Believing Is Seeing

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These stories were written at intervals over a long period, and it so happened that each time I had written one of them, someone asked me for a story for a collection. I began to feel positively precognitive.

The trouble is that the collection didn’t always match the story. “The Sage of Theare” started because I remembered, or thought I remembered, a story by Borges being read on the radio, in which a scholar arduously tracked down a learned man but never quite found him. I have never actually found that story either. If it exists, it behaves like its own plot. But years after I thought I remembered hearing it, I started having dreams about it—strange circular dreams in a strange city where gods took a hand—and the dream person never found the wise man he was looking for. In order to exorcise the dreams, I wrote the story. I was writing Chrestomanci books at the time, so the story fairly naturally included Chrestomanci, too. While I was finishing it, Susan Schwartz asked me for something for a collection called Hecate’s Cauldron, and with some doubts, I sent it to her. She used it, and to my dismay, it stuck out like a sore thumb. All the other stories were very female. Chrestomanci strides among them like a grasshopper in a beehive. His effect on the gods in the story is rather the same, too.

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