor turns to cold silver sand. Esk's staff lunges at Simon, striking him on the head and knocking him unconscious. The Things vanish.
The Librarian hides Esk before the senior wizards arrive and blame the incident on a 'Critical Mass' of magical books. Simon is taken to the infirmary. He lies in a fever for three days, and Cutangle and Treatle discuss his brilliant theories while struggling to actually remember what they mean.
Granny examines Simon and declares his mind has gone Wandering - he has left his body, and the Things have taken his consciousness to the Dungeon Dimensions. Esk is horrified and guilt-ridden, believing the staff tried to kill him. She throws the staff into the flooding River Ankh in anger. Granny explains that the Things feed on magic and are drawn to powerful minds like Simon's, and that they will try to send something back to inhabit his body.
POV: Eskarina Smith·On page: Simon, The Librarian, Esmerelda Weatherwax, Archchancellor Cutangle, Treatle
Section: The Cold Desert
Granny confronts Cutangle in the Great Hall, demanding he help save Simon and Esk. Their confrontation escalates into a spectacular magical duel - Granny versus the Archchancellor, shapeshifting through snakes, reptiles, ice storms, sabre-toothed tigers and eagles. The duel draws the Things closer, and Esk runs to Simon's room to protect his body.
She finds the door sealed by dark forces. Unable to get it open by magic, she touches the ancient stone walls and enters the University building's mind, persuading it to tear its own door hinges free. Inside the room, brilliant light and chittering Things surround Simon. Esk plunges in and her mind is swept away to the Dungeon Dimensions.
On the cold desert of silver sand, she finds Simon sitting cross-legged in a circle of Things, holding a glass pyramid containing a perfect model of the Discworld. Other geometric shapes hold other worlds - a sphere with a blue-green ball, a prism with a disc encircled by a snake. Simon has been reduced to a giggling child, shaking the stars like a snow globe. Esk snatches the pyramid and runs. The Things are clumsy and fragile - she kicks them apart like badly-assembled mannequins - but when the Simon-Thing speaks with dozens of voices, threatening her, she realises these creatures cannot take anything unless it is given to them.
POV: Eskarina Smith·On page: Esmerelda Weatherwax, Archchancellor Cutangle, Simon, Treatle
Section: The Resolution
Back in the real world, Granny and Cutangle stop their duel when students report what has happened. Granny declares they must recover the staff from the river to save Esk and Simon. The two unlikely allies row a small boat into the flooded, stormy river, trading childhood memories - both grew up in the Ramtops, in neighbouring valleys. They find the staff at the centre of a vast circle of frozen sea, its magic radiating cold intense enough to solidify the ocean.
Granny berates the staff into submission with threats of spokeshaves and sandpaper, grasps it bare-handed despite its lethal cold, and flies them back to the University on her battered broomstick. Cutangle, riding pillion and touching various things he shouldn't, begins to view Granny as 'a fine figure of a woman'.
At the University, Cutangle declares Esk a wizard - changing the lore with a quiet ceremony. The staff passes between Esk and Simon in the Dungeon Dimensions. Esk realises the crucial truth: the Things feed on magic, so the way to defeat them is to not use it. She absorbs the staff into herself, the Things collapse, and both children return to their bodies in a silent explosion of octarine light. Simon's stutter has vanished. Esk wakes wearing a small blue wizard's hat with silver stars. In the aftermath, Granny and Cutangle share tea on the verandah. He invites her to lecture at the University on herbs and headology. They agree to dine together. And Drum Billet, having chosen to give life another chance, is reincarnated as an ant in the University walls.
POV: Eskarina Smith·On page: Esmerelda Weatherwax, Archchancellor Cutangle, Simon, Treatle, The Librarian·Mentioned: Drum Billet