Chapter Text
Chapter 2
Of Kettles, Bubbles, and Other Unlicensed Phenomena
The morning began with a smell. This was not unusual in Ankh‑Morpork, a city which arranged smells with the artistry other cities reserved for fountains. Today’s smell had notes of burnt toast arguing with damp wool and - if one stood in just the right place and tilted one’s head toward the Unseen University’s rooftops - the bright, tinny tang of new weather, still in its wrapper.
On the third crooked floor of a house that leaned against its neighbors like a drunk in polite company, Nell the witch was educating a kettle. The kettle was shaped more or less like a kettle but had a personality that suggested it did not think much of being boiled. It sat on a small brazier, rocking sullenly while Nell addressed it with the same tone she might use for a wayward child or a minor demon.
“Listen,” she said, adjusting her hat to the angle that implied she was in charge (and causing two terrified moths to evacuate from the ribbon). “We are making a squall. Not a scandal, not a soufflé, and certainly not whatever you did last time that smelled like a secondhand rainbow. We need three minutes of rain over the Plaza of Small Gods, with a respectful breeze and no lightning. People keep losing their umbrellas to flash‑bangs and it makes the Watch nervous.”
The kettle clonked its lid as if to say, If you’re going to be like that, I shall sulk at a rolling boil. A chalk circle surrounded the brazier, marked in the exacting geometry of someone who had measured using a boot and an optimistic string. Around it: Nell’s attic. It was a museum of curated chaos; broomsticks with opinions lay in a straw basket like discontented cats; a proprietary tin labeled “IMPORTANT DUST (DO NOT SWEEP)” gathered further importance by the day; a row of baby jam jars contained bad ideas she was saving for later.[1]
[1] “Keeping” bad ideas is a hallmark of the profession. Proper witches know that ideas get worse if left unattended and better if pickled in clarity, salt, and the occasional dose of guilt. They’re like cucumbers, morally speaking.
Nell peered into a hand mirror stained with the thumbprints of old weather. A drizzle ran down the glass from the inside. She wiped it away, and for a moment the mirror showed her own face - heart‑shaped, sharp‑eyed, wearing that expression young witches have when trying not to be impressed by the world. Then it showed a view of the Plaza of Small Gods: prayer sellers already hawking on the cobbles, iconographers with collapsible tripods, and a cloudless blue that looked a bit smug about itself.
“Right,” Nell said. “Time for the pinch.”
From the workbench she selected a thimble net, which is exactly what it sounds like: a piece of crocheted night sky woven fine as a whisper, stretched over a brass ring. It’s for catching thunderstorms on the small setting, and confetti on special occasions. She held it over an open book. Pages fluttered with the polite distress of paper confronted by a witch and a net.
The book was The Treasury of Useful Intangibles (Household Edition). Nell had acquired it from a barrow that had briefly been a bookshop before remembering it was a barrow. She’d paid with a handshake and a promise to look after the index. Now she found the entry for Squall, minor (portable, urban), and shook the net twice over the page. Something like a sneeze of weather - thin, silver, slightly embarrassed - settled across the threads.
“Gently does it,” Nell murmured to the kettle. “In you go, my sparkly darling.”
The net unhooked its hesitation and slid the squall into the spout. The kettle burped. The window rattled. Across the Ankh, a flock of pigeons experienced sudden introspection.
A voice drifted up the stairs, followed by the stairs themselves, which had become mobile in sympathy with the house. “Miss Nell? Miss Nell! Are we insured for incidental damp?”
That was Bolin, Nell’s landlord, whose cardigan had once been green before deciding that green was altogether too ambitious. The cardigan could have been declared a nature reserve if nature had been willing to take responsibility.
“We’re insured for non‑specific outcomes,” Nell called back. “It’s the only policy that will cover me preemptively.”
Bolin’s head poked into the attic. He was a man who had been carved from the respectable end of a carrot and left to dry in good company. “That kettle is threatening to whistle in a key I don’t approve of.”
“It’s learning soprano,” Nell said. “Don’t fuss.”
She gave the kettle a stir with the splint of a fallen lightning rod - eight inches of bad decisions wrapped in copper wire - and the attic took a breath. Lacy condensation printed itself along the rafters; the broomsticks shifted, muttering; somewhere under the floor a mouse cheered because it thought a tap had been left on forever and this would be the making of its career.
Nell checked the mirror again. In the Plaza of Small Gods, people were adjusting to the day with the practiced shrug that says, “We live here, therefore everything is somebody else’s problem unless it becomes ours, at which point there will be paperwork.” She felt the kettle tremble like a dog about to bark. “Now,” she said, and with a single turn of the rod she let go of the net.
It slipped through the kettle with a discreet gulp, the way a good waiter removes a plate. The attic stilled.
In the Plaza of Small Gods, three minutes of tidy rain began, plinking off holy umbrellas (Blessed Are Those Who Keep Dry) and turning the cobbles into a mosaic of practical reflections. The breeze followed, soft, very nearly apologetic. People tilted their faces for it the way people do when they don’t admit to enjoying weather because it smacks of poetry and susceptible shoes.
Then the rain marched out of the Plaza, pivoted with the military precision of something that has read the map upside‑down, and strode in the direction of the Unseen University.
“Ah,” Nell said. The ah you say when a cake comes out of the oven in an unexpected shape but an undeniably ambitious mood.
On the roofline of the University, a gargoyle felt a raindrop and closed one eye with professional suspicion. Wards hummed like bees who had signed an agreement not to sting, provided everyone behaved. They had been tuned to deflect weather, and this fell under the purview of Weather But Also Sort Of Intent, which always makes wards nervous; as any wizard will explain, intent is sneaky and might be carrying a concealed clause. The squall sniffed the wards, found them to taste of paperwork and ink, and decided that if it kept its head down and its edges tucked in, it could simply sidle past, as all respectable phenomena do in academia.
It sidled into the Library. Books tightened their spines and stared out the windows with that particular brand of panic only literature can manage (“think of the pages!”). The Librarian, who had long ago dispensed with complicated pronouns and adopted a robust orangutan‑centric grammar, looked up at the sudden sprinkle and said “Oook,” which in this case meant, I have dealt with far worse than a precipitation incident, but nevertheless I would like it to stop.
The squall discovered the stacks, and like all tourists of taste, immediately got lost. It left droplets on indexes, streaked glossaries, and produced a rainbow so small it could be worn as a thoughtful brooch. Somewhere a book of maritime lore cleared its throat and suggested, loudly, that squalls belonged outdoors where they could have decent horizons. The squall, feeling both chastised and flattered, popped into a stairwell and found itself face‑to‑face with Professor Albemethe Slightly, Sub‑Lecturer in Incidental Inclementation.
Professor Slightly wore a robe several sizes too big because he liked to make an entrance and also because the robe had belonged to a more intimidating relative. He had the sort of spectacles that turned his eyes into crystal balls, which was not itself a magical feature, merely a strong statement of intent. He was carrying an umbrella big enough for a family of four and a playful dog.
“Aha!” he cried, opening the umbrella indoors with the ferocity of a man who did not believe in indoor superstitions because outdoors had enough for everyone. “Unauthorized homebrew atmospheric!”
The umbrella wrestled in the corridor as if affronted by the concept of custody. The squall zipped past him down the stairs, brushing the banister with the respect owed to polished wood, and spun toward the lathe‑room where apprentice wizards learned to turn complicated pieces of reality into tidy cylinders.[2]
[2] The lathe‑room is a solution looking for a problem. Wizards love it because it is full of tools and danger and the smell of knowledge gained noisily. The city loves it because, when it explodes, the University usually foots the carpentry bills.
Nell saw most of this because she had her mirror, and also some of it because the mirror had decided she deserved a generous angle after that bit with the net. She put the lightning rod down and grabbed her hat. The hat grabbed back. “No time to be clingy,” she told it. “Someone’s about to assert jurisdiction, and it’s not going to be me if I must sign in.”
Bolin flapped in the doorway as she barreled past, nearly inhaling his own cardigan in self‑defense. “Are you going out in that weather?” he asked.
“It’s my weather,” Nell said. “If I don’t go out in it, it will get ideas.”
She mounted her broom, which had very firm opinions about cobblestones (namely: they were uncooperative and lumpish) and flew from the attic window. She left behind a wake of startled pigeons, three strands of hat ribbon, and the notion that you get bollixed up if you try to fit normal errands into a day that’s already done you the courtesy of being unusual.
Ankh‑Morpork unfolded below her: roofs like the backs of dragons, alleys that looked guilty without knowing why, shop signs that promised things they did not have the equipment to deliver. The breeze she’d ordered found her face with a sort of bashful friendship. She aimed for the University, keeping to the aerial lanes traditional for hastily improvised transport engineers and witches with appointments.
Which is when the Watch arrived, because the Watch always does. They cannot resist a moving violation with magical gloss.
“YOU THERE!” boomed a voice from ground level. Sergeant April Resk - who had the posture of a lamppost and the moral flexibility of one as well - stood at the corner of Tea Lane, flapping a hand for attention. She was, as ever, accompanied by an officious clipboard and an officious mustache. Neither belonged to her. Both belonged to the notion that if you wrote a thing down hard enough it would stop happening.
“Got a permit for weather‑release over municipal walkways?” she called up. “And also… did you see the rainbow that tried to pickpocket a monk? I’m very prepared to make notes.”
“It wasn’t a rainbow, it was remorse,” Nell shouted back. “Resentful weather will always attempt to retrieve what it has just deposited. It’s like tipping.”
“Is tipping compulsory?” Sergeant Resk demanded, because she was the sort of person who recognized a policy issue at fifty paces.
“In Ankh‑Morpork,” Nell said, banking left, “nothing is compulsory unless a guild says so or it happens to you while you’re not looking.”
She might have gone on, but the University had decided to assert itself: across the lawn, an ornamental sundial was throwing shade, literally, in slabs thick enough to trip over. The squall had dashed twice round the High Energy Building, overturning a table of glassware and giving a lab assistant an unwanted facial that left them smelling faintly of strawberries and yachts. Now it fled under the Archchancellor’s window, where it met a line of soap bubbles drifting from the laundry yard. The bubbles absorbed it at once, and for half a minute the air was full of shimmering spheres that contained tiny thunder, which is a phrase that ought to be printed on a bottle.
Nell landed on the lawn with the crunchy inevitability of someone who has landed on that lawn before. Wizardly heads popped up along windowsills like nervous mushrooms. Professor Slightly collided with her umbrella‑first.
“You!” he announced, pointing with a hand that ought to have had a wand in it but was instead occupied by a damp sandwich. “Explain yourself! Or rather, explain your weather, which is in flagrant violation of Subsection Four of the Atmospheric Courtesy Act as adopted by the Faculty Board in a fit of cooperation.”
“I aimed it at the Plaza of Small Gods,” Nell said, brushing lawn off her skirt. “It has gone astray. Possibly intoxicated by learning. Take it up with the kettle if you must prosecute.”
“Kettle?” Professor Slightly repeated, in the tone of a man discovering that the Big Bad had arrived at the end of the corridor wearing a tea cozy. “Oh, we’ve had a day now, haven’t we.”
A bubble the size of a cathedral drifted between them, filled with lightning that looked deeply embarrassed about the acoustics. Nell lifted her thimble net and snagged the bubble’s edge. It wobbled, decided to mind its manners, and settled into the net with the obedient sigh of a dog who admits it has eaten something that was not food but was nevertheless delicious.
“Right,” she said. “I’ll take this back to the Plaza before it buys a degree.”
“You can’t simply - ” Professor Slightly began, because wizards feel it’s their job to finish other people’s sentences when physics has already surrendered.
“You’re absolutely correct,” Nell said briskly. “Let’s do it together. You can supervise.” She started toward the gate with the bubble bulging saucily in the net. It hummed to itself, and her hat hummed back in the key of Determination.
Professor Slightly trotted after her, juggling umbrella, sandwich, and the threadbare dignity of a department budget. They were joined at the gate by a young wizard with a face like an unfinished sentence, who panted, “Professor! The lathe‑room has turned the apprentice into a dowel pin!”
“How large?” asked Slightly.
“Regrettably life‑size,” the young wizard said. “He keeps rolling elegantly toward any incline.”
“I’m busy!” Slightly told him, in the voice of an academic torn between a crisis of the present and one that reflected more favorably on his tenure. “Tell him to wedge himself behind the bench until I return.”
“Should we call the Carpenter’s Guild?” Nell asked, struggling a bit with the net as the bubble attempted to admire itself in a window, producing a small echo of thunder synonymous with smugness.
“No,” said Slightly. “We call them only after we’ve made it worse, or it doesn’t count as research.”
They made it onto the street to find a spiritual entrepreneur selling consecrated towels (“For all your wet metaphysical needs!”), an iconographer trying to catch the sparkle of electric contrition, and Sergeant Resk marching toward them with a look that suggested she had located the correct line on her form and intended to use it liberally.
“You’ll want the bit where it says ‘temporary municipal blessing,’” Nell offered, as the Sergeant’s pen poised like a tiny sword.
“I’ll be the judge of what I want,” the Sergeant said, and then, because she was honest and no one's fool, glanced down and indeed wrote: Temporary municipal blessing. “Name of phenomenon?”
“Squall, minor, urban,” Nell said.
Professor Slightly leaned in and whispered, “Write ‘pedagogically recalcitrant’ after that.”
The Sergeant eyed the bubble in the net. “Is it armed?”
“Only with intent,” Nell said. “The worst kind, but nonetheless biodegradable.”
They proceeded like a small parade: Nell with the net, Slightly with the umbrella, the Sergeant with her clipboard, the bubble drifting along like a grand duchess who had just remembered she was made of water. Citizens paused to watch because citizens will watch anything if it looks as if it might eventually apologize in public. At Fink Street a dog barked at its own reflection in the bubble and became briefly philosophical; at Doodle Alley a grocer attempted to sell the bubble a cucumber; on the Bridge of Thrice Intriguing Carp a fisherman suggested they could use it as a weather float.
At last they reached the Plaza of Small Gods, now drying obediently where the squall had done its duty before being led astray by academia. Nell lifted the net and gave a small, confident twist, like a conjurer tidying up a flourish. The bubble elongated, turned into a column, became a ribbon, and then went off like polite applause: tiny drops pattering onto stone. The thunder inside it offered a small, apologetic cough.
This was when Nell’s rival arrived, as rivals do when they have practiced timing in the mirror. Tansy Peavey wore her witchcraft like a fitted coat with the seams let out for ambition. She had a broomstick that gleamed as if it had been waxed with someone’s hopes, and she leaned on it now with a smile that had borrowed its edge from a paper knife.
“Nellophelia,” Tansy said. No one called Nell “Nellophelia” unless they wanted to be admired or arrested. “I saw an educational drizzle heading toward the University and thought, ‘that has the stamp of a certain… exuberance.’ So of course I came to see.”
Nell, refreshed by a small rain of success, wiped her hands as if there were nothing to wipe. “Tansy,” she said. “I didn’t recognize you with your mouth closed.”
Sergeant Resk held her pen poised, hopeful. “Would either of you like to repeat that slowly?”
Professor Slightly inserted himself diplomatically into the space where swords might have been if either witch had believed in them. “No harm done,” he announced. “A learning experience for all concerned. And an important reminder that - ah - inter‑institutional cooperation is key to the improved management of unscheduled barometric events.”
“Also,” Nell added, not to be out‑importanted, “that the kettle will have to be taught about maps.”
Tansy inspected the remains of the bubble turning to damp along the stones, the way you might inspect the crumbs of a cake to deduce whether it had been worth eating. “The city is not a classroom, you know,” she said lightly. “One is supposed to take one’s lessons far from the fragile minds of the public.”
“And one is supposed,” Nell returned, “to remember the public has better minds than most classrooms.”
Professor Slightly stage‑coughed the cough of a man who knows he is one metaphor away from a committee. “Right! Well! I shall write an apology to the Librarian, and possibly a note to the lathe‑room to remind them of the ratio of cylinders to people, which currently favors cylinders. Miss Nell - ”
“Nell,” Nell said.
“Miss Nell,” he repeated, with the cheerful obstinacy of a man ignoring a correction. “You will of course be invited to deliver a short talk on the safe urban use of kettle‑based weather. We could do with your… pragmatic… practical… field‑tested perspective.”
“You want me to tell the University not to be stupid,” Nell summarized.
“Succinctly put,” said Slightly.
Tansy smiled that knife‑smile. “Oh, do accept, Nellophelia. And wear your best hat. Do you still have the one that looks like it’s arguing with gravity?”
Nell’s hand touched the brim reflexively. The hat bristled, because it had feelings. “My hat and I will be delighted, if it is understood that I will not improve the University’s manners, only its outcomes.”
Sergeant Resk had been writing this down, and now frowned at the line. “Do outcomes need licenses?” she asked. “Only I’ve got a blank for that.”
“Outcomes,” Nell said, “are like soap. You don’t require a license unless it gets in someone’s eyes.”
The Plaza shook itself the way a dog does after a swim - water flying, but joyfully. The bronze statue of a minor god of lost keys gleamed as if pleased to be included in something at last. People drifted back into the pathways of their lives, damp and satisfied. The little rainbow brooch, having fallen unnoticed by anyone into the cracks between cobbles, shone briefly and then went out. It had had a morning.
They walked back as a group, because that is what you do after you have survived a small adventure together; you move in a clump and tell each other what you think happened until the version you all prefer prevails. Professor Slightly puzzled out loud. Sergeant Resk flagged two more forms for future use. Tansy said nothing, which was uncharacteristic, and regarded Nell from under lashes that had been trained to a fare‑thee‑well.
At the University gates, the Archchancellor himself put his head out of a window and withdrew it immediately, which is the official academic gesture for “I saw nothing and will defend this decision with my life, or at least with paper.” The Librarian, somewhere in the stacks, shelved a damp book with the resignation of a civil servant who has a mop and is not afraid to use it. The lathe‑room reported, via runner, that the apprentice had been sanded gently until the corners wore off and he resumed a roughly humanoid contour. He was, said the runner, smoother than he had started, which might prove advantageous.
On the lawn, a patch of toadstools had sprung up in a circle that suggested somebody had thrown a party and left early.[3] Nell paused to admire them and to make sure they were not plotting to unionize. Her broom nosed her knee with impatience; it did not approve of mushrooms because they occupied the floor, and the floor was where the broom wanted to be whisking any time it wasn’t pretending to be a vehicle.
[3] Mushroom parties are legendary for their quiet, which usually means the gossip is phenomenal later.
Bolin was waiting at the house when she returned, clutching a towel of questionable ancestry. “Well?” he demanded. “Has the weather been sent to its room?”
“It’s had a talking‑to,” Nell said, stepping through the sash window because the stairs had temporarily decided to lead to last Tuesday’s spare pantry. “I’ll brew it a cup of tea and let it cool down.”
“Can you brew weather tea?” Bolin asked dubiously.
“You can brew tea for anything if you’re polite enough to pretend it takes milk,” Nell said, hanging up her hat on a peg that had never been there before and would probably go away later. The attic exhaled. Little droplets still pearl‑strung the rafters. The kettle was listing on the brazier as if nauseous with ethics.
Nell knelt and patted it. “You did well,” she said. “A few laps round the library and a good cry. We’ve all been there. But next time, plaza means plaza.”
The kettle gave a little hiccup that sounded like remorse and limescale. She fed it a shred of weather from the thimble net - a flake of cloud no larger than a thumbprint - and it settled, dreaming of drizzle.
On the workbench, The Treasury of Useful Intangibles had fallen open to the page she’d used. Dotted in the margin in an ink that was not Nell’s (it had the slight smell of chalk dust and budget meetings) were the words: “Note to self: approach this witch for seminar. Also advise librarian to install gutters indoors.” Professor Slightly’s handwriting crawled like a scholarly insect, but the intention was clear. Nell grinned in spite of herself. Recognition feels exactly like mischief, if you do it right.
She stood, brushed her skirt, and surveyed the holy chaos of her attic: the jars of bad ideas humming softly, the broom pretending to sleep so it wouldn’t be asked to talk about its day, the carpet which had chosen a pattern and was now sulking because no one had complimented it. Outside, Ankh‑Morpork was getting on with its business of producing grime, miracles, crimes, and bread in equal quantities. The city did not dislike witches; it merely considered them extremely useful and therefore treated them with the wary affection people reserve for complicated appliances.
There came a knock at the trapdoor - the sort of small, precise knock that implies gloves. When Nell opened it, Tansy Peavey was there, hat immaculate, broom parked at an angle that suggested it had given up on Ever Being Understood.
“I brought you this,” Tansy said, proffering a coil of ribbon like a truce offering. It was the deep night blue that hats love. Hats are shallow like that.
“Oh?” Nell said, taking it. “Are you taking up millinery?”
“Don’t be common,” Tansy replied, but without heat. She came up into the attic as if the steps existed for her convenience. “I simply thought that if you are going to lecture the University, it might as well be while wearing something that will frighten the faculty.”
Nell made a noncommittal noise that could have been thanks or a spell to ward off insincere niceness. Tansy walked the circumference of the chalk circle, inspecting the sigils like a cat making the rounds of a new room.
“Your net work has improved,” Tansy observed.
“And your broom is nearly as snooty as you are now,” Nell said. The broom quivered on its bristles, flattered.
Tansy’s smile went sideways and briefly human. “Be careful with the University,” she said. “If you let them, they’ll clap you between book‑ends and label you. They do it to each other. It’s habit. You’ll wake up footnoted.”
“I can be a very unruly chapter,” Nell said.
“Do,” said Tansy, and was gone - so neatly that it took a moment to register she had left no draft on the air, no snide remark trailing to the floor. Only the ribbon in Nell’s fingers, which the hat tried to steal at once.
Nell tied it around the crown, and the hat stood two inches taller out of sheer satisfaction.
“Well then,” she told the attic. “We’ve got ourselves invited to the party we weren’t sure we wanted to attend, and we cleaned up after ourselves, which is more than can be said for most parties. Let’s have a cup of tea and a biscuit with ambitions.”
The kettle, fully restored to a professional simmer, obliged. The tea tasted like forgiveness and tar. Nell drank it looking into the mirror, where the Plaza of Small Gods showed a smear of rainbow drying on warm stone, and the University’s windows glowed like a mouth ready to argue.
Below, the city practised its endless chorus: the creak of wheels; the six hundred languages of market stallholders; the breathy hiss of fresh bread meeting hungry people; somewhere, the faraway chime of a temple bell trying to keep decent time; and, over it all, the steady, friendly grumble of the River Ankh, which likes to tell itself the same story daily: I have always been here; I will always be here; I bring things; I take things away.
Nell set down her cup. “All right,” she told the day, “you’ve been very fancy. That’ll do.” She lifted the thimble net once more, peered through it like a child through lace at a world she fully intended to meddle with, and began making a list titled: Things To Say To Wizards That Will Sound Like Compliments While Improving Outcomes.
The first item was: You have spectacularly narrow corridors for such large ideas.
The second was: We should put gutters in the library, darling.
The third was simply: Tea.
Because tea is what you have before and after and during. Tea is a boundary and a bridge. Tea is the moment you take hold of the weather, and the weather takes hold of you, and you both agree to behave yourselves in public. And if something small and rainbow‑colored twinkles in the corner of your eye while you drink it, and you think: perhaps the world is slightly mad but in a direction I can work with - well, that’s a chapter worth keeping.