Victor poked an exploratory finger in his ear. It must have been a trick of an echo, or something. It wasn’t that the dog had gone ‘woof!’, although that was practically unique in itself; most dogs in the universe
He shook his head, and looked back as Silverfish climbed down from the screen and motioned to one of his assistants to start turning a handle at the side of the box. There was a grinding noise that rose to a steady clicking. Vague shadows danced across the screen, and then …
One of the last things Victor remembered was a voice beside his knee saying, ‘Could have bin worse, mister. I could have said “miaow”.’
And now it was now eight hours later.
A horribly overhung Ponder Stibbons looked guiltily at the empty desk beside him. It was unlike Victor to miss exams. He always said he enjoyed the challenge.
‘Get ready to turn over your papers,’ said the invigilator at the end of the hall. The sixty chests of sixty prospective wizards tightened with dark, unbearable tension. Ponder fumbled anxiously with his lucky pen.
The wizard on the dais turned over the hourglass. ‘You may begin,’ he said.
Several of the more smug students turned over their papers by snapping their fingers. Ponder hated them instantly.
He reached for his lucky inkwell, missed completely in his nervousness, and then knocked it over. A small black flood rolled over his question paper.
Panic and shame washed over him nearly as thoroughly. He mopped the ink up with the hem of his robe, spreading it smoothly over the desk. His lucky dried frog had been washed away.
Hot with embarrassment, dripping black ink, he looked up in supplication at the presiding wizard and then cast his eyes imploringly at the empty desk beside him.
The wizard nodded. Ponder gratefully sidled across the aisle, waited until his heart had stopped thumping and then, very carefully, turned over the paper on the desk.
After ten seconds, and against all reason, he turned it over again just in case there had been a mistake and the rest of the questions had somehow been on the top side after all.
Around him there was the intense silence of fifty-nine minds creaking with sustained effort.
Ponder turned the paper over again.
Perhaps it was some mistake. No … there was the University seal and the signature of the Archchancellor and everything. So perhaps it was some sort of special test. Perhaps they were watching him now to see what he’d do …
He peered around furtively. The other students seemed to be working hard. Perhaps it was a mistake after all. Yes. The more he came to think about it, the more logical it seemed. The Archchancellor had probably signed the papers and then, when the clerks had been copying them out, one of them had got as far as the all-important first question and then maybe had been called away or something, and no-one had noticed, and it’d got put on Victor’s desk, but now he wasn’t here and Ponder had got it which meant, he decided, in a sudden rush of piety, that the gods must have
They had to accept what you put down. Ponder hadn’t shared the room with the world’s greatest authority on examination procedures without learning a thing or two.
He looked again at the question: ‘What is your name?’
He answered it.
After a while he underlined it, several times, with his lucky ruler.
After a little while longer, to show willing, he wrote above it: ‘The anser to the questione One is:’.
After a further ten minutes he ventured ‘Which is what my name is’ on the line below, and underlined it.
Poor old Victor will be really sorry he missed this, he thought.
I wonder where he is?
There was no road to Holy Wood yet. Anyone trying to get there would take the highway to Quirm and, at some unmarked point out in the scrubby landscape, would turn off and strike out towards the sand dunes. Wild lavender and rosemary lined the banks. There was no sound but the buzzing of bees and the distant song of a skylark, which only made the silence more obvious.
Victor Tugelbend left the road at the point where the bank had been broken down and flattened by the passage of many carts and, by the look of it, an increasing number of feet.
There were still many miles to go. He trudged on.
Somewhere at the back of his mind a tiny voice was saying things like ‘Where am I? Why am I doing this?’ and another part of him knew that he didn’t really have to do it at all. Like the hypnotist’s victim who knows they’re not really hypnotized and can snap out of it any time they like, but just happened not to feel like it right now, he let his feet be guided.
